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One switch games9/9/2023 The company has promised at least one more patch to add other Konami characters as Bomberpeople, like Simon Belmont from Castlevania and the Pyramid Head from Silent Hill. and gain so much from the performance boost. Crisper Bombermen would be lovely, sure, but players lose nothing from some slight blur. Technically, it's just a matter of rendering primary colors, low-poly models, and simple textures. Bomberman is not a visually messy game, other than its bursts of flame. In the case of Super Bomberman R, the resolution slash totally works. That's a severe cut-and one that, in the past, could have been held up by a Nintendo "quality" certification roadblock, considering how much blur it adds to the game's appearance. Ars doesn't have pixel-counting gear handy, but rough estimates see the multiplayer mode's pixel count dropping from 1080p to 720p in the Switch's docked TV mode and from 720p to 540p in portable mode. This locked 60-FPS patch (improved from the original 30 FPS refresh) is remarkable for many reasons, most notably because it makes a major sacrifice to pull the performance-boost off: It slashes the game's rendering resolution. Weeks after launch, Konami pushed a critical patch to fix the game's woeful multiplayer modes, while the most recent, which went live late Thursday, was transformative: It bumped all multiplayer modes to a 60-frames-per-second visual refresh, and it added four free multiplayer arenas and other welcome tweaks, to boot. Not just first-party games, either (though performance-boosting patches have certainly been welcome for Zelda: Breath of the Wild).Īs it turns out, Konami, who owns the rights to the '90s multiplayer franchise Bomberman, has been responsible for three major patches to Switch launch title Super Bomberman R. Now, not even two months into the Switch's life, almost all of its games have received at least one patch in their first two weeks of existence, and quite a few have gotten multiple patches over the past two months. Something has clearly changed in terms of how developers can push updates on a Nintendo platform to make their games better. And other attempts at developer outreach, like interview requests sent to Nintendo's "indie" publishing manager, were frequently stonewalled as recently as 2014. Nicalis, the publishers behind indie favorites Cave Story and Binding of Isaac, publicly bemoaned the certification process that held back updates to the company's Wii games. Nintendo has been notorious among game makers for getting in the way of updates to released games that other game consoles have already addressed (and thus opened the door for more great indies and experimental games on consoles). At the time, they mostly spoke about the ease of translating games from other platforms, whether through a major engine like Unity and Unreal or through their own custom-built engines.īut what the speakers didn't explore much at the time-because, you know, the system wasn't out-was how easy it was to patch their games. The participating "Nindies" game makers on hand echoed that statement. Nintendo spoke at length at a late-February event about how its Nintendo Switch platform will make certain development tasks easier for game makers. And in one case, those updates have transformed at least one major Switch game from "maybe try" to "must buy." Patchwork ![]() What's bubbling up is just about as good, however: frequently updated games. But something interesting is quietly bubbling within the world of Switch games-though, sadly, I don't mean Nintendo's catalog of classic Virtual Console games. These include a gussied-up Mario Kart 8, the brand-new fighting series Arms, and a new Splatoon game that is finally looking more like a sequel than a last-gen port. With the Nintendo Switch's newness starting to fade, interest in the new console has begun to shift toward its upcoming wave of "bigger" games.
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