Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

@JaxonH that water still looks good.

Stay Hydrated

I still prefer jet ski from Go Vacation.

Wave Race 64 was always such a perfect arcade racing game that I spent a lot of time wondering “what if Nintendo hadn’t given up on arcades in the 80’s but instead carried on Sega style”.

I mean given they walked back into a genre and owned it what might they have done…

Folks keep screaming for Mario Kart 9 but I would love to see the MK team be handed a wave race/1080 revival. Crusin proves arcade racing still has an audience right?

Official cover of Doraemon: Story of Seasons - Friends of the Great Kingdom Switch version.

I feel like any series that is regularly hitting a minimum of 2 million in sales for a budget release is doing pretty good when it comes to consumer interest.

The fact that making the terrible decision that was Paper Jam (which still sold over a million copies mind you), shouldn't have put the company in a position where all it could do was rerelease old games on a dead system.

TBH I'm feeling at this point that, if Nintendo are going to bring back a Mario RPG, they're going to have to go hard.

I'm thinking a new series. Like Paper Mario was to Mario RPG, and M&L to Paper Mario.

Even with the improvements to Origami King, it's clear that Nintendo doesn't see Paper Mario as a traditional RPG anymore. And Mario and Luigi, though reasonably successful, began to stagnate a little in its later life (I can't imagine it drawing in a massive new crowd on the Switch unless they did something particularly innovative).

@Ryu_Niiyama MK8 Deluxe continuing to get more tracks until it has every track in the franchise while dormant racing franchises like F-Zero and Wave Race return would be cool.

@Grumblevolcano agreed. MK8DX is in a really amazing space right now. It’s kinda the Ultimate mario kart.

The Square Enix 2022 insanity continues, the Life is Strange collection which was delayed for Switch has now been given a September 27th release date.

@link3710 What makes you say Paper Jam was a terrible decision? I have some issues with the game but I don't see why the premise was inherently bad or any more likely to fail than the other games in the series.

Cruis'n Blast is amazing- peak arcade racing and quite possibly the best I've ever played.

Rubber band AI is part of the arcade experience. Hasn't stopped me from winning races and having a blast. In fact, it's what keeps arcade racers from being boring time trial simulations against pre-programmed ghost data (which is all it would be without reactionary AI).

Physics aren't supposed to emulate a racing sim. It's an arcade racer. It feels great. Cars are super responsive, which is all it needs.

Chocobo GP I can understand, but Cruis'n is an arcade masterpiece through and through.

Glad to see Life Is Strange Collection finally get a release date. I'm all over that.

Just realized I haven’t played before the storm. Well guess I better take care of that.

I only own like 2 racing games on Switch... My younger brother owns all of them besides the newer WRC (or whatever they are called lol) games.

@Dogorilla Simple.
1. Mario & Luigi fans are also by and large likely to be haters of modern Paper Mario, and Nintendo had basically stuck up the middle finger at them about daring to want Paper Mario to have RPG elements.
2. At the same time, Mario & Luigi's selling point has always been it's vibrant worlds, goofy cast of characters, and ability to appeal to people with a wide skill range.

Nintendo (well, IS and Nintendo) decided that if they were to do the crossover, they needed to tone down the RPG elements (per interviews: minimize story, no sidequests outside of toad collecting, less combat options), have absolutely no new characters or locations because it would be 'too confusing', reduce the need to read dialogue to a minimum because dialogue was 'not Mario like', and tone down the difficulty to attract new players (in a series that's mostly been on the easy end, NA localization changes aside).

Could it have worked? Maybe. Was it tone deaf to the player base? Definitely. In order to work it needed to attract an entirely new audience, like how modern Paper Mario and classic Paper Mario have almost entirely different fanbases.

@gcunit @JaxonH By the way after the conversation the other week I went ahead and bought the wireless bone conductors after all. Overall I'm pleasantly impressed. The quality of sound is definitely an upgrade as I hoped (bone conductors are newish tech for personal audio, and while it will always sound somewhat like sound in a tunnel through tin, it's definitely a more full-range audio in the new ones vs my 5+ year old ones, it's a few generations newer in the driver tech. SBC isn't the limiting factor overall, when the resolution of the drivers by the nature of the tech is the limited. The latency....yeah...it's latent..... I wouldn't use these things for Splatoon or Bayonetta where every hundredth of a second counts, but for XC3 and the like? It's fine. The delay is, wired, Noah grunts as he jumps. With the SBC delay he grunts at the apex of his jump, so it's significant latency, but for any game where audio timing isn't that important (basically all RPGs etc) it's nice. And the nicety of having a truly unchained switch off the wire and comfort of the upgrade is nice, too. And it works for my handheld streaming Kishi setup. It's not for all situations but it's good for when it is.

Only thing is you're right about Switch disconnecting ....every.single.time it powers off I have to go back to the system BT menu to turn it back on. Still, compared to the wire hanging down all the time handheld, it's nice.

@link3710 I agree most of those design choices were for the worse, but I don't know how much they would have affected sales. I'd have thought most players wouldn't have a strong opinion on the changes to Paper Mario and wouldn't be too put off by the blander world and characters, they'd just want a fun new Mario game. But of course it did sell less than the previous games, so maybe I'm underestimating the general public's savviness when it comes to choosing games.

Anyway, I hope we haven't seen the last of Mario & Luigi. At its best it's up there with classic Paper Mario imo. Though Nintendo may decide it's unnecessary to keep it going alongside both Paper Mario and Mario + Rabbids, and they may have a point sadly.

@Buizel I agree M&L stagnated but I'll never understand why it wasn't more successful. It was a great series. But Nintendo never reached the highs of Mario RPG. I don't understand why they haven't doubled down on rebuilding a Mario RPG franchise. It's not like they shy away from the RPG genre in general or anything. Heck, with Ubi on board they even have a Mario SRPG.....with GUNS. So why there's no real Mario RPG anymore I'll never know.

I tried the one on GBA (Superstar Saga?) and was bored senseless by it, so it's no huge loss for me.

Definitely prefer Paper Mario (even modern PM, if TOK is anything to go by; what it lacked in RPG mechanics it made up for in numerous other ways).

@Dogorilla I could honestly see Sparks of Hope being the last collaboration title. Ubisoft's falling apart, won't be long before they get acquired by another company.