Nintendo apparently obliterated any chance of Mario and Luigi experiencing brotherly affection in Wii U retro challenge game NES Remix, and I can't help but feel a bit disappointed in the developer's flagrant bias against toxic yaoi. Come on, Nintendo, don't you know we're in the middle of a male loneliness epidemic?

Mario blogger and connoisseur Supper Mario Brother explained in a Bluesky post, with information discovered by Bluesky user DavidPCM, the way "NES Remix contains a graphic that seems to be an 'anti-brother romance failsafe' for Mario and Luigi." Nintendo appears to have been preoccupied with the idea. So much so that it preemptively altered a scene between Mario and Luigi that should be "normally impossible to reach in-game" anyway.

I can't quite fault Nintendo for this – "NES Remix incest glitch" sounds like something I would learn about from the front page of Reddit, and then my eyes would start bleeding. But, to defend hypothetical affectionate Mario and affectionate Luigi, I really think the graphic Nintendo devs were so worried about could be interpreted as familial. Their concern was with the standard pink heart that appears between Mario and Pauline once Mario finally rescues her in Donkey Kong.

been digging through NES Remix lately. one thing I've never seen before is that they edited the heart at the end of Donkey Kong to "GOOD JOB!" in the remixed stages with Luigi. Luigi never reaches 100M in that game, so it's never seen. It's also completely omitted in the .fcb for Bonus-4's mission.

— @davidpcm.bsky.social (@davidpcm.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-07-24T19:58:28.111Z

Supper Mario Broth reminds us that, in stages Remix 14 and 17 in NES Remix, Donkey Kong is all wiggled around. The game is mirrored, and Luigi replaces Mario as the hero to protect him, not Pauline, from Donkey Kong. In these topsy-turvy stages, it isn't actually possible to activate the heart graphic like you would in a regular game of Donkey Kong with Mario and Pauline.

"The only stages visited are 25m and 75m," says Supper Mario Broth, and the pink heart only appears in the black void sky when Pauline is whisked away at the 100m stage. So, heartbreakingly, "Mario never actually gets saved," clarifies Supper Mario Broth. Another man lost to the loneliness epidemic.

But just in case Mario managed to extricate himself from Donkey Kong, enroll himself in psychotherapy, and gain a new zest for life with the help of hobbies, friends, and indeed, a brother's love, the NES Remix devs decided to change Pauline's pink heart to a graphic for Mario that says "GOOD JOB!"

While I'm glad Mario is at least being encouraged to express praise, you never see him tell Luigi GOOD JOB! since the conditions for him to do so are nonexistent in NES Remix, like we established.

Ultimately, "it is unknown why the graphic was added," says Supper Mario Broth. "The developers could have planned to have the full game playable in that mode, or they could have changed the graphic purely as a precaution in case someone managed to get to 100m (e.g. via a glitch) to prevent implications of romantic love between Mario and Luigi."

So sorry, guys, but if you want to give each other an encouraging kiss on the forehead, it's going to have to happen somewhere else.

Mario Kart Tour is shutting down after 7 years, but Nintendo isn't planning on an Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp-style offline version.

Former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé has admitted the NES and SNES Classic mini consoles were made to help the company as the Wii U struggled.

As spotted by Nintendo Everything, Fils-Aimé spoke at the NYU Game Centre Lecture Series and explained Nintendo was making efforts to make things work during the Wii U era, including killing the 8GB model of the console. "The other thing we did is, in two successive years, we launched those micro legacy devices. If you remember those, right? The small NES and then the following year the small SNES," he explained, "We did that to sustain our business because we needed something to sell at volume come the holiday season. So it was a series of commercial ideas, knowing full well that… you know, the Wii U was on life support."

Of course, many had speculated this to be the case, especially with the NES Classic, given it was released in 2016 when the Wii U had almost nothing going on, but now we have a somewhat official word. It had already been a weak year with the likes of Star Fox Zero and Pokken Tournament disappointing, and then the only game released during the holiday season was the decent at times Paper Mario: Color Splash.

The SNES Classic had a bit more company with 2017 being a landmark year for Nintendo – which released two of the greatest games of all-time with Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey – but Nintendo likely wanted a contingency plan in case the Switch didn't pop off.

This also explains why the series never continued and Nintendo didn't bother with a Game Boy Classic, N64 Classic, or Virtual Boy Classic (maybe not the last one). Although 2018 also marked the launch of Nintendo Switch Online, the company probably saw a potential cross-contamination… even if N64 games wouldn't arrive on Switch for another three years.

Zelda: Twilight Princess did what Ocarina of Time couldn't because Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto really "wanted to see Link fight on horseback"

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess fans have finally natively ported the game to PC and mobile, swinging the doors wide open for mods.

Decompilation efforts for the Nintendo GameCube version of the game began as early as 2020, and fans finally completed their years-long mission six months ago. It took practically no time at all for the group to then pump out a PC port called Dusk that's not just functional, but really damn impressive.

The Twilight Princess port obviously requires that you dump your own copy of the game before playing (find out more here), but judging from the trailer embedded below, it's well worth the effort.

Dusk comes with much higher resolutions and uncapped frame rates, options for gyro aiming while using a bow or grapple, multiple bloom presets, better shadow details, the Wii U version's free cam, the Wii version's mirrored mode, achievements, and difficulty modifiers.

More transformative additions are also included, such as quality-of-life features that can make Link climb ladders faster or quickly skip through text, and cheats that can practically break the game - I imagine both will make the game's notoriously arduous opening slightly easier to get through.

What I'm most excited for, however, are the mods that'll inevitably roll out from here on. The trailer already gives us a taste of what's possible with support for custom models, giving Wolf Link new fur coats and, more drastically, replacing this Hylian Link entirely with Linkle or his design from Ocarina of Time.

"So excited to share this with the world," modder Taka Rikka tweets. "This wouldn't have been possible without so many people in the zeldaret / GC decomp community and beyond coming together to dedicate their talent to this. The biggest thanks to all of them."

"When we started the decomp project in August 2020, it was hard to imagine ever finishing, much less seeing it be used for a project like this," they continue. "So many hours of effort were poured into the decomp by many contributors all over the world." They also hint at "future updates" in the pipeline.

Twilight Princess' port is yet another in a fast-growing line of fan-made decompilation projects. Decompiling games involves taking apart their code, making things like unofficial ports possible. Most recently, we've seen the process lead to some incredible preservation tools, such as the ones that made Sonic Unleashed's Xbox 360 version playable on PC.

Unofficial Animal Crossing PC port is here, offering the widescreen 4K experience the 24-year-old GameCube classic deserves

Square Enix has announced a Google collaboration to bring an original companion character named Oshaberi Slimey to its Japan-exclusive MMO Dragon Quest 10. Slimy is powered by the Gemini AI model, and some fans of the Dragon Quest games are already plotting to kill him.

Anime News Network shares from Japanese news sources, including 4gamer, that, at a recent press briefing, Square Enix and Google Cloud shared their intentions to pursue "living games." The companies define the concept as games where generative AI is crucial to all parts of production – including in player-facing features like the chatbot Oshaberi Slimey.

The slime represents Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii's old dream to include an AI-powered friend in one of his games, because he thinks things like, "It would be fun to investigate a murder case while interacting with AI."

Meanwhile, Dragon Quest fans think things like, "We don't need AI slop!," as one Twitter reaction with nearly 500 likes says, or "hopefully i can kill slimey in game."

"Can't localize it but can put AI bullshit in it," says another popular Twitter comment about Dragon Quest 10.

In summary, "Japan can keep DQ10 after all I guess," as one would-be fan says. "No thanks."

English-language Japanese news update account Genki explains in an original translation that Oshaberi Slimey will react to players on-screen information by doing things like providing hints, commenting on boss fight wins, or recognizing outfit changes using AI-generated speech. But all of those abilities only make Slimey more despicable to those disappointed by Square Enix's seemingly limitless commitment to AI.

"The corporate love for AI needs to die," a Dragon Quest fan concludes. "Consumers don't want this rubbish polluting what we love."

"Square Enix, hire us, I'm not joking," says team of Final Fantasy modders who gave Final Fantasy 7 new voice acting and audio, because "we must fix" the JRPG's busted new PC version.

Princess Zelda actor Patricia Summersett revealed that she is fluent in the Hylian alphabet featured in Twilight Princess.

The Legend of Zelda turned 40 this year, with the anniversary of the original game's release hitting on February 21. However, despite the legacy of the franchise and how story heavy each entry can be, it wasn't until over 30 years in that the titular princess was fully voice acted, with Summerset taking up the role in 2017's Breath of the Wild before reprising it for Tears of the Kingdom and multiple spinoffs (well, she was voice acted in the Zelda CD-I games too, but we're sticking to canon.)

Naturally, being the first to lend your voice to such an iconic character would be a lot of pressure, but Summerset nailed it, becoming a hit with fans with the series, and that may be down to how much prep she did for the role.

Speaking to IGN, Summerset mentioned that she sees a lot of cosplay of Twilight Princess versions of the characters at conventions and casually mentions she writes notes in Twilight Princess Hylian to fans, as if knowing that is a regular occurrence.

When pushed, Summerset explained, "It's something I did early on when I was recording [Breath of the Wild] and I was just starting to look through [series companion book] Hyrule Historia at the different versions of the languages from all the previous games." She explains that she didn't know what would be in Breath of the Wild, but that Twilight Princess Hylian was "so beautiful."

Summerset adds, "I thought I could probably learn those characters, which is essentially just the alphabet, and started practicing that over coffee. So now I can kind of write fluently and use it all the time." So if Nintendo ever gets around to a Twilight Princess remake, they know who to call.

The Legend of Zelda actor would love to see Ocarina of Time remade in Breath of the Wild's engine: "What's not to love?"

I used to make jokes about how many "final" updates Terraria has had, but at this point, is it even a joke anymore? I think the launch of 1.4.5 marked the sixth final update for the sandbox game, but I've honestly lost track at this point. Yet, wouldn't you know it? Just one month later, developer Re-Logic is already teasing even more content on the way.

There are bug fixes and balance tweaks on the horizon, but that stuff's to be expected. The real surprise in the latest Terraria State of the Game blog (spotted by PCGamesN) is "more items."

"We're experimenting with adding a few long requested items," the devs say. "What those may be will remain a mystery for now…" Add to that some quality of life tweaks, including "some more hotkeys and other gameplay adjustments," and you've got a nice little final update going. Plus the devs even have "a very exciting potential feature for builders" working in a recent internal beta, which they're teasing with the following image.

Your guess is as good as mine as to exactly what the big building change here is, but I think it's increasingly clear we're living in a post-post-post-final update world. How can we make jokes about it when Re-Logic is just continuing to deliver more, and more, and more updates to a game now approaching its 15th birthday? At some point, we have to recognize that Terraria is well and truly a forever game.

Or, as lead developer Andrew "Redigit" Spinks put it last year: "Terraria will never die as long as there is one last final update."

Stardew Valley creator "wanted the mines to be like Terraria," but it was way "too ambitious" in the end: "Should have been an entire game on its own."

Commanding a ship in Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag is a sublime experience to this day – you'd hope so in a game about pirates – but I don't remember the sailing-based missions in Assassin's Creed 3 being nearly so mechanically refined. As it turns out, Ubisoft felt the same way, as Assassin's Creed 3 creative director Alex Hutchinson has revealed the studio wasn't confident enough in the tech to make it a bigger part of the game.

Talking to PC Gamer, Hutchinson said "there was a whole fear that the tech [for the ships] wouldn't work" during the development of Assassin's Creed 3. "So it couldn't be a huge part of the main story, because we weren't certain it was going to work."

It's been many years since I played Assassin's Creed 3, but I distinctly remember not gelling with the ship-sailing mechanics. Thankfully, it seems the feature was well-received enough to satisfy the top dogs at Ubisoft, as the studio would go on to make a whole game based on sailing a pirate ship around the open ocean in Black Flag, my personal favorite in the whole series.

"When it was cool, then you're like, 'This is great,'" said Hutchinson, adding that "the old AAA model" meant Ubisoft didn't get an alpha build of the game until two months before its release and that the beta and final builds would arrive shortly thereafter, making it hard to know what the complete game looked like until launch was imminent. Although I could personally do without the naval missions in Assassin's Creed 3 entirely, I'm ultimately profoundly grateful they were added because they were the catalyst for one of my favorite open-world games ever.

Find out where your favorite landed on our list of the best Assassin's Creed games ever.

The Nintendo Switch 2 sold more consoles by the end of 2025 than the Wii U sold in its entire lifetime.

The Wii U is such an interesting console to look back on, as not only does it feel like a test run for what the Nintendo Switch would eventually become, but – outside of the Virtual Boy – it's hard to think of a system Nintendo struggled with more. The actual game library was great – as evidenced by the fact pretty much every single one of its games came to Switch – but with a name like that, it had not a chance in the world of being successful. It eventually ended up as Nintendo's second worst-selling console ever with just 13.56 million sold in its four-year lifespan.

So it's not exactly a big surprise that the Nintendo Switch 2 – which was already the company's fastest-selling console of all time – has officially outsold the Wii U. In the latest financial results release from Nintendo, it was confirmed that as of December 31, 2025, the Nintendo Switch 2 had sold 17.37 million consoles in just under seven months. However, it still has a ways to go to beat the Wii U's 130.60 million sales on the software front, with the Switch 2 sitting at 37.93 million games sold. Between September and December was the console's strongest period, selling over seven million units over the holiday period.

The best selling Switch 2 games list was also updated with Mario Kart World unsurprisingly still holding the top spot. Pokemon Legends: Z-A debuted with 3.89 million copies of its Nintendo Switch 2 Edition sold while Kirby Air Riders had a solid 1.76 million copies sold (with the majority of those coming from Japan at 900,000 copies sold).

Nintendo does what '90s Nintendo could only dream of – sell out of the Virtual Boy

Former Sega developer Ryoichi Hasegawa says that Nintendo was adamant that Mario should always be a step ahead of Sonic in promotional art for their Olympic team-up.

Frankly, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games doesn't make a lot of sense conceptually; when it comes to the footrace events, having the "fastest thing alive" take on a slightly overweight fella from New York who eats pasta and mushrooms exclusively seems like a weird choice. But then, when you look at trailers or artwork, Mario is always keeping the pace and even slightly ahead of Sonic, and it turns out that was apparently intentional.

