The Friday letters page is increasingly worried about the current state of Xbox, as a reader is upset with the Super Mario Galaxy remasters.
Games Inbox is a collection of our readers’ letters, comments, and opinions. To join in with the discussions yourself email gamecentral@metro.co.uk
Repeat performance
So another Fallout annoucement and Bethesda managed to sideline Fallout: New Vegas yet again. I guess the rumours are true and they really do resent the fact that they didn’t make the best one. I thought the annoucement was going to be a Fallout 4 remaster and I’m not really sure why it wasn’t. Are Bethesda short of money? Did Oblivion not sell well? It’s not like they haven’t got time because they didn’t even make the Oblivion remaster themselves.
I know Obsidian has said they’d like to do the New Vegas remaster themselves, except they haven’t got time, but this is all getting a bit silly now. The game’s 15 years old and it looks older, it is long past time it had a makeover and some quality of life improvements.
Bethesda are so slow though. They take forever to make something and then when they do it always seems outdated, on a technical level. If I were them, I’d be worried about Xbox and its ridiculous new targets, because the smart business decision would be to take their franchises away from them and make a new developer that can work at quicker pace, with more modern results.
Ratso
Fallout reheated
So Bethesda really wanted you to think that Fallout 4 Anniversary Edition was a remaster, huh? What a waste of time that whole livestream was. Re-releases aren’t usually a thing for games but here we are with Bethesda trying to sell the exact same game they put out 10 years ago. I don’t think there’s a price yet for it but whatever it is, it’s too much.
Bethesda lost a lot of respect from me with Starfield and they’re not really doing anything to get it back with things like this. Especially when they farmed out Oblivion to someone else to do. Why couldn’t they do that with some Fallout remasters as well?
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Although to be honest, if you start down that route, I’m not sure there wouldn’t be a good argument for having someone else do all their games from now on. I’m not sure the Bethesda that made Skyrim is still around anymore.
Roadie
Additional Nightmares
This game looks good, it is a 3D platformer inspired by games like Little Nightmares, Inside, and Bramble: The Mountain King. It is called PHi: The Broken Strings and is currently on Kickstarter and is 30% funded so far. They have just released a playable demo of the game on Steam too.
I’ve backed it for a digital copy and my name in the credits for £19. If I had been an early bird supporter I could have got it for £15. I’ve really enjoyed games like Little Nightmares, Limbo, and Planet Of Lana, which it is also similar too, so had to back it. Hopefully it will get fully funded, as the last Kickstarter game, Otherside, I mentioned on here did not reach its goal and did not get funded, unfortunately.
Andrew J.
PS: I find it very difficult to narrow down my favourite games to just three games, as there are too many choices on various platforms for me.
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Galaxy of complaints
Nintendo do seem to be in place where you kind of feel like you’re being exploited by the bare minimum effort with this Switch 2 business model, from the paid updates to pricy merch and accessories. I think a bad rep will be difficult for them to shake, as this strategy it continues.
Sticking to the idea of premium pricing for the minimum effort there’s the Super Mario Galaxy re-release(s). Classics, of course, and the way Nintendo tailors it’s game to its hardware is part of what makes them stand out. However, updating these I feel they’ve dropped the ball. In handheld mode I’m constantly making compromises when it comes to control and actually playing the game, and the whole experience ends up feeling quite restrictive.
Wiggling the console around or having fingers obscuring the screen while you paw away at it just isn’t fun. Why is this pointer always on screen? Why can’t I just use buttons and the analogue sticks instead of the gyro? Nintendo should have prioritised smoothness of play (i.e. getting rid of the pointer all together and just having a button to auto lock onto those level elements) and interaction over trying to replicate the Wiimote. That probably would have made the game trivially easy… but better that compromise than this I’d say.
Is a flawed remaster of a great game still a great game or a bad effort? Or both. In 2025 on the Switch… are these 10/10 games? And alas I have to say no, and it’s probably not possible for them to be off the Wii.
