Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

@Octane I thought Horizon had a price cut.

I must not be very perceptive to HD Rumble. Two games have been mentioned here: Shantae and Mario Kart 8; I own both and don't really notice a difference. It sure does feel different than other console's rumbles, but I'm not experiencing a wide palette of vibrations, just the same hard buzz.

@Nicolai Blaster Master Zero has waves that go across the screen. The vibrations intensify and move through the controller accordingly.

I just want to make sure I haven't missed something. Has there ever been a confirmation whether or not the Splatoon 2 Switch bundle is coming to America, or are we just pretty sure it is not coming out here? I'm waiting for a bundle like that to take the plunge, so I was hoping it would be announced in the Direct.

@Nicolai I think that's the whole point with Kart 8 Deluxe. Too me it felt more natural then on Wii U and it just became second nature. It felt so smooth off of a boost.

The days until Splatoon 2 is killing me. Can't wait to get my hands on those new Chargers.

I'd much rather the original too.I couldn't get into X at all and was left feeling disappointed with it if I'm being honest.The original gripped me big time,I couldn't put it down,although it was always at the back of my mind when playing, "Imagine how good this would look in HD".That's the problem,it isn't and would need a lot of work while X would be a quick and easy port.

Yeah, the amount of work to do a good HD version of Xenoblade makes far less sense as it would take more work and money for...more than likely no major difference in sales.

And tbh, if the next game they're planning IS a sequel to X, they obviously should port it instead.

I'd love a port of X. It's a gigantic game that would really benefit from being portable - I could complete some missions, or simply explore Mira without being tethered to my TV, and in HD.
It was a great game, it deserves a second chance away from the Wii U.

Let's hope that XBC2 lives up enough to get a port for the Switch U.

What they're essentially able to do is play back sound through the rumble. For a game like Mario Kart obviously they want the rumble to be like road noise for the most part. Which frankly isn't much different from what you'd get from standard rumble. But the coins? They are a bit different.

It's hard to kinda describe really. I kinda feel like ordinary rumble feels like holding an off-balance motor because that's what it is. With the Switch it sometimes feels the same. But sometimes feels like you're holding a box with bit of wood wound up in a rubber band

Yeah. I've been thinking about how to fix the RNG items, and the only good solution I've thought of is to improve item trading and information on how to find who has what item (and a better indication of where characters are would be highly appreciated in general)

On Gamespot they've ranked every console since the Dreamcast on gigaFLOPS/teraFLOPS.They say while it can provide a good indication of a consoles performance,it isn't perfect as some other factors have to be taken into account.Anyway,the Switch is ranked 6th behind the One/One S/PS4/PS4 Pro and One X,in that order.No surprises there but what I didn't know was when it comes to FLOPS the Switch is actually closer to the One (310 gigaFLOPS difference) than the One is to the PS4 (533 gigaFLOPS difference).As for the One X,that's way out on its own being nearly 2 Switch's of FLOPS more flopperful than than the PS4 Pro.

Well FLOP me sideways... and yet the Wii U, which is presumably in seventh place, is still the mother to the two best games of the last 3 years.

It just goes to show that many of these devs that say the Switch isn't powerful enough are talking out their FLOPShole.If they can get their games looking nearly as good on the One as they do on PS4 with a big difference in FLOPS then they can surely get them running and looking nearly as good on Switch,albeit with some sacrifices here or there.

It should be noted that this isn't how you should be measuring the gap in performance. What you want is a relative rather than a absolute difference in FLOPS. I mean the comparison is pretty meaningless because there's more to game performance than raw FLOPS but if you were to do it based on Gamespot's numbers.....

Wii U = ~1.5x more FLOPS than 360
Switch = ~3x more FLOPS than Wii U
XBOne = ~1.5x more FLOPS than Switch
PS4 = ~1.5x more FLOPS than XBOne

Though I'm not entirely convinced that the Switch is as powerful as the Gamespot article claims.

@skywake I think Mario Odyssey is proof that the Switch isn't close to the Xbox One. That's meant to be a game that according to Digital Foundry say, is pushing the system to it's limits (though again early games never look/run as well as they do later in a system's life so I take what they say with a pinch of salt) Although the game is really good looking and quite an accomplishment for a portable, I think it also shows the amount of downgrading you would need to do to get triple A games running on the system.

Strange concept, stop me if ya heard this before.

Is the game fun?
If yes: job done.
If no: move on.

Power does not determine enjoyment. It determines scope.

@BLP_Software But that can't be right, surely ultra realistic graphics is surely what gaming is all about right?... right?

@FragRed The reason why games looked better later in the system's life was because most consoles used a new architecture back in the day. Developers learned to utilise the hardware better over the course of the system's lifespan. I'm not sure how much of that still applies today, with consoles being close to PC/mobile architecture. They are already familiar with the hardware in a sense, so it's possible that the improvement isn't going to be as much as it used to be over the Switch' lifespan.