nichesitetool.com

The Thursday letters page admits to preferring third person Resident Evil, as a reader asks which are Suda51’s best games.

To join in with the discussions yourself email gamecentral@metro.co.uk

AI takeover
Count me in the set of people that think Mario Kart World is mostly great. The open world is strange in the way it’s used but I’ve enjoyed the actual racing a whole lot. However, one issue I’ve not really heard anyone talk about is that I feel the game is probably a bit too hard in single-player.

I consider myself a pretty decently skilled gamer – not amazing but at least a little above average for most games – but I’ve really struggled with everything above 50cc. It’s not even the random elements, with blue shells at the finishing line and whatever, but I find that the higher you go the less mistakes you can afford to make, as catching up is surprisingly difficult.

Knockout Tour is the worst, as I even started to find that difficult in 50cc, let alone the higher speeds. It’s got to the point where I feel I have a better chance of winning online, against human players, which doesn’t seem right. Is it just me being terrible against the AI or is the game actually a lot harder than you’d think?
Tolly

See the fear
Being able to switch from first to third person in Resident Evil Requiem seems like the obvious choice, now that it’s been revealed. I’ll most play in third person, like I always do, but I imagine first person will be better for some action scenes and aiming and such like.

First person is always described as being more immersive but I’m not sure that it actually makes that much difference in a horror game. Resident Evil 7 was scary, but no more so than some of the earlier games, while Resident Evil Village wasn’t frightening at all. It wasn’t trying to be (except for that bit) but nothing about being first person made it automatically more tense, at least not for me.

A lot of the appeal in Resident Evil is the characters and so I think it’s important to see them as much as possible. I can’t even remember what the main character is in 7 and Village, as I don’t think you ever see his face. But I remember Rose, because she is in a lot of cut scenes. The first person-only games were a worthy experiment but I hope it’s days as the only option are over.
Sully

The last reveal
So there we have it: the Nintendo Switch 2 is the fastest selling console of all time, despite coming out at a slow time of year for games (and not during a pandemic) and being expensive for a Nintendo console. Having a lot of stock obviously helped but I still think it’s an impressive achievement.

What matters now is where Nintendo goes from here. I agree that their line-up of games so far is not very impressive, which is not a problem I imagined the console having, knowing how well Nintendo supported the Switch 1.

I hope there is a Nintendo Direct this month but I’m not sure it would have much on anything but the games that have already been announced. I feel Splatoon Raiders was probably the last reveal for the year, which is going to leave us hanging for a long time until there’s any new news.
Onibee

Email your comments to: gamecentral@metro.co.uk

Bananas decision
It’s nice to hear from Nick the Greek! I’d be up for continuing our Mario Kart rivalry at some point if we can catch each other online. I’m not sure I have enough free time to do a photo feature at the moment but maybe at some point. I’m glad he still remembers my Zelda ones.

As for the Switch 2, I have mixed feelings. Mario Kart World is superb, especially the Knockout Tour, but it’s noticeable we’re lacking a big new single-player at the moment. For the first Switch, we had Zelda: Breath Of The Wild which made the launch much more exciting.

It’s a shame Donkey Kong Bananza wasn’t out for launch. I really hope it’s good. It’d help if Nintendo clarified if it was developed by the Mario team. I’ve seen a lot of complaints about the lack of Mario game announcement, but Bananza might very well be it. Guess we’ll soon find out!
Ryan O’D

Deferred purchase
Let’s forget about all this new console nonsense and concentrate on what’s good. I did shelve my Switch 2 purchase for a Meta Quest 3. It was time. I’m loving the hardware and interface. This feels like the future, but I’ve still got feelings Nintendo-wise.

Quest offers brilliant product and form and I can be the Batman or anything until I’m convinced to dip a toe into the Nintendo hype. I did double down on my Switch and got a Hori split pad and a 128GB card. I’m a Ninty boy at heart. Sorry guys but a guy’s got to geek out and feel the goodness. Maybe another day. I can’t, for the love of me, justify Switch 2 right now. OLED model, it shall be.
D Dubya

Flawed genius
I thought the Romeo Is A Dead Man trailer was great, which has prompted me to look at more of Suda51’s work. I know his games are always a bit rough around the edges, but which games are definitely worth playing and which are more curiosity only?

