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Welcome to the All Things Nintendo Podcast. I'm Brian Shea, and this is a weekly podcast to discuss all the biggest news and games from the world of Nintendo. It is Thanksgiving week here in the United States, so I am pre-recording this episode, so as such... There won't be any news discussion this time around, but as you know, such that any happens, I will catch us up next week. This week, though, we are going to be celebrating three key anniversaries and talking about the best deals.
on the eShop's Black Friday sale. Joining me for all of that is a freelance writer you've likely read on outlets like NPR, Polygon, Rolling Stone, and of course, Game Informer. It is Josh Broadwell. Josh, how are you doing?
I'm doing great, thanks, and thank you for inviting me on the show. Yeah, excited to have you. You did a few fantastic reviews for Game Informer. It was always fun to work with you when you were doing some freelance writing for us. You did our Baldur's Gate 3 review, right? I did, yes. Yeah, I remember that was the one that sold me on that game. It sounded amazing. It had a lot of hype. And then you reviewed it for us. And I think you gave like a 9.5 or something. And I was like, oh, man.
think i gotta check out this game i never finished it but i did put a good 28 or so hours into it and i wanted to go back ever since but last year was a crazy year for games and uh This year has been a crazy year for life. So it has not happened. It's not been in the cards. But Josh, we have a tradition here on all things Nintendo. When anybody makes their debut, we get to know them a little bit.
through the lens of their history with Nintendo. So the first part of the questions that I'm going to ask you is, what is your first Nintendo game? This can be your first memory with Nintendo. This could be the first game you ever played, first game you ever owned. You can choose to interpret this however you want. Okay, well, I've actually got a bit of a two-part answer to that. So one is a bit more unorthodox than the other.
When I was probably about four or five, my brother, who was four years older than me, had a Game Boy, original Game Boy, big, you know, great brick.
and i would like a good sibling steal it from him from time to time uh and so my mom was concerned that i would break it or something so she she got me this little thing it was like a little piece of plastic it was um with some plexiglass and in it was like colored water and oils they could turn it around and you know it was game boy shaped and being a trusting toddler and maybe perhaps not the brightest one i thought was my game boy um but yeah when i did finally get my own um
The first one was Kirby's Dream Land 2. It's a good one. Yeah. It's a real good one to start with. One of the ones that I kept trying to steal from my brother. But I finally had it on my own. Well, awesome. Yeah. I mean, have you kept up with the Kirby series ever since? Oh yeah, absolutely. It's always been one of my favorites because I think probably because it was my first memory. Do you have a favorite Kirby game overall?
I think it's probably from someone who grew up with a Super Nintendo. It's probably a pretty predictable answer, but a superstar. Superstar is pretty fantastic. What do you think about Forgotten Land? That was a pretty big departure from the standard Kirby formula. Everybody was like, oh, it's like Mario Odyssey, but Kirby. But I thought it was a lot more like Mario 3D World.
but Kirby. Yeah, I definitely agree with that. And I enjoyed it. I'm always excited when they do something different with it. So Star Allies was fine, but I think it was really refreshing to see the different departure and direction with Forgotten Land. And as somebody who grew up with Return to Dream, or not Return to Dreamland, Dreamland and Dreamland 2 specifically, what did you think about Return to Dreamland that we just recently got the remaster of on Switch?
oh i loved it it was great you know it's obviously it shows its age i guess but it's so nostalgic that that was you know it was worth putting up with the with i guess the older design Yeah, and it was nice to return to that style of Kirby, right? Because they tried... I mean, I guess Triple Deluxe was pretty...
traditional Kirby. And then Robobot was like, hey, let's just give Kirby a mech. And it was like a little over the top. So it was nice to see them come back. And, you know, obviously they've experimented quite a bit with like Epic Yarn and Rainbow Curse where they were just trying different mechanics.
and different art styles. But I truly do think that Kirby is at its best when it's just like a straightforward platformer with some action built in, like Forgotten Land. Like that's... I feel like if they need to innovate the Kirby franchise, that is the direction that they should go because it plays off of what makes that series so cool and what makes that character so cool.
and expands it out i mean that's why mario 64 was such a a big success when it first came out because they didn't try to be like i mean i i think that they tried maybe a little too much to innovate with like something like mario sunshine But for that first foray into 3D, they weren't like, oh, we're going to give him a water pack and we're going to make this a completely different style game. They were like, no, what if we just transposed the core Mario experience into 3D?
And I think that when they innovate with Kirby, they should try to kind of keep that same philosophy. Yeah, I definitely agree with that. Alright, well that brings us to the second part of this question, which is what is your favorite Nintendo game of all time? Oh, that is such a tough one, but I think I'm going to do a bit of recency bias here and say it's Xenoblade Chronicles 3.
Wow. I don't know if we've gotten that one yet. It's just fantastic. I mean, I think the way that it presents its themes, well, I mean, I guess it sounds a bit cynical, but I really didn't expect it to actually... address the things that it did address or to do it very well but you know it's talking about the purpose of life and and what you do when
you're left behind you know someone else is gone how do you honor their memory how do you keep going and how do you live when you know that your life is you know coming to an end it's just it's extremely you know it's heavy obviously and deeper than i think the first season update games ever tried to go um
And yeah, it just kind of really captivated me. Now, I know you're a big RPG guy. Like I mentioned at the top, you reviewed Baldur's Gate 3 for us. So obviously you have to be a big RPG guy to want to play Baldur's Gate 3. If I wanted to get into the Xenoblade franchise, which entry should I start with? I know we got X coming on. I've heard X is kind of separate from like the trilogy, but like...
Where should I start? Because all the Xenoblade games are about, or Xenoblade Chronicle games, I should say, are about to be on Switch by the time X comes out. So which one should I start with? I think probably... Either definitive edition of the first one or three because even the three kind of especially with the DLC it does draw on you know kind of like
overarching plot threads from the first two games. It is kind of a standalone one, and I think the way that it balances the different combat styles from the first two games. and just the more kind of confident storytelling. I think it makes it a lot easier to get into. This is the first one. It's a little rough. It's the kind of pseudo-MMO style combat with the hot bars and everything and cooldowns and whatnot. Not quite.
as engaging over a long period of time i think as what xenoblade 3 does um two i like it's a mess i like it but it's a mess yeah i I've heard X is a little divisive. I know there's a lot of people who love that game, but I remember our staff, the people who played it, were like, this is by far the worst Xenoblade Chronicles game. Did you play X or did you?
kind of skipped the wii u generation overall i played a little bit of it yeah but it was like it was a lot later after i'd already played the first two games it was like a pre-owned copy that stopped working so i didn't even get to finish it um yeah so it was um
It's big. I think it's too big. It's a lot bigger than it should be. And I think there's just not a lot of... narrative sinew to tie it all together so a lot of times you're just kind of wandering and i mean it is visually impressive and especially later when you do get um videos that i've seen at least access to the little the flying mech things but yeah but it i think it would be a tough one to start with just because it does kind of just throw you out there and that's pretty much it
Yeah, I've heard great things about 3 and the series as a whole. I mean, I shouldn't just specifically say 3, but 3 in particular is the one that I've heard fantastic things about. And, you know, everybody has told me I should check it out. It's just always like with what time, right? Like there are so many huge RPGs that came out in 2024 alone, let alone the ones that like Baldur's Gate 3 that I still haven't like.
played all the way through and need to catch up on but like i haven't finished like a dragon infinite wealth that's one of my favorite games of the year and i haven't finished it Same thing for Metaphor Re-Fantasio. These are just massive games that I have not had a chance to play all the way through, even though I would love to.
i finally finished astrobot that's how far behind i am and like i love astrobot is in contention for my game of the year and i finally rolled credits on it uh the other night so It's just impossible to keep up right now, especially with how many huge RPGs have come out. But yeah, all right. Well, before we jump in to these anniversaries, just wanted to remind everyone that you can support the All Things Nintendo podcast through various different methods.
The best way is through the Patreon page, which offers bonuses like early and ad-free episodes, access to the community Discord, priority for Q&A episodes. And if you come in at the $10 level, you get an entire second weekly podcast called All Things Gamers. support for the show on tpublic.com which is my merch store and my youtube channel which you can find at brian p shea
All right, Josh, since we are skipping the news segment this week, the bulk of this episode is going to be focused on those aforementioned three big anniversaries from the world of Nintendo. Let's just... Let's start off with a big one right here. First up, Nintendo DS turned 20 years old last week and... If you listened to the Game Boy History episode I did back in July, you already know the name Satoru Okada.
He worked closely with the legendary Gunpei Yokoi on the Game & Watch, Game Boy Color, the original Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, and Game Boy Advance SP. And then around 2002, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi instructed his team to start working on a new handheld device inspired by an idea that he actually had earlier, which included having two separate screens.
And Okada, who was actually the one that fought Gunpei Yokoi on the Game Boy. Because Gunpei Yokoi, he was this genius inventor. He created all these amazing products for Nintendo. He... was the one that created the game and watch and he wanted the game boy to kind of be like a premium game and watch he didn't want it to be like cartridges you can swap out he wanted it to be like individual
uh games that are like short-term use and like kind of like the like like the game and watch right where it's not like these long-term experiences and okada fought him on that and he actually got hiroshi yamauchi to overrule gunpei yokoi's desire to have these of shorter term games as like the the impetus of the game boy so okada won that battle but uh he argued with yamauchi on this one that he said that the two screens was a bad idea for the ds
But unlike his argument on the Game Boy, Okada didn't get his way and Yamauchi overruled him this time. And that was the birth of the Nintendo DS. So Josh, did you ever own a DS? I did, yes. Okay. I would probably have to agree that the two screens probably wasn't a great idea. Really? Okay. I think it wasn't until, honestly... until much later in the DS lifecycle, at least from my memories and my perspective, that the touchscreen was really used in an interesting way. Because I remember...
The first one I got for it was for her birthday. I can't believe it was 20 years ago. That's just wrong. Did you get it right when it came out? This birthday present, was it 2004? The following year, it was 2005.