Hasegawa – who was the localization producer of Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games' original Beijing 2008 incarnation – has claimed in an interview with Arcade Attack that Nintendo "demanded" that Mario be a step ahead of Sonic on the artwork for the game. He explains that with the artwork that appeared on the box, manuals, and the disk, "there was one small error: Sonic's foot was in front of Mario's foot, and Nintendo demanded us to change the priority." And while it may seem silly, Hasegawa recalls thinking "Oh my god, we have to change it, or there will be no deal."

Of course, Nintendo was in a favorable position to make these demands, even if the game was developed by Sega. Sonic 06 and the GBA port of Sonic 1 didn't land the best reviews, and with Mario being fresh off a career-defining win with Super Mario Galaxy, there was no question who the big dog was.

I did do a quick glance at the other release, and it looks like Mario is just a bit ahead in the 2012 London Olympics, as well as the Vancouver and Sochi Olympic Winter Games cover arts, before the duo stood as equals on both the Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 cover art. Maybe the Wii U's own misfortunes were enough of a hit to put Mario and Sonic back on, er, equal footing.

Mario's new voice actor has "unbelievable respect" for 32-year icon Charles Martinet

Nintendo has tentatively won a patent law battle it has been waging for 15 weary years – though BigBen Interactive, now Nacon, has already appealed a German court's decision requiring it to hack up about $8.2 million in damages and legal fees. Hey, what's another 15 years of waiting?

In any case, Nintendo of Europe lawyers celebrated the "remarkable" ruling in a December 16 press release (spotted by games fray). Patent attorney Christof Karl and IP lawyer Pascal Böhner explain it's uncommon for German patent law proceedings to calculate damages in the way they have in this instance.

"Particularly significant: the court assumed that Nintendo would have made 100% of the sales made by BigBen," the lawyers write, "without any deductions in view of third-party suppliers that were active in the market." The original patent suit filed in 2010 took issue with what Nintendo's lawyers call an "ergonomic" third-party controller BigBen was selling with "features characteristic of Nintendo's Wii Remote."

While the Mannheim Regional Court had already decided back in 2011 that BigBen, indeed, infringed Nintendo's Wii Remote patent, Nintendo and BigBen dedicated another 14 years to debating how valid that patent really was. Subsequently, German and wider European courts sided with Nintendo in 2017 and 2018 – but BigBen has appealed this most recent ruling in Nintendo's favor.

"The judgment is therefore not yet final," Nintendo's lawyers admit, "but it is provisionally enforceable against provision of security." Poor Wii Remote. Always the plaintiff, never the bride.

Call up your lawyer and enjoy one of the 25 best Wii games of all time.

Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford says Nintendo's innovation has resulted in great consoles like the Wii and Switch 2, as well as occasional duds (from a sales perspective, anyway) like the Wii U.

Pitchford has been a vocal fan of the Switch 2, but for reasons that don't need explaining, he's been less vocal about the Wii U, which is in my opinion Nintendo's best console from purely a hardware perspective even though it was an objective failure in terms of sales.

Talking to GamesRadar+ during Gamescom 2025, Pitchford briefly touched on the awkward middle child of the Nintendo console family, if only to single it out as an example of a misstep from Nintendo, as if it hasn't been beaten up enough.

"The Nintendo Switch 2 is an awesome, awesome machine," said Pitchford. "I'm so grateful for it. I remember when I was first briefed by Nintendo about this platform, and I was so excited, because what we're always expecting is that Nintendo's gonna do something really interesting, and sometimes there's an incredible innovation, like the Wii, which just exploded.

"And other times," Pitchford added, "the innovation, like I was saying sometimes, like the Wii U didn't work as well as the Wii. The Switch 2 is just brilliant. It's less about innovating and more about perfecting and giving us what we want and what works."

During the same interview, Pitchford called the release of the Switch 2 "the most successful new console launch in the history of video game consoles," which is true in terms of sales, and said he naturally wants to "bring more games to it."

Speaking of, the whole reason Pitchford is talking about the Switch 2 is because it's getting Borderlands 4 on October 2.

In the meantime, here are the best Switch 2 games you can play today.

Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag is one of the long-running series' most beloved, least controversial games so far, so it's not surprising to hear widespread rumors about Ubisoft apparently looking to remake its hit pirateventure. But despite how far those whispers have traveled across the high seas, Ubisoft is somehow convinced that the project isn't already one of gaming's worst-kept secrets and allegedly "threatened to sue" the game's lead actor for hinting at it.

A couple months back, Edward Kenway actor Matt Ryan was filmed at a convention cheekily telling one fan that they "might have to beat [Black Flag] again." Rocking the boat further, he added: "Well, especially this one. There's a reason I say that, but I can't say anything."

Alongside the existing rumors and reports of a Black Flag re-release, AssCreed enjoyers everywhere took it as soft confirmation that a remake was indeed on the cards in a 'wink wink, nudge nudge' sort of way. Not everyone seems to have been so excited, though.

In a newly surfaced video from a different convention, Ryan alleges he doesn't know anything about a potential remake and that Ubisoft actually threatened him with legal action over what he said previously.

"I don't know, mate. I don't know," he says when asked about the project's existence. "Thing is, is that, when that [first video] happened someone was doing this," he adds, pointing at the camera, "and I was being very free and open, but I didn't know that they actually were recording me on their phone, and then the company threatened to sue me."

"Yeah, so, I say nothing," Ryan says.

Whether that legal threat makes Black Flag's remake more or less likely is up to you but, heck, even a prominent statue maker seemingly slipped up and teased a remake: "Has that been announced?"

Assassin's Creed Black Flag remake rumors get even more fuel as Ubisoft France posts about the original game following a blatant hint from Edward Kenway's actor

Mario Kart 8 is, perhaps, the finest example of the supremely popular Mario Kart series. It’s also a deeply weird one – which is good, because otherwise I wouldn’t have too much to write about. It first came out on the Wii U, way back in 2014. To put it in perspective, that puts it both 11 years from 2025 and the release of Mario Kart: Double Dash. Yes, I get a perverse joy out of spooking people out with the passage of time.

It was a strong showing on the Wii U, but that console being what it was, meant that not many people got to experience it. Oh, sure, it sold over a million copies in its first four days, but the Wii U’s general unpopularity meant that not many people got to experience it. I remember that the rerelease on the Switch a whole three years later was a controversial move, but in the long run, it turned out to be the right one.

Changing lanes

When I grabbed a Switch in 2020, battling my way through lockdown scalpers, Mario Kart 8 was top of the list of my most-wanted games. If you play games, there’s a significant chance that you understand why. Mario Kart is constantly wheeled out (pun only slightly intended) at gatherings, and it’s a perfect party game. I’d argue that it’s a much better party game than something like Smash Bros., which while easy to get into, can be more difficult to intuitively understand. We all know what racers are like.

The game’s Switch version would have remained a fantastic game, but more of a stopgap installment, were it not for the additional tracks that started hitting with the game’s DLC. These packs, drip-fed to us over the course of 2022 and 2023, added a whole host of classic Mario Kart tracks from across the series’ history. They include city tracks from Mario Kart Tour, the Mario Kart Wii’s horrifically tough Rainbow Road, DK Mountain from Double Dash, and my all-time favorite Mario Kart circuit, Coconut Mall, from the Wii.

This cartload of content, which would have been more than enough for any single game, was added to an already 48 courses, giving us a total of 96 courses in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. If you want to play a Mario Kart game in the year of our Luigi 2025, there’s little reason to play anything else. If you’re a motion controls sicko, you’re still catered to as well, much to my chagrin, so even the venerable Mario Kart Wii, a staple of my student flat, can be retired.

Ever since I picked up Mario Kart 8 and its DLC, it feels like there’s always something fresh to play. I’ve probably played every course in the game at least once, but that doesn’t really matter much, as by the time you’ve finished rotating your way through them all, in 50-200cc karts, the first tracks will feel fresh again. Above all else, Mario Kart 8 feels like a love letter to the entire series, or a greatest hits album. The new tracks are all fun, but it’s in the revisits to old favorites, like Coconut Mall, my beloved, that really sell the game to me. Older games in the series have featured tracks from previous games, but never in such numbers.

It is the essential Mario Kart game.

While fantastic, this could also pose a problem for Nintendo: where does it go from here? This seems like a ne plus ultra, so what can the next Mario Kart game do to not feel overly fluffy and inessential in comparison? With Mario Kart World announced as a launch title for the Switch 2, I feel that it will need to build on Mario Kart 8 rather than try to replace it. This could, for instance, involve integrating the DLC tracks from Mario Kart 8 into Mario Kart World as bonus stages. Otherwise there’s the possibility that World will feel barebones (I nearly wrote Dry Bones) in comparison, regardless of its open world features.

Until we try out the game's open world and see just how substantial the new additions are, I can’t say whether Mario Kart World will be able to replace the previous installment or not. One thing we can say for certain, though, is that if you own a Switch, you absolutely need to own a copy of Mario Kart 8 as well. It’s as essential as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, or Super Mario Odyssey. What’s more, it’s emblematic of the Switch’s design philosophy as a whole – it’s a console that lends itself to multiplayer better than any other modern alternative, and what better multiplayer game than Mario Kart? It is a keystone game, arguably the most essential Switch title, even after all this time.

As Mario Kart World and all other upcoming Switch 2 games draw nearer, we'll be bringing you all the Nintendo Switch 2 news as it happens

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild opens with Link awakening in Hyrule. It's not a new scenario in a The Legend of Zelda game – plenty of instalments start with our sleepy protagonist venturing forth into the wider world. But as you exit the little cave that you slumbered in, you soon realize that this is not merely a retread of the franchise's greatest hits. Hyrule itself is a playground for the curious, and every new item and ability lends itself to imaginative action and problem solving.

Historically, every new Nintendo console, including the Nintendo Switch, has come with an unspoken disclaimer: This isn't as powerful as the hardware provided by rival companies. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild immediately refutes this reputation and has changed video games (especially when it comes to our definition of a good open world game) forever. Power is about what the player is able to bring to a game. Everything else is just window dressing.

Fresh air

When Breath of the Wild was released as a launch title for the Nintendo Switch on March 3, 2017, the acclaim and embrace were immediate. For around two decades, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time had been relatively cemented as the finest entry in the classic series (some also include The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past in that conversation and they're absolutely correct to).

Breath of the Wild broke up the rankings like a mousey Remote Bomb. The Legend of Zelda has always been a testament to the wonder of exploration – the "call of the wild" that lures you to remote places and asks that you test your mettle both within and against nature. Breath of the Wild felt like the apotheosis of this particular sensation.

It was also a necessary shock to the open world genre, something that had always thrived on size. Countless games have been sold on the promise of expansion and, to be fair, there is something to be said about how cool it is to watch a horizon get wider and wider. But it's also been an excuse for hollowness. You run, climb and ride through yet another stretch of digital plain on yet another version of a "fetch quest" and you think "What in the heck am I doing this for? This isn't more fun. This is just…more."

Breath of the Wild lays no claim to being the biggest game ever, but it rarely makes you contemplate your open world purpose. Mostly because there's no time to. Even when you're not trying to solve the puzzles in the latest shrine you just encountered or tackling a Divine Beast, you're constantly running into challenges – a new enclave of enemies, a new biome or climate to prepare for, a new bit of treasure that hangs just out of reach that requires, not some fix-all tool, but your own ingenuity.

Breath of the Wild even invites you to challenge yourself. Sure, you could run straight into a gaggle of monsters and swing your sword with abandon, but what if you used the environment around you to dismantle them? It would take longer, but would pay off in pure satisfaction.

This kind of exhilarating gameplay did not go unnoticed by the video game industry at large. Not only did Nintendo eagerly capitalize on Breath of the Wild with a sequel, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, that doubled down on its inventiveness, but other developers took note. Sucker Punch used Breath of the Wild as an aesthetic inspiration for Ghost of Tsushima. When directing Elden Ring, Hidetaka Miyazaki took Breath of the Wild, alongside a few other outstanding open world games, as an influence. When Outcast returned with Outcast: A New Beginning, it sought to recapture some of Breath of the Wild's delightful aspects. Even first person shooter Halo: Infinite, yes really, initially sought to replicate Breath of the Wild, before cutting back on its lofty ambitions.

Catching feelings

However, if there was any title that seemed to take an obvious cue from Breath of the Wild, it was from one of the most reliably traditional series in gaming: Pokémon Legends: Arceus. Pokémon's move to the modern definition of "open world" had been all but inevitable, but many aspects of Legends: Arceus seem drawn from Breath of the Wild's wellspring.

This is especially clear with the "roughing it" sensibilities that require a player to work through obstacles while keeping on the move. Considering that Pokémon games of the past typically stuck to a pace that was dictated by the player, this made for a very refreshing title and likely Pokémon's best in nearly a decade.

In the eight years since its release, esteem for Breath of the Wild has only grown. Though it wasn't the only open world game from that time period to make an impact (games like The Witcher 3 and Red Dead Redemption 2 were also huge hits), it is Breath of the Wild that feels like it's seeped into the broader medium the most.

It reframed our relationship with the objectives of open world games in a way that's immediately obvious, all while still feeling very much The Legend of Zelda. And though, again, the Nintendo Switch would never have the pure processing power of other modern systems, Breath of the Wild proved that a developer need not feel limited by that fact. Instead, like many of the sequences in Breath of the Wild, it was an invitation to try something new. A challenge.

With the Nintendo Switch 2 on the way, it's a pretty safe assumption that we'll not just get new main series The Legend of Zelda games, but perhaps dozens of other titles that can trace their roots back to Breath of the Wild. After all, it helped make a Nintendo Switch 2 even possible, as the game was so foundational in the turning of the original Switch into a worldwide phenomenon. What remains up in the air, though, is if we'll ever get a game as forward-looking as Breath of the Wild again, one that wasn't just interested in continuing the The Legend of the Zelda brand but in reinventing how we fall in love with it.

Need another adventure? Check out our best Zelda games ranking!

Nintendo's G-rated official site Play Nintendo lets kids know who their favorite characters are friends with and, apparently, it's not them. In particular, it seems the entire Super Mario Bros. cast is too embroiled in their own one-sided drama to give healthy human relationships a chance.

