Shaun Musgrave

While the Castlevania series hasn’t been completely absent from gaming since 2014’s Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2, it certainly felt as though it was. Some excellent collections, collaborations, a now-defunct mobile gacha game, and a remake of the much-maligned 1980s arcade game helped keep the fires burning, but we’ve been waiting a very long time for a new adventure with Drac and the Belmonts. Coinciding with the 40th anniversary of Castlevania, Konami tapped developer Evil Empire to deliver Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse.

One way or another, Falcom has slowly been getting the entire Trails series released for the Nintendo Switch ecosystem. This time around, we get another gap from the past filled with a remake of The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter

I swear, Shinobi seems to have the worst luck sometimes. In spite of its age, it’s not a series with absolute oodles of entries. Even counting spin-offs, there have only been 15 distinct Shinobi games since the original 1987 arcade release. Impressively, all but a couple of them are very good games. Nevertheless, something always seems to keep Shinobi from finding the success it deserves. Sometimes it’s a matter of hitting a console before it finds its footing. In the case of

Square Enix has never been shy about reissuing the Final Fantasy games in various forms. Pop into the digital shop on your platform of choice and you can find remastered or remade versions of many of the mainline entries along with a generous helping of spin-offs, too. We’re at the point where some of these games are remasters of remakes, even. You know what you won’t find a remaster of, though? Final Fantasy XIII. Not the original game, and certainly not its two follow-ups. It’s well past time for Lightning to return.

For many people, the Pixar story begins with Toy Story. When it hit theaters all the way back in 1995, it was the first fully computer-animated feature-length film. An impressive technical achievement, to be sure, but if a technical achievement was all it was then, it wouldn’t be much more than fodder for pub trivia nights. The then-novel look of the film may have been what initially brought people to the show, but what made the movie a near-instant classic was its heart. The story of how Andy’s toys reacted to a new member in their proverbial flock was a surprisingly human tale given its stars. That’s something that the Toy Story series has carried through in each of its installments, all the way up to the latest.

It’s weird how the nature of licensed video games has changed over the years. In the early years of gaming, true licensed games were rare. Some of the first were movie-based games like Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark, but that soon gave way to more generalized licenses. Things really shifted when Ocean took a chance on grabbing the license for a movie called Robocop, a move that earned some serious cash and put that publisher on an eventually self-destructive course. Soon every movie that could remotely support a game had one, something that carried on for around two decades. Then in the 2010s, that changed. It’s rather uncommon for a movie to get a video game based on it nowadays, especially on consoles.

Some genres are better-served than others on the Nintendo Switch 2. Even adding the Nintendo Switch catalog in, we could use a lot more high-quality examples of certain kinds of games. I’d argue that semi-realistic racing games are one such hole in the library. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit and GRID Autosport are great, and at a stretch you can throw Burnout Paradise Remastered in there, but it’s really a short list. Well, Ubisoft just drove up in a Lamborghini and dropped off a Switch 2 port of The Crew Motorfest. Dare we dream?

Nihon Falcom’s Trails series is a long, winding, and currently unfinished story. It kicked off all the way back in 2004 with the original Japanese release of Trails in the Sky FC and currently spans over a dozen full-sized RPGs. Newcomers who ask where they should or could start with the series are often told to go all the way back to that first Trails in the Sky game in some form or another, and that may well be the real answer if you plan to stick around for the long haul. That is admittedly one serious commitment, though. What if you just want to dip in for a relatively shorter and mostly self-contained arc? Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure might just be for you.

In something of a Halloween miracle, we are now able to play at least one native version of every mainline Resident Evil game on the Nintendo Switch 2. Capcom has released Switch 2 versions of the remakes of Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 3, and Resident Evil 4 all at once, giving Switch 2 owners ostensibly a much better option for playing these than the existing cloud versions that were released on the original Switch. All of these games have been available on other platforms for a while, so even keeping it specific to the remade versions, they’re not exactly unknown quantities. Still, it’s worth having a look at how this particular version turned out for Switch 2 owners thinking of spending the spooky season in Raccoon City.