Museum features consoles from 1983’s Famicom to 2017’s Switch, as well as honouring Nintendo’s pre-video-game era Traditionally, visitors to Kyoto in October come for momijigari, the turning of the autumn leaves in the city’s picturesque parks. This autumn, however, there is a new draw: a Nintendo museum. The new attraction, which opens on Wednesday, is best described as a chapel of video game nostalgia. Upstairs, Nintendo’s many video game consoles, from 1983’s Famicom through 1996’s Nintendo 64 to 2017’s Switch, are displayed reverently alongside their most famous games. On the back wall, visitors can also peer at toys, playing cards and other artefacts from the Japanese company’s pre-video-game history, stretching back to its founding as a hanafuda playing card manufacturer in 1889. Downstairs, there are interactive exhibits with comically gigantic controllers and floor-projected playing cards. Continue reading...

An 80s vision of NFL that you can take on bathroom breaks with your phone – that’s what I call building back better What a year 1983 was, eh? The release of the Nintendo Entertainment System heralded the Third Generation of Gaming – arguably the zenith of game design - and we had the first Super Bowl broadcast on Channel 4. Both rocked my world as a teenager. Nintendo had Super Mario. Channel 4 had Super Gario AKA Gary Imlach who is one of the greatest sports broadcasters ever. They also had Mick Luckhurst. Who isn’t. Now that is what I call variety! Both worlds are gloriously represented in my latest gaming addiction NFL Retro Bowl ’25. Continue reading...

Nintendo Switch; Grezzo/Nintendo It’s great to finally get to play as Zelda, but working out how to take an active without being able to fight is rather hard work Unlike Princess Peach, waiting in a castle to be rescued from Bowser, Zelda has never been a damsel. She has always commanded magical power, even in the early days of the series, when she would enlist green-clad swordsman Link to save the kingdom. For the last couple of decades, since 2003’s Wind Waker, Zelda and Link have been something of a team; they are friends, companions, a powerful regent and her loyal knight. But still we, the players, have always taken Link’s role in the story. Echoes of Wisdom is Zelda’s first star turn in the series that bears her name. Sinister rifts have appeared across the kingdom of Hyrule, sucking its citizens inside, where whole slices of the landscape are stuck in suspended animation. Zelda can traverse these rifts, and close them – after conquering the dungeon inside. The main difference between Link and Zelda is that Zelda can’t fight. Instead, with a magical staff, she can summon material “echoes” of real objects from thin air – which could be anything from a cut of meat to distract monsters, to crates and tables to construct towers and staircases. When you come across the usual Zelda selection of deceptively mild-looking monsters, you can simply conjure a spear-wielding Moblin or a few bats into existence to dispatch them for you. Or, failing that, you can manifest a pot and throw it at whatever’s menacing you. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is out September 26; £49.99 Continue reading...

From playing Super Mario on a giant control to spotting Pikmin hiding in corners, my visit to this delightful museum in Kyoto offered up experience over education • Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Nintendo was founded in 1889 in Kyoto, 100 years before the release of the Game Boy. Long before it was a video game company, it made toys and hanafuda cards adorned with scenes from nature, used to play several different games popular in Japan. By 1969, Nintendo had expanded its business to include western-style playing cards, and the company built a plant to manufacture them in southern Kyoto. Until 2016, the Uji Ogura Plant was a card factory and as a repairs centre for the company’s consoles. It has been turned into a Nintendo Museum, opening on 2 October, where the gaming giant’s entire history will be on display. Nintendo flew me to Kyoto to see the museum. Along with the Super Nintendo World theme park, at Universal Studios in Osaka, it will be a major draw for video game tourists in Japan. It’s laid out across two floors: upstairs, there is a gallery of Nintendo products, from playing cards through to the Nintendo Switch. Downstairs are the interactive exhibits, where you can play snatches of Nintendo games on comically gigantic controllers that require two people to operate and immerse yourself for a not-entirely-generous seven minutes in a NES, SNES or N64 game in the retro area. Or you can step into a re-creation of a 1960s Japanese home and whack ping-pong balls with a bat (the Ultra Machine batting toy was developed by Gunpei Yokoi, the inventor of the Game Boy, and released in 1967). Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: This autumn may not deliver its usual raft of franchise mega-titles, so use this time to embrace the weird, wonderful and original instead • Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Earlier this week, the culture desk asked me to recommend four games for our annual autumn arts preview. Reader: I struggled. The period between September and November is usually stacked with AAA releases as publishers jostle for space in the historically lucrative run-up to Christmas. Even in this era of “live service” games such as Fortnite, Destiny and Genshin Impact (which ignore external sales patterns in favour of their own ever-updating season passes) you’re usually guaranteed an autumnal belch of major gaming releases. But this year … not so much. September is mostly about The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (below). October is the Silent Hill 2 reboot, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and at a stretch Sonic X Shadow Generations. We have to wait until November for a truly busy blockbuster lineup with Slitterhead, Football Manager 2025, Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl all lining up for our wintery delectation. The long anticipated role-playing game Avowed has been delayed until 2025, while Indiana Jones and the Great Circle still hasn’t been given a release date beyond “2024”, which doesn’t seem promising. Continue reading...

Our video games writers get their children to play the games they loved as kids – and get to grips with the ones they adore now. Will they be bored, baffled – or hooked? Keza MacDonald plays Pokémon Shield Continue reading...

The makers of Italian action game have endured the longest development journey in history. Their game is now finally out – on the long-discontinued Game Boy Advance In 2002, a group of five Italians made the local news: they were going to be the first company in the country to develop a game for Nintendo’s popular portable, the Game Boy Advance. The cadre pulled together a few hundred euros and some computers to prepare for the project. They had no experience making games. They didn’t even have a programmer. All they had was a love for video games, a shared hatred of working for bosses and endless optimism. For the next two years, the group worked away. Late nights were common and the team barely took any time off. It was a grueling time, but they were determined to make an ambitious game with complex features. Its name was Kien. If you haven’t heard of it, that’s because it never came out – until now. The action platformer didn’t see the light of day until this year, by which time most of the original team had long since moved on. Only one member of the group of five remained: game designer, Fabio Belsanti, who never lost belief in the project. Continue reading...

Nintendo Switch; Nintendo As ever, Mario’s brother is a scream, but this remaster is haunted by the spectre of its much better sequel – and the price might spook you My favourite thing about the Luigi’s Mansion games is the detail. The way Mario’s cowardly brother nervously hums along to the music as he bumbles through spooky stately homes. The slapstick animations when he falls through a fireplace or gets catapulted into a secret room by a fold-down bed. The cackles and goofy expressions of the ghosts as they get up to their hijinks. As you use Luigi’s trusty ghost-capturing vacuum cleaner to pull back rugs and expose secret trapdoors (or secret spiders), and suck up the banknotes and golden coins that are hidden everywhere, you can’t help but notice how each little sound, scene and secret has been carefully arranged to give you a small dose of delight. This ghost-busting puzzle game was such a delightful surprise sequel in 2013, when it was released for the Nintendo 3DS. Its diorama-like mini-mansions and peepholes gave Nintendo’s artists ample opportunity to show off that console’s stereoscopic 3D effects, activated with a little slider at the side of the screen. But now it’s out on the Switch, 11 years later, and two things have changed. Firstly, the 3D effect that it was designed around is no longer a thing. And secondly, Luigi’s Mansion 3 now exists, and it’s significantly better. Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD is available now for £49.99 Continue reading...