Rosalina gets Brie, Samus gets the cheese

Hey, Chris here with your latest Nintendo round-up. It’s Hanafuda Report time (formerly Switch Weekly).

I completed Super Mario Galaxy 2 this week — it was my first time playing through it. As you’d expect, it delivers another excellent slice of Mario 3D platforming, and is packed with neat ideas. But it realy does stand in the long-shadow of the original game, and ultimately feels like a bit of an unusual release. Nintendo typically deliver one big 3D platformer per machine, so to see them revisit this ‘cutting room floor’ of ideas strikes me as something of a depature from their norms. I’m glad to have played it, but it didn’t feel as essential in the same way that the first very much does.

However, talking of all things Mario Galaxy, I fittingly rolled credits on Galaxy 2 just a few short hours before the Mario Galaxy movie trailer dropped on Wednesday. The short Direct presentation shared a first look, and divulged casting details for Bowser Jr and Rosalina (Brie Larson is a solid pick — she’s a genuine Nintendo fan!). The first movie was an entertaining good, not great bit of popcorn cinema, and this looks to be delivering more of the same intergenerational silver screen fun. I’m down to spend some time in the Mushroom Kingdom, and beyond in April.

Ok, Mario Galaxy stuff to one side, previews for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond landed this week too, and well…. there are deffo some pros and cons to cover. The game sure looks the part, and it seems to run amazingly on the Switch 2, but an annoying character that tags along with Samus in the opening hours seems to do some hand-holding which is generally not what we expect, or want, from the isolation and exploration of a Metroid game. More on that in the links below.

Oh also, remember last week when I mentioned how long it had been since Metroid Prime 3 came out? I got it way off. For some reason I calculated it from 2017, not 2007. So yeah, it’s actually been 6656 days…

Next week sees over 30 games landing on the eShop, including Sakurai’s Kirby Air Riders, Indika, and Morsels. Full list below!

Ok, that’s all from me. Catch you next time.