I have rebuilt a flat track as real geometry before, so the ten Super Mario Kart courses Nintendo dropped into Mario Kart World this afternoon are the thing I keep coming back to: months of environment work, shipped inside a free update, announced in about nine seconds.
The Direct ran at four in the afternoon Italian time, forty-five minutes, and it stayed inside the brief — Switch 2, winter. I wrote the preview this morning and the shape of it held. Two new games bookended the show. Everything between them was a port, a remaster or an update.
Ten courses, rebuilt out of bitmaps
Super Mario Kart in 1992 was Mode 7. The track was a single scrolling, scaling image under the camera — a picture of a road. There is no elevation in that data. No walls, no props, no horizon, no far side. What you remember as Choco Island is a top-down bitmap and a tile grid saying where the solid parts are.
So bringing Choco Island, Vanilla Lake and Ghost Valley into Mario Kart World means authoring everything vertical from scratch. Every kerb, every material, the whole silhouette against the sky. And because Mario Kart World is one continuous landmass instead of a menu of separate circuits, each of these has to sit inside terrain that already lights, streams and drains in a particular way — a far tighter constraint than dropping a standalone track into an empty box.
Ghost Valley is the one I’d want to see the whiteboard for. In 1992 the hazard was the missing railing: you drove off the edge into nothing, because there was no world underneath to fall into. Give that course an open world and the edge has to lead somewhere now. Someone sat down and decided what is under Ghost Valley.
Nintendo kept the question-mark panels, which is the correct call and the cheap part. The courses are the expensive part. They went out today with no ceremony at all, in a patch most people will file under nostalgia.
Metroid Ravenous, and a studio Nintendo left unnamed
The next 2D Metroid has a date: 28 January 2027, Switch 2, pre-orders opening today. Two amiibo come with it, Samus and a Chozo Statue, and a special edition carries a SteelBook plus a third amiibo of Samus in the Metroid Suit.
The trailer strands her injured on a hostile moon after an attack she didn’t see coming, and closes with her devouring one of the things living there. She talks, which she hasn’t done since Other M. Eat or be eaten.
Every outlet I’ve read today assumes MercurySteam, who made Dread. That is a sensible guess and it remains a guess. Nintendo put no studio on screen, and I am not going to hand credit for a year of somebody’s life to a team that hasn’t been named for it yet. Ask me when the product page goes up.
Xenoblade at 4K and sixty
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition arrives 3 December with 4K, framerates up to 60, a new hero called Shimmer carrying an ability called Foresight, and a horde mode called Heroes’ Vault.
The resolution line is where the work is. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 shipped in 2022 on hardware that fell well below 720p out in the open fields, and Monolith Soft built those fields around distance — enormous draw, aggressive level-of-detail swaps, and fog doing a great deal of quiet lying about what is actually out there. All of that got tuned against a pixel budget. Change the budget and every one of those numbers is now wrong.
At 4K you are asking textures authored to be read at a fraction of the size to hold up at several times the pixels. LOD swaps that used to happen safely inside the fuzz now happen in front of you. The fog line that hid the far field becomes a visible seam. Sixty frames then halves the time you have to draw any of it.
That is weeks of re-tuning across an entire open world — draw distances, fog curves, texture budgets, shadow cascades — and it is completely invisible when it’s done right. I have enormous time for that job. It is also the one nobody writes up, because the whole measure of success is that you cannot tell anyone was there.
Everything else, with dates
Nintendo’s own:
- Kirby and the World Beyond — Switch 2, spring 2027. A free-roaming 3D Kirby in the shape of Forgotten Land, landing in the series’ 35th anniversary year. It closed the show.
- Pikmin 4 – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Dandori Academy — 12 November. Voice commands to Oatchi through the system mic, and Dandori Academy, a time-trial mode with weekend exams, online leaderboards and 72 stages rolling out over time.
- Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity – Definitive Edition — Switch 2, 25 February 2027.
- Star Fox — free update on 29 September. Battle Mode goes to four players split-screen on a single console, with three new stages and online teams.
- Star Fox Adventures — added to GameCube Classics on Switch Online + Expansion Pack today, taking that library to eleven.
- Pokémon Pokopia — the second half of the Expansion Pass, later this year. The trailer showed Skitty, Doduo and Braixen, which brings their evolution lines with them. Costumes and accessories, no new areas.
- Mario Kart World — the ten Super Mario Kart courses above, free, today, plus two new Knockout routes in Propeller Rally and Turnip Rally.
Everyone else:
- Monster Hunter Wilds — Switch 2, 4 December, with local co-op. The Ascendance expansion follows on that version.
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered — Switch 2, 29 September, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine included. Free if you already own The Witcher 3 on Switch.
- Onyx: The Dark Grip — Bloober Team, Switch 2 exclusive, 2027. It’s 2.5D, built on touch and motion, and it does not run docked at all. You play a man called Holden who reads your inputs as supernatural interference and comes apart accordingly. One screen, one input model, one performance target: I’d rather a studio that size commit to a single target properly than ship two half-served ones.
- Final Fantasy VII Revelation — Switch 2, April 2027, closing the Remake trilogy. Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion is on Switch 2 today.
- Persona 6 — announced for Switch 2, no date. Persona 4 Revival reaches Switch 2 on 20 May, behind an 18 February release on PS5, Xbox and PC.
- Romancing SaGa 3, remade with full voice acting — 16 February 2027, on Switch 2 and other consoles.
- Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 3 and Resident Evil 4 Gold Edition — 16 October.
- Meccha Chameleon — Switch 2 today. Twenty million copies on Steam in a couple of months, and now its console debut.
- Disney Dreamlight Valley: The Keepsake Sea — Switch and Switch 2, November. You go under the water as Merfolk, with Milo Thatch, Jack Sparrow and Megara along for it.
- Stage Fright — Switch and Switch 2, 2027. Two-player co-op from the Overcooked! team.
- Hot Wheels Infinite Rush on 10 September, Fading Echo on 17 September.
What the winter actually is
Nintendo’s next four months are conversion work. Xenoblade re-tuned, Pikmin re-targeted, the Witcher rebuilt, Monster Hunter squeezed onto a smaller machine, ten SNES bitmaps turned into places you can drive through. The two genuinely new games are sitting in 2027, on the far side of GTA 6, which is where every other publisher put theirs a year ago.
From here, watching an industry that runs on money from Kyoto and Los Angeles, what stands out is how much of this winter is somebody’s careful second pass over work that already shipped once. That is the least celebrated labour we have. It is also most of what you will be playing in December, and Nintendo read the whole of it out as a list of dates. Thirty seconds on who did it would cost them nothing.