Marc
PS: With the talk of Nintendo DS and 3DS games on Switch, am I just crazy or would simply turning the screen 90 degrees and splitting it in half work? There are already third party grips that do this for vertical shooters, so Nintendo could just do an official DS branded one and charge twice as much. Why are we trying to attach a second screen?
GC: You can make the pointer go away in handheld mode by pressing the touchscreen.
Retro rallying
Just a quick heads up to fans of old school rally games in the style of Colin McRae.
Back in issue 262 of Retro Gamer (August 2024) there was a feature on a game called Old School Rally. Made with PS1 style visuals but updated for modern day it’s developed by a single developer and it now has a demo on the eShop. I thought the demo was really good and I can’t wait for the reviews to roll in.
It is available to pre-order and will be released on the 4th of December.
Charlie H.
Fully stocked fridge
It’s all very well the games industry wants gamers to go all digital but after going through my Switch storage over the weekend gone (in order to update Warface and realising Vigor is no longer playable on Switch), I realised I just don’t have the storage for any more games.
Yet, as I type, I have five digital-only games on my eShop Wishlist*.
Yes, I could uninstall other games saved to my Switch’s storage or just buy another SD card and then spend six-plus hours transferring everything over, but I just can’t be bothered or have the time to do that.
It was long enough when I transferred my data over from a 128GB SD card to my current 256GB SD card back in 2022 and I said at the time I won’t be doing that again.
No wonder I prefer physical, as the majority of Switch games are on the game card.
LeeDappa
*The five games are Double Dragon: Revive, Marvel Cosmic Invasion, Shinobi: Art Of Vengeance, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown, and Terminator 2: No Fate.
Mercy killing
Watching Xbox over the last few months has been so painful. It’s like you can see them falling apart in real-time. It would be a mercy just to pull the plug now and sell it off to Apple or Amazon or someone, like another reader said.
Instead, we’re going to have wait for years to learn that, actually, Xbox didn’t make double the usual profits of anyone else in the games industry. How could they possibly even hope to? They don’t sell hardware anymore and every report and leak we get says their management is terrible.
The only way they’ll hit their targets is if they sack thousands of people and shut down a bunch of studios. That’ll make the line go up for a year, but after that… who’s going to make their games for them?
Hayfield
Hundreds and thousands
I was quite surprised by GC’s ‘wow’ response to Simundo’s mention of hundreds of games in the backlog. I’d have thought with an ageing demographic, and all the distractions life brings, that would be pretty common.
Personally, I’m currently finishing off my last DS game (Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story), and am about a third through Zelda: Skyward Sword, with at least another five Wii games to get through, 30-40 Xbox 360 games still to play (currently playing Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed – hot take, the single-player is more fun than Mario Kart 8), around 40 Switch games, close to 250 PlayStation 4 games, and probably 300+ across Epic Games Store and Steam.
A while ago I covered this issue in a weekend piece, but the constant stream of ‘free’ games is great for me, but I can’t see how it is sustainable for the industry. To answer Ed’s question, over the last 11 years I’ve also completed an average of 10 games a year. In each December alone, Epic Games probably give that amount away for free, then there are PS Plus games, or whatever sub you may have access to.
There is zero incentive to buy a game if it may take a decade before I get to play it and it then could be given away for free/part of a sub sometimes literally within months of release. The lack of technical innovations between generations, and cross-generation releases also means I’m still perfectly happy pottering away on my PlayStation 4, and as someone else said, likely just skipping the current gen and likely getting the best games given away in future months.
I may well be on the more extreme end, but it’s quite the odd situation the industry has got itself into.
Ernie
Inbox also-rans
As someone who has never been great at strategy games, which would GC recommend out of Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle or Sparks Of Hope? They are both £12 in the eShop sale at the moment.
Charlie
GC: Well, the sequel Sparks Of Hope is the best game but if you play that first you’re not really going to want to go back to the original.
Are you planning to review Painkiller? I quite enjoyed it on the original Xbox and it’s less than £30, so I’m considering a purchase.
Coinslot-
GC: Maybe. But we didn’t think much of the original and the initial response to this one seems muted.
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