Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

This. This!

I really hope they make more co op games, because I haven’t played a couch co op like this ever, the different gameplay styles, the split screen, it’s all so amazing!

@Snatcher I've never really played a couch co-op game. Me and my younger brother don't "gel" well.

We're certainly about due for a new 2D Mario. And with the movie releasing soon, it would make sense to leverage that interest to sell the game.

Power outage for 5+ hours tonight. While everyone else was bored to tears, I was busy exploring the world of Aionios.

#HybridSupremacy

@Ralizah #HybridSupremacy

@Ralizah
And with that OLED, I bet it easily lasted all 5 hours too.

@JaxonH Didn't need to (at some point, family needs became important, and needed attending to), but it probably would have, yes. I played for a couple of hours during the outage, and then even after it came back and I retired to my quarters, I played a couple more hours in handheld mode, and it was hardly in a rough state battery-wise when I awoke this morning (I was using pretty much all of my chargers for other devices that had depleted over the course of the night).

Literally the best battery life I've seen on a portable system since the Game Boy. That it's running gorgeous, HD console games all the while makes it even better.

There's been so little NSO news recently that I almost forgot my subscription expires in 2 weeks. I'll wait for the Direct though because maybe there'll be something announced there that's worthwhile upgrading to the Expansion Pack.

Ark Survival Evolved showed some new gameplay footage live, and I grabbed a couple screenshots. It actually looks really good. They said it has faster load times than any other version also, at around 20 seconds from boot.

@Ralizah
It's crazy Switch has better battery life than any 3DS or Vita model despite having a 7" 720p screen running full console games. They really knocked it out of the park with battery life. And personally that's more important to me than graphics. I'm not expecting the next Switch to match this one for battery, due to more demanding games, but hopefully it doesn't revert to being as bad as the original v1 Switch. I don't think it will. They seem to understand the importance now as seen with the v2 revision.

I'd accept a shorter battery life if it meant more games ran at native res when undocked, personally.

Anything less than V1 battery life is unacceptable, though.

A bigger issue for me would be size and weight. I think the Switch is about as big as I'd reasonably want a portable console to be. I'd hate for the successor to go full chonk, like with the Steam Deck.

I'll say this for the PS Vita, though: while the actual battery life when playing is nothing remarkable, the way it conserves energy in rest mode is nothing short of remarkable. The thing can literally last for more than a month on a single charge without shutting off.

The Vita used to be the most premium-feeling portable I ever owned. Now it's the Switch OLED.

I actually told my mom about it and she's actually interested in it. Let me know how you like it!

@JaxonH I agree for sure. Not counting NSMBUD, It's been a long time since the last 2D Mario game. If they make it as good as SMB3 and SMW, I'll be one happy guy.

@Grumblevolcano I'm actually doing the same thing. I still have the regular NSO family membership, which expires at the end of this month, and I wanna see if they're gonna add more stuff to the expansion pack. It'd be cool if they at least throw in Game Boy Advance games. (Mario Party 1, 2, and 3 would be great to have on the N64 app as well!) GameCube games would be sweet of course, but it's kind of a lost cause at this point, I think.

@Ralizah
I'm OK with individual games running at higher clock rates if needed. I'd sacrifice up to 25% battery life for specific games to give games a little boost that need it. But overall, I think the priorities were in order. v2 prioritized battery life rather than graphics and I'm glad it did. Now that battery life is where it needs to be, performance can be the next focus.

Ok, I couldn't think of a better place to ask this even though it's only partly Switch related and partly WiiU. Everyone talking about Xenoblade 3 has got me really wanting to play it. The problem is I haven't played 2 yet because I haven't finished X yet. I'm where you have to fight the guy who looks kinda like a tiger and his comrades in the snowy mountain area (I think it's chapter 9). But it's been a really long time (like years) since I've played, and it's hard to get back into it. Plus it's so hard to have to go back to playing on the TV (I know you can play on just the Gamepad, but this game is much better on the TV with the map on the Gamepad). So I guess my question is, is it worth trying to push through and finish X, or should I just give it up and move on to 2 (or even skip 2 and just go to 3)?

AFAIK, X has nothing to do with the rest of the series. I also never finished it and I've never felt much reason to and I played 2 as if X never even happened.

@Xyphon22 You don't need to play XC2 to enjoy and understand XC3, but doing so will enhance your experience with the latter.

But I'll say this: don't allow some notion of an "ideal" play order to keep you from playing the games you want to play. If you really just want to play XC3 and are OK with missing out on some references and callbacks to the previous game, then just play XC3. It'll still be a great time.

So, if you want to play them all anyway, I'd recommend playing XC2 first. But it's certainly not necessary.

XCX can be safely pushed aside until you wish to return to it, because it doesn't seem to connect to anything else in this series. It's its own little thing.

I had a V1 Switch for nearly 3 years and I can tell you right now: you're absolutely spot on. That thing had the 'Battery Low' message pop up more for me in those 3 years than it ever did for my 3DS XL which lasted me over 7. I finally bit the bullet and upgraded to the newer version that came out about a year after my original Switch and good lord, the difference is night and day I swear. I very rarely see that notification unless I consciously let my thing run too low, it's fantastic now. My old one is stuck in a box somewhere in the house now and I never want to look at it again for as long as I live honestly, even if it brought me some great memories of Christmas 2018 and beyond.

@Fizza
We tolerated it because we had no choice at the time. It was better than no hybrid experience at all.

But after the v2 upgrade (and even more so with the OLED), going from 5 hrs minimum at max brightness to 2.5 hrs max brightness is downright criminal. It's what makes Steamdeck so hard to swallow for me. Without steps taken to mitigate battery drain, many bigger games get 80-120 minutes. Like... what good is 60fps and 720p if the system is dead in less than 2 hrs? I have to cap at 30fps on low settings and set a sub-native resolution just to push 3 hrs, and in many games (like Spiderman and Horizon), just to actually hit 2 hrs.

My brother used to come over and play MHGU and Splatoon 2 with me over local wireless, and his Switch would consistently die every single time. Eventually I put together a charge pack with portable battery and USB-C cable in a mesh bag just for when he would visit. Ever since he got the OLED though, we can play all afternoon on a Saturday without issue.

I'm still perfectly fine with my V1 Switch in terms of battery life and screen quality. My pro controllers however are a different story, have to charge them pretty much every day nowadays and it's annoying. Yes, there is a solution (get the Sunbreak or Splatoon 3 pro controller) but it came to mind recently that Nintendo's been very quiet about the XC3 Special Edition so I've returned to holding out hope that a XC3 pro controller is being announced alongside the release date of the special edition.

@Grumblevolcano
If they were releasing a XC3 pro controller it would have already been released, or at the very least announced.

Nintendo isn't being quiet for secrecy's sake. There's just nothing to discuss at the moment. They told us what the deal is, they told us the rest of the CE will ship in September, and they'll send out shipping notifications when that day comes. There's nothing more to really say on the matter.

Pro controller gets 40 hrs easy. I can go 2 weeks before charging. I don't, because I nest it on the charge block when not in use, but there have been times I've tested its battery. If you're charging every day your battery is definitely borked.

@JaxonH For Europe it's different, the preorders go live in September. It felt like a potential way to pad out a XC3 segment of a Direct, "Here's what's coming in wave 2, by the way the Special Edition releases on [insert date] and we're also releasing a pro controller the same day".