First noticed by Mario blogger Supper Mario Broth, the Play Nintendo website indicates that the franchise's Plumber-in-Chief Mario is friends with all the usual suspects – his brother, Luigi, his love, Princess Peach, and so on.

And yet, while customizable Miis – egg-headed characters who represent the player – generously consider Mario to be their only friend in the whole lonely world, Mario doesn't feel the same. Though his friends list is long and, honestly, a little self-congratulatory, it does not include Miis.

Supper Mario Broth elaborates on this detail in a subsequent Bluesky post that recognizes that there "many one-sided friendships are listed on the official Play Nintendo site." They compile some of the most "bizarre" in a complicated flowchart, which reveals several bombshells.

Pauline, Mario's first leading lady and the first female character to appear in the Mario games, is a woman of class, happy to acknowledge characters like Peach, Princess Daisy, and even her kidnapper Donkey Kong as pals. But none of these characters feel the same about her.

More predictably, Luigi's nemesis, the sour-faced Waluigi, seems to have been banished from the core clique – Mario, Peach, Toad, and even Bowser – though forgiving souls like Rosalina and Baby Luigi are comfortable being mutuals.

"The Play Nintendo site contains 40 Mario-related characters, and mapping out all friendships in a satisfactory manner requires 3D visualization," Supper Mario Broth concludes on Twitter. All I want to know is – Kirby, can I get a follow back?

As Mario Kart World approaches, fans remember bizarre Mario Kart 8 frame rate issue which has lasted 11 years, but only on the Wii U with CPU racers and on every 64th frame.

It's important that racing, fighting, and any other type of competitive game runs at a consistent frame rate, but it turns out the original Mario Kart 8 on the Wii U repeats its 63rd frame if one specific condition is met.

If you're playing Mario Kart 8 on the Wii U with any NPC racers present, the 64th frame will actually be a repeat of the 63rd. This means every 1.066 seconds, rather than seeing a new frame, you get the same one twice.

This will likely be imperceptible to most players, but the issue has been known for a while.

I'll be honest, even seeing it in action, I cannot notice the duplicated frame, but maybe my eyes are just slow.

Strangely, this error is only a problem when computer-controlled racers are present, so if you're playing with friends, the game is locked to 60fps. MarioBrothBlog on Twitter suggests this means "it may be an error in the code instead of a performance issue."

This issue isn't present at all in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on the Switch, though, so if you've only ever played that version of the game, that's why you've never noticed a drop in the frame rate.

The Nintendo Switch 2 will allow games to go up to 120fps, but outside of a 120fps mode, the upcoming Mario Kart World will seemingly run mostly at 60fps.

You should check out all the other upcoming Switch 2 games that have been announced.

The days of Xbox and PlayStation being at each other's throats seem long gone as Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer is done with trying to force Nintendo Switch and PS5 owners over to Xbox Series X|S.

Microsoft (which owns developers under the Xbox Game Studios, Bethesda, and Activision Blizzard umbrellas) has been porting more and more games to rival consoles over the last few years. Sleeper hits, like Grounded, and blockbusters, like Sea of Thieves, have made their way to other platforms with Forza Horizon 5 and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle up next - and the division's boss has shed some light on the strategy.

Spencer acknowledged that "one of the reasons that investing in our own platform is important" is that when Microsoft sells a copy of a game on another platform, it only gets 70% of the revenue, compared to 100% of the money when selling the same game on Xbox, via an interview with Xbox Era. But he also said he wants to "find fans of our franchises" that won't move to Xbox, no matter what.

"I’m not trying to move them all over to Xbox anymore," Spencer said. "People were all so invested in where our games are. Let’s just allow more people to play and yes, the 70% that we make on games on other platforms is helpful to us being able to build great portfolios... And I know it’s not what everybody else is doing, but I just believe games should be the thing that’s at the forefront. Maybe it’s because of how I’ve grown up in this industry. I came from building games. But I think the games are the things that I see growing in their strength in what we’re doing and it’s because more people can play."

Moving forward, as we saw in the latest Xbox Developer Direct, the publisher won't be hiding PS5 and Nintendo Switch logos in its game showcases as it had done in the past. "I think it’s just being honest and transparent about where the games are showing up... people should know the storefronts where they can get our games."

Of course, the executive still said he was committed to supporting the company's native hardware and systems. In the past, he's even confirmed that a next Xbox console will come, perhaps dissuading rumors that Xbox would take the Sega route and completely opt out of the race. There's even been rumblings about a next-gen Xbox handheld for a while.

Elsewhere, Xbox CEO Phil Spencer said he doesn't "want to see every game turn into some big live service," and Game Pass allows for more "games that have a beginning, middle and end."

The Nintendo Switch has been, by all measures, a very successful console. It’s sold 146 million units to date, making it the second best-selling console of all time in the USA – trailing only Nintendo’s own DS. With the Switch 2 now fast approaching, we thought it would be fun to look back at the Switch’s launch titles and see how they compare to some of the great launch titles in Nintendo’s back catalogue - and yes, you can expect some of the best Mario games below.

Launch games are meant to showcase the very best that a console has to offer, demonstrating the importance and social cachet of having this small plastic box under your TV. The Switch is an incredibly important console, but where does it land in the grand lineage of Nintendo console launches? Let’s take a closer look.

NES launch games (October 18, 1985)

• 10-Yard Fight
• Baseball
• Clu Clu Land
• Duck Hunt
• Excitebike
• Golf
• Gyromite
• Hogan’s Alley
• Ice Climber
• Kung Fu
• Pinball
• Soccer
• Stack-Up
• Super Mario Bros.
• Tennis
• Wild Gunman
• Wrecking Crew

There’s something quite charming about the titles of some of these games, isn’t there? In these days of long-running video game series, it seems incredibly quaint to call a game something so simple as Tennis or Soccer. While there’s still a decent amount of chaff in these launch titles, they represent a sea-change in what home video games could be. Instead of beeping and booping your way through games on the Atari or Spectrum, you could explore more detailed and colourful worlds in titles like Ice Climber, or blast your way through a game of Duck Hunt. That’s not even to mention the blazing-fast loading times that made a mockery of cassette-based machines.

The real star of the show is, of course, Excitebike… who am I kidding, as much as I like this game, it’s Super Mario Bros. that stole the show. This is where it all started, the game that, like gaming's Helen of Troy, launched a thousand console sales. One of the longest-running franchises in video game history, it all comes back to this fairly humble game on the NES. This is a tough act to follow.

SNES launch games (August 23, 1991)

• F-Zero
• Gradius III
• Pilotwings
• SimCity
• Super Mario World

Sega may have beaten Nintendo to the 16-bit punch, releasing the Genesis/Mega Drive in 1989, but the SNES came out swinging with some sensational titles. Sure, there were significantly fewer of them than the NES had, but they were effectively wall-to-wall bangers, with the slight exception of Gradius 3.

What it had most of all though was variety. The launch titles ran the gamut from racing games to strategy games. The glitziest game was, without a doubt, Super Mario World, a game that is frequently tied with Super Mario Bros. 3 as perhaps the greatest 2D platformer of all time. SimCity, an already much-loved title for Mac, MS-Dos and Amiga players, got its own special version thanks to a collaboration between industry titans Will Wright and Shigeru Miyamoto.

Yet beyond these titles, two games on this list – F-Zero and Pilotwings – made substantial use of Nintendo’s secret weapon, Mode 7. This hardware feature allowed the SNES to scale and rotate a background layer, leading to faux-3D graphics. This was in 1991, long before 3D graphics were the default, and was a substantial reason to buy an SNES over a Genesis/Mega Drive, despite the hefty price tag of $199 (around $450 in today’s money).

Nintendo 64 launch games (September 29, 1996)

• Pilotwings 64
• Super Mario 64

Another story of Nintendo leapfrogging other consoles with their tech, the Nintendo 64 was the first successful 64-bit console. Sure, there had been the Atari Jaguar, but despite having some cool features, it was almost the definition of a commercial flop. The Nintendo 64 launched with the fewest launch titles of any Nintendo console, featuring just two on its US launch. Originally, Cruis’n USA had been planned as a third launch title, but was pulled from the launch lineup due to its poor quality, which, judging by contemporary reviews, was probably the right choice.

Howard Lincoln, Nintendo of America's chairman at the time, defended the barebones launch lineup by saying "we’re convinced that a few great games at launch are more important than great games mixed in with a lot of dogs”. Meow, Howard.

There might not have been a great variety in the launch titles, but both of them were absolutely fantastic. Despite the limitations of the Nintendo 64’s cartridge system – which required all games be able to constrain themselves, contortionist-like into a snug 64MB – both of the games had a lot to offer, particularly Super Mario 64, which, while it’s hard to believe, was only 8 MB. Uncompressed photos are bigger than that!

GameCube launch games (November 18, 2001)

• All-Star Baseball 2002
• Batman: Vengeance
• Crazy Taxi
• Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX 2
• Luigi’s Mansion
• Madden NFL 2002
• NHL Hitz 20-02
• Star Wars Rogue Leader: Rogue Squadron II
• Super Monkey Ball
• Tarzan: Untamed
• Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3
• Wave Race: Blue Storm

The GameCube is a charmingly dinky little console and severely underrated, but this launch lineup is incredibly mid, with Howard Lincoln’s proverbial dogs howling over launch day. The highlights of this lineup were, undoubtedly, Luigi’s Mansion, Super Monkey Ball, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 and Star Wars Rogue Leader: Rogue Squadron II.

The GameCube, with its tiny discs and better processor than the PS2, never really found its niche. If you picked up one on launch day, you got to choose from the scattershot of launch titles, covering a wide variety of different genres. Luigi’s Mansion, a fantastic little game with a huge amount of personality, is definitely the right choice here, blending action-adventure gameplay with campy horror elements, and Luigi’s perpetual whimpering. It provided a very nice stopgap in between Mario games, with the GameCube being notable for the lack of a Mario game upon launch, with Super Mario Sunshine a whopping 9 months away for US gamers.

While somewhat lacking in quality compared to Nintendo’s previous launch lineups, there was a lot of fun to be had with the GameCube launch games.

Wii launch games (November 19, 2006)

• Avatar: The Last Airbender
• Barnyard
• Call of Duty 3
• Cars
• Excite Truck
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy
• GT Pro Series
• Happy FeetMadden NFL 07
• Marvel: Ultimate Alliance
• Monster 4x4 World Circuit
• Need for Speed: Carbon
• Open Season
• Rampage: Total Destruction
• Rayman Raving Rabbids
• Red Steel
• SpongeBob SquarePants: Creature from the Krusty Krab
• Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz
• The Ant Bully
• Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
• Trauma Center: Second Opinion
• Wii Sports

When the Wii launched, it was an absolute smash hit, and a huge part of that was thanks to its motion controls. Motion controls get a bad rap from a lot of people, myself included, but there wasn’t really anything like this back in 2006/2007, with the Kinect and Playstation Move still a long way off.

While not every game made great use of the Wiimote and its wand-waggling weirdness, a good selection of the launch titles did. Rayman Raving Rabbids, for instance, made ample use of them, while Trauma Center had you suturing wounds and solving emergencies with ample use of haphazardly applied antiseptic gel with a wave of your Wiimote.

The real star of the show, however, was Wii Sports. This pack-in game is one of very few titles that made good use of the motion controls. It was, quite genuinely, a console that anyone could play, and for all of the Wii’s many issues, Wii Sports and the later Wii Sports Resort were perfect party material, and a testament to the fact that motion controls aren’t always just a gimmick.

Wii U launch games (November 18, 2012)

• Assassin's Creed 3
• Batman: Arkham City Armored Edition
• Ben 10: Omniverse
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 2
• Darksiders 2
• Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two
• ESPN Sports Connection
• FIFA Soccer 13
• NBA 2K13
• Game Party Champions
• Just Dance 4
• New Super Mario Bros. U
• Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge
• Nintendo Land
• Rabbids Land
• Scribblenauts Unlimited
• SiNG Party
• Skylanders: Giants
• Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed
• Tekken Tag Tournament 2
• Transformers Prime: The Game
• Warriors Orochi 3 Hyper
• Wipeout 3
• Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2013
• ZombiU

The WiiU was, in essence, an uncomfortable halfway house between the Wii and the Switch. While it undoubtedly served as a decent proving ground for Nintendo’s next console, it wasn’t a good system, plagued by poor battery life, a lack of third-party titles and a name that made more than a few potential customers assume it was nothing more than a Wii accessory.

For all of its many faults, and believe me, there are not enough words in this article to convey quite how flawed the Wii U was, its launch lineup could have been worse. While far from great, it had some interesting titles. ZombiU, for example, is an interesting survival horror game that, while not needing the tablet whatsoever, made decent use of the second screen. Nintendo Land was fun, if fairly transient, and Batman: Arkham City was a great title for those who’d not played it before.

Ultimately, however, the lack of strong first-party games was one of the issues that likely led to the Wii U’s failure.

Nintendo Switch launch games (March 3, 2017)

• 1-2-Switch
• Fast RMX
• I Am Setsuna
• Just Dance 2017
• Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove
• Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment
• Skylanders: Imaginators
• Snipperclips
• Super Bomberman R
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

The Switch was the natural next step for Nintendo: a console that took inspiration from the Wii U while refining the concept down to a much finer point. Here was a console that was more easily portable, had innovative controllers and, most crucially of all, one of the best first-party games of all time available on its launch.

It is hard to overstate the importance of Breath of the Wild to the Switch’s success. While it was available on Wii U as well, it was higher resolution on the Switch and generally performed much better. Breath of the Wild is the best-selling Zelda game and easily one of the best, with some even considering it to be one of, if not the best game of all time.

Despite the rest of the launch line-up being fairly lacklustre, this evolution of Zelda was strong enough to act as a keystone for the entire system. So, really, how does the Switch’s launch titles compare to the rest of the Nintendo consoles? Taking a broad view, it sits squarely in the middle of the pack: better than the Wii U, Wii and Gamecube, but not quite able to offer the sheer consistent quality of the SNES or the Nintendo 64. So, what’s next? It’s reasonable to assume that there will be a Mario Kart game will be among the upcoming Switch 2 games at launch, given its presence in the reveal trailer, but as for the rest? We’ll have to wait and see.

Check out all of the upcoming Nintendo Switch games while you wait for the newest console.