But WarioWare Touch, I remember having a blast with that and thinking it was really cool the way it used the touchscreen. And then it was a long time before there was a game that came out that really felt like it needed the touchscreen. So I think I would have to agree with that as far as the... Not the best idea. Maybe for a prototype. Well, so Yamauchi's thinking was that he was actually worried about what he was considering pretty underwhelming sales for the GameCube.
And he wanted to ensure that the next system that they created was a huge success for the sake of the future of Nintendo. And I found a 2004 article on Nintendo World Report. And Yamauchi said, quote... if the ds succeeds we will rise to heaven but if it fails we will sink to hell which i'm like wow that's that's hardcore right no pressure so uh shortly after development started yamauchi actually retired from nintendo and satoru iwata took over
as president of the company different satoru and uh in 2003 nintendo announced that it would be releasing a game system in 2004 that was neither a successor to the gameboy advance nor the gamecube and that it would have two screens and then In January 2004, Nintendo announced that it was codenamed the Nintendo DS. And I found a Yahoo Finance news article from the day that it was announced.
And it had a quote from Satoru Iwata. He said, quote, We have developed Nintendo DS based upon a completely different concept from existing game devices in order to provide players with a unique entertainment experience for the 21st century. And so the hope here, according to Iwata and previously Yamauchi, was that the DS would put Nintendo back in its previous place where it was kind of leading the way for innovations within the gaming space.
And in May 2004, the device was shown for the first time at E3 by brand new Nintendo of America president and now former guest to all things Nintendo, Reggie Fils-Aimé. And that was also when they announced that the Nintendo DS was the final name of the handheld. And do you remember that press conference? Very vaguely. Mostly...
From that period, I remember them saying that it would be like a third pillar and that they would continue to support the Game Boy. And because I mostly remember my mom saying, they're not going to do that. They never do it. They always end up phasing it out. Then you have to buy the new ones. That's actually what I remember the most. Do you remember his famous quote, Reggie's famous quote when they came out? Hold on, I'm trying to find it.
Yeah, that was when he came out and he introduced himself to the public for the first time. Do you remember how he did it, Reggie? Honestly, no. I want to say I remember seeing something about it later. just referenced online, but from the time, no, I don't remember that. It was definitely referenced online a few times. So, you know, Nintendo, very clean-cut, family-oriented company, and Reggie comes out.
And his first thing he says is, my name is Reggie. I'm about kicking ass. I'm about taking names. And we're about making games. That's right. Yes. I don't know why. I thought that was later. Oh, that was for the deal. Wow. Okay. And then, you know, they announced the DS during that. They already announced it, but they showed it off for the first time. And it was kind of like a clunkier.
thicker prototype than what ended up coming to market they actually after showing it to the press and like i guess they got some feedback at that e3 they iterated on it a little bit and made it a little bit sleeker and a little bit more uh like thinner but you may recall that like first DS models were actually pretty bulky so it was that was the one that my brother I never I didn't have a DS till years later but my brother had it like the original DS
and um i would play his he's seven and a half years younger than me so he he was more in like the target demographic at that point right um he's he's 10 years old so yeah um He had the DS and I remember being excited because it had the Game Boy slot. And I remember being like, man, this is this thing's pretty bulky. And I actually think I still have his DS because he fell completely out of gaming. And I think I have his DS. And then I also have a DS Lite that I got from a, I don't know.
how I got I think I found it one day like it was a weird thing I found it had like an old Power Rangers game in it in the Game Boy Advance slot I don't know so uh Iwata had said that the DS was the first step in Nintendo's attempt to expand the gaming population.
because he felt the touchscreen method of gameplay would allow more people in the general population to play games. And this was a strategy that was actually carried forward for the next several pieces of hardware that Nintendo would put out. with I think the Wii being probably the biggest success story in that line. But you know, the 3DS and the Wii U were also products of that line of thinking.
um did you ever kind of like before i brought this up did you ever trace that lineage to be like oh okay yeah like the wii was kind of born out of the the ds because like you know, the line of thinking that they had was like, these are going to be more like approachable ways for people to get into gaming? Or was this kind of like the first time you've drawn that connective tissue? Um, not so much as far as like an interface.
approachability uh connection no i hadn't really thought about it until now but it was more of just a general sort of um marketing it to a broader audience marketing i guess the software to a broader audience but yeah but no not not the interface like that Yeah, I mean, this was kind of the first time when I was researching for this episode, I was like, oh, okay, that makes sense. And it's interesting to see people like Satoru Iwata, one of the most influential people in the history of Nintendo.
talking about it back before the wii was even like i mean i'm sure they were concepting things for the wii at that point in the in like the r d department or something right but like the Wii was just like a sparkle in the eye of Satoru Iwata at that point. And it's like to have him intentionally say back in like 2003, 2004, that this is going to be like... a new initiative for nintendo to like expand the gaming population through like different means of control that's really fascinating and like
you know that was followed through all the way up through the wii u with its touchpad and motion controls and you know the the second screen experience on a console like that that's really fascinating to kind of look back and be like oh this all started 20 years ago
Right. Yeah. And I think it would be really interesting to kind of to know what put them on the idea, like as far as where you've got even now publishers and manufacturers looking for ways to find new audiences. And then, you know, what prompted them to think.
different ways of interfacing you know i wonder if it was like people saying that just maybe the game boy was too small maybe the it was too hard to hold or whatever that's yeah i'm really interested in that now yeah i mean i'm sure there's more information out there if nothing else i'd love to you know talk to somebody at nintendo about this right yeah for real It would be pretty fascinating to just trace the lineage and the influence of the DS and what they accomplished with that. But...
The Nintendo DS finally arrived in the US on November 21st, 2004. It's $150 and it sold over 500,000 units in its first week, which was way over the original projection that Nintendo had, which was 300,000. It sold over a million units in its first month. And then I found an article from the Associated Press. Josh, I don't know how old you are, but are you old enough to know what Tickle Me Elmo is? Yes, I am.
Okay, so for those who are maybe younger listeners to the show, Tickle Me Elmo was a very sought after Christmas gift. It was an Elmo doll that you would press a button on it and it would laugh like you were tickling it. It was the most sought after. toy in that christmas so much so that it became uh branded as like oh tickle me elmo at this this is the tickle me elmo of this year is kind of like uh the the shorthand for like this is the must-have gift hottest selling gift hardest to find
for the Christmas season. The Associated Press branded the Nintendo DS the Tickle Me Elmo of 2004. And less than a year later... Nintendo announced that the DS had sold more than 6.5 million units. And at launch, it had seven games in the U.S., including Spider-Man 2, which is based on the Tobey Maguire movie, Metroid Prime Hunter's First Hunt, Madden NFL 2005, and of course, a DS remake of Super Mario 64 that added...
Luigi, Yoshi, and Wario as playable characters. The DS continued being a massive success for the next several years, and they put out various iterations of the hardware over those years, and the DS and DS Lite. Both included the Game Boy Advance cartridge slot for backwards compatibility. And then they later put out the DSi and the DS XL. The DS Lite actually proved to be the biggest seller out of all of these revisions. Josh, this...
DS Lite raked in nearly 94 million units in sales alone. I had no idea. crazy amount of of sales i mean i think that's like three or four times the amount that the wii u sold in total and that's just one of the models of the ds line right like so that's that's crazy so that's staggering yeah wow So that bodes pretty well for the DS family of handhelds, which if people have listened to this show before, they know that I've brought this up.
That family of handhelds would go on to be the second highest selling game system of all time with a total of 154 million units sold, which is just 1 million shy of the all time record held by PS2. And that also means that the DS is the highest selling Nintendo system of all time, with number two being the Nintendo Switch. which has actually still to this day been steadily gaining ground and currently sits just 8 million units behind the DS. The Switch is currently at 146 million units.
compared to the ds's which was 156 or 154 i'm sorry It's pretty impressive considering there have really been three very minor iterations of the Switch, most of which don't improve a lot. Whereas at least with the DS Lite, it's a lot smaller, you can get different colors. I think the battery life was better.
um the dsi i don't actually know who that was for it always seemed like an odd prospect i'm not sure about that one so that's really impressive as far as like how successful the switch has been Yeah, I mean, the Switch has been, I mean, they did an amazing job of consolidating the developers and consolidating the separate audiences of Nintendo, right? Because some people just love their handheld. Some people love consoles. I'm much more of a console guy myself.
So that would explain why I didn't have a DS for quite a while. But it makes sense that it would sell pretty well, especially with, you know, when Animal Crossing was blowing up in the early stages of the pandemic. And, you know, they've had a ton of other big successes. Like everybody loves Mario Kart. Like I feel like.
everybody who owns a switch has Mario cart. And it, I mean, it's pretty much like a, a one out of three attach rate, slightly more than one, one out of three attach rate. Cause I think the last numbers were like Mario cart eight deluxe had sold like. 58 million copies it's by far the best-selling switch game of all time and there's no chance anything catches it right um
But where does the DS rank among your favorite Nintendo systems? Clearly, you know, you and Okada were wrong with saying that the two screens was a mistake because it ended up being Nintendo's biggest success ever. But where does this rank among your favorite Nintendo systems? It's somewhere in the middle. I mean, I don't know. I mostly... This kind of sounds like hater energy, I guess, but it was...
A lot of my favorite series had my least favorite installments on the DS. Like Phantom Hourglass. I like the idea. I like the experimentation. I got bored with it. Metroid Prime Hunters. is actually really fascinating from a historical and cultural perspective, because it's like Nintendo trying to do a Halo multiplayer kind of thing. But at the time, it was just kind of like, eh.
