Greetings once more, Nintendo Force fans! I hope the summer is finding you well, and that you've been able to beat the heat – potentially by enjoying reading an NF issue in the shade!
And if you've been reading a thicker book, perhaps you've been marking your place with one of the snazzy new Pikmin bookmarks we included alongside the print copies of our latest issue? Their flowers/buds/leaves pop up right out of the top of your book to mark your place. And when you're ready to r...
2023-07-31 19:33:14 +0000 UTC
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The Kickstarter campaign for NF's first-ever book has been a great success so far, with nearly $100,000 pledged from 2,000 different backers! Thank you to everyone one of you Patreon patrons here who jumped back over into the Kickstarter ecosystem to pledge your support and preorder your copy.
There are only 48 hours left to back the book! If haven't supported the campaign already but you're able to do so before Thursday at 5:00 p.m. Eastern, please do! You'll snag backer bonuses for yo...
2023-07-11 20:40:49 +0000 UTC
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Video games are made to make you feel victorious. They're at their best when, after playing them, a deep sense of pride wells up within you -- after you overcome an obstacle, or beat a big boss.
"Big" being the operative word there. One of the ways video games get to their goal of making you feel huge feelings is by putting you in command of characters who are seriously smaller than their opponents.
I mean, just think about a random assortment of final battles from various games y...
2023-06-26 19:16:29 +0000 UTC
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Our new Kickstarter fundraising campaign is now active! Please visit the campaign page here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nfpublishing/the-impact-of-iwata
Then watch the video, peruse the pledge tiers and pick any one of them to show your support and preorder your copy of "The Impact of Iwata," NF's first-ever book!
I've got my fingers crosse...
2023-05-30 17:00:45 +0000 UTC
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We're doing it! After more than a decade of producing fine magazines, we're finally expanding to also encompass book publishing!
NF Books will allow us to revisit topics and themes we've touched on in past NF Magazine issues, and go into much more depth and detail than the normal magazine format usually allows. To this day, our single most popular issue is still "Thank You, Mr. Iwata" from 2015, published shortly after the legendary Satoru Iwata passed away that summer. That issue celeb...
2023-05-29 16:00:17 +0000 UTC
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Everybody loves a good homonym, right?
The subtitle for the new Legend of Zelda sequel may be "Tears of the Kingdom," but I think "Tiers" will ultimately prove to be a more apt descriptor of its adventure. Because this game has taken the vast open overworld of Breath of the Wild and layered a whole 'nother explorable space on top of it: the sky!
Plenty of video games have offered expansive landscapes to roam across at this point, but I can't think of any other examples of games th...
2023-04-24 20:35:28 +0000 UTC
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Being a fan of video games used to be a numbers game.
In the late '80s and into the mid-'90s, gamers were unhealthily obsessed with "bits." If your preferred video game system had more bits than your friends' machines did, then you were the winner! You could hold your head high and strut victoriously all around the playground at recess time.
See, the NES was just an 8-bit system. But then Sega raced ahead and brought their Genesis, a 16-bit system, to the market faster than Ninten...
2023-02-20 20:20:17 +0000 UTC
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Today's the day! Exactly 10 years ago, on January 11, 2013, the first NF issue went on sale. A whole decade later, we're still going strong – and Fire Emblem is back on the cover again!
Thank you all for your support for 10 whole years. We couldn't have kept this mission going for even one year, much less a decade, without the support of our first single-issue customers, then our first subscribers, then our first Kickstarter backers and finally our patrons here on Patreon! ...
2023-01-11 18:24:24 +0000 UTC
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My, how time flies!
It seems like this journey began only yesterday, but as of the release of this issue, we've been publishing Nintendo Force Magazine for over a decade! Over 10 years in the trenches, carrying the torch that Nintendo Power dropped when they ended their run in December 2012 -- and ensuring that coverage of Nintendo games in the printed magazine medium has remained constant and continuous all that while!
I want to take the opportunity here, right up front, to thank...
2022-12-19 20:25:11 +0000 UTC
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Airfare is expensive.
Train tickets. Cruise vacations. Even just the gas to refuel your own car can bankrupt you if you drive too far! Traveling in the real world isn't financially feasible for the vast majority of people around the planet.
Luckily, there's countless ways to explore all- new worlds for the low, low price of $59.99! Video games have offered escapes to new landscapes for decades now, and in recent years the open world genre of games has prioritized players' fe...
2022-10-24 20:25:17 +0000 UTC
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OK, everyone get the voice of the Count from Sesame Street in your mind. Ready?
"One. Two. THREE!"