Confession time: I'm a Wii U stan. In fact, I'm so much of a Wii U stan that I'd make the argument that it's Nintendo's best console since the NES, purely from a hardware perspective. Software-wise, it's one of the worst, which is a big reason it ultimately failed, but the actual design of the console is ingenious, and I hope against hope the Switch 2 brings back its most defining feature: second-screen gaming.

For the young'uns, the Wii U is a Nintendo console that was announced in 2011 and released in 2012. It looks a lot like the Wii that came before it, but with a peripheral screen you can use as a controller in tandem with your TV. While your TV acts as the traditional display, reacting to input from the directional pad and buttons and displaying the view of the player character, the GamePad's gyroscope enables motion controls to display what you're actually aiming at with your real-life hands. I still vividly remember watching its reveal and thinking, "that's going to be great in horror games," and I was right. More on that in a minute.

In a way, the Wii U opens up a new dimension that exists only on the GamePad screen. If you want to quickly look behind you, you can do so by physically turning around in the real world and seeing what's behind you in the game, as if it acts as a portal into a parallel universe. Nevermind the convenience of quick-touch inventory management and map access, as well as the cleaner main screen due to HUD elements being on the GamePad, when utilized cleverly the Wii U's second screen simply means more immersive, and by default, scarier games.

The Switch could never

Nintendo tried with the Wii U, it really did. Nintendo Land was essentially designed to be a showcase for the GamePad's unique capabilities, and it does so well, but pretty much every first-party Nintendo game released for the Wii U utilizes it in some way. Without even digging too deep, I can think of a bunch of examples of the GamePad either being instrumental to a game's functionality or simply making it more fun, immersive, and convenient.

The golfing game bundled in with Wii U Sports Club lets you place the GamePad on the ground and visualize your golf club hitting the ball as you swung. Mario Maker is infinitely easier to navigate and interact with thanks to the touchscreen, which you can use to create maps while actually playing them on the TV. Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE turns the GamePad into a fully functioning smartphone, letting you receive calls, texts, and messages in separate group chats you can simply tap to expand. Pikmin 3 lets you send off captains to complete tasks by just drawing a line on the GamePad, which is really freeing.

I could go on and on, but the longer I do, the more I delay the ace in my sleeve: Zombi mother-effin' U. Not Zombi, the mid-to-good horror game you can play on PlayStation and Xbox. No, Zombi U, the original version of the game that was a launch title for the Wii U and is made exponentially better and scarier thanks exclusively to the GamePad. Zombi U's second-screen functionality is the best use of the Wii U GamePad there ever was, a sad reminder of the missed potential in the middle-child of Nintendo's console family, and the crux of my plea for Nintendo to bring it back in the Switch 2.

Tension u can touch

Like I said before, I've had the pleasure of playing many games that benefit from the Wii U GamePad, but Zombi U is the only one where I felt the second screen was integral to the experience. Its gimmick is simple but incredibly effective, and I don't think it's been done anywhere else. First of all, the UI is almost entirely displayed on the GamePad, making the action on the big screen all that much more immersive. But if you've been reading this article you already know that's nothing special.

What's special about Zombi U is the backpack. It's just a little icon on your GamePad screen alongside your map and equipped items, but if you touch it and slide down it opens up your inventory. When that happens, the first-person camera on the big screen turns into third-person and you lose control of your character, who's crouched down looking through your inventory.

The thing is, the action doesn't pause when you access your inventory, which means if you want to equip something or just ruffle through your bag, you have to physically look down at your GamePad with your real-life eyeballs while your character is completely vulnerable to attack. It's incredibly tense, and the same sort of thing happens any time you have to scan your environment, loot a corpse, look through a cabinet, tap in the code to a keypad, and pick a lock.

The most stressful moments in Zombi U, which to this day rival the scariest games I've ever played, are when I'm surrounded by a horde of encroaching zombies, running low on ammo, and struggling to find space to open up my inventory and swap weapons. If I don't have a weapon loaded up in one of the six quick access slots the game gives you, I have to avert my eyes from the main screen and drag one out of my inventory manually while my character is completely defenseless.

Do I try to buy myself a few seconds by tossing a molotov cocktail or flare in the direction of the zombies? Do I try to run far enough away that I can quickly swap weapons, or do I flail around with my cricket bat and stubbornly fight the inevitable? More often than not it's the latter, simply because I'm paralyzed with anxiety. Unfortunately for me, it's a decision with a lot of stakes, as when you die in Zombi U, you lose that character permanently, and the only way to retrieve your items is to go find your body and loot it.

Warp pipe dream

I still remember thinking the Wii U was a revolutionary moment for horror, but even more broadly, I still think there's a lot of untapped potential in its gimmick, largely because the console failed so spectacularly that Nintendo ditched it entirely with the Switch. Think of the possibilities! Nintendo seemingly revealed a new Mario Kart with the announcement of Switch 2 - a second screen could be used as a rear-view mirror or backup camera. I remember thinking the Wii U version of Breath of the Wild would've really benefited from making the GamePad the Sheikah Slate, which would've made switching between runes and accessing the map a lot more seamless.

Of course, it'll come as no surprise by now that my happy chemicals are most activated when I think of the potential for second screen horror on the Switch 2. Imagine using the GamePad, or whatever weird name Nintendo could come up with for it, to scan environments and reveal specters you can't see on the main screen, kind of like how Fatal Frame: Maiden of the Black Water turns the Wii U GamePad into the Camera Obscura. Think of the tension in a survival horror game with no safe rooms where you have to use the second screen as a crafting bench in real-time, all while vulnerable to attack. And I'm just riffing off the top of the dome here! I shudder to think of what the brilliant engineers and developers under Nintendo's leadership could conjure up.

That said, I'm also not naive. Regardless of its innovations, the Wii U was one of the biggest failures in terms of console sales of all time, while the Switch, which completely abandoned second-screen gameplay, is the second bestselling console of all time worldwide and the first in the US. Even I can admit it makes zero sense for Nintendo to make the Switch more like the Wii U, and I can just about guarantee that it won't. I'm not even sure it would be technically possible, since the Switch 2 presumably has to be plugged into the dock to project its image to a TV. Maybe there's something that could be done there with Bluetooth, but yeah, not likely.

So why even make the argument that it should? Well, to be quite candid with y'all, I've been looking for a topical way to get on my soapbox about this for literal years now, and as soon as the Switch 2 was officially announced, I knew my opportunity had arrived. The Wii U was and still is my weird, awkward, but ultimately underappreciated horror companion, and I'd like to think in some alternate reality there's a Wii U 2 sitting under my TV.

Despite having a slight existential crisis thinking about the fact that it's been a decade since I first raced a young Ciri through Kaer Morhen in The Witcher 3, that very realization got me thinking about the wealth of notable games celebrating 10-year anniversaries in 2025. Any time I think about what I was playing in any given month in 2015, it's like a who's who of memorable experiences that have stuck with me to this day. From losing myself to the angst and mystery of Max Caulfield's journey at Blackwell Academy in the first episode of Life is Strange, to getting caught up in Victorian London in Assassin's Creed Syndicate, or the rad-filled wastelands of the Commonwealth in Fallout 4, I really was spoilt for choice – and that's not even touching on the stellar indie games that came our way as well.

But 2015 wasn't just impactful personally speaking. CD Projekt Red's engrossing fantasy RPG was just the tip of the iceberg in a year that forever changed the industry. So many of the games that came our way back then are still very much talked about now, and their influence on players and developers alike can also still be felt.

Yearning for Yarnham

Whenever I return to the world of The Witcher 3, I forget it came out in 2015. I think that speaks volumes about how effective it is as pulling you right in with its worldbuilding and storytelling, and thanks to a shiny next-gen upgrade, it looks better than ever. Of course, it took some time to get the grand adventure into the shape it's in today. At launch, it wasn't entirely smooth sailing for Geralt, with some game-breaking bugs and issues in its sprawling open-world that needed ironing out. But despite some bumps in the road – including Roach's now infamous penchant for roofs being among them – its gripping questlines, morally grey choices, and engaging combat worked together to deliver one of the most influential and best RPGs of all-time.

But before Geralt's last adventure even entered the scene, FromSoftware came in swinging earlier that year to change the face of action RPG horror. Drawing us into the gothic, decaying city of Yarnham, Bloodborne is considered to be one of the best – if not the best – examples of its genre. By learning from what came before in the likes of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, it refined and improved on the Soulslike formula with its distinctly dark horror aesthetic and lovecraftian foes.

I'm by no means a Souls player, but even I was aware of how big it was in 2015. In fact, it often dominated the conversation online at the time, and a decade on, its influence in the modern soulslike landscape can still very much be felt. Neowiz's excellent dark fantasy, Lies of P, is a prime example – being about as close to a successor as you can get. While Elden Ring's expansion Shadow of the Erdtree - and the upcoming standalone adventure Elden Ring Nightreign - are helping to sate the Soulslike hunger, Bloodborne still has a firm hold over the hearts of players. Hell, any time there's an announcement for another State of Play showcase, the outcry for a remaster or Bloodborne PC port is never far behind.

Hella good

Personally speaking, Life is Strange is the game that shaped 2015 for me the most. Thanks to its episodic format, its steady release ensured that it was never far from my mind throughout the entire year, and I got swept up in thoughts and theories of a growing community who tried to guess where Max Caulfield's journey would take us next. At the time, I'd never played anything quite like it. Telltale's Wolf Among Us and The Walking Dead were some of the few points of comparison, but Don't Nod's narrative adventure stood out for exploration of the highs and lows of the teen experience, and how it played around with choice-based decision making with its supernatural rewind mechanic.

Life is Strange filled a gap in the gaming space that would go on to spawn a whole series. Above all, I think it demonstrated that there was a growing desire among players for more story-driven adventures with relatable characters that could be just as entertaining and engrossing without combat being a factor.

While Life is Strange saw the start of something new in 2015, the release of Metal Gear Solid 5: Phantom Pain closed a chapter at Konami. As Hideo Kojima's swansong game before he parted ways from the studio, we haven't seen a mainline Metal Gear game since Big Boss' action-packed open-world adventure. With remasters such as Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater to fill that hole, there's been speculation and rumor about a potential Metal Gear Solid 6 for almost 10 years, but whether we'll see a comeback remains to be seen. Still, Kojima has gone on to make waves outside of Metal Gear and Konami, with his studio Kojima Productions bringing us the likes of Death Stranding and its upcoming sequel, Death Stranding 2.

Nintendo even went outside of its wheelhouse by bringing us the paint-filled shooter, Splatoon on the Wii U, which would spawn two subsequent sequels in the years to follow. Plus, we saw the arrival of Mario Maker that awakened our imagination by putting the iconic plumber's platforming directly in our hands by allowing us to create our own levels and challenges.

Outside of some of the bigger releases, the indie scene brought us some imaginative and impactful gems that still hold weight today. Before Telling Lies or Immortality, there was Sam Barlow's Her Story, which came our way in 2015 to pull us right into an inventive interactive FMV mystery that blurred the lines between TV and games in such a novel way.

Towards the latter half of the year, Undertale from developer Toby Fox stole the hearts of many (myself included). With its unique storytelling, loveable characters, and memorable lines, it's a thought-provoking, funny, and emotionally impactful RPG wrapped up in a nostalgic pixelated art style. It feels like a mishmash of genres in certain respects, but the themes it explores make it so relatable, and at this point, I think it's fair to call it a timeless indie classic.

Frictional Games then came along to bring us more scares with Soma. Following the breakout success of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Soma proved the developer could continue to deliver original psychological horror experiences that aren't afraid to explore what it means to be human and leave you with lasting questions.

Double trouble

2015 was also a big year for major series, with the launch of both Assassin's Creed Syndicate and Fallout 4 in November. The former tread new ground in the core AC series by bringing in dual protagonists, including a lead female assassin in Evie Fyre. It also introduced the grappling hook, which freshened up rooftop traversal and changed the way we could parkour around the Victorian London open-world. With Assassin's Creed Shadows set to come in 2025 from the same developer behind Syndicate, the Fyre twins still arguably influence the stealthy series, with Shadows also boasting two lead characters.

Fallout 4, on the other hand, signaled the last mainline entry in Bethesda's post-apocalyptic RPG we'd see for a long time. Fallout 5 is still years away, but with an unexpected next-gen upgrade and the Fallout TV show, the last adventure in the Wastelands is far from forgotten.

There are so many more games I could highlight, from the likes of Yakuza 0 – which launched in Japan in 2015 and eventually made its way out into the wider world a few years later – to Moon Studio's moving Metroidvania-like platformer Ori and the Blind Forest, and Rocket League, which is still going 17 seasons later. Not to mention the stellar Trespasser DLC for Dragon Age Inquisition, and the visually impressive (albeit divisive) Order 1886. As with any year there are highs and lows, and while it's easy to let nostalgia skew your perspective, it's undeniable that 2015 saw some fantastic games that have made a lasting impression.

That we still talk about so many of the releases a decade on says it all. While I still can't quite believe that so many years have passed since I was in Kaer Morhen learning the ropes, thinking back on everything 2015 brought us has been quite a ride. But more than that, it's also made me appreciate the year we have ahead. With so many new games coming our way and a wealth of exciting upcoming indie games on the horizon, I can only hope that in 10 years time, I'll look back on 2025 in the same way. With everything from Avowed to Assassin's Creed Shadows, Monster Hunter Wilds, Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, Lost Records Bloom & Rage, and Elden Ring Nightreign – to name a few – I'd say there's a chance.

One small feature in the latest Cyberpunk 2077 update made me fall in love with driving through Night City all over again.

Shortly after Nintendo issued a warning to players to "refrain" from using "unauthorized software" to keep their Wii Us online since it "may pose unexpected security risks," unofficial Nintendo Network replacement Pretendo has shared its own response, noting that "we are committed to user safety."

Nintendo shut down the official Nintendo Network-powered Wii U and 3DS online servers last April, but fans haven't been willing to give up on their favorite games that easily. While some simply kept their consoles for as long as possible past the shutdown to avoid disconnecting, others turned to alternative means like Pretendo. It's still a work in progress, but the open-source project is using "clean-room reverse engineering" to recreate the official service established by Nintendo, and has been usable for quite a while already. It works on the 3DS family of consoles and the Wii U – the latter doesn't even require a hacked console for it to function (although its features are more limited if used that way). 