I had just played Metroid Fusion for the first time a few years previously, and I wanted more of that. But at the same time, there's some really fond memories of it as well. I think Advance Wars Dual Strike was probably... I played that a ridiculous number of hours. I mean, it was fantastic. Animal Crossing Wild World is pretty close up there. You know, like the only thing that replacing holidays with some of those was.
baffling but aside from that you know it's a really mixed but so definitely somewhere in the middle for me not my favorite but not my least favorite yeah i mean honestly it's pretty low on my overall like this era of nintendo is probably among my least favorites yeah like the gamecube gameboy advance wii and ds era is like
like in terms of both nostalgically nostalgically is that a word and uh it is now and like at the time like i loved wii sports there's so many games on the wii that i love and there's many games on the gamecube that i love but like
When compared to, like, the SNES, the N64, and the Switch era, like, it's nothing compared to those, in my eyes, anyway. I understand, like, I also didn't, you know, these weren't the formative... gaming experiences that they were for other people that are younger than me like people who are like you know 10 15 years younger than me the gamecube
And the Wii were their games that they grew up with. That was their NES and Super NES for me. So I totally get why somebody would have that fondness. But it's kind of like when somebody's like, oh, yeah, like Sonic Unleashed. That was the Sonic game that I grew up with. And I'm like, oh, well. Sonic...
Three and Knuckles was the one I grew up with. I understand why you would have that fondness for it. But yeah, it's pretty it's honestly pretty low for me. And we're going to get into that when I get to like the near the tail end of the show. We're going to be ranking our favorite DS. games and uh spoiler alert i had kind of a difficult time filling this list out it's only five lit five entries yeah mine too to be honest so in 2011
The DS's successor, the 3DS, arrived. It retained the dual screen and overall form factor of the DS, as well as backwards compatibility with the DS, but it added more processing power, the ability to display games in 3D. without the use of glasses thanks to a stereoscopic 3D top screen. We're not going to get too much into the 3DS, but how did you view this as kind of like the evolution of what the DS accomplished?
I thought it was actually a bit of a reversal, at least in terms of the target demographic they were trying to reach. Because I think, especially in the first year, the 3D aspect kind of seemed... more like a gimmick, and most games didn't use it or didn't use it particularly well. And it seemed like they were trying to lean more on their core franchises than they had done in the DS era. So I think that was, yeah, I think that'd be my overall take. Yeah.
I remember it didn't sell particularly well right out of the gate. And they ended up having to do the 3DS ambassador program for people who adopted it early. And then they did a price cut like very, very early on. people who adopted it early got that ambassador program badge and it gave them like a bunch of like Game Boy Advance games.
that you couldn't get otherwise. I don't think they ever put those games on the virtual console storefront. It was exclusive, which is such a weird thing. It's such a Nintendo thing to do. I don't know. DS ended up being Nintendo's biggest success story ever in terms of sales. So, you know what? 20-year anniversary, that's a big milestone for that handheld that ended up, you know.
basically setting the course for Nintendo's next two decades. So, you know, happy anniversary to the Nintendo DS. Any closing thoughts before we move on to the second anniversary?
um yeah i think actually just and it kind of just came to mind just while we were talking is it's interesting to see how i mean you can kind of start to see in the ds era maybe the beginnings of the idea that perhaps nintendo should combine its development departments instead of focusing on two consoles because you've got these more ambitious ideas on
on the wii like you know full zelda game um and then but you just get a tiny spin-off on the ds and you generally have a whole other room to explore maybe the way that you would have done like in say majora's mask as a spin-off sequel um and i think getting into the 3DS era where most of their big releases run the 3DS instead of the Wii U. So yeah, I would be interested to know one day maybe if that is when they kind of start having the idea that maybe we should just do one system.
Interesting, yeah. I mean, that would make sense because a lot of people were kind of turned off by Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks. Meanwhile, you know, the Wii was getting Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword.
which uh both were pretty well received so yeah i mean i though in hindsight uh phantom hourglass we may not think too highly of it today but uh it was well received back in the day as well like it i think i saw like it was getting like you know eights and nines so it wasn't like a failure by any stretch but like yeah at the same time it's yeah it was definitely second rate when compared to like something like skyward sword right
But all right, Josh, let's move on to the second anniversary that we are covering on this show. And it's actually kind of a unique one. Usually when I do anniversaries, we cover platform anniversaries or game anniversaries. But this time... We are going to do a brief rundown of the 10-year history of the amiibo. What fondness do you have for the amiibo? Are you an amiibo guy?
uh well i mean i'll be completely honest when they first came out i wasn't able to afford many of them um by the time that i was able to you know they were already sold out so i ended up kind of getting like a really scattered collection of amiibo like
Eight years after the fact and I don't use them much in the games. I think probably my favorite integration is just uh in breath of the wild to scan one and a bunch of random stuff falls out of the sky like because that's just fun you know whether it's useful or not it's just fun um mostly just as a collector's thing for me though
Yeah, that's how my experience has as well. I recently was on the Toadstool Boardroom podcast with Logan J. Plant, who people would know from this show a few times in the past couple or a couple of times in the past few months. And they were talking about the 10 year anniversary of the amiibos as well. And I told the story where it was like.
I was like, this is stupid. I'm just going to like, you know, back in 2014 when they were about to come out, I was like, I'm just going to like, you know, if I want a Nintendo figure, I'll just buy like a nicer Nintendo figure. I don't need these little things. And now I look over and I have like three shelves full of Amiibos. And what happened was Super Smash Brothers for Wii U was coming out and Nintendo sent me a review copy and they included with it the GameCube controller adapters.
And a Mario amiibo. and i was like oh that's kind of cool like whatever and i used it just like in the review process so i could test it out and like oh here's what the amiibo functionality does right and then i was like well i should probably get the link amiibo too because like it's cool to have like my favorite characters
And then I slowly expanded from there. And now, like, you know, fast forward, like sometimes like, you know, they would send over amiibos to the Game Informer office and we would have extras and we would be able to divvy out among the staff. So I have like characters I don't even care about, like some of the Animal Crossing villagers. Like, I don't.
not villagers but like the the animals themselves right like i don't really care about them but i i have them and then like you know i wanted a lot of the mario i have every single zelda amiibo so it quickly got out of hand. And I was like, oh, of course I have to have Ryu and Ken and Sephiroth and Cloud.
Can't not have those. I love Donkey Kong. So yeah, let's get Donkey and Diddy Kong. It quickly got out of hand. I'm looking at my three shelves. I love Splatoon, so of course I had to have the Inklings.
all them naturally naturally so yeah uh let's talk about the history here a little bit of this this scourge that has taken over my my uh my various shelves even more so than funko pops ever threatened to uh so off the backs of the uh skylanders which was created by toys for bob and activision and then also disney infinity
which was created by Disney Interactive Studios. Nintendo saw that these were super successful and people were really liking what is known as toys to life, and they decided to try their hand at it. And in 2014, Nintendo revealed to its investors that it was working on a line of figures that you could scan to get various interactive elements in these different games using the Wii U's near-field communications capabilities, or NFC for short.
At E3 2014, Nintendo announced the Amiibo, which would launch alongside Super Smash Brothers for Wii U. And Shigeru Miyamoto announced that going forward, many of the games in development in Nintendo would be using Amiibo in a variety of ways. And his quote was... Nintendo is known as a video game company, but in fact, it is also a toy company, which if you know your Nintendo history, you know that they started.
in toys and cards and all kinds of stuff so yeah you know we talked about gunpei yokoi earlier and like you know his contributions to the toys department was uh pretty substantial as well before he made the leap over to creating gaming devices um on november 21st 2014 we received the first line of amiibo figures which included wave one from the super smash brothers line and that consisted of mario peach yoshi donkey kong link fox samus we fit trainer of all of all characters villager
Pikachu, Kirby, and Marth. And then wave two would arrive one month later adding six more figures. Wave three hit two months later with 11 more. And by the end of 2015, we were seven waves deep. with a ton of Amiibos already on the market.
And not only that, but some amiibo had become extremely hard to find. And I distinctly remember the villager amiibo from the Super Smash Brothers line, the Animal Crossing villager, being extremely hard to find, extremely valuable, all over eBay with like hundreds of dollars.
for this thing and in early 2015 uh you know they they were just like impossible to find on on store shelves and they're fetching hundreds of dollars on these online auction sites and in a march 2015 investor call nintendo president satoru iwata said he was actually shocked by the prices he was seeing on these auction sites and that fervor continued through 2015 to the point that
GameStop's website and registers were crashing on pre-order days for Wave 4, and Amazon set aside special time periods and time blocks where people would have to pre-order their Amiibos. And as a result...
of several hard to find amiibo figures importing actually became a pretty big practice which you know hardcore gamers have been importing games for years right but now it was becoming more mainstream because people wanted the specific amiibo figures and they were easy to find in japan but really hard to find in the US. A lot of those were due to problems that were happening on the docks as well. So like it was becoming harder to get their figures into the US in some cases.
So the Amiibo figures themselves depict various characters from across series like Smash Brothers, Super Mario, Legend of Zelda, Kirby, and Animal Crossing. And Nintendo also released a line of Amiibo cards for Animal Crossing Happy Home Designer. And those cards, they were just collectible cards. Like you open up booster packs, essentially. And they provided similar functionality as the amiibo figures, but without having to manufacture or buy.
the more than 450 cards that are a part of that series good lord 450 cards and they kept releasing those through 2021 by the way the final amiibo cards were 2021 i do remember that yeah i i think i have like three or four of them lying around somewhere um but
Speaking of that functionality, they did a wide range of things in these games, including new outfits for Mario Kart, saving character configurations in Smash Brothers, rare outfits and items in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, as you had mentioned. And even you could get Zelda items in the Switch version of Skyrim. Oh, I forgot about that. Yeah, you get the Hylian Shield, the Master Sword, Link's Tunic in Skyrim, which was wild.
um so there were 45 games across the wii u 3ds and switch that support a universal amiibo functionality and then several others that allowed for select amiibos to work so also adding to the amiibo weirdness it's worth noting that the power-up bands at super nintendo world the amusement park double as amiibo Do they really? They do. So I have a Mario and Yoshi power-up band, and you can scan those on your Switch or Wii U, and it will double as a Mario or Yoshi amiibo. Oh, that's wild.
Wild to think that that's probably easier to find than the actual Mario and Yoshi amiibo too. maybe i mean i don't know if you go to like a nintendo store like if you're if you're like me and you happen to find yourself in japan you go to the nintendo store they had every single amiibo it was wild to see them all on the show but if you count You know, the power bands plus the amiibo cards and the figures. How many total functional amiibos do you think there are, Josh? Take a wild guess. 450.
