And a few non-Nintendo ones for good measure.
Over the holiday season, we’re republishing select articles from Nintendo Life writers and contributors as part of our Best of 2023 series. Enjoy!
Have you ever been listening to music, enjoying yourself, and then BAM, suddenly you hear the first four notes of a song from a video game — and then you have that song stuck in your head for the rest of the day?
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You mean you forgot cranberries, too?
It’s here! Season’s Greetings to you and yours! The mood is right, the spirit’s up, and with any luck you’re taking it nice and easy today and, perhaps, settling down to devour not just some delicious festive treats but also some of the many excellent video games 2023 has gifted us.
We’ve briefly surveyed the past 365 days of gaming elsewhere, so we won’t recap all of TOTK’23 here. Suffice it to say, it’s been a year of highs and lows — and one of rare quality and abundance in the software department! While Switch approaches the start of its eighth year next March and the hardcore among us eagerly await Nintendo’s next move, we’ve all been enjoying our gaming this year, as a great and ample man once commanded. Jolly good.
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Online play officially ends “early April 2024”.
Earlier this year, Nintendo announced it would be ending “online play and other functionality” that uses online communication for both 3DS and Wii U as of “early April” 2024.
Now, in an update, it’s been discovered that new users can no longer go online in any games on 3DS or Wii U. This information comes from a lengthy blog post on Pretendo, which mentions how this change took place “some time in late December 2023”.
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The Sounds of the Switch.
2023 hasn’t just been a banger year for quality video game releases — it’s also been a bloomin’ good year for video game music.
We’re living in a time where video game music is becoming more recognised and celebrated worldwide — earlier this year, the Grammy’s gave out its first-ever award for ‘Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media‘ (which went to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarok). And in 2022, Kirby won a Grammy (sort of).
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Metroid Prime gets an honourable mention.
Nintendo has got a lot of mileage out of the Switch and graphically speaking it has also pushed the hybrid system to its absolute limits.
It’s not gone unnoticed this year, either. The tech experts at Digital Foundry have featured Super Mario Bros. Wonder in their “best game graphics of 2023” round up, noting how well the presentation of the game matches the hardware specs.
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Congratulations, Nintendo.
Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has won all sorts of awards since its arrival earlier this year, and now to top it off it’s taken out EDGE’s ‘Game of the Year’ award.
The outlet placed it ahead of games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Super Mario Bros. Wonder. Along with this, Tears of the Kingdom also took out best Nintendo game, and Nintendo won the best publisher award as well. Here is Edge’s GOTY top 10:
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Metagross joins the battle.
The Pokémon Company’s free-to-play mobile and Switch MOBA Pokémon Unite has had another strong year of updates, and to go out with a bang it’s adding not one but two new playable Pokémon this month.
Following Meowscarada’s arrival earlier on 7th December, Metagross will also be arriving next week on 26th December. In addition to this, Pokémon Unite is currently offering a surprise gift, which gives players a free Unite License covering a selection of 20 Pokémon.
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The finest Switch games of 2023, as ranked by you.
Looking back over the last 12 months, it’s been an incredibly fruitful year for gamers, and Switch has enjoyed an excellent seventh year on store shelves.
Industry-wide layoffs in the latter half of the year made for a sobering counterpoint to the glut of great games, and at times the pandemic-related backlog of projects which flushed through in 2023 made it difficult to keep tabs on everything we would have liked to, but it’s been a good year for anyone just playing video games.
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The Year of Mario?
Soapbox features enable our individual writers and contributors to voice their opinions on hot topics and random stuff they’ve been chewing over. Today, Richard looks back on a year when Nintendo let Mario get a little loose…
If 2013 was the Year of Luigi, 2023 may as well have been the Year of Mario. Though only three new games in the Mario franchise were released in ‘23—with one being a remake—the mustachioed plumber himself was everywhere.
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Let’s-a snow, let’s-a snow, let’s-a snow.
With just two sleeps to go before the big day, we are unwrapping a present early here at Nintendo Life. It’s a festive edition of What Are You Playing! Something about ‘What Are You Sleighing‘ sounded a little too sinister…
Before we sledge into our gaming plans over the holiday period, however, let’s take a look at some of the week’s holiday highlights. We chatted to Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown‘s director about the game’s anime inspirations and uncovered the secret purpose of Hyrule’s Shrines in Tears of the Kingdom. We also kicked off the GOTY discussion with our picks and highlighted some of the very best games that you can pick up in the Switch eShop Festive Offers sale.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