I thought the State of Play had a great variety of games shown but was tainted by the spectre of Sony’s profligacy in how they’ve managed their internal development teams. I think the most obvious reason for their silence is that they’ve nothing first party to show right now, but hopefully that changes from 2026 and beyond.
Magnumstache

GC: Our favourite thing he’s done is still killer7, but we don’t think it’s directly available on any modern format. The first two No More Heroes games are good and so too is Lollipop Chainsaw, which just got a remaster. A lot of his stuff is quite flawed, but almost all of it is interesting. He’s got a collaboration with Deadly Premonition’s Swery65 coming out this year, called Hotel Barcelona, so we’ll be very interested to see that.

First timer
I’m one of those people that has never played the two most recent Zelda games before and I’m definitely impressed by the Switch 2 Edition of Breath Of The Wild. You can tell it’s an older game, a Wii U game, as you say, but the smooth frame rate is very nice and the sheer scale of the world is incredible.

It seems endless at the moment and I can see from the map that I’ve visited maybe an eighth of it so far, which is amazing really because it already seems really big. I’m not even hating the breakable weapons that much either.
Art

Specialist subject
Limited Run games are taking pre-orders for Toaplan Arcade Collection Volumes 1 and 2 (I’m sure both will get digital releases) for PlayStation 5 and Switch and I wondered if you could help me with the quality of the games included, I’ve heard of very few of them (many Truxton, which is supposed to be good?) and wondered if you thought the collections sound worth it please?

Toaplan Arcade Collection Vol. 1 includes Tiger-Heli, Flying Shark, Twin Cobra, Fire Shark, Out Zone, FixEight, Dogyuun, and Batsugun.

Toaplan Arcade Collection Vol. 2 includes Slap Fight, Truxton, Hellfire, Twin Hawk, Zero Wing, Vimana, Truxton 2 and Grind Stormer.

Thanks for you help, keep up the great work.
Beastiebat (PSN ID)
Still playing: Devil May Cry 3 on Very Hard, Level 18 can do one; and just started Super Double Dragon, also surprisingly difficult

GC: This is the first we’ve heard of this, but while Toaplan were a great developer they shut down in 1994, so all their games are pretty old. Tiger-Heli and its sequel Twin Cobra are what made their name, but Slap Fight and Flying Shark are perhaps the most recognisable to UK gamers, as they were ported to 8-bit computers.

Almost all their stuff is good though, including Truxton (aka Tatsujin), the R-Type-esque Hellfire, Zero Wing (the source of the All Your Base meme), and Bubble Bobble style platformer Snow Bros. (which recently got a remake). Their final game, Batsugun, is regarded as the first true bullet hell shooter.

Inbox also-rans
Everything about this MindsEye game is so weird. I hadn’t heard about it until this week and it seems a complete mess. Why did they release it at such a stupid time? I thought the guy in charge was some kind of seasoned industry veteran?
Tacle

Now that we’ve had a new Marvel fighting game announced, and Invincible has one, it’s high time that we got a new DC game. I don’t particularly want Injustice 3, but I’d love a DC Vs. Capcom game. Would be a fun way to get back at Marvel, after their betrayal.
Focus

Email your comments to: gamecentral@metro.co.uk

The small print
New Inbox updates appear every weekday morning, with special Hot Topic Inboxes at the weekend. Readers’ letters are used on merit and may be edited for length and content.

You can also submit your own 500 to 600-word Reader’s Feature at any time via email or our Submit Stuff page, which if used will be shown in the next available weekend slot.

You can also leave your comments below and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter.

MORE: Games Inbox: When will Mario Kart World DLC be released?

MORE: Games Inbox: When will the Nintendo Switch 2 Lite be released?

MORE: Games Inbox: Does Mario Kart World have the best Nintendo soundtrack?

Nintendo might not want to make a new F-Zero game but the creators of Fast RMX do, with a sequel that has some of the best graphics on Switch 2.

Much has been said about how Nintendo is in a slightly awkward position with the Switch 2, in that most of its major franchises were so expertly revamped and perfected on the Switch 1 that it’s hard to know where to go with them from here. Do they try to reimagine Zelda once again? Or make Smash Bros. even bigger in scale? Or do they continue with more iterative and less ambitious sequels? Or maybe they should focus on other forgotten franchises… like F-Zero.

Nintendo’s explanation for why there hasn’t been a new F-Zero in over two decades (except for online title F-Zero 99) is that there’s no point unless they can come up with something new for it, especially as it’s never been a big seller, that can get by on just its name.