It's not clear what prompted Nintendo to speak out about Wii U online replacements on its Japanese customer service Twitter account today of all days. It didn't specifically call Pretendo out, but the unofficial network service has now weighed in on the matter itself. To an extent, it's actually on board with Nintendo's warning, as it says: "We understand Nintendo's warning, always be cautious of what you're installing and do proper research! 

"That said, our tools/servers are open source and we are committed to user safety, going so far as to release security patches for games Nintendo themselves no longer supports," it continues. 

Backing up that point, Pretendo says that it previously "released security patches for Mario Kart 8 and Splatoon fixing critical vulnerabilities several months before Nintendo released official updates," and 3DS and Wii U era aside, its team "regularly contributes to Nintendo’s bug bounty program to report modern exploits."

Needless to say, it seems Pretendo is confident that its own services don't pose a risk, although Nintendo clearly isn't too comfortable with the existence of such software – why it's airing those concerns over nine months after the official Nintendo Network shutdown is rather strange, though. 

Looking for a last-gen throwback? Be sure to check out our roundup of the best Wii U games of all time.

Over nine months on from the shutdown of the 3DS and Wii U online servers, Nintendo has issued a statement asking players to "refrain" from using unofficial services that allow them to continue playing like nothing ever happened, thank you very much.

While some players valiantly hung onto the old servers for as long as possible to keep them alive last year – an effort which lasted a whopping 210 days for one particular Mario Kart 7 player – if you boot up your Wii U or 3DS now and try to jump into an online game, you're not going to have any luck. That is if you don't turn to other, not Nintendo-approved means, anyway. After Nintendo first announced its plans to shut the Wii U and 3DS servers down, the developers working on the unofficial Pretendo servers confirmed that they had "begun discussing our development road map internally to accommodate this," and today, it serves as a popular replacement for the online services for many. 

In a new post on its Japanese customer support Twitter account (translated by Google and verified using DeepL), Nintendo doesn't call out Pretendo or any other specific alternatives by name, but it warns against using "unauthorized services" that replace the Wii U's online functionality as "they may pose unexpected security risks." It's not clear what prompted the company to post this now – as it points out itself, the servers officially shut down on April 9 last year, and while Pretendo is still a work in progress, it's been available for quite some time now. 

The statement also comes at a time when Nintendo fans everywhere have got their eyes glued on the company's social media pages in the hopes of seeing a Switch 2 announcement. Apparently, that could be happening sooner rather than later, as one leaker recently claimed it'll happen this week – something which was corroborated by multiple other sources including Eurogamer and The Verge's Tom Warren. We're now halfway through the week, so we'll just have to watch this space to see if the reports end up being correct.

Since Nintendo's warning about using "unauthorized services," to replace the dead Wii U servers, Pretendo has publicly stated that "we are committed to user safety, going so far as to release security patches for games Nintendo themselves no longer supports."

The numbers have been totted up, the players have spoken, and Minecraft has been voted the winner of the coveted Still Playing Award on PC and Console at the Golden Joystick Awards 2024.

It's fair to say that Minecraft has become a global phenomenon and cultural touchstone in the *checks notes* 15 years since it first became available in 2009, becoming the first video game to sell over 300 million copies. Unless you've been living in a cave for all of that time, then it's likely that you'll already be familiar with this building sandbox and what it's capable of.

Minecraft had to overcome 11 competitors to take home the Still Playing Award on PC and Console, defeating online stalwarts including Fortnite, Roblox, and the other Golden Joystick Awards 2024 nominees for this prize:

• Apex Legends
• Counter-Strike 2
• EA Sports FC 
• Dota 2
• Fortnite
• GTA Online
• Minecraft (winner)
• Naraka: Bladepoint
• Roblox
• Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege
• Valorant
• Warframe

In our revisited Minecraft review all the way back in 2017 we described it as "A communal imaginarium, a cultural phenomenon, and an epic social experiment" that offers "A big, beautiful welcome mat to the front door of your imagination". That summary still holds true today, with recent building projects including Bloodborne's Yharnam, a real-world infrastructure project for Japan's government, and an entire fantasy kingdom 12 years in the making.

The world of Minecraft is still evolving after all of this time, with the announcement in the last couple of months that the developers are completely revamping how they do updates, eschewing the previous infrequent major patches packed with fresh content for more regular free update "game drops" to add new features as and when they're ready.

With the game being turned into a Netflix animated series, as well as the live-action A Minecraft Movie with Jack Black and Jason Momoa at the helm, you can expect to hear plenty more about Minecraft in 2025.

Terraria 1.4.5 was set to be the game's sixth final update in three years, up until it started getting delayed. True to the spirit of all those "final update" memes, the devs at Re-Logic keep pushing the update back because they keep adding more stuff to it.

"The teams remain hard at work on adding/tweaking/fixing content for Terraria 1.4.5," Re-Logic explains in the latest State of the Game blog. "The finish line is starting to take shape, though we admittedly do have a couple of decent-sized ideas we want to discuss internally and decide if we should take those on before we can say for certain. How's that for vague?"

Vagueness aside, it seems the devs are starting to get a pretty good idea of how much work is left on this update. "The team has the final list in-hand - as well as a few possible additional things that we might include, which we will decide in the next couple of weeks - and is hard at work with getting all of that content together," they continue. "Terraria 1.4.5 has turned into quite an update, far exceeding our initial intent to 'just do the Dead Cells content.' We know the update process has been longer than usual (or anyone expected), but the end is in sight and we hope that it will not be too much longer before we can get and give a sense for timing."

Terraria launched way back in 2011, and Re-Logic's commitment to more than a decade of post-launch updates has become absolutely legendary in the community - particularly given how many times the studio has previously said it was done. Many of the game's major patches have been billed with some degree of finality, but 1.4 in particular was supposed to be "Journey's End." Then we got 1.4.1 as "Journey's Actual End," and on and on until we're now at 1.4.5.

1.4.5 was originally scheduled to launch in 2023, but it seems players aren't too displeased by the long wait. Earlier this year, they gave their informal blessing to the delay. Someday, Re-Logic may move on from Terraria - but it is not this day.

Terraria creator once again proves he's his own game's biggest fan by getting Zelda-inspired fan art of an iconic sword tattooed on his shoulder.

It turns out The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has a development tool that attaches the identity of an individual developer to specific changes made in the game world.

Back in 2006 for the 'Iwata Asks' series of interviews, Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto recollected instances during development where he would become angry when finding rogue stones placed throughout the world which were sometimes disruptive to environmental development for various reasons. Miyamoto said he would demand to know the culprit, but everyone would just point fingers.

"'Who put this stone here?'" Miyamoto said in the 2006 interview. "Somebody must've put it there! When I try to track the culprit down, it always comes back to the director. 'The designers and programmers didn't do it, so it must've been the director! Who's in charge here!' This happened quite a lot."

Well, perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, it seems Tears of the Kingdom now has a tool that lets the overseers at Nintendo see exactly who's responsible for things like placing down stones. As observed by Japanese game developer Nikaido Range, a slide shown during a recent CEDEC 2024 presentation seemed to reveal the tool in a Tears of the Kingdom development screenshot.

Again, there's no hard evidence to confirm this development tool was added to appease Miyamoto, but there is a strongly implied connection between that classic anecdote and the discovery of a tool that sure sounds like it would've made Miyamoto's job a lot easier back in the day. At the very least, it's hard to imagine a world where Miyamoto didn't at least give this feature a big thumbs up when it was pitched.

Although I personally would rank Twilight Princess much higher, the official GR+ ranking of the best Zelda games is more than respectable.

For the first time in three years, there's a new route in the fastest The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time speedrunning category, and it comes down to an unlikely savior: the Wii U.

Any% runs of Ocarina of Time are under four minutes these days, thanks to a particular way to exploit the game's code that runners call Stale Reference Manipulation, or SRM. The technique used in any% OoT speedruns is called the Lightnode SRM, which allows players to alter the game's memory based on the characters of the save game filenames.

Back in 2021, a method was found that let you use Lightnode SRM to instantly warp to the game's credits from the starting area of Kokiri Forest. Boom - four-minute speedrun. But this particular technique was only possible with the Wii Virtual Console version of Ocarina of Time, thanks to a bug in how the system's N64 emulation works. As a result, Wii became the platform of choice for most of the game's any% speedrunners, since it was the only place you could use this particular Lightnode SRM technique.

But as MrCheeze - a member of the Zelda speedrunning community who's been instrumental in devising strategies like this - explains on Reddit, the Wii isn't actually the best place to speedrun Ocarina of Time. Rather, the ideal platform is the Wii U. That's because the Wii U N64 emulator achieves much better frame rates than the Wii, and over the course of the four-minute OoT speedrun, the reduced lag on Wii U could theoretically save you as much as two seconds over the Wii version. 

Again, the particular SRM technique used on the Wii VC is only possible thanks to a bug in the emulator. But now, after three straight years of runners using this same technique, MrCheeze has managed to find an SRM filename that works on Wii U. If you want to see the technique in action, you can check out the video above from runner Malicia - the first to set a new personal best with the new discovery. MrCheeze also has a more detailed technical breakdown of the new technique on Mastodon.

Whether we see a new OoT any% world record on Wii U is up in the air for now, since runners will have to decide if they're willing to switch to a whole different platform for a potential two second time save. But there's another advantage to the Wii U for this speedrun: the TV remote button. Yeah, remember how the Wii U came out when it seemed like every game console needed to double as a way to control your cable box? Now that option is finally useful.

Triggering the appropriate Lightnode SRM requires an extremely precise input on the analog stick. The Wii U can take analog stick input from multiple controllers at once, but one input will override the other - unless that second input is on a Wii U gamepad with the remote control menu up, which pauses controller inputs. So, in theory, you could use a rubber band or some other implement to hold the gamepad's analog stick in exactly the place you need it, bring up the remote menu, use another controller to play the game, and then deactivate the remote screen, instantly giving you the exact input needed to finish off the trick.

The video below from bradyONE shows how it all works, and it makes a very difficult part of the Lightnode SRM route much easier to execute. There's just one problem: it might not be legal. The current rules for OoT speedrunning note that "throughout the duration of any speedrun, you are only allowed to use one controller with one analog mapping per controller port. In other words, you may not switch controllers, switch mappings, change calibration, or toggle on/off calibration or mappings during your run." 

With that in mind, the controller manipulation part of the Wii U run is currently banned, but that's been the topic of a fair amount of debate in OoT speedrunning circles. Allowing the Wii U technique would violate the current rules against controller swapping, but this is also just the default behavior of the console. That's the question the community is going to have to unpack for the next phase of the game's speedrunning scene.

For now, though, this is the first major development in the OoT any% run in three years, and that alone is cause for excitement. Never underestimate the speedrunning community's ability to keep giving old games new life.

Legendary Mario Kart 64 speedrunner saves a lost run with a nearly impossible YOLO strat and breaks his own year-old world record.

It's a dark day for Nintendo fans everywhere, as yet another nail has been driven into the coffin of the company's underrated previous-gen console, the Wii U. 

You might have thought the Wii U was already dead, and yeah, in many ways it's safe to say it was. After all, online services for it and the 3DS were shut down earlier this year, and while many players managed to cling to them for way longer than Nintendo intended (Nintended?), it's impossible to boot your Wii U up right now and connect to an online Splatoon match on those classic servers. Today though, it's been confirmed that repairs are no longer being accepted for the console in Japan, as the company is out of parts.

In a tweet posted by the Japanese Nintendo customer support account earlier today (translated using Google and DeepL), it's stated that there's no stock left of the "necessary parts" required for repairs of Wii U consoles and their peripherals, so effective immediately, Japanese customers will be unable to get theirs fixed by the company. To be fair, we knew this day was coming – in May 2023, it was confirmed that as soon as Nintendo was out of parts, repairs would no longer be offered, so it seems there was enough stock to last for over a year. 

Obviously though, it's far from ideal – some consoles will be approaching their 12th birthdays this year, and as time passes, it'll become even more likely that they'll need fixing in one way or another. On top of that, there's the fact that the system is so reliant on its unique GamePad controller – many games actively require you to use it rather than other controllers, and you can't even change your system settings without it. Unfortunately, that means that even if it's just your GamePad that stops working, you're going to lose a massive part of the console's functionality. 

While many of the best Wii U games like Mario Kart 8, Tokyo Mirage Sessions, and Bayonetta 2 have been ported to the Nintendo Switch for an alternative way to play, there are still many stuck on the previous-gen console, with no indication that they'll be brought over to the current generation any time soon. Here's hoping that Xenoblade Chronicles X, Paper Mario: Color Splash, and the HD versions of The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker and Twilight Princess might make it to the Switch or its successor eventually.

Be sure to check out our roundup of the best Nintendo Switch games for some top titles to dive into on Nintendo's current console. 

Splatoon The First was supposed to have fizzled out when Nintendo shut down online servers for both the 3DS and Wii U over two months ago. Things didn't shake out so simply, though, as one dedicated player defied the Big N and managed to keep paintballing. Until now, that is. 

Captain Lcd101 was and forever will be the "final Splatoon player" as they managed to keep both their console and the game connected online for a whopping 68 days after shutdown. That phase has sadly come to an end, however. 

"My connection to Splatoon has been terminated," the Splatooner tweeted. "In my move, I accidentally lost connection to my router. I'd like to thank everyone for this inkredible support... Words cannot express how amazing it's been to wake up every day and see you cheering me on. You've made me the luckiest squid (or octo) online and I'm just so thankful for all of your love."

Captain Lcd101 can still keep their head held high, though. Along with seven other dedicated players, Splatoon's last inkling managed to beat a record long held by Halo 2 superfans who clutched onto their dying game for 25 days after the original Xbox Live servers were sunsetted. Some things are worth the map purgatory, right?

According to community member GaffsNotLaffs, who has been tracking the end of the Nintendo Network, only two known players remain connected to 3DS and Wii U servers. One player is still cruising around in Mario Kart 7, while another gets to enjoy the delightfully absurd player-made creations of Super Mario Maker.

Check out everything we know about the Nintendo Switch 2 for a look into the future.

Splatoon was supposed to die quickly; it should have fizzled out after Nintendo shut down 3DS and Wii U servers on April 8. But one brave player has managed to keep Splatoon-ing two months post-mortem while Nintendo starts removing features from the sequel.