855! No, that's insane. There were 450 cards alone. Man, that is not what I expected. Over 800. Yeah, I found a Reddit thread where somebody had compiled all the different types of amiibos. And yeah, it was insane to see it all listed out. It took multiple seconds to scroll as fast as I could to the bottom with my mouse.
But if you just want to count the figures, there were 234 officially released figures. The most recent amiibo arrived in February of this year. Do you remember what it was? Was that Sora? It was. It was Sora from Super Smash Bros. Kingdom Hearts protagonist. How many amiibos do you have overall? Maybe a dozen? Not very many. I've got a few ones that I really like. I did get the Sephiroth one.
I think a couple of Zelda ones and the Palomute I found randomly on eBay. It was like, yeah, that was fun. But yeah, that's all I've been able to collect, really. Is there a favorite of yours or is it just kind of like, eh? Probably the Palomute because it's cute. that's fair yeah you know easy to please i was looking up like the valuation of some of these figures and the oddly enough the box boy amiibo figure which i didn't even know existed
is the most valuable amiibo. Really? It seems like it regularly fetches around $250 on eBay. And I think it's because it was a very limited run of figures. is that how you pronounce it keen i don't know what the name of the character is but um but yeah i i did not even know that existed i have the shovel knight one which was actually the first amiibo that was produced by a third-party developer it was licensed by nintendo
But it was the first one produced not by Nintendo. And I remember I actually met with Yacht Club Games. the day they announced it because there was like a nintendo direct and it was during like it was to coincide with like pax west that year and i happened to be at pax west and that night i had a demo for whatever the new shovel knight thing was and they i was interviewing yacht club and they're like oh we have the amiibo if you want to
see it so i had to like hold the amiibo of shovel knight i have one as well but like i it was kind of cool in that moment to do that right um but any closing thoughts on the amiibos before we take our first break I think it would be interesting to see on a smaller scale, less like collectible items.
more interaction between like maybe that could be something for augmented reality between items like that and games because i think the concept is neat even if it was used in a really limited way um but yeah i would actually like to see more of that less less reliant on buy these before scalpers get them and more on something easy that people could actually, you know, get their hands on. But I think it's a neat idea. It just wasn't really integrated very much.
Are you shocked like I am that Nintendo, I feel like any other company, maybe not Nintendo, but any other company, if they had something that was as successful as Amiibos and as sought after as Amiibos. And yes, I pluralize amiibos. It sounds weird if I'm just like as successful as amiibo. Are you shocked that they never did like a free to play game where you scan your amiibo figure in?
to play that game and that is just the character that you play like i feel like like a moba or something like that would be so easy to do for like a company and be like oh well we'll sell like 50 amiibo figures to the hardcore players who want to play this game and scan in their favorite character. I feel like that's tailor-made for a game like this.
Yeah, I agree. I think it runs counter to, at the very least, the public facing design philosophies that Nintendo promotes. I can see them not doing that because, you know, you're promoting... competition over fun and depending on who's able to get their hands on you know x expensive figure you know they're gonna have an advantage over someone else it doesn't really seem like something they would do but i could definitely see someone else you know having considered it
Yeah, I mean like if amiibo was owned by like EA or Activision, you would have every single game would require amiibo figures. Yeah, absolutely. But Josh, we are going to take our first break of this episode. And when we get back, we're going to dig into, in my opinion, the biggest anniversary that happened over the last couple of weeks, Donkey Kong Country. We will be right back.
We are back, and although we already covered two pretty big anniversaries in the first segment of this episode, I want to use this main segment to celebrate... the 30th anniversary of a game and series that is very near and dear to my heart. It is Donkey Kong Country. Josh, what was your first experience with this franchise? The first experience I can remember was...
Early 90s on the Super Nintendo. My dad was working... night shift so my brother and i could only play like this really short window in the evening like around dinner time but not too late because we'd have to go to bed um and i remember like it was this really exciting thing being able to finally play more of donkey kong country um and then
Yeah, it was just, it was fantastic. It was completely different from other platformers I'd played at the time. It was, you know, more, I guess, more dangerous seeming, more tense than Super Mario World. It was just, yeah, it really stuck in my mind and I love it.
So I've told the story a billion times about how I use this game amongst like among others, like Super Mario World and Mario Kart to bond with my father who had traveled a lot for work. So we would play like two player games a lot. And Donkey Kong Country was one. of like the most prominent examples of that so i won't tell that story again because i've told it so many times um but i do remember asking for it for christmas in you know christmas 94 and i
was like, so excited to get it. And we were moving from Florida to Maryland. At the time, we were temporarily living in Florida was like six month period that my dad had to relocate. to work his job. And so we relocated to just outside of Jacksonville, Florida for six months during second grade for me.
And I remember snooping a little bit as a kid because that's what you do when it's getting close to Christmas time. If you're a kid listening to this, don't snoop. It's very bad. And going into my parents' closet and looking up at the top. and seeing Donkey Kong Country just kind of poking out. And my parents found out that I found that. And they told me that, oh, that's not actually for you. We got that for your uncle.
who also would play video games. And I'm like, oh, okay. And I got really sad. And then I opened it up on Christmas morning and I was like, oh, it was for me. And I was so excited. And that was also the first time I got to play Madden.
because alongside getting donkey kong country we also got madden 95 i think it was uh that that year so it was like kind of a cool year for for super nintendo gifts um But in order to talk about the history of Donkey Kong Country, you kind of have to transport yourself back to the early 90s to understand the context that Rare was operating in.
If you go back a few months and listen to the Console Wars episode of All Things Nintendo that I did with Blake J. Harris, you already know that Sega was taking it to Nintendo at this point in time. Sega was almost as popular, and for a brief period it was... actually outselling the Super Nintendo with its Genesis system. And Nintendo was starting to gear up to create the Nintendo 64.
which at that point was codenamed the Ultra 64, and several developers had already started switching their priorities over to that system in a way that I think that we're already starting to see in modern times with Switch to Switch 2. You know, I've talked about how like, you know, the game, look at the games that we've seen in 2024 from Nintendo. A lot of them are from like, not the A team of developers, right? Like the Zelda game that came out wasn't like...
directed by Hidomaru Fujibayashi and produced by, I mean, maybe it was produced by Eiji Aonuma, but it wasn't like this is the Tears of the Kingdom team making the next Zelda game. It was Grezzo, if I'm not mistaken, the team that did the remake of... ocarina of time for 3ds and like a few of the other like remasters that that
Zelda franchise has done. And then same thing for Mario & Luigi Brothership. It was a choir that put those out. And then we've seen a lot of remasters and Princess Peach Showtime and games like that. So I think that... What we can draw from that is that a lot of the A-Team developers have switched over to already developing for Switch 2. And during this period, back in 1993, 1994...
We were starting to see that where a lot of the bigger name developers were starting to develop for the Ultra 64, as it was codenamed back then. And one of the A-teams that was still working on the SNES... was the Mario team with Takashi Tezuka and Shigeru Miyamoto, but they were preoccupied with Super Mario World 2 Yoshi's Island at the time. So we were kind of in this weird period of the Super Nintendo and...
Like I said, Sega was taking it to Nintendo with their marketing, and they were doing a great job starting to narrow the sales gap between the Genesis and the Super Nintendo. And it was kind of like a pivotal moment for Nintendo. And one of the studios that was already considering looking towards the future at the Ultra 64 was a British development studio called Rare.
And Rare had published a ton of games on NES, including the RC Pro-Am, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Snake Rattle and Roll, Battletoads, and a ton of others. But their contributions to the SNES were actually... pretty subtle the only one that i could find up to that point was a battletoad sequel in 1993 and they actually put out at that point
more games on the Genesis than they had on the Super Nintendo by 1993. So it was an interesting time to see this longtime Nintendo partner starting to develop more for the Genesis than they were the Super Nintendo. And around that time, according to a 2001 profile by IGN, Rare had bought new Silicon Graphics workstations with the specific purpose of developing 3D games for the Ultra 64.
Because the Silicon Graphics workstations were powerful enough and they were designed with 3D visuals and gameplay in mind. And they were super expensive. I read somewhere that it was like 80,000 pounds.
british pounds per workstation wow so like uh just like i mean we're not gonna know what it was back then but like 80 000 pounds would it be today about just over a hundred thousand dollars us so these were super expensive workstations So Rare started fiddling with these and they discovered that these more powerful machines could also be used to create 16-bit games like you would see on the Super Nintendo.
So Nintendo was looking for something that they could do to compete with Aladdin on Sega Genesis, of all things. And people would pretty much agree that the SNES version is the better version. But the Genesis version of the Aladdin game had better graphics since they used actual Disney animators for the characters and the environments and everything. Oh, I didn't know that.
Yeah, so it was like, if you look at the animations of the Genesis version of Aladdin, it's just an absolutely gorgeous game. So Nintendo saw this and they're like, we need something that is as beautiful, if not more beautiful than this game. So, according to a 2014 article that I found on Nintendo Life, Howard Lincoln, who was at the time the chairman of Nintendo of America...
Also, he was instrumental in helping to bring Tetris to the US and bundling it with the Game Boy. So he has a long history as well with making all these huge decisions at Nintendo. Howard Lincoln traveled to England to meet with Rare because he heard about the capabilities of these Silicon Graphics computers, and he saw a prototype of a game that Rare was developing with that new hardware. It was a boxing game called Brute Force.
And it impressed Howard Lincoln, but he actually decided to have deeper conversations with Rare to figure out how they could create a better looking game for the SNES.
um and you know probably the most beautiful game that the snes had ever seen was kind of like what they were looking for because they needed something that could compete with what the genesis had with aladdin which is just the funniest like high water mark that they were going for um but up to that point uh how did you kind of view
the Genesis versus SNES kind of console war. Did you see like that Genesis was like making up ground or did you see as like, it was just kind of like a flash in the pan for Genesis. I was in first grade at the time. I had no idea what was going on. I played my Mario games.
