ErraticGamer

Deserves every one of those sales. What a lovely gem of a game.

That said, I think that almost everything on the Switch suffers from being put on a 4K TV - of course it does, it's a machine that caps output at 1080 and struggles to maintain even that resolution for many of its games. It's a 720p tablet with TV output options, not a 4K-ready home console. That's not a knock against it, that's just what it is.

It is bonkers to me to see The Witcher 3 referred to as a lesser experience on Switch. I own it on PS4 and PC, and Switch is absolutely where I prefer to play it, purely for how well it runs in portable mode and how pleasant it is to play it that way. Honestly, with the most recent patch, it's as gorgeous on that small screen as anything else on the system, and that they managed to cram the entirety of that massive game onto the Switch is witchcraft.

If Klei can make a bad game, they haven't done it yet. Fantastic and a must-have for strategy/tactics fans.

And a tight 628MB? NICE.

Oh noooooo

Between this, Slay the Spire, and Into the Breach, three of the best indie addiction machines of all time are now on Switch

Yeah, the DigitalFoundry video also cited several instances where the enemy AI just stopped doing anything and stood there waiting to be shot, which seems like a pretty big non-cosmetic downside to the port.

At least gonna wait for some patches.

And yes, The TakeOver also looks pretty sweet.

Just so's you guys know, SoR4 didn't take dashing out, they just use it as character differentiation. Cherry can run all over the screen, and Adam has the double-tap dash, and I believe the retro characters all have their original run/dash options when you unlock them. It's just Axel, Blaze and Floyd who don't have it (though if you use jumping and their non-health-draining special attacks you can get around just as fast with them, too).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5sRY6PFnZ0

Oh man, I had forgotten about this little gem.

It's not good for, like, hours, but if you want to jump in for 20 minutes it's a great little minimalist stealth game.

Nice! Day one pickup for sure.

@Darlinfan Fair enough. To be fair, it wasn't you, but what I see at the top of this thread is somebody explaining why they aren't buying the game, not telling other people not to, and then getting jumped on as though he should keep his opinion to himself because we don't want to hear about it in here.

And that's BS. If Miyamoto was a predator, to reference your previous post, I'd want to know, and I wouldn't tell anybody else not to play Mario but I might stop buying it myself. (Personally, I can't watch Kevin Spacey movies anymore, and it sucks because I loved his work. Oh well.) It's valid discussion material and it's a bad look for the NL community to be stomping on somebody explaining their position on something they care about in a non-dogmatic way.

That said, now you and I are doing the thing where the whole thread is this, so I'm good if you're good. 😉

@Darlinfan "what difference does it make if they're ***holes or not?"

Clearly, none, to you - and it's your money, that's fine - but some folks feel culpable for who gets the money they spend - and that's their money, so that's fine, too.

I can't tell you to care about it, and I won't! Not my call! But to blow up a comments section because somebody else cares about something is ridiculous. I bought and played Ion Fury and I think it's a great game, but yeah, the folks who handled that issue were dicks about it, and if that turns somebody off from the game, that's part of running a business and selling a product. It's not unreasonable to talk about, and pretending those things just can't be connected is absurd.

@Pod RIGHT? Ion Maiden was SUCH A GOOD NAME.

@RileyR I'm gonna assume that there's plenty of other art out there if somebody doesn't want to buy this. Hang on, just lemme - yep, I checked, there's a lot. 😛

@Pod It's a full game at this point, no episodes or early access or any of that nonsense. Really good example of the Duke Nukem era FPS design with modern enhancements to the tech.

Holy crap, you whiny children. Ion Fury is a great game AND people are well within their rights not to spend their money on art made by artists who have been personally crappy to them and tell other people why. It was one comment and you MADE it the only thing being talked about by bitching about his one comment. NintendoLife, moderate your comments. Good lord.

That said, "it's just about games" is a cute way not to talk about the humans who make them, and a fully consistent position until the day we all lose our s*** over the last thing done/said by Miyamoto or Kojima or Iwata (RIP) or Nomura or Carmack or Newell or Ed Boon or Sid Meier or — hunh I guess actually we do care about developers and designers, nevermind 🙄

Did it with both The Witcher 3 and Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, and I've already gotten further in each of those games on Switch than I did on PC or PS4. Being able to take it wherever I'm going absolutely makes the difference for me, and it's more than worth the graphical tradeoff to me.

I don't think local media is going anywhere, but once the availability of the tech expands a bit, I definitely think cloud gaming is going to have a massive impact on the market. Launch foibles notwithstanding, Stadia works and works really well, and other services like the XCloud Beta or PS Now or the Shadow.tech cloud PC's have also proven that the capability is there for users who have the connection and the bandwidth.