Defying Nintendo is no easy feat, but I guess being a huge Splatoon fan makes some people up for the challenge. Lcd101, the self-proclaimed "final Splatoon 1 player," has now lasted over two months on the nonfunctional server. 

They post daily updates in a captain's log on Twitter. It seems that life in the barren, Book of Revelation Inkopolis has become so boring, Lcd101 has taken to reminiscing about better Splatoon days. 

Their most recent log from June 10 celebrates "day 63 on the Nintendo Network!" with a reminder that "ten years ago today, Splatoon was officially revealed to the world at E3 2014. For ten years, we’ve been living in a more creative, colorful world."

As Lcd101 basks in their nostalgia, Nintendo is seemingly working on dismantling Splatoon 2, its 2017 third-person shooter for Switch. The developer noted in its customer support center that Splatoon 2 has lost access to Twitter (or X, or whatever) integration and social media integration for its friends list.

In addition, players will no longer be able to post directly to Twitter or Facebook from Splatoon 3. These changes presumably come, in part, from Twitter/X's decision to monetize their third-party API. 

But fans have started to lament the fact that "Splatoon 2 is slowly dying" as players flock to Splatoon 3, which released in 2022. 

"I'm afraid Splatoon 2 died the minute Splatoon 3 came out," one Reddit commenter said. "Could since never get into a single ranked match."

Splatoon update account OatmealDome also notes that, after 2's posting features were removed, "all players in the Square are now Nintendo-made presets, like the Miiverse shutdown in Splatoon 1." Splatoon 2's future looks dark. You should try playing Splatoon 1 instead.

Or try one of the 25 best shooters to play right now.

With controllers clenched and routers reinforced, a few determined players have been fighting to stay connected to the recently deprecated Nintendo Network servers for 3DS and Wii U. As of today, May 21, the number of known players logged in has dropped from four to three, as the last known Xenoblade Chronicles X representative has finally disconnected. 

"I just got DCed," Twitter user XC_omoroid said. "I'm surprised that I somehow managed to beat the record set by the Noble 14 with the game known to have the worst netcode on Wii U?" Thankfully, they confirmed in a follow-up post that they "somehow managed to quickly beat all the online exclusives before getting kicked off the server," so at least their save file is functionally content complete. 

XC_omoroid has been fighting the good fight since the April 8 shutdown, and as they mentioned in their tweet, this puts their online record ahead of the famous "Noble 14," a group of players who clung to the Halo 2 servers for weeks after the original Xbox Live shutdown over a decade ago. 

"The worst netcode on Wii U" is maybe pushing it, but the multiplayer in Xenoblade Chronicles X, a stupidly large JRPG that was well-received back in 2015 and which is now crying out for a Nintendo Switch re-release louder than ever, was indeed notoriously janky. It was also cool and kind of endearing conceptually. Up to 32 players could form a large Squad for online communication via the Blade Report, or a smaller squad for simple four-player online Squad Missions. 

Somewhat like Dragon's Dogma's Pawn system, you could also sign up to have your avatar added to the Blade pool where it could be scouted by other players, passively earning resources for contributing to their adventures. Naturally, you could enlist other players' avatars as well. All of this multiplayer stuff is fortunately non-essential apart from true completionist runs, and frankly it didn't work very well even when the servers were still alive, but it did add some spice to XCX's oddball world.

In addition to widespread player efforts, this server shutdown prompted the formation of dedicated watchdogs like Nintendo Network After Hours, whose most recent count reckons there are now just three known players still connected to the defunct servers: Fishguy6564 in Mario Kart 7, SlitherySheep in Mario Maker, and Lcd101 in Splatoon. This stuff can be difficult to track and validate, but this figure lines up with our ongoing coverage of the shutdown's aftermath. 

The last Pokemon player has made the ultimate sign-off as 6 survivors hang on to keep the Wii U and 3DS servers alive.

Believe it or not, the final Splatoon player still inking it up in the canned Wii U servers has cheated death yet again.

When Nintendo pulled the plug on the 3DS and Wii U server on April 8, many beloved games and their online functionality went down the drain too. To stay in their favorite games for as long as possible, several dedicated fans channeled their inner Noble 14, refused to turn off their consoles, and miraculously stayed connected to the undead Nintendo Network. 

One such player is Lcd101, the final Splatoon inkling who's luckily still connected to the original game, although surviving for this long kinda got them stuck in map purgatory with a rotation that won't change for another decade, as opposed to the switcharoo that normally occurred every few hours.

Things have now become even weirder for the last inkling standing since the servers seem to be having an existential crisis. "I'm shaking," the player tweeted earlier today. "My console froze for a few minutes just as I went to enter Booyah Base and I thought it was over. It then loaded."

Lcd101 continues to explain that their "ink color has changed yet again," after going from pink to green a few days ago. "I think this might be caused by bad data," the player speculates, "Day 38."

There are now only four known players still connected to either the Wii U or 3DS servers, according to tracker GaffsNotLaffs, with one player in Mario Kart 7, another in Super Mario Maker, and a third in Xenoblade Chronicles X. The group has collectively beat a long-held record originally set by the final Halo 2 superfans, who managed to keep their OG Xboxes connected to the servers for just over 25 days a decade ago.

Booted from the Wii U servers? Move on with everything we know about the Nintendo Switch 2. 

The fight to stay online on 3DS and Wii U continues well over a month after the servers were supposed to shut down, but we're now down to the final four - all because one player's 3DS just crashed.

Just ahead of the planned Nintendo Network shutdown on April 8, two players called Fishguy6564 and Marioiscool246 set up a pair of bots in Mario Kart 7 to continually race against each other online. Those bots have been racing over and over again since that day. With the loss of the last Pokemon XY player on May 8, that left Fishguy6564 and Marioiscool246 as the only known 3DS players left online.

But yesterday, May 13, tragedy struck as Marioiscool246's 3DS froze, apparently on the Luigi's Mansion track. A total of 13,151 races were run, with 6495 won by Fishguy6564's bot and 6656 won by Marioiscool246's, according to the latter player's own estimate. I guess we now know how many races it takes to break Mario Kart 7. 

Fishguy6564 remains online, though now simply connected to an empty lobby. According to GaffsNotLaffs on Twitter, that leaves us with just four players on the Nintendo Network, counting the three other souls who are sitting on lonely Mario Maker, Splatoon, and Xenoblade Chronicles X connections. They've been dropping like flies in recent weeks though. As of May 5, eight final players remained, but that number's now already been halved. Godspeed to those who remain.

These are the 25 best Wii U games. (Yes, we managed to find 25!) 

A small handful of old video game loyalists are continuing to keep the Wii U and 3DS servers alive even now, but the war has lost an important soldier, as the last remaining Pokemon player has logged out for the last time.

That player was known as Amanda, and had been logged into the Pokemon XY servers. Now, GaffsNotLaffs on Twitter, who has been regularly reporting on the status of the last remaining players, says "Amanda has disconnected from XY. Pokémon is finally dead on the Nintendo Network. 6 known players remain on the Nintendo Network." 

That leaves us with two players in Mario Kart 7, one player in Super Mario Maker, one player in Splatoon, and two players left in Xenoblade Chronicles X. The proud. The few. The final six. It's possible that there are more players hanging on somewhere out there right now, but they're yet to be discovered, and I'd guess that anyone dedicated enough to keep a Wii U or 3DS game running this long is probably also dedicated enough to have spoken with some like-minded players.

These players have already managed to beat the 14-year-old record held by the Halo 2 fans who stayed on the dying OG Xbox servers for 25 days back in 2010. The Wii U and 3DS holdouts are already up to 30 days, and there's no obvious end in sight. Maybe at some point Nintendo will literally pull the power cord out of whatever aging machine is hosting these players, but until then the fight goes on.

The Nintendo 3DS and Wii U’s real legacy is how they brought players together.

Minecraft speedrunner Feinberg has spent the past two years dominating one of the survival game's most demanding categories. Now, after setting his 18th straight world record with a "pretty unbeatable" time, he's taking a break from the grind.

The category is Minecraft 1.16 AA RSG - a challenge to get all advancements starting from a random seed without taking advantage of any major glitches in the 1.16 version of the game. Speedrun.com shows that the category got started in 2020 with a run that went over 34 hours, but by 2021, the times were dropping precipitously. In November 2021, Feinberg set his first world record of 4 hours, 38 minutes, and 14 seconds.

Despite a few other players setting impressive times in the interim, in February 2022, Feinberg set another world record of 3:33:46, starting a chain of records that continues to this day. On May 5, 2024, Feinberg's 18th world record brought the time down to 2:14:19, nearly 10 minutes faster than his previous time. This the first time anybody's managed to get a time under the 2:20:00 mark, a milestone the community once thought impossible.

"Taking a break from 1.16 aa rsg for a while, this is pretty unbeatable," Feinberg says in the description of the run's YouTube VOD. "Some pretty obvious timeloss w mega taiga + skulls but otherwise run is near flawless, nothing really went wrong in the midgame which is why the pace felt so amazing at 1:35ish."

So what does a break for a runner like Feinberg look like? Well, he's now spending his time on Twitch streaming all advancements runs in the 1.20.6 version of Minecraft "to learn and improve." Speedrunners are clearly just built different.

Skyrim speedrunner breaks 3-year-old record by leveling from 0 to 80 and killing the RPG's infamous Ebony Warrior in just under 12 minutes.

Despite it all, I look back on Nintendo’s years with the Wii U and 3DS fondly; and while the games that both systems offered are a major source of nostalgia, it feels almost overshadowed by how Nintendo really fostered relationships in ways that have yet to be replicated since. With features such as StreetPass and Miiverse, Nintendo gave players all the tools to make communities all their own, and it’s a pity they were left behind.

It may be a silly thing to reminisce about – aspects of these consoles that didn’t directly tie into the games most players bought them for. But for a specific type of Nintendo fan, I can assure you that having a connection to the other players meant the world to me. Setting up my Wii U at launch, and getting to discuss all the games I was excited to play – this was before I joined Twitter, and it’s not hard to wish for something akin to that lighthearted discussion board given the current state of social media. Scrolling through Miiverse not only let me learn about games I’d never heard of, it also helped me find others to play those same games with. As a Monster Hunter fan since the PSP, finding friends on Miiverse to play Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate is still one of my fondest memories of the Wii U as a whole.

Community

While Miiverse eventually found its way to 3DS, it always felt a bit overshadowed by the system’s other major social feature. As I began to go to conventions such as Anime Expo and San Diego Comic-Con in my later school years, StreetPass became a revelation. If Miiverse helped players discover new friends and games across the world, StreetPass did the same for those around us. Taking a break from walking through convention halls to check the Miis you’ve accrued was a ritual that many convention-goers from the mid-to-late 2010s are all too familiar with. Finding out who you’ve crossed paths with, and the games they play were one thing, but seeing the impact that those same players could have in many games on the system helped make even single-player games feel like a community experience.

That’s not to mention the impromptu multiplayer experiences that StreetPass could bring. Waiting for a panel, and seeing the green light pop up indicating that someone else with a 3DS was nearby, perhaps in the same line as you. Maybe one of you notices that the other has the same multiplayer games, and within moments the wait feels all the less painful as players bust out their systems to play Mario Kart, Smash Bros. or Monster Hunter. Maybe you exchange friend codes, and perhaps those chance encounters lead to friendships down the line.

Nintendo has always excelled at bringing players together. We can see it even now with the Switch and how the Joy-Cons are explicitly designed around the idea that you could hand one off to a friend or a stranger to play multiplayer – even if they don’t have a Switch of their own. Yet while the magic of the Switch’s Joy-Cons has perhaps faded over the system’s life, it always felt like both StreetPass and Miiverse never suffered the same fate while actively supported.

As the Wii U and 3DS fade into the sunset, it’s hard not to hope that some of what made those systems so special might make a comeback. Yet even if that’s fated to not be the case, I’ll always have the memories of the games I played, and the friends I made along the way.

Looking to the future, I can only hope that whatever Nintendo works on next can bring that same energy forward. The gaming community truly felt like it was a brighter place for all that the 3DS and Wii U added to the conversation; and while we can never go back to those days, it’s exciting to think about what Nintendo has in mind to bring players together once more.

If you're still interested in the older handhelds, you can't go wrong with our list of the best 3DS games.

A new first-party Switch game just leaked thanks to an ESRB rating, and it sounds like a spiritual successor to one of the best hidden gems Nintendo built for the sadly deceased Wii U.

That game is Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, which recently popped up on the ESRB rating site. "This is a collection of 2D challenges and platformer games in which players traverse through various modes (e.g., speedrun, survival)," the description explains. "Several challenges involve reaching specific points, while others prompt players to defeat small enemies or survive brief battles. Some games depict pixelated characters using small swords or arrows to strike at enemies; enemies typically get stunned or disappear in a flash."

The name 'Nintendo World Championships' goes all the way back to a very early esports event the publisher held in 1990, where players would compete on custom cartridges featuring versions of Super Mario Bros, Rad Racer, and Tetris that had been modified for competition. The original Nintendo World Championships cartridges are among the rarest video games ever manufactured.

The ESRB description - where you play through various brief challenges with certain goals - sounds a whole lot like NES Remix, a series with three entries released across Wii U and 3DS. Each title included a selection of classic NES games that had been 'remixed' into various minigame challenges, sort of like meatier versions of the retro microgames in the WarioWare series. NES Remix 2 also featured a mode called Nintendo World Championship Remix, which offered a special selection of challenges with online leaderboards attached.

NES Remix remains one of my favorite first-party Nintendo oddities - it's one of the best hidden gems the publisher has ever put out, and it was a particular highlight in the otherwise thin Wii U library. It's also one of the few great Wii U games that never got a sequel or port on Switch, and if Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is indeed the follow-up it seems to be, I'm thrilled that the concept is getting a second chance.

Hopefully we'll see a fair few of the best NES games as part of this new release.

It's now been over three weeks since the official Nintendo 3DS and Wii U online servers were meant to shut down, and believe it or not, some dedicated (and extremely lucky) individuals who've refused to turn off their consoles are somehow still connected. One of these is Splatoon player Lcd101, who's survived for so long that they've now hit a map rotation that won't change for another ten years. 

Before this, Splatoon's maps changed every four hours, with the Ranked Battle mode on offer swapping between Tower Control, Splat Zones, and Rainmaker at the same time. However, after the servers were supposed to shut down, dataminer OatmealDome, who runs a website which displays future map and mode rotations for all the Splatoon games, noted that from April 30 at 2PM ET / 11AM PT / 7PM BST, the map rotation was set to last for an entire decade. 

