Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

It was a kickstarter game, Microsoft didn’t really have much involvement until pretty late which is why the game was multiplat.

Regardless of what game wins their "esteemed accolates", this had to have been the best year of gaming I can recall.

3 games released that I would consider to be among my all time faves. That almost never happens. 2017 Switch did it with Zelda BotW, Mario Odyssey and Splatoon 2, but tbh, taken as a group, I like Monster Hunter Rise, Metroid Dread and SMTV more.

2022 might give 2021 a run for its money though. With Bayonetta 3, Zelda BotW 2, Monster Hunter Rise Sunbreak, Splatoon 3, and both Triangle Strategy and Mario Rabbids as potential greats (I do love the first Mario Rabbids a lot more than I tend to give it credit for), a potentially great Kirby game and a possibility of a Metroid Prime remaster, Rune Factory 5 and some great games on other platforms like Horizon, GoW and (even though it's too difficult for me, Elden Ring has Souls diehards excited), 2022 could be the best year in gaming like... ever.

@Pizzamorg
Metroid is very similar to Zelda with its puzzles, except I always considered Metroid to have better puzzles than Zelda and the best of any video game franchise ever. It's not so much bumbling around as it is exploring. If you like exploring its fun. The game is very well designed to guide you without having any idea where to go, while at the same time giving you free reign to explore and backtrack as you get new abilities which can access previously blocked off areas. Its not like Hollow Knight where you're hopelessly lost with no idea where to go. Difficulty isn't that bad (certainly not "brutal"). Maybe if you've no experience playing 2D games, but if you grew up playing NES/SNES games it fits like a glove. It's about the same as DKC Tropical Freeze, I'd wager. Tough, but fair. Idk. Some ppl have found it hard. I found it just right- challenging enough to be engaging but not so much to be frustrating. It helps that it gives checkpoints outside of bosses and EMMI zones.

Not using reviews as basis is a double edged sword. On the one hand, it can omit great games in favor of lesser games, but on the other hand, it can omit overrated games that scored high due to reviewer bias and represent underrated games that scored lower due to reviewer bias. Although, the latter almost never happens. When a game is overrated, the Awards is their chance to save face and feel justified- if an overrated game wins, they can use that to deflect criticism.

Whereas I thought 2021 was one of the worst years for gaming in recent memory. The last couple of months have been good, but earlier in the year it was just a wasteland, so long between releases I really cared about and a number of games I was interested in released and turned out to be garbage. I spent most of the year playing old games over the last decade or so I missed. I finished like three AC games, all of the Dragon Age games and probably a bunch of other stuff I forgot just waiting for games to come out.

GTA trilogy is now at #1 on the UK eshop, not even Pokemon preorders are beating it.

@Pizzamorg
Not really.
For me, year 2021 is a pretty good year for some upcoming casual and kids games such as My Universe games, The Smurfs Mission Vileaf, Paw Patrol, Blaze & the Monster Machines, Kitaria Fables, Key We, etc.
I like those upcoming games during year 2021.

I took at the release calendar, I don't even know if I played a 2021 release for the first four or five months of the year? I think the first thing I played was Outriders? (I didn't play Rise until much later in the year). Like I say, there was either just nothing coming out I was interested in or the stuff I was interested turned out to be garbage.

I actually played a couple hundred hours of Outriders if you include the time spent in the demo, but that game had all kinds of problems top to bottom, I was just so desperate to play something new, I kept playing long after the fun stopped.

I think ME Legendary then came out like a month or two later and I could finally put Outriders away. Once I did, I basically never looked back although apparently they have a big announcement tomorrow?

It just really sums up 2021 in gaming for me that I was basically half way through the year and the first good 2021 game I played was a rerelease. It then took a couple of weeks and Biomutant came out and it was the first good 2021 release I actually played, that wasn’t a rerelease. In any other year I don’t think I’d put it in any kind of GOTY conversation, the game had all kinds of problems, but the year was just such slim pickings I took all it would give me at that point.

And from there, the story just goes and goes. Months of wasteland, a release, months of wasteland further.

@Pizzamorg
I think you just never tried some casual or non popular games to balance your gameplay.
Nothing wrong for adult gamers to play casual or kids games.

Well I am going to get Ring Fit for my Birthday and my fat ass needs it, haha.

@Pizzamorg
I will get Ring Fit Adventures too, maybe end of December 2021 or early January 2022.
I got some weight during pandemic.

Yeah same, I went from a gym regular to absolute fatty thanks to various lockdowns etc. I am trying to get back into running and doing some home weights, but it is hard to motivate myself on my own. It is easier when I was with friends in the gym. I am hoping since RFA is a game as well exercise, it might be easier to motivate myself.

That's what happens when you avoid most of the good games that come out in a year.

What have I “avoided”?

Go to your local gaming sites, search for the list of reviews. It's pretty simple.

I'll grant you that the AAA space is miserable and dead outside of like 3 companies and this is a year of re-releases to a degree, but those three companies put out some quality stuff, and there's plenty of stuff that I casually notice for a minute that turn out to be pretty quality games. I'm not the best to keep track of this nowadays but I go to enough places where I notice a well reviewed game that looks cool before I forget about it for a billion other things on my mind.

