#261: Your Nintendo Update
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One string banjo. 
Issue 261 — December 12, 2021 
Hey, issue # 261 of Switch Weekly here with your Nintendo round-up. Last week I mentioned how I was pleased to see Paper Mario come to the Nintendo Switch Online service so soon…. but shortly after I hit send I realised that we’ve already had the N64 games for the best part of two months. Time is a construct…. Anyway, with Paper Mario now on the service I think I’m going to play through it over the Christmas period. In other NSO news, we got word this week that much-loved Banjo-Kazooie is arriving in January. So, if Paper Mario and Banjo are anything to go by, it looks like we may be getting one N64 game added each month. I’ve seen a few grumble at this, and I get that, as the NES/SNES pacing was frustrating enough — however its worth noting that the N64 library isn’t quite as rich and diverse as its predecessors, so if the cadence is slower, that would go some way to explain why I reckon. We now find ourselves in the middle of December, as such I’d be keen to know what your Switch highlights have been this year. I figured it would be cool to pull together a list of what the Switch Weekly community enjoyed in 2021 , so please do feel free to tell me here , or hit reply to this email. Finally, there’s just over a dozen games hitting the Switch next week , including that interesting looking Shovel Knight puzzle spin-off. Full list is below.
Thanks so much for reading,
REVIEW Loop Hero — ” if you’re ready to just poke at a rock solid concept until it cracks and bends to your will, Loop Hero is amazing “. Here’s another glowing review from Alex Harding at Switchaboo . Neal Ronaghan // Nintendo World Report Masayuki Uemura, the designer of the NES and SNES, has died age 78 — I had the pleasure of seeing Uemura give a talk last year ( just before the pandemic really hit ), touching upon his R&D impact at Nintendo. Chris Scullion // VGC Nintendo loses court case over eShop pre-order restrictions — Good . Tom Phillips // Eurogamer Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon is the Switch puzzle game I’ve been craving — Some glowing early impressions on this spin-off puzzler — it’s out next week and looks to be a rather ingenious mix of traditional puzzler gameplay and dungeon crawling. Giovanni Colantonio // Digital Trends REVIEW Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX — ” polishes and modernizes two classic RPGs that are somehow more fun and engaging now than they were 20-odd years ago “. Cory Tischbein // RPG Fan REVIEW Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space — ” an exceptional throwback to the glory days of Telltale Games “. Sam Williams // Vooks The 50 best video games of 2021 — I quite like a round-up article looking back over the year that was, and this is just that. Not Nintendo only, but plenty of Switch game highlights in here. Polygon Playing videogames carefully —Edwin asks what if care, rather than skill, was at the heart of the culture of playing videogames? Note, this isn’t particularly Nintendo focused, and I’ll also add — content warning on this one for mention of terminal illness . Edwin Evans-Thirlwell // Eurogamer Dr. Mario or: How I learned to love video games again and accidentally made one — Filmmaker Albert Birney on how the video game of his 8-bit web series Tux and Fanny serendipitously came into existence. Albert Birney // Talkhouse How one small company is making the Switch Joy-Con you always dreamed of Damien McFerran // Nintendo Life
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