I love my Switch - probably my favorite console of all time - but I took my Stadia controller and Chromecast 450 miles this week and plugged it into a TV in the house I'm staying in, got it on their WiFi and was playing AC: Odyssey in 10 minutes and it was barely different from playing it locally. That's gonna be more than good enough for a LOT of people, especially once Stadia's 1080p "just buy the games" free tier launches next year.

Convenience counts for a lot, and the notion of "don't buy a PS5 or a Xbox X or a new PC, just click here to own the game and play it right now" is gonna hook a whole lot of people.

Performance in the hub town is just absolute garbage, but on an actual hunt it seems fine. I did 4 of them and had a decent time. Nice to see more quality free options on the Switch.

Honestly I'd be perfectly happy with a port of Burnout Paradise, which should be more than doable given the hardware that game can run on. ANY competent AAA non-kart racers would be nice.

What a coincidence, I just deleted this from my phone this week. Take as long as you want, guys. Take forever. Don't release it. It's a bad game.

"business and technical challenges"

read also as: "then we couldn't charge you again for more loot boxes"

Overwatch is a great game and I'm glad to see it on Switch but this answer is nonsense, just like it was nonsense when Overwatch came to PS4 and XB1. Drop the level down to 1 if you have to - new system, new community, new skill levels - but let people keep their damn skins. It's just skins.

It's an incredible demo and absolutely sold me on the full game. I understand why most games can't have a demo this long but for those that can, this is how you move units.

Since nobody appears to have mentioned it yet - you can rebind the controls, and R isn't bound to anything. Just set Kick to R, and that problem is solved.

I'm with others on not loving the symmetrical sticks of the DS4, but I've still been using it on my Switch for months with a Magic NS adapter for the D-pad. Fantastic for Celeste, fighting games, Tetris 99, and anything else where precise D-pad inputs make a difference to the quality of the experience.

This is a total non issue. The bottom button is "confirm". The right button is "cancel". I was used to it before I was out of the tutorial area. It's fine.

The Steam Link is my primary assurance that once the tech really catches up, this thing could work. On a wired connection it's nearly flawless.

Oh local streaming is fantastic. If you haven't done it yet, get you a Steam Link. That thing changed my gaming habits completely.

I'm glad companies are exploring this tech (I'm real interested to see what Google does with their incoming cloud gaming beta), but I agree that it's clearly not quite ready yet. I've tried PlayStation Now, and it's just not a very good experience. Not awful, but certainly not worth paying a full price per game on.

Once the tech catches up and can actually deliver the experience, though, I think the appeal is obvious. Keeping up with gaming hardware is expensive. For people who don't replay games and don't care about personal media ownership, this could be a great way to keep up with new releases without having to shell out for a Pro / X / new computer / new video card / whatever the next price of entry is.

NintendoLife, I trust you guys, but the recorded livestream linked earlier in the chat ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUhu5QQTL2A ) really doesn't show the framerate problems you're talking about, even with a pretty sizable city towards the end. It isn't perfectly smooth, but it is impressively good considering what the Switch is being asked to do.

Recommend watching that and making your own decision, if you're on the fence because of performance concerns.

Wow. This is a baffling, terrible choice. I was absolutely looking forward to using these controllers with games like Shovel Knight, or any number of other eShop titles that don't require the full button set of a Joycon but would benefit from a solid D-Pad.

$60 for controllers that only work with a so-far small selection of titles that we lose if we ever stop paying a recurring subscription fee? Hell no.

In my opinion, the obsession with scores comes not from tradition of media in general (many media reviews have chosen not to use scores, since forever) but from (1) the history of game magazines reviewing games as consumer products with a ranking for Graphics, Control, Fun Factor, etc, and (2) the ubiquity of "User Reviews" on every shop and community site in existence.

(1) is just not useful anymore. Games are complex, massive pieces of art, not a toaster. If it's broken, yes, warn people it is broken, and if it performs exceptionally tell them that, but otherwise don't treat it like a toaster. And as for (2), it makes sense to ask users to contribute their opinion via a simplification (a star rating or whatever) because not every user has the skill to write a good review or the interest in doing so, and nobody has the time to consume everybody else's long review.

But if somebody's being paid to actually review a game, a number at the end serves only to encourage people to skip what they said for a meaningless, context-free shortcut that is better served with words. Provide a summary of the words for people in a hurry if desired, but the number is never adding value.

"Metacritic needs to exist."

...god, why?