As the inspiration for WipEout, F-Zero is the quintessential future racer and its greatest entry is GameCube title F-Zero GX, which technically is a Switch 2 launch title, as it’s now available as part of Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack. But if you crave something new there is an alternative, in the form of loving tribute Fast Fusion.

German developer Shin’en has been making F-Zero clones since the Wii era, all with different names but always starting with word Fast. Fast RMX was a launch title for the original Switch and now we have Fast Fusion, which suffers from all the same pros and cons as the previous titles. As if to make Nintendo’s point, there’s precious little innovation here but what it does have is a blistering sense of speed and some of the best graphics on the Switch 2.

Unlike F-Zero and WipEout, there’s very little context given for Fast Fusion’s races. Not only is there no attempt at a story, or even any characters, but there’s no explanation for what’s going on or where you are. The implication is that you’re taking part in a futuristic racing championship but there’s zero worldbuilding, beyond some vaguely sci-fi sounding names in the leaderboard.

That doesn’t really matter though and once in a race you can instantly see where all the effort has gone, with some really quite stunning visuals for a launch game. Mario Kart World’s cartoon style has made it difficult to gauge exactly how powerful the Switch 2 is, but Fast Fusion frequently looks like a higher end PlayStation 4 game, and certainly much better than Fast RMX.

If you don’t know what F-Zero, or WipEout, is then it doesn’t matter, because it’s not a complex concept: imagine Formula One but in the future, with anti-gravity cars and roller coaster style tracks, and that’s pretty much it. WipEout had weapons and power-ups, but F-Zero and Fast Fusion do not.

Instead, Fast Fusion has a boost that is, slightly counter-intuitively, activated by collecting enough coins to fill up a bar. But you can also get a boost from driving over differently coloured chevrons, while manually switching colours between red and blue, so as to match the colour on the ground – or otherwise you slow down instead of speeding up.

There’s also a very powerful jump and the ability to lean left and right, but those are more advanced techniques that are not necessary at first. You can knock into enemies, to send them spinning, but there isn’t really an attack ability, which is something of a shame because if you or an opponent hit an obstacle you explode in a rather nice crash.

Although the game has the worst rubber band AI we think we’ve ever experienced, and the vehicles feel a bit lightweight in terms of handling, races are a lot of fun. The track design can seem a little pedestrian (we’ve been spoilt by the overabundance of shortcuts in Mario Kart World) but the sheer spectacle of it all keeps your interest.

If you’re wondering about the name, there is a fusion process, similar to the Shin Megami Tensei series, where you can put two vehicles together, to fuse them together and get a blend of both their stats and their physical appearance. That’s kind of neat but there’s only three stats and there’s not a lot of thought needed for which ones to splice together.

This costs money to do, naturally, but while the standard game mode is similar to the Grand Prix system from Mario Kart you have to pay to unlock subsequent cups, which we wish we’d known the first time, before we spent all our money on new cars and fusions. Although it’s a regular irritation when you have to repeat a whole cup, or waste time in Time Attack, just to earn a few more credits to play a new one.

There’s also Super Hero mode, where if you crash that’s it (it’s basically iron man mode, in other words). That’s as frustrating as it sounds and so too, unfortunately, is the online multiplayer. There’s up to four-player split screen, which is great, but there’s no matchmaking for online so you either race with a friend via GameChat or… you don’t race online at all.

Again, it all comes back to the visuals, with 12 highly varied tracks that range from a redwood forest to deserts with sand whales jump out around you, to a race in an asteroid belt and around a futuristic city. There are four separate graphics options in TV mode, two of which are 4K, although this results in a slight blurriness that we assume is a result of upscaling rather than being a native resolution – so we stuck with the performance option, although only the Ultra Quality option is not 60fps.

Fast Fusion is rough around the edges in almost every respect and, apart from its graphics, shows little real improvement over its eight-year-old predecessor. Its low price excuses a lot of its problems but at the same time it fails to address Nintendo’s problem, of how to introduce new concepts to the formula. And yet between this and the GameCube games on Switch 2, this is a good as F-Zero fans have eaten in a long time.

Formats: Nintendo Switch 2
Price: £13.49
Publisher: Shin’en
Developer: Shin’en
Release Date: 5th June 2025
Age Rating: 3

Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter.

To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.

For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.

The most successful Legend Of Zelda game of all time is remastered for the Nintendo Switch 2 and gains a significant performance boost.

Nintendo may be the most inscrutable video games company in the world, but you didn’t need any insider information to know that there was going to be a remaster of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild for the Switch 2. Not even they would ignore such an obvious idea and so it is that both Breath Of The Wild and its sequel Tears Of The Kingdom have been given special Nintendo Switch 2 Editions.