Yes, 3 is the number of the day, as this edition of Nintendo Force has been made to mark a truly unique moment in video game history. For the first and probably only time ever, Nintendo is publishing three "3s" back-to-back-to-back.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 on July 29. Splatoon 3 on September 9. Bayonetta 3 on October 28!
I mean, what are the odds of three separate se...
2022-08-22 19:33:16 +0000 UTC
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Well, the pandemic finally caught up to the magazine printing industry.
Though the world's been dealing with the impact of COVID-19 for over two and a half years now, NF wasn't too negatively effected for a long while. Throughout all of 2020 and 2021, we were able to keep trucking along with our regular rhythm, and the printing company that we work with to produce physical copies of each issue -- Century Publishing in Post Falls, Idaho -- was able to keep production costs for each print...
2022-07-29 19:00:35 +0000 UTC
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Greetings, NF faithful! It just occurred to me recently that we haven't offered any extra incentives for subscription referrals in a long time. So let's change that!
Starting today, if you get a friend to sign up as an NF subscriber by pledging to this Patreon page, I'll personally mail you an extra NF issue -- and I'll send one to your newly subscribed friend, too! I've got a stockpile of extra copies of several back issues, and they're better off being owned and read by you and some n...
2022-07-22 18:50:23 +0000 UTC
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Lace up your sneakers, grab your favorite baseball bat and make sure you've eaten a balanced breakfast, because it's time to head outside, hit the streets and throw down with any roaming bands of punks who get in your way! The milestone 60th issue of Nintendo Force is here, and in this edition we're celebrating the bare-knuckled beauty and brutality of beat-'em-ups!
The upcoming release of WayForward's all-new River City Girls 2 has inspired this selection of direction, as it's all abou...
2022-06-21 14:10:14 +0000 UTC
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Did you know my Dad was almost an NBA star? He just missed out because of two things: He was a foot too short and had no talent!
Yes, that's a favorite joke of my father's, but it does ring true for a lot of us -- some people are born with natural potential for athletic achievement, while most of the population will never get the chance to score a touchdown in front of a crowd of millions, or sink a winning putt to claim the coveted green jacket. But that's where video games step in! Th...
2022-04-30 01:00:25 +0000 UTC
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In a world that bombards us daily with fresh news of wars, diseases and disastrous climate change, you'd think that most people would seek a reprieve with the entertainment they consume -- you'd think they would want to take their minds off such ever-present problems. But no! More and more, the television shows, movies and video games we're offered take those same kinds of disasters and amplify them to an even greater intensity. They present worlds in which normal human life has been all but ...
2022-02-22 14:32:24 +0000 UTC
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The well-oiled machine that keeps cranking out new Nintendo games has run on a few different kinds of fuel over the decades, but as we enter the year 2022 it's safe to say that pure nostalgia is its preferred source of power! With so much Nintendo history now in the books (and the magazines) and so many happy memories living in the minds of multiple generations of players, it's totally understandable why just about every new product the company puts out does its best to tap into that apprecia...
2021-12-20 20:45:09 +0000 UTC
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Get ready, Force fans, for the finale of NF Magazine's ninth year! It's amazing that our journey has already brought us this far beyond the point when we had to say farewell to Nintendo Power. And what's even more amazing is that, this far into our run as NF, there are still some classic Nintendo franchises that have never had a chance to step into our spotlight -- since they've been inactive this entire time!
So, ladies and gentlemen, I'm proud to present an issue headlined by Advance ...
2021-10-31 01:06:29 +0000 UTC
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Samus has returned to the cover of our magazine for the first time since Samus Returns, and this time we're shining the spotlight on her time spent in the shadows!
Back when we published NF #29 in 2017, headlined by Metroid: Samus Returns for the 3DS, we brought to all of you fine readers a full History of Metroid feature to bring everyone back up to speed with the many previous adventures of Samus Aran. It's still relevant to revisit now, so I encourage you all to do so! It paints a pi...
2021-09-20 19:04:07 +0000 UTC
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Sing along with me! You know the words!
"They're the world's most fearsome fighting team! They're heroes in a half shell, and they're green! When the evil Shredder attacks . . . "
Wait. That hasn't happened for a long while. The Foot Clan fled. Krang went back to Dimension X. And Shredder himself hasn't tried to whip up a fresh batch of turtle soup in, what, nearly seven years? Not in the context of a Nintendo system video game, any way.
But you can't ke...
2021-08-16 19:16:44 +0000 UTC
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Falling from the sky to crash into your mailbox, email inbox or both, it's the latest issue of Nintendo Force! Will it land with grace, or smack into the ground with a thud? That probably depends on your personal opinion of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword!