If it was actually possible to play, you'd be stuck with Turf War on Blackbelly Skatepark and Port Mackerel, and Rainmaker on Bluefin Depot and Moray Towers. This selection is rather amusing, with Moray Towers being one of the most divisive maps in the game, largely thanks to how much it favors charger (sniper) weapons – one fan describes the ten-year rotation of it as "a fate worse than death."

With no one else to play with, Lcd101 hasn't been able to access the actual multiplayer modes since April 9, but they've finally reached this fabled rotation. It's been a long time coming –  for quite some time, they were able to remain waiting in the empty lobbies, but last week, they announced that matchmaking had finally gone offline, putting a stop to their endless search for other players from beyond the void. However, this didn't mean that they'd gone offline, as they were still able to see gear in the shops change, and get those all-important stage rotation updates from Squid Sisters Callie and Marie, which bizarrely, all became delayed by half an hour from when they were actually supposed to happen. No one was supposed to see it get to that point, I suppose.

At the time of writing, it's believed that Callie and Marie have made their final news broadcast, meaning they've told us to "stay fresh" for the last time. Lcd101 reports that no further newsflashes have occurred since the ten-year rotation began, but even so, it doesn't sound like the player is done trying to survive yet.

"So what does this mean for me? I’m still going to stay in the game for as long as there’s something new to document," Lcd101 writes. "Currently, I don’t have any plans to disconnect from the Nintendo Network. I still want to see if the shops update tonight. For now, I’ll just keep swimming."

As of their final update eight hours ago, the gear in the shop did indeed change, despite the lack of map rotation. It's not clear how long Lcd101 plans to hold on for – it seems rather unlikely that they'd be able to stay connected for an entire decade just to see what happens at the end, after all. For now though, they remain one of nine people still known to be connected to the Nintendo Network servers. 

Be sure to check out our list of the best Nintendo Switch games for some newer games to dive into.

It's been 15 days since the Wii U and 3DS servers were supposed to shut down, but a few courageous players have somehow managed to cling onto whatever bits of life are left in a handful of games for those systems. The last remaining Splatoon player is holding fast even as the servers have started to crumble around them.

"Hold on to your tentacles… for some bad news," Lcd101 writes on Twitter. "As of the (delayed) 2:00 A.M. EST rotation, matchmaking (lobby) has officially gone down in Splatoon. Other online services, including the news and shops, are still functional and I still remain online. I repeat, I am STILL online." Matchmaking, of course, doesn't have much point right now, given that Lcd101 is the only player who's still connected to the Splatoon servers. 

Lcd101 notes that the game is displaying the same error code that happened when it was temporarily shut down back in 2023, so I guess we're not in fully uncharted territory here. Either way, Lcd101 says "I intend to stay online in this state for as long as possible."

As of just a few days ago, it was believed that six players were hanging on in the 3DS and Wii U servers. Incredibly, it seems that another holdout has been discovered. As GaffsNotLaffs notes on Twitter, there's one player hanging on in online lobbies for Wii Sports Club, joining the other proud few remaining players in Mario Kart 8, Mario Kart 7, Splatoon, Super Mario Maker, and Pokemon XY.

The best Wii U games are still great even without their online features.

One lone Splatoon player is still holding out in the Nintendo shooter's servers hours after they were officially shut down, and they're "so lonely."

Earlier this week came the unfortunate shutdown of servers for Nintendo's 3DS and Wii U platforms, completely shuttering servers for tons of games like Splatoon and Mario Kart. Well over a day later, at the time of writing, one lone Splatoon player is still somehow online and active on their Wii U, staking their territory on Nintendo's servers and refusing to budge.

You can see the player in question just below. "Almost a day after closing, I am the final Splatoon 1 player online," the player writes, adding that they're going to "hold out" for as long as they possibly can. Somewhat predictably, though, considering that they're still playing what's ostensibly an online shooter, they're "so lonely." Still, they've got the amiibo games to keep them company.

But there's more! A matter of minutes ago, the player reported that they're still active and somehow alive on the Wii U's servers, and are reposting the map rotations for Splatoon. 

It turns out the player in question is actually on a Steam Deck, playing the original Splatoon through an emulator. That's not to say they aren't using the same game servers that they would if they were on a Wii U, obviously. The player is leaving their Wii U firmly powered down for the time being because they don't want to see what would happen if the same Nintendo ID was active on two devices at once.

Even after the Wii U and 3DS servers shut down, Nintendo fans continued playing their favorite online games for hours. "IF YOU'RE STILL ONLINE FOR SPLATOON 1, DO NOT RESET YOUR WII U. It's still kicking for a LOT OF PEOPLE! KEEP PLAYING," wrote one player in a spirited Twitter post. Dozens of players continued playing for a while, but we might have the final Wii U online player on our hands here.

Take a look at our upcoming Switch games guide for a look at all the new Nintendo games we've got to look forward to for this year and beyond.

In a big win for video game preservation, a project meant to archive Wii U and 3DS data - including DLC - before Nintendo's server shutdown resulted in a "massive success."

On Monday, Nintendo shut down the Wii U and 3DS servers for good, which sucks. But what makes it suck less is that the SpotPass Archival Project has saved a ton of data and content from being lost forever. Over the last several days, various members of the the 3DS and Wii U Homebrew modding community rallied the troops across various online forums in a desperate, last-minute attempt to preserve system data sent to 3DS and Wii U consoles straight from Nintendo via the company's now-defunct Spot Pass program.

Essentially, Spot Pass was just a very Nintendo-esque term for an always-online system that delivered notifications and game updates to 3DS and Wii U consoles without requiring anything from the user. In many cases, the updates took the form of free DLC that could've easily been installed without the user ever noticing, which made it imperative for the preservationists at SpotPass Archival Project to convince as many 3DS and Wii U owners to dump their data into the archive. And miraculously, the effort resulted in 15,579 3DS dumps and 7,553 Wii U dumps, undoubtedly saving a ton of game content from being permanently deleted.

The good folks at SpotPass Archival Project say there are plans in the works to publish a completed archive of all of the Nintendo data they managed to collect before the shutdown. The when and where "will be available regarding that when we have more information to share."

"Thanks to our [sic] help, various network revival services will continue to distribute SpotPass content for many titles, ensuring that features in these titles can be used long after Nintendo has pulled the plug," reads an update on the project's official website.

Furthermore, the archivists say they're working on ways "to archive old SpotPass data for a few specific games such as the StreetPass Mii Plaza" and promise more information on that front "soon."

With an enemy as unbeatable as time, video game preservation - or any type of preservation - will always be an uphill battle, but it's wins like this one, which not only act as records of history but also produce tangible rewards in the form of playable content, that make it all worth it.

In other news, the impossible Super Mario Maker level has was cleared just days before Nintendo killed the 3DS and Wii U servers.

It's truly the end of an era for Nintendo fans, as online services for 3DS and Wii U have finally shut down. With it, we say goodbye to online multiplayer for the likes of Splatoon, Animal Crossing: New Leaf, Pokemon X and Y, and Xenoblade Chronicles X, with everything shutting off for good at 5pm PT/8pm ET yesterday (or 1am GMT this morning for UK folks). 

Or at least, that's what was supposed to happen. All over social media since the supposed shutdown, many players were left baffled as they found their 3DS and Wii U games continuing to function perfectly fine online as if nothing had changed. The hours since saw this devolve into a battle of sheer willpower, with fans leaving their systems on and permitting the online services to cheat death for as long as possible. And, for a surprising amount of time, this worked very well. 

This determination to hang in there was particularly prevalent within the Splatoon community, which began rallying together for a single purpose: "KEEP IT ALIVE FOR AS LONG AS YOU CAN SOLDIERS."

Two hours after the planned shutdown time, one fan advised: "IF YOU'RE STILL ONLINE FOR SPLATOON 1 DO NOT RESET YOUR WII U. It's still kicking for a LOT OF PEOPLE! KEEP PLAYING." 

Meanwhile, 3DS Pokemon players also found themselves inexplicably managing to complete online trades with fellow server shutdown survivors for hours longer than they should have, with one report even claiming to have successfully traded within the last hour. Others reported they were able to stay online until they themselves disconnected – at which point they weren't able to get back in – while others were eventually hit with error messages. 

It's not remotely clear what allowed some players to stay online while others were swiftly booted, but there is something oddly poetic about the community banding together until the very end. As the hours passed, many players voluntarily stepped away from their consoles, mainly to get some sleep, but some clung onto the dream until they were forcibly removed. At the end of the day, all good things must come to an end eventually, even if for nostalgic fans, it's admittedly a very bitter pill to swallow.

Of course, online functionality is still alive and kicking on Nintendo Switch. If you're looking for some new games to play, be sure to check out our recommendations for the best Switch games.

Super Mario Maker players have finally beaten the fan-made level that was previously thought to have been impossible for mere humans to complete, just two days before Nintendo kills the servers.

Team 0% is a group that's been on a long quest to complete every single Mario Maker level before servers shut down forever, but they hit a large snag in the road when faced with the game's hardest level: Trimming the Herbs, a stage that's only 17 seconds long and requires crushingly precise reflexes. 

After a hard-to-comprehend 280,000 attempts, the community discovered that Trimming the Herbs was uploaded with tool-assisted speedrun techniques that allowed its creator to publish the stage without beating it themself. That means Team 0% had technically completed every Super Mario Maker level humanly possible weeks prior.

That disqualification didn't stop a few players from rolling up their sleeves and trying to do the impossible anyway, though. Team 0% uploaded the clip (embedded below) of player sanyx91smm2's live stream, which shows a jaw-dropping 13-second run through Trimming the Herbs, followed by the player gasping in disbelief for a full minute. 

An incredible reflex flex and a heart-warming community effort all rolled up into one video. Team 0% has now declared that "Super Mario Maker is complete" and will now fully move on to beating the Nintendo Switch sequel.

Unfortunately, the rush to complete every single Super Mario Maker stage wouldn't be needed if Nintendo weren't planning to shut down 3DS and Wii U servers tomorrow, April 8. That means games like Mario Kart 7, Kid Icarus Uprising, and Pokemon X/Y will fully lose their online functionality forever. Both platform's digital storefronts had already been shut down in a crushing blow to game preservation.

The end is nigh - Animal Crossing and Mario fans flock to their favorite games before 3DS and Wii U servers die. 

It's a rather sad time to be a Nintendo fan nostalgic for the 3DS and Wii U era of games. In less than three weeks, the online servers for all games on the consoles will be shut down for good, making an enormous number of online modes for fan-favorite games unplayable forever.

It's now almost 13 years since the first 3DS model launched, and nearly 12 since the Wii U, so it's fair to say that their online functionality had a good run, even if so many incredible games are about to become a lot less playable. Some of the most popular ones that'll be affected by this include Animal Crossing: New Leaf, Mario Kart 7 and 8 (the non-deluxe Wii U version), and the first Splatoon. In New Leaf, for example, players will no longer be able to visit others' towns online or play minigames over the internet on Tortimer's Island, while Mario Kart players will be stuck playing against CPU racers and friends in local play for the rest of time.

Needless to say, for anyone still playing these games regularly, or even just those who like to revisit them on occasion, it's a huge loss, and many fans are dusting off their consoles to make the most of the functionality while they can.

"Playing Animal Crossing: New Leaf for the last few weeks Nintendo's online servers [are] still available for 3DS. Trying to grind out badges I never finished in its [heyday]," one Twitter user writes, referring to the in-game achievements that'll soon be impossible to achieve if you've not got them by the time the servers shut down.

"For one last hurrah, me and @Lukario31 raced on every Mario Kart 7 track before the 3DS online shuts down," says another. 

"Two of my closest friends are going to play New Leaf with me counting down to the last moments of its online features and it’s going to be the most bittersweet feeling we ever witness, I fear," an Animal Crossing fan posts. 

If you also want to get in on the online action before the shutdown, functionality is set to end on April 8, 2024. It'll still be possible to download update data as well as games previously purchased from the eShop, and the Pokemon Bank and Transporter apps (which are required to transfer your old Pokemon to Nintendo Switch) will remain in operation. Otherwise, all other online functionality will be gone, in what really feels like the end of an era. 

Looking for more new Nintendo games to play? Be sure to check out our list of the best Nintendo Switch games.

The title of "hardest Mario level ever made" will be a topic of debate for far better platformer players than me, but one very strong contender looks like the final roadblock for the Super Mario Maker fans who are rushing to beat every single level before the servers go down.

Wii U servers are set to shut down on April 8, taking the ability to play the levels uploaded for the original Super Mario Maker down with them. The ability to upload new stages was disabled back in 2021, so there's a finite - but massive - number of levels sitting on those servers. With all that in mind, a loosely organized group called Team 0% is working to make sure every single Super Mario Maker level gets beaten before the servers die.

A week ago, there were 178 levels left. Now, there are just nine. But those nine levels include some of the toughest challenges yet, including one stage called Trimming the Herbs. This level was uploaded back in 2017, and after nearly seven years, it remains unbeaten. It's the oldest unbeaten level, and the only one that didn't originate in Japan. The only person to have ever beaten it is its Canadian creator, Ahoyo, who uploaded the original clear video to YouTube. 

Take a look at that video. Cutting the intro and outro bits, the actual level is only 17 seconds long, and if you - like me - have watched some high difficulty Mario levels over the years without actually developing the skills necessary to play them, it doesn't even look that hard. Certainly I would've expected a minutes-long marathon like this to have been more challenging, but if you check out the Team 0% Discord, all the discussion is about just how ridiculous the challenge level of Trimming the Herbs really is.

Have another look at that video above, and try to zero in on Mario's movements. See how he keeps dropping the Bob-ombs and grabbing them again? Every single one of those drops and regrabs is apparently frame perfect, meaning you have exactly 1/60th of a second to make the correct input. And some players argue that isn't even the hard part - the real challenge is having to do it all while controlling your momentum with absolute precision.

According to the fan tracker at Is Super Mario Maker Beaten Yet? there have already been 43,004 attempts to beat Trimming the Herbs, and there are likely a whole lot more than that since the tracker can be slow to update. Team 0% is very much on pace to beat the final levels before the April 8 shutdown, but right now it's looking like Trimming the Herbs is going to be the final boss of this whole endeavor. 