Considering we spent literally hundreds of hours playing the original versions of both games, there’s no way we, or anyone else, is going to be able to replay the whole thing in a reasonable amount of time, thanks to Nintendo not sending review units ahead of time. But the important thing to note about the Switch 2 version of Breath Of The Wild is that it doesn’t contain any new content.

There’s a multitude of technical improvements, and a mobile app with new features, but the actual gameplay, game world, and story are exactly the same as they were back in 2017. This means that despite concerns about Mario Kart World, the Switch 2 does launch with one of the best video games ever made.

Breath Of The Wild is an incredible game. Not just in its own right but as an example of perhaps the most thorough and successful reboot of any media property ever. It’s still a Zelda game but the open world gameplay and the lack of traditional dungeons transforms the formula into a freeform adventure that no other game, beyond its own sequel, has come close to emulating.

It’s an incredible achievement and absolutely deserves to retain the 10/10 score we originally gave it. And that’s before we start to get into the changes for the Switch 2 Edition. Naturally, the first thing you notice is the graphics, which despite no obvious changes to the textures or 3D models do look noticeably better. The higher resolution helps a lot but you can also see changes to the lighting, in part thanks to HDR support, and draw distance.

We’d also swear the game was using ray tracing at times, especially the way the light glints off metal shields, but Nintendo has made no mention of that, even though the Switch 2 does support the technology.

Whatever’s going on the game looks fantastic, although because nothing substantial has changed in terms of the graphics themselves the simplistic textures do stand out at times, since this is still essentially a Wii U game. The desaturated colour scheme is also something we were never too enamoured with the first time around, although we’ve long since accepted that as part of the game’s aesthetic.

The most important graphical change is that the whole game now runs at a steady 60fps. When originally released there was some notable frame rate issues but while the most serious instances, such as in Korok Forest, were dealt with via a patch the game could still run into trouble at times, especially when there was a lot of enemies or explosions on screen.

Now everything is silky smooth no matter where you go and what you do, which makes a big difference. The Switch 2 also ensures faster loading times and while they’re not instantaneous, when you warp from one place to the next, it’s now only around a five second wait.

Plus, using the Master Cycle Zero motorbike, which you get from completing The Champions’ Ballad DLC, is no longer inhibited by juddery performance, as the game struggles to load in new areas of the map quickly enough, for the faster moving vehicle. Although none of the DLC is included with the Switch 2 Edition, so you have to buy that separately.

There’re no other changes to the game than that, beyond a second save file if you want to start again from scratch, but there is the Zelda Notes mobile app, which is filled with little extras but only one of any real significance.

The most useful feature is the ability to link the app with your save and have it direct you, via a map and a GPS style voiceover, to any Koroks or shrines you missed. We 100%-ed the game the first time round, except for all the Koroks, so this is super handy for those that want to catch ’em all.

Technically, the only new content in the whole remaster is commentary from Princess Zelda, which kicks in whenever you visit certain areas. None of it is particularly interesting though, and if there’s one thing we didn’t want more of from Breath Of The Wild, it’s the Zelda actress’ awful voice-acting.

And that’s it really, apart from the ability to share items with other players, edit photos, and check your play data and that of other players around the world. Although you can also get a free random item every day and more out of using an amiibo, but as far as we’re concerned that’s cheating.

Despite the understandable concerns about the price of games on Switch 2, this new edition of Breath Of The Wild 2 is quite reasonably priced, at least in terms of the upgrade. It’s just £8 or completely free if you’re subscribed to Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack. The changes on offer are very clear and if you want to go back to the game and 100% it this is a great excuse, as the performance improvement is very noticeable, even to the non-technically minded.

And if you’ve never played the game before, and have just got a Switch 2 and want to check out the many classics released for its predecessor, then this is the perfect opportunity. The only problem is that if this was any other eight-year-old game its price would’ve shrunk considerably over the last few years, but it hasn’t – because it’s Nintendo and their prices rarely ever decrease.

That’s unfortunate but the simple reason as to why, is that people are willing to pay that much to play great games, and there are very few, if any, that are greater than Breath Of The Wild.

Formats: Nintendo Switch 2
Price: £66.99 or £7.99 upgrade pack*
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo EPD
Release Date: 5th June 2025
Age Rating: 12

*free with Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack

Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter.

To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.

For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.