This isn’t for a lack of games played or a lack of knowledge as to what is out of there, I just think almost nothing of note came out in the first half of the year that wasn’t a rerelease or Rise. The second half has been better, but I can’t call it a “great year in gaming” if half of it was a wasteland when you exclude rereleases.

SMT V and Monster Hunter Rise are the only two games I've played this year that I'd be comfortable listing above everything else.

There are also a lot of "I liked it quite a bit" sorta games like MH Stories 2, Gnosia, Bowser's Fury, etc.

2021 is no 2017, but it's still a pretty consistently excellent year on Switch. Probably the most consistently excellent year, to be frank.

2018 was pretty awful, though, and 2020 could have been better. 2019 was mainly good during the second half.

2017 had amazing games on Playstation 4 and Switch, and I believe even Xbox got Cuphead that year, which is very much one of my favorite games on any platform.

Well yes, the major releases were lacking. But quite frankly, I've felt that way for a lot of the past few years. At worst this just felt like 2014 again (except with better Sony games), so I'm used to it.

But otherwise, I dunno. If you really want to play quality games from this year, I'm at number 200 on this Metacritic page for 2021 releases and we're still at 80.

Thinking about it, since 2014 I had a live service game like Destiny (2), World/Iceborne or the Division (2) to focus most of my year on. I didn’t really notice droughts between releases, I just took new releases as they came as a break from my second job of the live service grind. However, this is the first year in about 7 where I didn’t have an active live service game on my rotation soaking up all of my time, so I guess I am just so much more aware of every second between a release.

2021 was the first year where I chose not to buy most new releases. Reason being a mixture of wanting to focus on my backlog and getting mentally tired of following new releases. In spite of that I feel like Nintendo's year was pretty strong, with a good mix of first and third party support. Which is more than what I can say for Sony.

I have no proclivity whatsoever toward big budget AAA. There are some I like, but 80% of the best games I'm interested in are AA titles. The other 20% is split 15% AAA and 5% indies. And while Awards shows may not recognize a port, remaster or expanded release, I do. A fun game is a fun game.

So I was playing Bravely Default 2 back in February and loving it. I was playing Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury and loving it. I was playing Persona 5 Strikers and loving it. 3 bangers in a row very early in the year leading up to the March release of Monster Hunter Rise. Had also played Atelier Ryza 2 in January. 3 months in the year and already had 5 purchased games with 1 GOTY release.

That followed up with New Pokémon Snap and Trails of Cold Steel in April, and I love the Trails of Cold Steel series. May saw SMT3 Nocturne and the Monster Hunter Rise 3.0 update, June had Mario Golf, Tony Hawk, Ninja Gaiden (as well as Legend of Mana and Disgaea 6 but I didn't enjoy those much).

Then July had Monster Hunter Stories 2, Neo The World Ends With You, Great Ace Attorney Chronicles and Zelda Skyward Sword HD, all 4 incredibly good games. There was also Ys IX but, I stopped playing due to performance issues.

August was a bust. But September made up for it with WarioWare, Cruis'n Blast, Ni No Kuni 2, Hotwheels Unleashed, Castlevania Advance Collection, Quake, Axiom Verge 2, DBZ Kakarot, Diablo 2 Remastered, Eastward, and more. Absolute unit of a month.

And October, wow. Metroid Dread and Monkey Ball, Tetris Effect Connected and Switch OLED right off the bat, Disco Elysium, Crysis 2 and 3 Remastered, Dying Light, Fatal Frame, Mario Party, Voice of Cards... what a month.

November and December are no slouches either with GTA Trilogy, KOTOR, SMTV, Pokémon BD/SP and Danganronpa Trilogy.

And that's not even counting all the other games on other platforms, from Returnal, Ratchet, Forza Horizon 5, Halo Infinite,, Resident Evil Village, Scarlet Nexus, Tales of Arise, Deathloop, Psychonauts 2, Guardians of the Galaxy, Life Is Strange True Colors (I'm waiting on Switch version), Mass Effect Collection, etc.

I suppose if someone predominantly plays games on power platforms, I can understand the perspective of a lame year. But for someone like me who primarily games on Switch with a dash of PC/PS5 here and there as needed, and doesn't value AA games or remasters as "lesser than" big budget, realism-focused AAA games, it's basically been an onslaught all year long.

Come to think of it, I didn't play a lot of brand new games in the first half of the year (just New Pokemon Snap, which was cute if nothing particularly notable), but I didn't mind as I had tons of remakes/re-releases (Xenoblade: DE, Mario 3D World, Star Wars: Republic Commando, Asha in Monster World, Famicom Detective Club: the Missing Heir, the Ninja Gaiden Sigma games) and older releases (Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order, Sakura Wars, Ratchet & Clank, Ace Combat 7) to play or finish off, all of which were first time playthroughs for me.

I've played a few more genuinely new games since then though, with stuff like Tales of Arise, Metroid Dread, & SMTV. And even then, some of the remasters I've played came out this year (like Fatal Frame V, in addition to some of the others already mentioned). So good year overall for me.