Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

@AegisPrime
I mostly agree, but I do still want a PS5 whenever stock is readily available. I do like a lot of Sony's exclusives, and they tend to get some of the Final Fantasy stuff exclusive or timed exclusive.

It's the best thing that's happened to us in a long time.

Before Switch, there really wasn't any reason to buy 3rd party games on a Nintendo platform. Wii U did offer some cool gamepad integration in games like Splinter Cell Blacklist, Mass Effect 3 and Batman Arkham City, and Call of Duty Black Ops 2 had Wiimote integration, but it didn't get more than a handful of games. But that was never a huge selling point over graphics and performance.

So for many years, I was a split gamer across Wii U/3DS and PS4. Nintendo was just a small community of people like us who were into their games.

But Switch has changed everything. The system finally gave us reason to prefer playing games on Nintendo platforms, not only due to hybrid advantage, but also gyro aiming and, multiple controller options which is very underrated. Unfortunately, Nintendo being irrelevant for so long meant those games werent coming. I remember companies saying, "if it ever breaks 100m sold, then we'll take a look at it". Felt impossible at the time. Ppl were regularly dooming the system. Pushsquare members laughed and mocked the reveal, claiming it was, "the worst idea for a console in the history of gaming and would certainly flop worse than Wii U and be the death of Nintendo, because they just don't get it". Trolls on NintendoLife would repeatedly tell us, despite its first year success, it was a fluke and demand would fall off a cliff soon after, and the Switch would never break 30m sold.

Its massive success has changed all of that. Had Switch failed, hybrid gaming would have died off, gyro aiming would have never caught on, Steam Deck wouldn't have been announced, and half the games Nintendo is releasing today wouldn't even exist.

We needed this so badly. Nintendo needed it too, no doubt. But as gamers, we needed it. Nintendo is the only one that dares to do something different. If they failed with Switch, like so many hoped they would, we'd have been trapped in HD twin purgatory for decades to come.

But best of all, it's success has solidified hybrid gaming as a permanent niche, and will allow Nintendo to focus on iteration rather than revolution moving forward. They've been searching for their niche for decades, and that led to constantly reinventing the wheel. As we've already witnessed with the OLED, Nintendo is starting to settle into this new market and embrace higher quality tech to offer a better gaming experience. And I fully expect Switch 2 to make a sizable jump in power.

Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon Thoughts

I don't like it. Sorry, I find this game horrible, just as bad as Cadence of Hyrule. It's brutally difficult, the skills you buy aren't permanent, and you can't change the rogue like mode back to puzzle mode after its been set. Can't believe this game reviewed so well.

I love Shovel Knight, but this is not good. It's frustrating as heck. Died 4 times on the first stage, finally beat it, and died so many times on the next stage I finally gave up. The fact there's no permanent progression to help you overcome as you keep dying just kills it for me. I thought all the skills I was buying was stacking. Turns out, nope. Just one active skill at a time, they just swap out when you buy a new one, and you permanently lose the old one.

I regret buying this game.

Wow, Square Enix is releasing 2 Switch exclusives less than a week apart. We knew about Triangle Strategy on March 4th but now Chocobo GP is launching March 10th.

I think it's safe to assume the next 1st party game after Pokemon Legends Arceus will be in April at the earliest. I doubt Nintendo would want to burn bridges with Square Enix again.

So, i have now finished Gnosia and like to share my thoughts on that game.
It was a really interesting little visual novel with great Characters and a compelling story that gets revealed bits by bits over time, making the ending feel really satisfying to me now that i am at the end(also restarting the game again to get the true ending).
But i felt that the endgame, speaking the last few hours had dragged really badly in the gameplay department. The social deduction part was fun as mechanics still got added to the game and there is a certain amount of depth to it, but once you realize it is just heavily based on RNG it takes the fun out of the game. Furthermore, it is a real chore to search for the right character to focus in a loop even with the event search mechanism.
Game really could have been shorter and more lenient in its events and it would have been far better. 80 loops would have been more than enough for me, but i ended up with 118 in the end.
That said, it is still a fine game just with clear issues. Did anybody else here play the game and felt similar? I didn't want to post into the old Gnosia thread

@Grumblevolcano Looks great. With so much lined up in 2022 it's been easy to forget about this title. But even with the abundance of kart racers on the system I've still got my eye on this. Nice to see characters like Steiner are playable - I just hope the courses do a good job at representing the series as a whole.

Although I have to mention how suspiciously similar one of those courses looks to Mario Kart's Electrodome / Rainbow Road, as well as how some of the UI elements look very similar to MK8's...