3DS and Wii U servers officially die in 2024, but fans have already spent years building their replacements.

The original Super Mario Maker will effectively shut down in April, and a group of players is racing against the clock to beat every single level before the servers go offline.

Super Mario Maker on Wii U was, as Nintendo put it, "discontinued" back on March 31, 2021, meaning that no new levels could be uploaded after that date. But all the old levels remain available to play - until, of course, all Wii U servers shut down on April 8, 2024. That means there's a roughly one-month time limit for the community to prove it has what it takes to beat every level that's ever been uploaded.

A loosely organized group called Team 0% is working together to make sure no level goes uncleared, and they've built a website called Is Super Mario Maker Beaten Yet? to track the stats toward that goal. Back in February 2023 - the earliest date recorded on the site - there were 41,113 unfinished levels. Today, players have completed 99.62% of those remaining stages, and there are only 178 levels left to go.

Team 0% includes some extremely talented Mario players and speedrunners, and if you think that means those final remaining levels are ridiculously challenging, well, you'd be right. There's a YouTube playlist collecting whatever known footage of the unfinished levels exists, and it serves as an ode to the ridiculous limits level creators have been able to stretch Super Mario Maker towards. Just take a look at the level below - I can barely make sense of what's happening in it, much less imagine the skill it'd take to complete. 

Of course, all these levels have been completed at least once before, since Super Mario Maker won't allow you to upload a level until you've beaten it yourself. (That's how clear videos for uncleared levels like the one above can exist.) Some impossible levels created through hacks or exploits have been uploaded online, but for the handful that haven't yet been deleted by Nintendo's moderators, Team 0% has already checked them out and removed them from the totals.

Team 0% players are still averaging dozens of clears a day, but the rate has been slowing down dramatically now that it's down to the absolute toughest levels. Still, at the current clear rate, Super Mario Maker will be beaten by March 9, according to the automated estimate on the Team 0% Discord - but that date has already been pushed back a few times in the days since I started following the group's progress.

If you've still got a Wii U hooked up (I do) and you think you've got what it takes to defeat some uber-challenging Mario levels (I do not), take a look at the remaining stages, grab a level ID, and do what you can to help Team 0% reach the finish line. Know that I'll be rooting for you along the way.

Are the days of Super Mario Maker 2 similarly numbered with the Nintendo Switch 2 seemingly so close? 

Legal discussions around the relationship between Palworld and Pokemon are pretty played out, especially with The Pokemon Company suggesting it has limited interest in chasing after any kind of copyright lawsuit. What remains far more interesting, however, is the idea that Palworld has taken the Pokemon formula and innovated on it far more successfully than Game Freak has managed for years. Now, albeit probably more by accident than design, Pokemon Legends: Z-A could prove to be the perfect rebuttal to those claims.

There are plenty of readily-apparent comparisons to be drawn between some of Palworld's designs and Pokemon, but that's not really why the link between the two games is interesting. Palworld has succeeded not because it was inspired by Game Freak's designs, but because it's the first game to do something genuinely new with the creature-collecting format that Nintendo helped popularize nearly three decades ago. In 70 hours with Palworld, I'm still yet to touch a gun, but its survival mechanics, genuinely threatening wild creatures, and the ability to rely on the inherent skills of the creatures you catch, all create a world that feels more alive than any Pokemon game has for years.

PLA-world

The only game that's come close is Pokemon Legends: Arceus. Survival and sweatshops aside, the Hisui region offered the first real sense of what it would be like to occupy a world roamed and ruled by wild Pokemon, and considered how people's relationship with these creatures would have shaped the world they lived in. Twists to capturing and battling further considered the reality of Pokemon outside of the turn-based format that's always felt like a clunky realization of the world shaped by the manga and anime. 

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet tried their best to emulate some of those ideas, but Pokemon's first true open world faltered significantly. Gen 9 might have had a strong sales performance, but performance issues, even amid dated visuals, meant that this was far from the (long-delayed) step into the modern era that many Pokemon fans had been hoping for. 

And it was a world shaped more by Scarlet and Violet than Legends: Arceus that Palworld burst into. Plenty of factors played into Pocketpair's lightning-in-a-bottle moment, but it can't be denied that in fumbling its most recent mainline game, Game Freak handed the survival game devs the key and the kite. If Palworld had launched into Arceus' shadow, it would have found itself competing with a game that adapted the traditional Pokemon formula with far more confidence and competence than Gen 9 would prove to. That might not have had any measurable impact on Palworld's success, but it certainly wouldn't have let the survival game launch into an environment where Pokemon felt at its weakest point in years.

I'm not laboring under the assumption that Nintendo or Game Freak got Pokemon Legends: Z-A ready in direct response to Palworld. It's been a matter of weeks since the survival game topped the Steam charts; with Z-A releasing in 2025, it will have been in the works for multiple years already. Even if Nintendo matches Arceus' release window with an early 2025 release, Palworld will already be more than a year old, and I'd guess it will hold much less cultural sway than it does now. But the accusations remain clear – mainline Pokemon games have become stale, and Game Freak isn't the force of innovation that the creature collecting genre has found itself in need of. 

If there's been an exception to that rule in recent years, it's been Pokemon Legends: Arceus, so if more games like Palworld are going to come knocking in their search for a slice of Nintendo's pie, it's lucky that a new Legends game will be there to answer.

Pokemon Legends Z-A could show us yet another side of the RPG's history, building on what made Arceus so special.

The next Pokemon Legends game could be coming to the Nintendo Switch 2.

It's Pokemon Day, which, of course, means another Pokemon Presents showcase featuring all kinds of news and reveals related to those adorable pocket monsters. Among the announcements was Pokemon Legends: Z-A, a new game in the same vein as Arceus, that will see the return of Mega Evolutions.

Pokemon Legends: Z-A won't be released until sometime next year, so we've still got a bit of a wait ahead of us, but on the bright side, we could very well get to play it on the Switch's shiny new successor. 

This was hinted at in the final seconds of the reveal trailer with the message that the game will be released "simultaneously" worldwide in 2025. Giving further weight to this theory is a post on the official Pokemon Twitter account, which says Pokemon Legends Z-A will launch on Nintendo Switch "systems" next year. 

Of course, it's entirely possible that this refers to the various versions of Nintendo Switch, such as the OLED model and Switch Lite. Still, with the system now entering its seventh year, it's equally plausible that Nintendo could be planning to get its next console off to a strong start with some Pokemon-themed action.

Nintendo has, so far, not said it's planning to release new hardware in the near future, though there have been plenty of rumors that suggest Switch 2 will be in our hands before long. A report from earlier this week suggests it could launch in March 2025 and, back in January, in a survey that asked over 3,000 developers what platform they're currently developing for, 8% said the Switch successor. 

Even with a successor seemingly on the way, as our guide to upcoming Nintendo Switch games shows, there's still plenty of life left in Nintendo's current console.

As a longtime Pokemon fan who grew up playing almost every entry, Pokemon Legends Arceus was one of the biggest surprises of 2022. Not only did it give me the chance to see a world and region in a completely new context, but it did so in a novel way that felt like such a breath of fresh air for the long-running RPG series. Taking us back to ancient times in the Hisui region – that would later become the Sinnoh region in Diamond and Pearl – I relished the chance to explore a point in Pokemon's timeline that was completely unknown. Tasked with surveying the lands to build up the first-ever Pokedex, the adventure explored the history of how Pokemon and humans learned to live alongside each other, and frankly, I loved every minute of it. 

It's why, with the reveal of Pokemon Legends Z-A during the Pokemon Day Pokemon Present showcase, I'm so excited for what's to come. While the trailer gave us very little to go on, what it does tease already looks intriguing. If Arceus tried to show us how Pokemon and humans learned to live with each other, Pokemon Legends: Z-A promises to let us once again see a new side to an established region. From what we've seen, it appears that we're about to get to explore how a city came to be designed to foster Pokemon and people living together in harmony, and I can't stop thinking about just what that means.  

Building blocks  

Thinking back, 2022 was a year of highs and lows for Pokemon. For me, Pokemon Legends Arceus completely outshined the games that would follow it that same year with the release of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet – which were mired by performance issues and a rather lackluster story that didn't capture me in the same way Sword and Shield did. While it was novel to jump into the first open-world setting in the series and even play it with pals – which was a childhood dream of mine – Arceus felt like a far bigger step forward. It may not have been as polished as games past, but it let us explore open-zones and immerse ourselves in the world of Pokemon in a new way that broke away from the standard catch 'em all formula we'd come to know so well. 

Now, Pokemon Legends Z-A is going to let us step back into Lumiose City, which served as the central setting for Pokemon X and Y. I did dip my toes into Pokemon X not long after it released back in 2013 – I was studying at university at the time, and I ended up abandoning the Pokemon entry to get my essays done (very sensible of me, I know). As such, it's one generation I'm not overly familiar with, but if anything, that just makes me even more excited to potentially rewind the clock and see how the city came to be. 

In the trailer, we see the urban redevelopment plans for the city, with a blueprint-style run-through of the location as it's being built up. Said to be set entirely within Lumiose, it seems very likely that the game will follow the story of how the area in the region was urbanized to the parisian-style city we come to know in X and Y, one that develops on the seeds that were first planted in Arceus to create an environment where people and Pokemon can live together in harmony. 

But what part will we have to play? Well, if Arceus saw us surveying the lands to better understand Pokemon and improve our relationship with the critters, then we could instead be setting out to establish the various boulevards of the city as some kind of city planner who strives to foster the same harmonious lifestyle that began to take shape in the Hisui region. Just as Arcues saw us travel back in time at the beginning of the game, the very title of the next Pokemon Legends entry also suggests we'll be rewinding back to the beginning of the region – from Z to A – to see how that part of the Kalos region became the burgeoning city we know. 

With the tease of it releasing in 2025 on Nintendo Switch "systems" simultaneously, this could very well be a launch title for the much-rumored Switch 2. It's always best to temper expectations, of course – especially after the ropey world Scarlet and Violet strived to bring us – but if it's contained entirely within Lumiose city, I'm hopeful it will deliver a more polished open-zoned environment that builds on what we saw in Arceus. 

With no gameplay shown, we'll have to wait to see what direction Pokemon Legends Z-A goes in, but the potential it has to deliver us another refreshing experience that does something new is beyond exciting. Scarlet and Violet may have left me feeling disappointed, but Arceus is undoubtedly a personal favorite, and just the mention of another game that follows suit is enough to make me feel reinvigorated about a series that holds such a special place in my heart. 

Here are all the entries in the Pokemon Legends: Z-A Pokedex we've spotted so far.

The newly-announced Pokemon Legends Z-A has got fans reminiscing about Gen 6 and the X and Y sequel we never got. 

On February 27, during a Pokemon Presents, it was revealed that we'd be getting another Pokemon Legends game, two years after Pokemon Legends: Arceus. The new game's trailer didn't give much away but we know that Pokemon Z-A is going to take place in Lumiose City - in the Kalos region just like in Pokemon X & Y - and will see the return of Mega Evolutions. Most importantly, the game is set to release sometime in 2025. 

Very quickly after Z-A's reveal, Pokemon fans started reminding each other about Pokemon Z - a game that never actually existed. Traditionally, before DLC became the standard, The Pokemon Company had a habit of releasing two mainline games and then a sequel to complete them. For example: Gold, Silver, and Crystal; Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald; Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum, and so on. 

This (+2025 release) is the best case scenario [oc] from r/pokemon

When Pokemon Black and White rolled out in 2010, fans thought Pokemon Grey would be next. Instead, we got Pokemon Black and White 2. When Pokemon X and Y came around, fans, once again, expected Pokemon Z to complete the trio, but instead The Pokemon Company jumped generations completely and released Omega Ruby and Sapphire. Ever since then, fans have been theorizing about what happened to Pokemon Z.

According to Pokemon developer Junichi Masuda, in an interview with Spain's Official Nintendo Magazine back in 2016 (translated by DidYouKnowGaming), there wasn't ever any plan to make Pokemon Z. Talking about the theorized game, Masuda said at the time: "People thought Pokemon Z would come next, but taking advantage of the fact it’s the 20th anniversary, we decided to deliver another surprise with Sun & Moon."

Pokemon Z-A isn't exactly the Pokemon Z we've been waiting for, but that hasn't stopped fans from celebrating anyway. "Pokémon Z is real, we just needed to wait a decade," one Twitter user joked. "They finally made Pokemon Z and it's in the Legends style, hell yeah," another fan said. "POKEMON Z WAS ALWAYS REAL," another declared.

It's been 3,000 years from r/pokemon

"No one had Pokemon f****** Z coming as a Legends game in their bingo," a Reddit user has shared. "How am I supposed to ask 'where Pokemon Z' on every Nintendo presentation now?" another asked. This led another fan to reply: "Now you can start asking WHEN Pokemon Z!"

Wondering what pocket monsters we're likely to see in the new game? Here's the Pokemon Legends: Z-A Pokedex. 

Pokemon Legends Z-A is set "entirely" within Lumiose City, so don't expect to go travelling around to other locations from the Gen 6 games.

Pokemon Legends Z-A was just announced earlier today, February 27, billed as a return to the Kalos region of Pokemon Gen 6's X and Y. However, according to the Nintendo of America tweet below, the new game will be set "entirely within Lumiose City," rather than the region as a whole.

This means that we apparently won't be adventuring around the larger Kalos region whatsoever in the new Pokemon game, which is a big change from the past few mainline Pokemon games. For the unfamiliar, the wider Kalos region sported locations like mountainous areas, lush coastlines, and the central lowlands in the middle of the region.

It also featured its fair share of cities, including Vaniville Town, Santalune City, and the Parfum Palace, to name just a few of the human-dominated locations around Kalos. Nintendo of America seems to be letting slip that all of these locations will be out in Pokemon Legends Z-A when it launches next year in 2025.

Elsewhere in the new Pokemon Presents showcase, we got a look at a new Pokemon TCG Pocket game, which is launching later this year, and looks a hell of a lot like Pokemon's answer to Marvel Snap. You can unlock packs, open them, and reap the rewards within the enhance and bolster your existing virtual Pokemon card collection. 

Read up on our full Pokemon Legends Z-A PokeDex guide for a complete look over all the 'mons we've identified so far.