Sony and Microsoft don’t sweat Nintendo. At least, that’s the corporate line — they still might be coming for Nintendo’s ass.
Sony has shrugged off the notion that the PlayStation brand, with high-end graphics and adult-friendly play, could be considered in the same market as Nintendo’s Switch. Meanwhile, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer openly dreamt of porting games to Switch and intends to support the Switch 2 through his expansive (while consolidated) hopes for Xbox. Nintendo pioneer Shigeru Miyamoto is happy to “not get involved in what is sometimes called the ‘game war.’“ Companies to gamers: ✌️❤️
But for all the tunnel vision, everyone looks ready to rumble. The Switch 2’s specs inch Nintendo closer to offering the current-gen experience of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X in handheld form. PlayStation has responded with murmurs of its own handheld plans, while Xbox hopes to turn every device into an Xbox. But the counter to Nintendo isn’t all a hardware game. At this year’s Summer Game Fest, a slew of games played like legit competition to the first-party games that have remained under Nintendo’s lock and key.
No, you won’t play the next 3D Mario game on a PlayStation without hacking your console… but you may come close?
There has been no shortage of Nintendo clones over the last 40 years, but rarely does, say, a DreamWorks All-Star Kart Racing hit like the real Nintendo first-party equivalent. Case in point: Astro Bot, such a revelation in terms of letting a platformer team cook with the time and standards of a Nintendo game that it easily swept up Game of the Year awards throughout 2024. At this year’s Game Developers Conference, Team Asobi studio head Nicolas Doucet attributed the success to a small team (60 people), compact gameplay (around 12 hours) and constant review process that meant Asobi was never “compromising the players’ happiness.”
Nintendo’s Shinya Takahashi has agonized in public over a dream to condense the development cycle of the company’s games, but doesn’t waver on a need for quality. It is the same Takahashi who, after all, scrapped all of Metroid Prime 4 in 2019 in favor of rebooting it (with shipping planned for fall 2025). Maybe a little competition in the software department between the home of Zelda and the other titan video game publishers would be a good thing.
Takashi Iizuka, the head of Sega’s Sonic Team, is reaching for that level of precision with Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds. After just an hour of racing — and during the launch week of Mario Kart World nonetheless! — CrossWorlds played like a true high-speed alternative to the Nintendo franchise. The races moved at a clip, the PS5-level graphics were crisp and kinetic, and while the course designers throw racers a curveball with the addition of ring portals that transport you to a new track mid-race, the cups I was able to play were traditional lap-style experiences (which may speak to a select perturbed Mario Kart racer right now).
CrossWorlds, which is out Sept. 25 across all consoles, can’t match the sheer number of available racers packed into Mario Kart World — and announced additions like Hatsune Miku, Minecraft, and SpongeBob feel more like cheap Fortnite season skins than an expansion of the Sega pantheon — but as a racing game, it’s as good as what Nintendo can do with a modern racer, minus the need to own a Switch 2. And as Iizuka has boasted, it actually has cross-play.
A single game summoning the non-Nintendo Nintendo spirit of Astro Bot wouldn’t be a trend, but then I played Lego Party. Developer SMG Studios is really not hiding anything with the title: The multiplayer game, due out later this year across all consoles, is just Mario Party with Legos. Maybe that’s creatively bankrupt, but it’s also a hoot.
Staged on a Lego-constructed game board— which the team at SMG Studios says was fully “constructed” using scanned bricks — players take turns spinning for spaces, navigating multiple paths, springing booby traps, matching reflexes in an array of minigames, and trading smack-talk (this is not built into the game, but inevitable as competitors swing in and out of first place). SMG puts the full Lego twist on every aspect of the game, including decisions on which parts of the board to even construct mid-play. Some minigames rely heavily on builds, while others rely solely on Lego Movie energy to create humorous frenzy. I laughed out loud several times in my 30-minute, six-turn run, running in both directions around a pirate-themed board — opposed to screaming in agony like I do during any Mario Party bonus star round.
This month’s Donkey Kong Bananza is likely to remind players why Nintendo, Astro Bot be damned, is in its own AAA platformer/adventure lane — the Super Mario Odyssey team goes big. But for all the promised scope, I couldn’t help but think the sicko energy of Super Meat Boy 3D, which premiered first-look footage on June’s Xbox Showcase stream, might be what retro-platformer heads (who complained about Astro Boy’s easy challenges) are actually craving.
Team Meat’s 2026 release promises to bring the velocity and difficulty of the original 2010 Super Meat Boy to an isometric 3D world. The stages gush with color — and an excessive number of razor-edged traps should add an extra coat of Meat Boy-red to the backgrounds. Simple, and if the physics have been meticulously perfected, effective platforming entertainment.
New first-party releases have always been half of the pleasure of owning a Switch, with the deep well of NES, SNES, Game Boy Advance, and N64 releases turning the console into the ultimate easy-emulation machine. With the addition of GameCube games to Switch 2, I have already found myself drifting from Mario Kart World to the pleasures of Nintendo history. I didn’t need upgraded hardware to play The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, Soulcalibur 2, and Donkey Kong Country, but Switch 2 does make classics look and play better than ever.
But even Nintendo’s exclusive archives face competition from indie studios that are pushing retro history with modern sensibilities. This July’s Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is an immaculate recreation of the franchise’s side-scroller NES trilogy with variable difficulties and loads of action. Like Streets of Rage 4 and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge before it, Tribute Games’ upcoming beat-’em-up Marvel Cosmic Invasion feels recovered from the mid-1990s, but takes full advantage of movesets that make each playable hero unique and tag-team combo systems that feel more like Marvel vs. Capcom than a brawler.
Moonlighter 2, which pivots from the first game’s 2D look to 3D, served Zelda-but-make-it-roguelike on the SGF floor, with some unique shopkeeper mechanics that made it more than a Hades riff. Meanwhile, Mina the Hollower, from Shovel Knight developer Yacht Club Games, played like an actual 2D Zelda game I somehow never got around to (and with one phenomenal twist: You can burrow underground to assist in combat and puzzles).
I know we’re not supposed to compare Digimon and Pokémon, but when the upcoming Time Stranger has RPG fans who never gave the virtual pets the time of day shaking with excitement, while Pokémon devotees are simply praying this fall’s PokémonLegends: Z-A runs smoother than Scarlet and Violet, I can only wonder if Nintendo is feeling the heat. Or if Sony, Microsoft, and the major publishers think they can finally take on the monolithic family-friendly brand. They should. With all due respect to Miyamoto, the “game war” raises the bar for everyone. Imagine what a Nintendo that faced true competition would come up with next.
