Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

@Magician maybe Nintendo would do better in 2021, if she release Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild and Bayonetta 3 this year.

Or we just shrug our shoulders and say, "Ok cool rock on" because Metacritic is Metacritic lol

I'm usually a bit more defensive of Metacritic than most. But it's one thing to aggregate scores for a single game...and another to aggregate aggregates and try to compare them based on arbitrary weighting criteria. I wouldn't read too much into Metacritic's rankings at all.

I want to believe Nintendo has something waiting to be revealed, and in a way I’m glad there’ve been less leaks. Or rather leaks from significantly less credible sources.

The man who leaked all the Super Mario 35 stuff guarantees a Zelda collection, so that would be very good. Just get the hell out, March!

@TheJGG When you say he leaked all the Mario 35 stuff, what exactly did he say was going to be included? Because a lot of people were speculating something of a collection would be released but the details everyone gave seemed to vary from “source” to “source”.

You just described being human. Congrats lol

@Magician @TSR3 The rumour if true would support the other rumour that the Switch revision is more of a silent successor where the current Switch is supported for like 2 years and then everything is exclusive to the revision.

@Snaplocket I enjoyed Shadow the Hedgehog. I feel like it has far more replay value than most Sonic titles. And despite being hilariously dissonant in tone, it's a mostly solid game.

Let's imagine I don't remember Shadow the Hedgehog... enlighten me.

@Snaplocket I don't think anyone always agrees with critics. But a game that is well-received by critics tends to be better than one which is poorly received by critics.

Similarly, Metacritic may have questionable score aggregation methods, but there's a good chance a 90-scored game is better quality than a 60-scored game. I wouldn't feel as confident with higher granularity though (e.g. comparing a 90 to a 92 game...that's pretty much meaningless IMO)

When is comes to publisher rankings...it becomes more and more about the aggregation method and further from the raw data of the critic reviews. First of all, you're aggregating scores from multiple different games, rather than a single game, so you're likely to get vastly different distributions between publishers. Secondly - it's entirely subjective how you weigh this - do you just look at the best games, do you look at the number of good games? Do you look at all games? (in which case a publisher who has released one flop will have a reduced score compared to one with an otherwise identical outputs).

I just saw a list of the 22 games coming to the Xbox series of consoles (https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-03-27-microsoft-lists-22-id-xbox-games-coming-to-xbox-game-pass for anyone interested), and while I do have a Series X and Game Pass, often I find myself preferring to play indie games on the Switch instead. So I guess the question is, does anyone know if these games are coming to the Switch. And yes I am aware games like STALKER 2 wouldn't and I also know Google is my friend, but with 22 games listed I thought I would ask first.

@Snaplocket Of course people think critics are wrong if they disagree with them. That's... what disagreeing with someone generally entails. Especially if you believe yourself to have a reasoned position on an issue.

If you don't believe all viewpoints to be equally valid, you believe your own viewpoint to be reasonable, and critics disagree with your viewpoint, wouldn't that usually mean you'd naturally come to the conclusion that critics are wrong or mistaken?

Pixelheart's "big" announcement is only a few hours away. What is everyone expecting? The teaser video they posted previously suggests that a popular pachinko provider has given Pixelheart a license to redistribute a classic collection. My assumption is that it'll be the Konami arcade collection (with a few more games) for Nintendo Switch.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konami_Classics_Series:_Arcad...

@Grumblevolcano I'm not sure if I'd call an Orin/Lovelace based Switch a 'silent successor'? More like a revolution for Nintendo employing bleeding edge tech! Which is why I thought it was a bit of a mad rumour. But yes, anything more than a speeding up of the existing Tegra X1 would probably lead to new platforms exclusives sooner or later

@TSR3 @Grumblevolcano

For first party games, Nintendo will do their best to have their games run on every iteration of Switch. But third party publishers? For example games like RE 2 Remake, DMC 5, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Kingdom Hearts III, etc. Those would certainly be exclusive to the newest iteration of Switch, not compatible with the original or Switch Lite.

Started up MH Rise and it reminds me why I didn't get far in XCX on Wii U. The damned character creator is way too long.

In the case of XCX I bought the special edition day 1 and started it the same day. Watched the intro cutscene but then the character creator was so long that I got distracted by exciting things happening on the Xbox front. By the time I intended to go back to XCX, Nintendo made it very clear that they were porting the Wii U to Switch so I waited for a Switch port.

@timleon
That’s exactly it.

Review aggregates are incredibly useful. As we say- all models are wrong, but some are useful. What people have to understand is the margin of error. Now, I don’t know what it is. Trying to quantify uncertainty (aka trying to measure the unknown) is a difficult task. But it is one that I do at my job, so I am well versed in confidence intervals, 95% expanded uncertainty ranges, margin of error, etc.

And so, all specific aggregates are wrong, but within a margin of error, all aggregates are correct. The question is, what is the margin of error? To determine such a thing you would have to poll tens of thousands of individuals who completed a certain game, and ask them what they would score it. And you would have to take the aggregate of the masses and find the deviation from the review aggregate and record that deviation. You’d then have to repeat that process for 100 different games, and analyze those hundred deviations as a distribution, calculate the standard deviation, and multiply by 2 to get the 95% confidence interval for any given aggregate score.

That’s a lot of work. Nobody’s going to do that. But we can use statistical shortcuts like, taking the range of deviations from a few individuals and dividing by 4 to estimate the standard deviation. And usually when I hear disagreements, it’s never more than 1.5 off from what the individual would rank it as. So I would say, using napkin math, any given review aggregate is within +/- 1.5 out of 10 for 95% of the time. And that’s a pretty wide range.

That means 95% of the time, aggregates are correct... within a 15/100 score in either direction. And that explains why games many people feel is 8/10 gets a 90/100 aggregate. And many games people feel is a 9.5/10 gets an 85/100 aggregate. As long as you approach aggregates with that in mind, they can be useful. Obviously the probability gets smaller the father you deviate from the aggregate. So 50% of the time the aggregate is within 0.65 out of 10. You can use those estimates to get a range of scores that a game is likely to fall within by your standards.

@TSR3 I meant silent in the sense of name, the Switch revision's name likely won't be something that suggests a successor as Nintendo would want the new model to boost Switch's momentum rather than risk everything starting from 0.

@Magician I think around the first 2 years all 1st party stuff would be on all 3 models (Switch, Switch Lite, new Switch revision) but some 3rd party stuff would be exclusive to the new Switch model and then Nintendo drops support for the Switch and Switch Lite after that timespan.

I've long thought putting game reviews on a scale of 1-10 or whatever was pretty dumb. I much prefer reading narrative reviews and just listening to what people thought about it.

@Grumblevolcano Ah, that makes sense now