Talked about a Pokemon with kids on the playground that was about the extent of my knowledge to be honest like I had cousins who have the Sega But I yeah, that was it simpler times you know i mean hey i mentioned i was in second grade when this was all going down so i'm only a little bit older than you i guess but uh i kind of viewed it i was i was lucky enough to have both consoles and i told the story about how my parents
packed away my super nintendo for a few months by accident oh no while we were in the process of moving um we moved in with my grandparents very briefly and so they already took me away from all my friends and then they also uh took away my game console so they took me to a bj's wholesale and got me the genesis with uh sonic 2 and echo the dolphin but even though i fell head over heels in love with the uh the sonic franchise through that genesis console
I still really loved... It felt like Genesis was like, you know, trying to keep up with Nintendo rather than like... you know really taking the throne even though i i loved my genesis a lot i i was probably more of a sega genesis kid once that happened but then like you know once i had both of them it was like okay the the quality between these consoles felt
pretty noticeable with the snes um you know i definitely remember renting more games for my snes than i did my genesis once i had access to both of them yeah i think i could definitely see that like even now with more of the
retro sega games available you're looking at the lists even on the switch online app it's like okay that seems fun not something i would have wanted to spend money on at the time or you know if i could rent one game a month or whatever i probably wouldn't have picked that but yeah and i do wonder too
be completely honest i have very little knowledge of the 90s games landscape um but i do wonder if nintendo hadn't been in that sort of transitioning period before the nintendo 64 if sega would have been able to gain that much ground or if it was just because you know Here's an opening. Let's fill it.
Yeah, and like I said, they did go for the throat with Nintendo, which nobody had ever really done before, which I think was a pretty brilliant strategy. And then they also got to build off the backs of the Sonic franchise, which was the exact right game for the 90s.
1990s and having like you know all that attitude because that was like right yeah yeah exactly and the marketing matched that so i found a game pro article from 1994 that reported that rare co-founder tim stamper actually suggested to Nintendo that they think that they could use pre-rendered graphics similar to what Mortal Kombat did, but for a platforming game.
And Nintendo liked the idea so much they gave Rare the Donkey Kong IP, which at the time was pretty much completely inactive for the better part of a decade. And I saw speculation that the reason they did this was because... they saw it as low risk.
because like you know oh if they mess this up and like nothing ever comes of it it's not like we shelved one of our more active franchises it's not like we gave them zelda or or at the time metroid was was huge or you know even mario like they didn't give them that But they gave him a recognizable name for people who had loved games for more than a couple of years.
They gave them the Donkey Kong IP, and then in 2018, lead designer Greg Males actually was tweeting about Donkey Kong Country, and he was talking about when Nintendo came out, and... they noted the countryside backdrop of rare which you know the the studio at the time was pretty much based in a barn like that's where they were creating these games out on the the british countryside so nintendo code named the project country
And that's ultimately Rare took that as a badge of honor and made that the final name for the game, Donkey Kong Country. which is an interesting little tidbit there. Yeah, that's clever. And it makes sense too, because I always wondered if this is a country, I guess the island is a country, island nation, I don't know. They've never really quite connected the dots there, you know? That makes a lot more sense now.
So according to a 2021 article from GamesRadar, which I'm going to reference quite a bit in the subsequent parts of this retrospective, Rare created its biggest team yet, 12 whole people. to work on donkey kong country and the developers actually went to a zoo to watch how actual gorillas moved and here's uh greg males saying we did go to the zoo and observe the gorillas but found that
When they did move, it was completely unsuitable for a fast-paced video game. So all of the animation had to be done by hand. We went through about 15 different versions of how Donkey Kong could move. Donkey Kong's movement in the final game is based loosely on how a horse moves, but I recall laughing at some of the other animal-themed attempts, including a rabbit and a frog.
it would be interesting to see a donkey kong that could move like a frog but uh you know he did ride a frog yeah i was gonna say i guess they used that after all see and that's really interesting too that they wanted to match the level of animation that was in aladdin because
animators had worked on it and that's how disney animators used to work anyways was observing you know animals and seeing how they're basing their drawings on that that's a really interesting little tie-in yeah i'm assuming that was part of the influence there it was like they were like okay well This is how Disney does it. We're trying to beat Disney right now. We'll do the same thing. Nintendo versus Disney. What a world that was.
So Kevin Bayless, you may know this name. He was the lead artist in charge of redesigning Donkey Kong and also creating a companion for him. And his main goal, according to a Retro Gamer article in 2022, was to make him look like a believable... ape-like character. So originally the design was blocky and much more muscular.
But Nintendo actually saw this and they were like, no, no, no, no, let's go this route. So they faxed over reference material that caused Bayless to adjust the design. And then the final suggestion came from Shigeru Miyamoto, who you may know is also the creator of...
Donkey Kong, the original games, he suggested giving Donkey Kong a tie. And that was like Miyamoto's big contribution to the design of like modern Donkey Kong. And according to that GamesRadar article, Rare was originally going to use Donkey Kong Jr. as a sidekick character who, you know, he had appeared in a Donkey Kong game several years earlier, but they instead decided to create a new character with a different build and different moves at his disposal.
So they decided to model this character after a spider monkey. And the original name for the character was Dinky Kong, but they actually ran into legal problems with that name. So they settled on Diddy Kong, which in 2024 brings with it a whole... slew of other weird legal associations. I wonder if there's ever any like consideration of changing that name now. Like how would you even do that? He's such like a well-known character.
Yeah, I mean, I guess... Yeah, because any other time they've replaced Kong characters, it is a totally new character. I don't think you could replace Diddy Kong at this point. It'd be like replacing Luigi. I know, right? I just don't see any way that they could do it. I mean...
They didn't replace Wario when Elon Musk went on Saturday Night Live dressed as him. So I guess they're not going to replace it for another problematic character. So for the gameplay and level design, Rare referenced Super Mario Bros. 3, actually. That was their big point of reference. And the notion of having two characters, each one with a hit point, was inspired by the Big Mario, Little Mario concept from that series.
and Rare included barrels as a core design and gameplay mechanic to pay homage to the original arcade game where Donkey Kong threw barrels down at the player. And I was also reading up on one of their design philosophies. I forget where I was reading this, but... Rare wanted to have it so that a lot of the timing-based mechanics, like the swinging ropes or the barrels that you had to time and launch through, could be completed almost instantaneously, like the first pass.
you jump in a barrel it goes up you hit it immediately and it will it will let you go because they wanted if you were like good enough at the game it would allow you to like just blast through the level at like super speed basically and that was an intentional design by them which i think is a really smart approach it is that's brilliant i mean and and you can i mean
you can recognize that too sometimes but you still just have that delay and reflex because you think oh no you know this is awful hazard and then you still have to wait yeah that's fantastic
So we've talked about how Nintendo used graphing paper to design their Mario levels. And we've even seen that come to fruition with Super Mario Maker, where it's like you basically have a grid and they would draw individual squares to... design the levels i read a 2010 article from edge magazine and i saw that the team behind donkey kong country used post-it notes to design the levels and what they would do is they would take these uh these post-it notes
And they would like, you know, draw like a barrel on it or they would put like the ropes and then they would take them and arrange them however they wanted across like a board. And that would allow them to lay out the levels in like more efficient manner rather than having to redraw it every single time. So they would take them off one and put it on the other and they would copy down. Okay, well, we like the way this flow goes.
Let's take that, put it in the game, and let's start with the next level. Oh, that's a really clever idea. Yeah, I really, really thought that was a cool little tidbit that I found in that Edge magazine article. And they also included collectibles like the K-O-N-G letters and the balloons.
to add more depth to the experience which ended up becoming the studio's trademark with later games like donkey kong 64 and banjo kazooie which they coined the term collectathons or it those those resulted in the coining of the journal rare in particular coined that term but
they were known as collectathons because there were so many collectibles. They kind of got out of control with them, to be honest. Yes. So shortly after development started, Greg Males and a few other developers traveled to Kyoto. to present a prototype to Nintendo, including Shigeru Miyamoto and Gunpei Yokoi.
And to that point, Nintendo was concerned that the pre-rendered graphics wouldn't be a good fit for a platforming game and it would actually be unplayable. So the stakes were really high for this visit because they had to prove like this will actually work.
for a platforming game so in that uh games raider article males recalls that yokoi actually wasn't a fan of the visuals saying it looked quote 2 3d And which I thought was kind of funny, but like we've kind of learned that Yokoi was very old school. Despite being the guy that was a driving force behind the Metroid franchise and being instrumental in the creation of the Game Boy all the way up through, unfortunately, the Virtual Boy.
He was very old school in a lot of his designs that he did for Nintendo. So it kind of checks out that he would maybe be like, I don't really like the 3D look of these games. But Miyamoto, who again, the creator of Donkey Kong and also, you know, several other of the biggest games of all time, approved of not only the way it looked, but the way it played.
And he gave them the seal of approval. And even though he was busy with Super Mario World 2 Yoshi's Island, he still was able to provide a decent amount of input. to the donkey kong country team even though he wasn't the director or producer of the game and i do want to bring up there's been this long circulated quote that uh shigeru miyamoto said that Donkey Kong Country is proof that as long as a game looks good, it can play terrible and people will still like it. And...
That has been completely debunked. It is not a real quote. Shigeru Miyamoto actually really likes Donkey Kong Country. So I don't know where this quote comes from. It's one of those weird things where people love attributing quotes to Shigeru Miyamoto. We don't know if the... A rushed game is bad forever, but a delayed game is late once or whatever the quote was or is eventually good.
We can't find any attribution to that, but we have found that him dissing Donkey Kong Country and just saying it's nothing but a good-looking game has not ever been said by him because he's actually a big fan of Donkey Kong Country. yeah that seems like something he would say in private anyways not in public yeah it's such a weird thing just to have that like ubiquitously circulated um so in that 2014 article on nintendo life that i referenced earlier uh
It's said that Nintendo is usually very protective of its IPs when they license them to other developers. But the Rare co-founders, Tim and Chris Stamper, actually acted as shields to the development team because they wanted to prevent too much outside influence for Donkey Kong Country.