Just got my Xmas gift to myself from Japan yesterday. I fired up eBaseball Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2021 to play a couple exhibition games and was pleased with what I played. The gameplay is very similar to Acclaim's All-Star Baseball series back on the N64. Nice player animations, a decent framerate, pitching and hitting feel good, etc. Although since I don't read a lick of Japanese, I'll have to use my phone to navigate the game's menus.

I need to find the difficulty options, I won both games by a landslide, 47-3 and 56-6.

Which...just aren't typical baseball scores, if you're familiar with the sport.

Nintendo anounce 20 minutes indie World Showcase for dezembre 15th at 9 am

@Giancarlothomaz yes we know. Check main page.

@Giancarlothomaz https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/12/nintendo-indie-worl...

@Solaine Yeah, there's a point in Gnosia where you've stopped constantly unlocking new information in the game and start having to grind multiple loops without success trying to find the last few character scenes that have more arcane/contextual unlock requirements, and it gets pretty frustrating. There's an irony to this complaint insofar as it arguably better immerses you in the role of... someone stuck in a loop who is desperately looking for a way out by trying anything and everything they can. So even though it's annoying (I believe I used the phrase "stunningly repetitive" in my write-up on it), it also kinda works within the context of the experience itself. It is pretty jarring coming off that wonderful mid-game stride, though, when stuff starts to unlock nearly every cycle after you've pumped more points into your social stats, gained more skills, and thus start having a far easier time throughout the game's endless debate cycles.

@Ralizah Gotta admit, that looking on it from that perspective, it really makes a lot of sense to be frustrating with the context in the story, this reminds me of the tedious Drakengard gameplay now which kinda does the same thing. It probably was not intentional though and certainly it wouldn't have detracted from the experience if the Developers would have, for example, marked the Person you can focus on in this particular loop or something similar.

@Solaine I could have done with a little less randomness in loops with complex conditions for unlocking character scenes, if nothing else.

It's a super neat game, though. One of my favorites this year.

Got my Switch in review thing through via email. A cool idea, but a shame it looks like it cut off a few months ago based on the game times and number of games played etc so it isn’t very accurate today. Still cool to look at though.

Here are my stats from the year in review thing.

12 games (down from 26 last year).
220 hours (down from 345 last year).
52 in XC:DE, 43 in SMTV, 30 in ACNH.
5 hours in one day for SMTV
100% playtime docked.

Probably not completely accurate though. I know I played in portable (tabletop) mode a couple times during power outages, but I'm sure those didn't get tallied due to no internet connection.

My Nintendo Switch year in review might've messed up. Because I put more than 160 hours into Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and it said I only did 112 this year. That can't possibly be accurate. I did play a bit last year, but since I only got to the end of chapter 3 in like early February, there is zero chance I played 50 hours last year.

It is really funny that I had one less hour than last year. I thought I played almost nothing this year, so I'm glad to be proven wrong? Also it said my longest day, so I'm now certain August 17th was that awful, awful day when 1/3 of a single sidequest and a single room in a late game area took me 4 hours (the thing said 5 but I didn't play every moment I have the game on, so...yeah)

101 games
866 hours
386 in Olive Town, 116 in AoC,106 in Katanakami
15 hours in great ace attorney
587 hours docked, 279 handheld

That should increase next year as I wanna clear out some sRPGs next year.

I only got my Switch over the summer, but since then I’ve logged around 300 hours across 20sish games in that time based on the stats + a guess at the time spent after it cut off. Hilariously, almost half of that was in November when I stayed with Dad. Like the first month I got my Switch, I logged just under 70 hours, then it went down in halves to the point of going to almost single figuresand then it just skyrockets up to almost 130 hours in one month lol.

This is mostly because of releases like SMT V, but also because I was away with my Dad I was much more easygoing with my spending, probably spending several hundred pounds on games in the last month alone. I certainly feel like I got my moneys worth though, I have almost finished everything I bought over that period and mostly enjoyed everything I bought over that period, too, despite my reputation here.

This would also possibly explain why it shows I used the Switch in handheld over 20 percent of the time more than I did docked. I used it almost entirely docked when I was home, but with staying with family, I’ve been really using it more as a handheld device. When I get home, there are a bunch of games I want to throw up onto my proper TV, as it’s crazy I’ve never seen some games on a screen over 30 inches big and higher than 1080i.

It says my three most played games are Rise, Shield and SMT V but that is out of date now. It’d actually be Shield, then Rise and then BOTW now.

I have a grand total of 0 hours across all games because I turned off data sharing.

It's a relief to know that they didn't collect it anyway though.

speculating/predicting of what is gonna be show in tommorow Indie World.