I haven’t seen confirmation that this is what Ubisoft has been doing, but given how many studios they have and how quickly they turn games around, it wouldn’t surprise me if they used the “chase the sun” method of development, where as one team signs off, they hand development over to the next team, where it’s morning, and their work day is just starting. So it would just be very likely that every Ubisoft studio touches many games that Ubisoft works on. From the credits on their games, this is certainly what it appears to be. This is the same development method that Larian used to make a game as large as Baldur’s Gate 3 in only 6 years.

Digital Foundry has been looking at what tech could feasibly be in this thing for a long time now. They’re going to be very comparable in performance.

I believe it has a direct lineage from a game based on The Hulk called Ultimate Destruction, and you can feel that. You’re super jumping, gliding, and sort of like Venom, consuming people to pose as them. There are missions with a stealth element, but other times you’re throwing tanks at helicopters. Holding the run button will have you effortlessly doing cartwheels off the tops of cars and wall running straight up skyscrapers.

I haven’t played the PC version, but I expect it’s the same as the console version: Prototype (from Activision in 2009; there’s another game listed with the same title). The story is utter garbage, but everything about the moment to moment gameplay is great, and it definitely checks the boxes you’re looking for. I never played the sequel, because it re-used the same map, and that’s a lot like playing a Mario game with all of the same levels as the one before it, but this first game rules.

If you have access to something that can play Xbox 360 games, I’d also highly recommend the first Crackdown.

I hear very good things about Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed, and there’s a new one coming.

I’d encourage you to utilize those limited funds legally by buying games on deep discounts, if you were implying piracy, but even legitimately, being able to sideload all the old PC games you have is a massive plus. GOG and Epic give away great games for free on the regular, and an Amazon Prime subscription has recently been filled with some bangers that you get to keep via both of them.

You can sideload a program called Heroic Games Launcher that lets you easily manage your GOG games, as well as Amazon and Epic.

For $50 less, you get a similarly capable machine in terms of specs but more comfortable to hold, with an immensely larger library, and an operating system far more respectful of your authority to do what you want with the machine you bought.

It’s also launching day 1 on Game Pass, so Microsoft paid a pretty penny for it.

My running theory has been that the official release date is tied up in Microsoft marketing deals still. So I’m guessing we’ll hear the date from Microsoft during summer game fest.

$449, $499 with Mario Kart digital.

For $80, apparently?

I’m definitely keeping an eye on Selaco, but I’ll wait until it leaves early access.

Consoles won’t go away, but they’re in the process of transforming. Peak spending on consoles was all the way back in 2009 and has dropped ever since. There are perhaps dozens of reasons for the change, but one of them might be that the average consumer picked up on the air quotes around the ways consoles are cheaper. As for non-DRM, as long as piracy remains better than the official option, there’s money being left on the table, and I have confidence that a lot of that will change too, though it will be far slower than I’d like.

I agree, but it’ll be the only way they get my money. Everyone can see that PC line going up and that console line going down, so we’ll see how long they hold their ground; probably one generation longer than Sony does.

There is, if the money is there. Nintendo’s also under new management these days, and if the old strategies don’t work, they could pivot, just like Microsoft and Sony have.

You know, I just checked the ones I was confident on, and it turns out they each had an obscure Windows port back in the day that I never heard of. Still, the other popular trend going on right now for porting old console games like Tomba and Mega Man is to run them through tools that emulate the game and then output native code, and I wouldn’t consider it a waste of time to show where the demand is. For old sports games, it may be difficult or impossible to acquire the old rights, but if it’s at all possible, and these are customers that aren’t making them money on the modern iterations, that’s still worth it too.

I think that’s the name of Nintendo’s legal department.

With regards to the Dreamlist, this is so that they have ammunition to bring to rights holders. They just started bringing previously console exclusive games to GOG as well, so that barrier has been broken down. If there’s money in it, any game could be done.

I was talking about this with some friends. Anecdotally, almost everyone we know who plays games has a Switch, but very few of them seem to care about a Switch 2, for one reason or another. What will undoubtedly still move units are their marquis franchises, not the least of which is expected to be a new 3D Super Mario game. Mario Kart does extremely well for them, but I’ll bet some amount of its success is tied to very cheap console hardware, which the Switch 2 will not be out of the gate, so that parents can buy each of their kids a handheld to play with each other in the car, at the laundromat, at their siblings’ soccer practice, etc., and as the hardware gets cheaper, that probably contributes to its “long tail” of sales.

But yeah, for people who live and breathe video games, consoles have lost their luster. Games take longer to make now, which means there are fewer first party titles, which means we have fewer reasons to buy another machine that plays the same games as some other piece of hardware we already own. That will be especially true for the Switch 2, since they don’t have a Wii U library to plunder for titles that they can port cheaply for people who’ve never played them.

All that to say, my expectations as an armchair analyst whose word isn’t worth anything on the matter and whose predictions may as well be a dice roll are that the Switch 2 will do very well, but I’d be surprised if it did better than the first Switch, and I don’t know that we’ll ever see a console do as well as the Switch, or the PS2 for that matter, ever again.