And Mail said, quote, Nintendo were extremely busy at the time, so we were left to ourselves. It was an unprecedented thing for them to do, entrusting us with one of their most prominent... and fondly remembered ips with a relatively small and unknown uk development house i was young and naive enough not to realize just how crucial this game was for rare all i wanted to do was create a game that could be remembered
Miyamoto provided us with some suggestions for DK's look, and it was a sketch of his that included the tie. So that was the big contribution, it seems. Even though Miyamoto gave them tips here and there, it didn't seem like... even he was all that involved, even though he was, you know, a part of it, at least. That's wild. I mean, I guess, like you mentioned earlier, that by this point, Donkey Kong was inactive for almost a decade. So I guess that kind of just speaks to how...
relatively unimportant Donkey Kong was to them at the time wow yeah so it's interesting to see that but like the graphics were really the key selling point of this game I mean that's why Howard Lincoln went out to Rares like hey like we heard about these silicon graphics computers that you have like could you make something that could compete with aladdin and uh so rare actually had to use a special compression technique that let them wring out as much detail as possible from every sprite
while not overwhelming the SNES memory. They also had a lot of trouble creating the backdrops for the levels because they were so detailed and also super colorful. And the work was so power intensive that the studio needed to install... huge air conditioners so the workstations didn't overheat and they said that the the employees actually suffered in the heat because it was so hot in there and they had they had these air conditioners blasting but it was still extremely hot in there
Wow. So the result of using all this power was the pre-rendered graphics that they had. aim to have and they could display 3d character models on a traditionally 2d system like the snes And on the audio side, David Wise was hired as a freelancer to create placeholder music for the game, with the assumption that Nintendo's Koji Kondo would come in later on and create the soundtrack for the final game.
And Wise actually looked at the Mario franchise and was like, hey, this is a much more kind of upbeat game.
uh brighter environments and everything so like the latin beats that they use in in the mario franchise i don't think that's a good fit for a game like donkey kong country i'm gonna pull from more 1940 1940s jazz for a lot of the soundtrack and interestingly enough to coincide with the anniversary of Donkey Kong Country just last week the New York Times did an article talking to David Wise about the soundtrack
And he brought up his favorite track and also, I would argue, the most beloved track in the original Donkey Kong Country's soundtrack, Aquatic Ambience. And he said that that was inspired by a recent breakup that he was going through.
which he said made him feel like he was drowning. So he took those feelings and put it towards the water level sound. And that's a really fascinating inspiration to pull. Like, I swear, like... I like just reflecting on that like these people like composers and like any artist really like they
i swear they speak like a different language than all of like us normal people like how do you take that and make this incredible song like we have with aquatic ambience right it is it's yeah one of my favorite things is actually is to new composers and creators about that to try and kind of get an understanding of how these things happen.
And it's such a hard thing to pull out of them too, because it's like, like I said, it's like trying to explain like somebody who only sees in black and white, what, what the color orange looks like. And it's like, how do I even start to do this? Because it's a different like language altogether, basically. Right.
and it's one of those things where like if you're trying to explain something and to you it just seems completely natural and you know you're not really sure someone's wanting this detailed explanation of how it works and for you it's just like it just happens you know yeah so So, the boss theme. I don't know how much of a rock guy you are, especially 90s rock, but the boss theme in Donkey Kong Country, Wise says, was inspired by Nine Inch Nails' March of the Pigs.
which came out earlier in 1994, which, you know, it's a very intense song, very industrial sounding. Right. So a lot of heavy drumming going on in that song. So that was an interesting one as well to pull from that. Yeah, I did not know that. Wow. And then according to that same New York Times article, during a demo with Nintendo... Miyamoto was so impressed with the few tracks that were in place when he showed the prototype.
that he suggested to Rare that they keep David Wise's work in the final game. So Wise went and finished the soundtrack himself because Shigeru Miyamoto and Nintendo were like, hey, we actually love this soundtrack. We think it fits really well. We don't need to like bring in our own. guy to help you out with the music well that's an incredible confidence boost especially seems just a freelancer yeah that's not that's not a bad deal yeah right
So during its final pass on the game before, you know, Rare finalized the title, Nintendo did offer up a few directions to Rare, according to that 1994 GamePro article that I found. And they wanted Rare to reduce the difficulty to make it more widely appealing.
Basically, they were saying like, hey, the collectibles and the secrets would provide enough difficulty for the more hardcore players. And then the like the standard gaming population would be able to just get through the game. That's what they really wanted.
And then Miyamoto also suggested adding a ground pound move that Donkey Kong could use to defeat enemies and sometimes find hidden objects in the ground. And it's a different ground pound than what we know with Mario now, where he jumps up in the air and slams his butt down. It's like a ground like...
slap which is still used to this day in super smash brothers so that was those were like the big suggestions rare implemented those suggestions and had the game ready by its very tight deadline of thanksgiving 1994 And by the time development had wrapped up, Rare had put in about 18 months of work involving around 20 total people. But those 18 months were not 18 normal months. They were about 12 to 16 hours a day.
And that ended up spelling the most time the studio had ever put into a game at that point in time. And they were under a lot of pressure to get the game out by Thanksgiving. And they were able to hit that deadline. The game was announced at Consumer Electronics Show in June 1994, and people assumed it was an Ultra 64 game.
because Nintendo intentionally misled people. They wanted people to be like, oh my God, this is what the future of gaming looks like. This next console looks incredible. And then Nintendo intentionally saved it for the end of the trailer to reveal that it was actually an SNES game.
because they wanted people to be like mind blown like this is actually working on a super nintendo i think that's a really smart tactic it is yeah definitely because it gives you especially if if you've been i guess under criticism for maybe not being as advanced as a competition, then not only do you have people waiting for your next big console, you're also showing them, oh, but we're still good enough that we can make our old one look this good too. That's very smart.
And the game was marketed as one of the big pillars in Nintendo's Play It Loud campaign, which was meant to be a campaign that was designed to match the attitude that Sega was bringing with its marketing during that era. And, you know, it was very, very 90s trying so hard to capture that like Gen X attitude that was happening at the time and very. like neon spray paint and baggy jeans and like, you know, dude speak.
But Nintendo also sent out VHS tapes to Nintendo Power subscribers called Donkey Kong Country Exposed, which provided behind the scenes looks at Nintendo Treehouse, which we are familiar with today because Nintendo Treehouse does like Treehouse live streams. But this is essentially a group of employees at Nintendo that test games and provide feedback to the developers. And this gave players an unprecedented look.
at a game straight from nintendo instead of through a magazine josh do you think that served as kind of a precursor to the nintendo direct or am i just reading way too much into that coming off of our nintendo ds discussion No, I think that's definitely a good way to look at it because I was just thinking, as you said, wow, that's about 20 years ahead of current marketing practices now. Skip the middle medium and go straight to the consumer. That's very smart.
It's interesting how they did that. But Donkey Kong Country finally arrived on Super Nintendo on November 21st, 1994. I think all three of the anniversaries have been November 21st. which is very interesting. That was when it hit the US. It received glowing reviews, sold more than 500,000 copies in its first week. In total, it sold over 9 million copies, making it the third best-selling SNES.
game of all time can you guess the two that beat it i mean i'm assuming super mario world is up there somewhere that's number one can't think of number two super mario all stars
Oh, okay. Well, that makes sense. It's a compilation that remade Mario 1, 2, 3, and then also brought Lost Levels to the US for the first time, the Japanese Super Mario 2. And that placed... donkey kong country above huge games like super mario kart uh street fighter 2 the legend of zelda a link to the past uh super metroid and super mario world 2 yoshi's island that miyamoto and tezuko were working on at the time
So, yeah, big success for Nintendo. And following that success, Nintendo acquired a 25% ownership of Rare, which eventually increased to 49%. And this was the first time Nintendo had ever done this with a non-Japanese studio. And using the capital from this minority stake acquisition, Rare moved out of that barn and increased its staff from 84 members to over 250.
And Rare released two more Donkey Kong Country games on the SNES. Then on N64, it put out a ton of great games, including GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark, Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie. Diddy Kong Racing and Donkey Kong 64, which, by the way, also celebrated its 25th anniversary just last week. So lots of anniversaries that we just don't have time to cover all of them. But Donkey Kong 64, also 25th anniversary. Rare also around this time put out a trilogy of Donkey Kong Land games on the Game Boy.
And then they made their GameCube debut with 2002 Star Fox Adventures for the GameCube. So Josh, out of those post-Donkey Kong Country games, what is your favorite Rare game? I would probably have to say Star Fox Adventures.
Really? Okay. Absolutely not what I would have expected from Starbucks. You have animals in space to dinosaurs. It was the coolest thing to me when I first rented it. I mean, I think... i remember being frustrated with how obtuse it was at times and how easy it was to get lost and stuck but it just kind of had had an atmosphere about it really it was just um
An unorthodox adventure. And like I said, not what I expected from from Nintendo, from Star Fox or anything. And it was just a nice change of pace. It was really visually impressive, I think, for at least for an early GameCube game.
And it was a different way of interpreting what Star Fox could do and be, which I think they kind of kept a little bit with Star Fox Assault because you're trying a little bit more of the land missions and everything. I don't know. But yeah, I've got really fond memories of it. For me, it's Perfect Dark. God, what am I saying? Not Perfect Dark. Goldeneye! I got it in my head. I was like, not Perfect Dark. Goldeneye. Goldeneye is by far my favorite rare game of that era.
Really like Banjo-Kazooie a lot, but like, I don't know. Diddy Kong Racing is also in contention, but I just have so many fond memories of playing Goldeneye 007 with three of my friends and, you know. going through trying to speed run the levels to unlock all the cheat codes so much so much fun i i love goldeneye and it's it's wild to think that like the company that or the studio that put out
one of my top three Super Nintendo games also put out one of my top three N64 games. And it's a completely different genre. Like they went from a... 2d platformer to a first person shooter it's like yeah what studio does that right and and i mean they pulled it off so well you know it that's that's impressive So when 2002's Star Fox Adventure for GameCube came out, Rare was really optimistic this was going to be the start of a new prosperous era working with Nintendo.
