Mr Party Hat

I'd love a Prime 4 post-mortem at some point (which we'll never get, because Nintendo). Would be interesting to see how much of Bandai Namco's original development carried over to the Retro reboot, who was responsible for the bike, etc.

Retro always seemed like such mature developers. The bike desert thing looks like an obvious disaster that should have been scrapped early on.

Do they have any of that early Metroid bullshit where you have to bomb random corners without any signposting?

I physically recoiled at that photo.

This is my Christmas Day game, so I'm sure I'll leave my thoughts in a few weeks…

Echoes of Wisdom is that rarest, most wonderful of things: a brand-new Zelda world to explore.

I couldn't work out why that was engaging me SO much until I looked at the release timelines, and worked out the last time I had a chance to explore a new Zelda world.

Tears of the Kingdom re-uses a map we spent hundreds of hours in, so we can discount that. And following on from that, Breath of the Wild is wonderful (favourite game ever?) but it doesn't feel like a Zelda game. There's a very specific brand of Zelda ambience and cosy exploration feels that BotW is missing. Link Between Worlds uses the SNES map, we all know that one back to front. Skyward Sword didn't have an overworld.

And so we're back to Twilight Princess. Which came out almost 20 years ago. 20 years since I landed in a brand-new, Zelda-feeling Hyrule and wondered what was around the next corner.

So Echoes of Wisdom might not be the best Zelda game. It's probably not the best Switch 2 game I'll buy this week. But it's recaptured a feeling I thought I'd lost forever. It's a warm Christmas-day hug of a game.

'For how it looks' is the biggie for me. I totally get the performance hit when I can see a reason for it. The lightning in Assassin's Creed Shadows is an obvious one, I can totally see why there's a trade-off there. It looks stunning in the 40fps mode.

But some of the stuff being churned out on UE5 looks worse than older, more performative games. I'm playing Deus Ex: Mankind Divided at the moment, which is a lovely ten-year-old game with lots of reassuring boomer graphic terms like baked lighting and MSAA. It runs at 200fps on my computer, without any DLSS magic. And it genuinely looks better than these new UE5 titles that are struggling to hit 60fps at an internal resolution of 720p.

I have zero understanding of how these engines work, so I might be way off, but to me it feels like another case of reducing man hours and ending up with something objectively worse, but cheaper to make. (Not cheaper to buy, of course.) Because presumably, someone used to spend months 'baking' the lighting on these games, and now it's all done in real time. If that's not the reason people keep shipping games in this state, then I'm at a loss.