@ArcanaXVI Books and performances do still get reviews, but not scored ones (unless you mean user reviews on Amazon). Hamilton didn't get a star rating out of 5 from the NYT, it got thoughtful praise and critique. People knew it was "essential" vs "very good" because the piece said "this is essential, go see it."

Scores are a simplification measure, not an additive measure. They boil down whatever was said in words. If a site doesn't want to allow that type of simplification in their discourse, I'm all for that enforced complexity of writing and response.

"Why does the world keep changing?"

This isn't new. Book reviews used to very frequently not include "scores", before the only reviews anybody read for books started being Amazon's star rating.

Long pieces of art aren't consumer products. If it's broken, that's something important to report, but if it's good, numbers don't communicate why.

Metacritic has agreed to work with Polygon specifically on this shift, so at least in that specific instance, nothing has been lost.

Hugely in favor of getting rid of scores. Games are far too subjective for the ones at the high end (where anything "recommended" would be grouped) to be delineated by 8 vs 9 or 9.5 or whatever. If it's good enough to be worth considering, it's good enough to be worth reading what its strengths are and then deciding if I want to spend money on it based on those details.

If it's not good enough to be worth considering, that can be quickly communicated via text without a score.

Make it happen! After seeing how well Paladins plays there, I'd happily consider Overwatch if it works well on the Switch.

I feel pretty good for sci-fi and kart racers (though yeah, F-Zero, where the hell are you), but I agree that some more realistic racers would be very welcome. This might be fine or might not, but getting some Burnout on there would be choice, and I agree that a Switch port of the Wii U NFS: Most Wanted wouldn't hurt.

This game is incredible, and the frame rate drops aren't negatively impacting my experience. That they're gonna focus on it and get it fixed is great news, but I'm totally happy with the value I'm getting for the game's price.

The PC version of this game is superb, some of the best dynamic level generation I've ever seen in a game. Definitely interested in having it portable if the port is good.

Nice! I had a great time with this on mobile for a few weeks and would definitely download and mess around with it on Switch. I don't think it would have serious longevity, but hey, free is free.

I like the PC version of this a lot, so if it performs well on the Switch, I'm in for sure.

Honestly Cloud Gaming for me has been great, but I know that I'm in a tiny percentage of gamers that will be able to take advantage of it. Both GeForce Now and Playstation Now (they really do love the 'Now' branding, hunh) have worked great for me, and PS Now is actually a really good deal because I've never had Playstation systems and this is a great chance to catch up on old classics for cheap. But I have a hardwired FiOS connection with a reliable 100-150Mbps transfer speed, and that's just not something most gamers can rely on.

Eventually, I think this could be a great option for some cases - people who don't want to invest in a system of their own, or who want access to a large library of titles without the burden of the price or install size of all those games. But we're a long way from it becoming an acceptable default.

Paladins is actually a really good game in its own right, even though its debt to Overwatch in terms of design is pretty clear (yes, it started development first, but there were some major and obvious shifts along the way in reaction to what Blizzard was doing). But it's a fun game I'd happily load up and play on the Switch if it was available.

If you want to be able to use wired controllers, this guy from Amazon is $25 and has USB passthrough in addition to wireless, and also comes with a nice little USB-C adapter for if you want to use it undocked.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B074JZPS39/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o05_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1

The Dualshock 4's motion controls work, which is nice for gyro aiming in games that support that.

Jeeeesus. Five dollars. IF you come back and buy more [STUFF] from us after we literally handed your credit card number to criminals.

I'm sympathetic to the challenges of conducting online business but HOW do you think that's a smart response?

Yes yes yes. Excite Truck is amazing. One of my favorite Christmas memories came out of staying up until 3 in the morning getting through all the single player content by passing the controller around between family members until we beat each new course. Such a fantastic game.

Certain games in the Zelda franchise are direct sequels to other games in the Zelda franchise, and those are called out explicitly either in-game, in marketing, or both.

Other games in the Zelda franchise are re-tellings of a Legend, which means they bear resemblance to and share common elements with other tellings of the Legend because that is how legends work.

I think trying to shoehorn it all into an "official" split timeline was somewhat foolish, but I also understand why they did it since fans were hounding them about it forever. But I certainly don't have any expectation that they'll take that overcomplicated and restrictive formula and be bound to it going forward. Why would I want to limit them like that?

Breath of the Wild is maybe my favorite telling of the Legend yet. I look forward to the next one.

How does it play with just two people? That's the situation I'd most often be in, and I don't even have four separate control options (I just have the joy cons and one pro controller).

Nice! I actually wrote about that guy way back when it was a Kickstarter upgrade from a PC freeware game.

Good lord, that was 5 years ago. Welp, I feel old.