But from various reports that I'm seeing, Nintendo refused to give more resources to Rare, even though GameCube games took a lot more time and money to develop. And... Rare's success had also attracted attention from outside companies, and a bidding war actually broke out between Nintendo, Activision, Microsoft, and some other names.
who all hoped to fully acquire Rare. So Nintendo wanted to up its stake to 100%, and Microsoft and Activision were also interested in that. So later that year, Microsoft... was the one that came out on top you know they had a lot of money microsoft is one of the richest companies on the planet so it's hard to outbid them and microsoft acquired rare in 2002 and the
Rare lost access completely to the Donkey Kong IP. And I've seen reports and speculation that Microsoft actually thought it was also acquiring the Donkey Kong IP with Rare.
and was kind of surprised when it didn't get donkey kong as well but i can't find any corroboration or proof for that and i think it would be a little naive of of microsoft with all of its lawyers and yeah understanding of how intellectual property works to under like to misunderstand that you know nintendo owned the donkey kong ip yeah even if you have that much money that you can throw around without even thinking about it you're still going to make sure what you're buying
presumably hopefully so during that time rare was actually developing its next gamecube game do you know about this i do not So they put out Diddy Kong Racing on N64. Their next GameCube game was going to be Donkey Kong Racing for GameCube. Oh. Oh, that's sad, actually. There is a trailer that you can actually find online that was shown, I believe, at E3 of that year behind closed doors. And that game, unfortunately, never saw the light of day due to this acquisition.
And under Microsoft, Rare has developed Perfect Dark Zero, which was abysmal. The Viva Pinata series, which is a cult classic series. banjo kazooie nuts and bolts which is very different from its original iteration and several connect games which you you think of that and you're like oh that's sad how how they fell which i agree uh but it also did game boy advance ports of donkey kong country trilogy
and a DS version of Diddy Kong Racing. So they weren't completely cut off. They were still open to working on this IP and working with Nintendo properties and Nintendo consoles. But their biggest hit in this Microsoft era has undoubtedly been Sea of Thieves, which is a live service pirate game that launched on Xbox and PC in 2018.
and has made massive improvements in the time since its launch i remember the way that uh former game and former editor kyle hilliard described it when he reviewed it was like it's like an ocean but it's like knee high in depth
But it seems like they have made vast improvements in Sea of Thieves. I've never gotten into it, but it sounds like it would be a fun game if I could get a good group of friends together. But again, this is rare just being a completely different... type of of game and it is a different group of people at this point obviously like there's the vast majority of the people who are around during the snes era have departed rare by this point
But overall, looking at the entire history of Rare, by the way, they also put out Rare Replay, which was a huge compilation of various Rare games from its earlier years. Obviously, they could not do it on the Donkey Kong Country games because... It was an Xbox published compilation. But do you have a favorite Rare game overall? I'd probably have to say Donkey Kong Country 2. Okay. Yes.
i mean that that's i think a common answer and yeah i know yeah it's always gonna be the original donkey kong for me um just because of nostalgia and yeah i just have so many fond memories with that game um The interesting thing here, as I've mentioned several times in this podcast, in 2014, several key members of that core Rare team that was responsible for games like Donkey Kong Country all the way up through the N64 era with Banjo-Kazooie...
They had all left during the Microsoft era, and they came back together to form an independent studio called Playtonic, and they launched a super successful Kickstarter campaign for a game called Project Ukulele. And that game ended up being called Yooka-Laylee, Y-O-O-K-A hyphen L-A-Y-L-E-E, not spelled like the instrument.
But it was a spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie, and that game launched in 2017. And then in 2019, that same team released Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair, which is a spiritual successor to Donkey Kong Country. And I... personally love ukulele in the impossible layer it's a phenomenal 2d platformer feels like a modern donkey kong country from the people who made the original games um you know
grant kirkhope does the soundtrack david wise worked on ukulele in the impossible layer so like it is a lot of the dna kevin bayless is the character designer uh uh Yeah, a lot of the old school rare people are working on these games. So it's really cool to see them still churning out games in these styles that people love from 25, 30 years ago.
And both of those games are available now to purchase on the Nintendo Switch. And the entire Donkey Kong trilogy from SNES is available through Nintendo Switch Online. I guess when you look back at the creation of Donkey Kong Country and like kind of this improbable story of Nintendo giving one of its biggest IPs to an outside studio. Like, how do you rank that in like kind of like the the improbable success stories of that era?
I mean, I'd say it's pretty high, especially all the little caveats in it. Not only did they give Rare one of its inactive properties, one of the... most even if it wasn't active one of those well-known properties at that point but they gave them complete freedom to pretty much do whatever with it you know miyamoto's primary contribution was saying give him a grand pound and and give him a tie you know that's like that is
It's just an incredible level of freedom to just mold this in whatever way you think is going to resonate with hopefully its original creators and also consumers. I don't know that, I mean, I'm sure there are similar stories. I can't think of any off the top of my head. But yeah, that's just a fantastic story.
So that is going to wrap up our retrospective of Donkey Kong Country. If you haven't played it, I highly recommend you go back and check it out. I think a lot of people will agree with Josh that Donkey Kong Country 2 is kind of the pinnacle of the franchise. But also Retro Studios, the team that is making Metroid Prime 4.
They are putting together or they have Donkey Kong Country. They've been two Donkey Kong Country games themselves. They did Donkey Kong Country Returns, which originally came out on Wii, then was ported to 3DS and was coming out on Switch next year. And then they did the follow up Donkey Kong Country.
Tropical Freeze, which I would argue Rivals 2 as the best Donkey Kong Country game. It's a fantastic game. That is already on Switch. So if you want to check out the... There's five... uh mainline console donkey kong country games uh four of them are already on switch and the fifth one is coming out Next year, again, Donkey Kong Country returns HD, I think it's called. That's coming out early 2025.
Go check it out if you haven't played the Donkey Kong Country games. They're all fantastic, in particular 2 and Tropical Freeze from an objective perspective and from a nostalgic perspective. I'm always going to recommend the first one. But if nothing else, fire up Nintendo music and listen to the soundtracks of Donkey Kong Country 1 and 2 because goodness gracious.
But we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll be doing definitive ranking, getting Josh's eShop gem of the week and recommending some of the sales that you should take a look at on the eShop during its Black Friday sale. We will be right back.
We are back and it's time for Definitive Ranking, a recurring segment where we take a Nintendo topic and give our own personal top five lists. Since this episode celebrated, among other things, the anniversary of the Nintendo DS, Josh... I want to get your top five Nintendo DS games of all time. So I'll have you start at five, count it down to one, and give me a quick sentence or two about each.
All right. For five, I'll go for, and I should just go ahead and say that I'm terrible at ranking things, so I am actually coming up with the order right off the top of my head. For five, we'll say Professor Late in the Curious Village, a puzzle game where a gentleman... detective and his assistant arrive in this village that seems a bit odd almost as if everyone isn't real hmm foreshadowing um and
the way they interact with the world and everyone in it is through solving puzzles random puzzles logic puzzles um brilliant game the whole trilogy is fantastic um for number four How about Super Mario 64 DS? Mostly for nostalgic reasons. First time I'd ever played it. I skipped the Nintendo 64 era for PlayStation. Horrible thing to admit on a Nintendo podcast, but it's true. And...
For three, Animal Crossing Wild World. It was everything that was brilliant about the original Animal Crossing, only easier to play because you could take it with you wherever you wanted to go.
Strange choice to remove holidays in favor of things like once every two months animals break into your house and demand you pay them compliments. Not sure that was a good idea, but everything else was just fantastic. It was giving you more... control and not more control but more influence over how your town would grow just brilliant game um very fond memories for two um i'm gonna say
Pokemon Black and White 2. Wasn't a fan of the original Black and White. I thought it was a bit... constrained feeling for pokemon there was less emphasis on exploration i thought um black and white too i thought was fantastic a much stronger story great mix of pokemon um and Yeah, I think my favorite DS game is definitely going to be Advanced Wars Dual Strike. I actually think the...
Dual screen implementation was a bit weak because you can't control the battles that are playing out on the top screen, but combining commanding officers, having different synergies between them, so they have different powers depending on who you're working with, and the map design. The map design is absolutely fantastic.
Some of them were almost as if you've got fan-made maps or some of the arcade maps that were just kind of meant to be ridiculous challenges in the original games, and these were in the main campaign. So, very long sentence for that one, but it still was one sentence. Well, I can see with how close you are to the train tracks that spirit tracks would not make your list. No. Absolutely not. No, I live close to train tracks as well, and they love...
blowing that horn at all hours of the night. And I'm like, this is not necessary. But yeah, we actually only have one item that is a crossover here. Again, I mentioned this, that I was not a giant DS player. So my list is going to definitely be, like, play the hits. But...
This is like, I don't know. This is how I kind of experienced it. I actually was not a fan of black and white either. So it did not make my list, even though several people assert that's one of the best Pokemon games of all time. I just couldn't get into it.
um so number five for me super mario 64 ds i think that at the time it was my like one of my favorite games of all time right so like to have a portable version of that was really cool even if it didn't control super well because the original ds didn't have a deep or a analog stick or like a nub or anything it just had the d-pad which made it really weird to run around in a 3d space with that uh but we made it work
Number four for me was Mario Kart DS. I think coming off of Super Circuit, I was just convinced that... A Mario Kart game was always going to be bad if it was handheld as opposed to consoles. And Mario Kart DS was fantastic. So it restored my faith in having a portable version of Mario Kart. Number three.
