Gotta please ’em all: Nintendo and DLC
Chris Sutcliffe 6th February 2020I was away travelling for six weeks from August to October. While I (mostly) had an incredible time, there was a large part of me that regretted not having brought my Nintendo Switch, if only to potentially score some points with Nintendo UK’s PR team by tweeting a picture of me playing it at Thorong-La Pass.

Three amiibos
Since I returned I’ve been playing catch-up with some games that came out while I was gone. The PlatinumGames-developed Astral Chain, for instance, is a hybrid action/police procedural with a complicated action system that doesn’t quite live up to its former titles. Meanwhile, Nintendo’s own remake of Game Boy classic Link’s Awakening has been a little joy, if a little disappointing in how little it actually adds to the title beyond new visuals and physics. Daemon X Machina is a fun action game that feels tailored to those of us missing the Armoured Core franchise.
I’ve also been playing the post-launch downloadable content (DLC) characters for its flagship fighting game Super Smash Brothers Ultimate, which recently took the title of best-selling fighting game of all time. Despite that success, and the undoubted financial contribution that DLC has made to Nintendo’s bottom line, the adage that ‘you can’t please everyone’ has proven true, as each newly announced character has polarised the fanbase in one way or another.
Its most recently released fighter – Terry, a guest character on loan from SNK’s Fatal Fury and King of Fighters franchises – was subject to criticism from a proportion of the fanbase who were a) unhappy that he was