Yes, this July/August 2021 edition of NF is headlined by the Zelda game that first launched in November 2011, because once again Nintendo has reached back into Link's past to produce an HD port of an aging adventure. Unlike The Win...
2021-06-21 19:11:35 +0000 UTC
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It's here! It's real! After waiting for over two decades for it to finally appear, an honest-to-goodness actual sequel to the N64 fan favorite Pokémon Snap has arrived at long last. And we're in the mood to mark the moment!
One of the driving forces behind Nintendo Force, you've surely noticed, is contextualizing new releases by painting a picture of the past that led up to their launch -- timelines, chronologies, history features. It's kind of our thing. But New Pokémon Snap has no d...
2021-04-19 17:40:27 +0000 UTC
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Get ready, everyone, for a very special issue of Nintendo Force! Are you surprised it even exists? If so, I wouldn't blame you. Theming an entire issue around the career of a developer who doesn't even work at Nintendo may seem like a diabolical curveball, but it actually falls right in line with the spirit of NF. Like Goichi Suda (a.k.a. Suda51), our little publication is a scrappy underdog that, through a bold combination of heart and hardheadedness, "forced" itself into existence, despite ...
2021-02-22 22:10:26 +0000 UTC
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The massively popular "social deduction" game Among Us came to the Switch a few weeks ago, and we're working on a review for our next issue – but we need your help! Can you jump in for a few rounds of Impostor hunting alongside members of the Nintendo Force writing staff so that we can have full games with 10 total participants?
It's happening tomorrow: Friday, January 15 at 9 PM EST/6 PM PST. Four members of the Nintendo Force will be present, so we're looking for at least six of our...
2021-01-14 18:26:31 +0000 UTC
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Mario didn't start out Super.
He was just a carpenter. Later, a plumber. Really just a regular tradesman who just so happened to once rescue his girlfriend from an ape who climbed a construction site -- that was heroic, sure, but nothing that the word "Super" would reasonably describe.
It wasn't until Mario was opposed by a truly sinister villain (not just a goofy gorilla) that he was able to rise above the constraints of his normal self and achieve Super status. Mario would...
2020-12-21 19:30:32 +0000 UTC
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With nearly 50 different issues under our belts, we've had a few oddball theme names here and there -- but I think "Peanut Butter & Chocolate" just might be our weirdest.
Then again, maybe not? Maybe you guessed at our intention from the start with the tasty memories that combination of confections calls to mind. The smooth (or crunchy!) nutty bliss of peanut butter . . . sometimes I'll just eat it by the spoonful. The rich decadence of chocolate -- any dessert that includes it beco...
2020-10-20 17:38:14 +0000 UTC
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An anniversary is upon us!
. . . Well, OK, when it comes to Mario, some kind of anniversary is always upon us. His career has been so long and so varied at this point that you could find a new major milestone to celebrate for one or more of his classic adventures any time you wanted to, really, in any given year. But this year is a big one! This year is when Super Mario Bros., the original masterpiece that first spun "Super" Mario and his brother Luigi off into their own epic adventures...
2020-08-18 19:22:29 +0000 UTC
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CRUMPLE, CRUMPLE!
Get it? It's like "Grumble, grumble." The old Legend of Zelda line from the hungry Goriya. He complained until he got what he wanted, just as Paper Mario fans have been grumbling for years, waiting for Nintendo to give them a new sequel that's more like the original game in the series and its beloved follow-up, The Thousand-Year Door. But rather than satisfy that hunger, the designers at Intelligent Systems seem to have been satisfying their own creative needs for 16 y...
2020-06-22 18:06:28 +0000 UTC
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Hey hey, Force fans! We're about 10 days away from our next issue being finished, but we've got three orders of business to address before that.
===== PLAYER'S POLL =====
When we finished NF #46, we thought #47 would probably focus on the 35th anniversary of Super Mario Bros. Instead, Nintendo surprised us with a new Paper Mario announcement! That means we need some different Player's Poll questions, and different responses from you! If you resp...
2020-06-11 14:06:00 +0000 UTC
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Swordplay is simple.
Not in the real world, of course! Goodness knows if I ever found myself in the middle of an actual duel, I'd then soon find myself skewered shortly thereafter. But in the world of video games, nothing's more natural than hacking and slashing.
It's one of the easiest interactions to understand. You, a good guy, have a pointy blade. You press a button and it makes bad guys go away. Rinse and repeat. Instantly satisfying gameplay!
Swords have been the most ...
2020-04-20 17:05:13 +0000 UTC
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