Category: Nintendo

Materia Collective has released their next album called “The Dark Hunter”. It’s a progressive rock tribute dedicated to Nintendo’s Metroid franchise.

The Dark Hunter

The album features tracks from the superb Super Metroid and Metroid Prime, including renditions of the dark lair of Kraid, the jungles of Brinstar, the battle theme with Ridley, and of course the main theme from Prime. Oh yes!

Arranger and guitarist Ro Panuganti had this to say:

“The gripping atmosphere, exciting turns and twists, and of course the soundtrack from Super Metroid gave me chills. Creating The Dark Hunter was fulfilling my long-running dream of focusing on one theme, one sound, and one game series and making a solid album”

Panuganti says you’ll hear influences of modern progressive artists like Periphery, TesseracT, Plini, as well as more ’90s musicians like Pantera and Alice in Chains, who have found their way into the album.

You can check out a music video featuring the “Ridley” performance below:

For the rest of The Dark Hunter album, you can find that here.

An emulation of 1984’s NES Golf, along with added motion control support, is surprisingly hidden on every single Nintendo Switch.

NES Golf Switch: Directly To You

Hackers over at Switchbrew discovered something pretty special indeed. If the date on a Switch is set to July 11th, the day in which the late Satoru Iwata sadly passed away, and both Joy-Cons are then used in the “Directly” gesture that Iwata was famous for, NES Golf magically loads up onto the system.

Upon activation, you can hear a sample of Iwata’s voice:

Unfortunately, this only works if your Switch has never been connected to the internet before…

Satoru Iwata’s Legacy

NES Golf was programmed by Iwata during his time with HAL Laboratory before he became president at Nintendo in 2000. Iwata was responsible for some of Nintendo’s greatest successes in the Wii and DS – both systems took the world by storm. Iwata also played a key role in the development of the Switch.

Gamers all over the world and the industry at large were shocked by Iwata’s sudden passing. Many, including this writer, became so accustomed to Iwata presenting Nintendo’s Direct series, that he became almost like a virtual friend to them.

It’s been speculated that this Switch tribute is, in fact, a form of “omamori” in Japanese culture – a charm that is traditionally available at Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. It is said the omamori will protect you, or give you luck.

It’s a lovely and very Nintendo-like tribute to their former boss.

The time has come to “prepare your bodies” once again… Yep. Gal*Gun 2 is coming to Europe and North America early next year for PS4 and Switch.

The sequel to rail shooter Gal*Gun: Double Peace, the game features new characters and mechanics, including the ability to suck up demons with the trusty “Demon Sweeper”.

This is where you separate demons from the girls they’re possessing with a well-placed “pheromone shot”.

Gal*Gun 2: “Cutie Pies” Galore

Don’t fear, we’ve been informed there’s a brand-new story with new “cutie pies” to meet. The story of Gal*Gun 2 starts off with the demon-hunting angel Risu, who finds herself in a tough spot apparently.

Making things complicated for her are two new heroines: the “girl next door” Chiru, and your childhood friend Nanako.

You can see the first game in all its… glory… below:

Super Mario Odyssey will be a measly, yet at the same time impressive, 5.7GB in total. The final figure comes from Nintendo’s Japanese site who listed it on their store page.

This is a pertinent topic, especially as NBA 2K18 recently revealed that it requires 5GB for save data alone. That’s almost the whole of Mario Odyssey for a save file. Just so you know, that amount is for each individual save file too…

While the small file size of Odyssey may have some gamers worried about the lack of content in the game, it’s worth remembering that Nintendo has state of the art optimisation and compression techniques at their disposal. Super Mario 3D World on the Wii U came in at about 1.7GB, for example. And that was packed with content.

The Digital Storage Problem

But why are other developers finding it hard to get their file sizes down into a reasonable figure? Well, it’s pretty clear that no one knows hardware like the creators of said hardware, so there’ll be plenty of areas where Nintendo has a head start over everyone else.

However, more importantly, there’s also the limits of the Switch game card sizes themselves to consider, meaning developers, other than Nintendo, will start to rely on Switch owners having an SD card for extra data.

That’s a problem when we remember that the Nintendo Switch has just 32GB of internal storage. It now creates a situation in which an SD card is largely essential, rather than optional when downloading anything other than indie games onto the Switch system.

The saving grace here is that physical Switch game cards don’t require mandatory installs like other platforms, and SD cards are getting cheaper by the day.

Still, if you want a large digital library on the Switch, you’re definitely going to need that extra storage. For all the cleverness of the Switch, this feels like something Nintendo should have addressed before they got started.