Because it restored the franchise that I was so in love with as a kid. New Super Mario Brothers. That, you know, unfortunately, I think that they kind of... ran out of creativity as they got deeper into the new super mario brothers franchise but that was like a really big deal that they were coming back with the mario franchise with all new 2d games because it felt like okay well the 3d era is here
that's what all mario is going to be going forward so it was really cool to get a new 2d mario game and i thought it was a it's probably the weakest of the mario new super mario brother games but like at the time it was all i wanted basically great Number two, a game you referenced as being very good earlier in the episode, WarioWare Touched. I'm a sucker for the WarioWare games, especially when they thoughtfully implement some of the more...
gimmicky, for lack of a better word, controls of some of these Nintendo systems. I think Smooth Moves on Wii is the pinnacle of that, and it's probably my favorite WarioWare game. WarioWare Touch does a really great job of using the touchscreen, which didn't feel like we were just shoehorning it in like it kind of did with the Zelda games. Right. And then number one for me, it is a remake of what I consider to be the objectively best Pokemon game, and that is Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver.
those remakes i would kill to have those on the switch even just as is just bring them as is or like make it so that we can control the bottom screen like by you know using d-pad and buttons or whatever i understand like the complications of porting over a ds game to like a single screen system but like if they could figure out a way to make it work i i don't care i would pay the full 60 to have that playable on my switch because yeah the heart gold soul silver
Fan-freaking-tastic. Probably the best Pokemon game of all time, in my opinion. Yeah, I definitely agree with that. And seeing... Seeing the two regions from, you know, the Game Boy Color games remade in kind of Diamond and Pearl style. Just absolutely fantastic. It was incredible and still mind-blowing to this day that they fit the second region. into the game on Game Boy Color. That was not an exclusive DS post-game thing. That was in the original Pokemon Gold and Silver. Yeah.
Yeah, and I know it's off topic a little bit, but I didn't realize at the time when I played the original Pokemon Silver that that was actually going to happen. So finding out you could travel back there, there was this whole separate storyline. That was mind blowing. Yeah. um so yeah that's my list and uh you know there's not much crossover and i think it's more interesting when that happens uh so
Josh, that brings us to the eShop gem of the week. It's a chance for you to shout out a game that might not otherwise get shined that you can find on the eShop. What is your eShop gem of the week? I am going to go with Strange Horticulture. It's sort of a gothic mystery puzzle game slash shop simulator where you move back to a town where you used to live to run a plant store. Part of it is...
Using your encyclopedia to know what plants you're selling so you don't sell the wrong thing to the wrong person, which could have horrible results. Keeping a good label system so you can identify based on what people are telling you they want. People that come into your shop, some of them are normal. They have things like they need plants for a cold or something. Some of them aren't normal. They come in because they want help.
They want your help identifying a plant that was left at the scene of this horrible murder. While you're trying to run your shop, there's this strange cult that's gaining prominence in the town, a bunch of bizarre mysteries going on. You sometimes... run into when you're out collecting plants and then everything kind of gradually starts to converge and what you're doing ends up directly influencing the outcome of what's going on in the village absolutely fantastic piece
So it's $16, which, you know, very affordable. That's what I love about the eShop gem segment is, like, a lot of these games are super affordable. And I'm sure it'll be on sale at some point. And it came to Switch two years ago in 2022.
yeah sounds like a fun game i i've never actually heard of this game before you brought it up to me so uh i'll have to check this out and uh you know see if it would be up my alley but i have so many games on my wish list oh yeah and uh you know as i mentioned This game probably will go on sale at some point because it's not part of the Black Friday sale that we are going to talk about to close out the show because, you know, there's sales all the time on the Switch eShop.
I don't cover them very often, but this is a big one. This is the big sale. There's hundreds of games for sale as part of Black Friday. We all know that Black Friday is like... the biggest sales driven shopping period. It used to be one single day. Then it became like, oh, Black Friday and Cyber Monday and Small Business Saturday. Now it's just like, hey, the two weeks surrounding Thanksgiving are Black Friday.
Like, look at Amazon. Like, those are all Black Friday deals happening right now, like, as we're recording this, you know, at the start of the week that this episode is airing. And so I want to take the time. to talk a little bit about the eShop gems and maybe some more mainstream games that we would recommend on the Switch eShop as part of Nintendo's digital Black Friday sale on the eShop.
um i have a few that i've noted here that i'm gonna call out and then i'll throw to you to see if there's anything else you want to shout out um i'm gonna go alphabetically i I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled through this sale, and I think I found a good collection of games that I can recommend. Some of them are just absurdly cheap, like less than a drink at Starbucks if you're a coffee drinker.
Several of these games are some of the best games on the Switch period. So I'll start off. Ape Out, it is a kind of like Hotline Miami inspired game where you play as a... an ape, and you're escaping from... a like a research facility and you just they're you know the security is trying to shoot you you have to take them out and it's all set to like jazz albums that this the developer has created And it is incredible. It's artistic. Each world is a different jazz album.
And as you hit the guys, cymbals will crash. So your actions are controlling the music to an extent as well. That's only $3.74. I'm not going to go into too much detail about all these games. We've talked a lot this episode, but Axiom Verge, outstanding Metroidvania. It's $5. Bad North is a kind of real-time... tower defense kind of game, a real-time defensive strategy game. That's only three bucks.
I've talked endlessly about Bellatro. That's on sale for $13.49. One of the best games this year. Final Fantasy X 10.2 HD remaster is on sale for $20. You get two huge... beloved RPGs.
golf story uh speaking of a really good rpg that is a fun don't get sports story get golf story sports story is bad golf story the game that came out before that from that same studio is very very good one of the best games in the early switch life cycle that's only four bucks Hyper Light Drifter, if you like top-down Zelda games with kind of like a NES...
an SNES hybrid aesthetic and an absurd amount of challenge. It's so challenging in certain places, but it's so much fun. I beat it all the way through. It's a great game. That's only $5. Mark of the Ninja Remastered, which is a stealth 2D game that came out. God, that was like Xbox. 360 era but they did a remaster of it that's only five bucks the messenger which is the game from the sea of stars developer sabotage
That is $4. That's like a Ninja Gaiden Metroidvania style game. And it has a really cool mechanic where if you travel in like the original era that the game takes place, it's NES graphics. And then when you travel to the future, the game transforms. into SNES graphics and changes from like a Ninja Gaiden clone to a Metroidvania. So very cool mechanics to play there. That's only four bucks. Persona 4 Golden, one of the best RPGs of its era, 12 bucks.
Portal Companion Collection, you get two of the greatest puzzle games to ever exist. I don't know how it runs on Switch, but it's only $5. Rogue Legacy 2, it's a... one of the greatest roguelike games of kind of the modern era, I would say. That's only $12.49. Shovel Knight Treasure Trove. which is an homage back to the 2D NES platforming action games.
20 bucks, you get the entire collection of all of the Shovel Knight expansions as part of the Treasure Trove. So that's why I'm calling that out, even though it's 20 bucks. Slay the Spire. deck building roguelike uh one of the most beloved indie games of the past several years eight dollars and 49 cents
I don't have to tell you why I'm recommending Sonic Mania. One of the best Sonic games of all time. $7.19. I don't know how we got to that number. Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection. You get fantastic arcade ports of the early... Street Fighter games, $10. Super Mario Maker 2, I will continue to say that one of the great injustices is that Super Mario Maker 2 did not sell well on Switch.
I understand the novelty maybe ran out a little bit by the time we got to Mario Maker 2, but it's only $40. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Cowabunga collection is $16. That gathers so many of the classic Ninja Turtles games and then some of the non-classic ones as well. If you want to check out some historical... Ninja Turtles games that is there for you for $15.99. Tetris Effect Connected, which Tetris Effect, one of the greatest iterations of Tetris, I would say.
Very atmospheric, very cool puzzles, all driven by music. 20 bucks. How do you feel about Tony Hawk's Pro Skater? Because Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2 HD remakes of the first two Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games, $15.99. And then to wrap it up, Josh, Wargroove. which is basically Advance Wars, but set in kind of medieval times. $6.
I also didn't mention this because it's a Nintendo discount, but if you've been holding off on Tears of the Kingdom, that is $50 during this sale. So that's a $20 discount. If $70 didn't whet your appetite, maybe $50 will. miss anything. I was pretty comprehensive with my scrolling. Very comprehensive. But did I miss anything that you wanted to shout out on this sale?
Yeah, I think it's more expensive. It's $39.99, but the Crash Bandicoot Crashiversary bundle is a pretty good deal because you're getting Crash Bandicoot 4, the Remastered Trilogy, and the Crash Team Racing remake all together. Oh, wow. Yeah. it's normally a hundred dollars so 39 you know it's a bit steeper than what you were mentioning but not a bad deal if you've got to spend um
I can't let this go by without saying you should probably play Final Fantasy IV Pixel Remaster. It's down to $13.49. I know VI is technically the better game, but for me, Final Fantasy IV is the best. And then if you don't mind long load times, Disco Elysium, the final cut, is down to $11.99, but the Switch version does have longer load times than you're going to find on PC.
And just because Ace Attorney is fantastic and I think everyone should play Ace Attorney, you could get the Ace Attorney trilogy for $9.99 or the bundle of that and the Apollo Justice collection for $35.99. Awesome. Well, I mean, I think that we gave the listeners plenty of games to consider. Quite a few to choose from. The eShop Black Friday sale. I think it goes through December 3rd, if I'm not mistaken. That is right.
Okay. December 2nd. Ah, so close. But yeah, so you have a few days to still consider that as this episode is airing. But Josh, that wraps up this episode of All Things Nintendo. Thank you so much for joining me for this show. It's been great. Yeah, had a blast. Thank you very much for inviting me on.
And thank you so much to everyone for listening. As you know, the Patreon and the associated Discord server are the best ways to get any questions or comments in. You can also get in touch with me at brian at allthingstintendo.com or hit me up on social media at brianpichet. I'm really trying to build up my blue sky presence.
because I'm pretty much leaving Twitter behind and threads is kind of not it. So find me on Blue Sky in particular, at Brian P. Shea. That is also my YouTube channel name. And if you would subscribe to that channel, it would help me out a lot. Josh, where can people... find you online um i am primarily on blue sky now um you can find me at fin the brave that's f-i-o-n-n the brave all the work and for as far as like
normal work. You can mostly see me on BT 24-7, helping out with guides, and on Sports Illustrated with TLHF. That is our show for this week. Thank you again for listening. Take care. We'll see you next time. Before we wrap up this episode of All Things Nintendo, I just want to give a special shout out to the $10 patrons of the podcast.
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