I'm playing on PS5 on 60FPS mode and while the gameplay itself is okay, I'm already sick and tired of fighting with the camera. The shoddy, wonky camera is the leading cause of my deaths in this game. Trying to swap between platforms or rails, camera goes stupid, dead.
The texture pop in and world draw distance is equally awful. I hate to think how infuriating these elements would be on the Switch at half the FPS and lower visual quality.
After a couple weeks of playing, I don't think I can agree that this is the "pinnacle" of the franchise.
Sure, Splatoon 3 adds a LOT of needed quality of life changes but it also strips out a lot of maps and weapon loadouts which makes the game feel like several steps back from Splatoon 2. They've also completely retooled the balancing, which is, frankly, a mess.
A lot of the QoL updates could have easily been added to S2 as a premium DLC pack. The new primaries, specials, and secondaries could have easily been added as new loadouts in Sheldon's shop. They could have easily integrated the Sheldon License currency in S2 since the game already supports multiple currency types. There's only 5 new maps and 2 new Salmon Run maps, none of which have anything that really necessitates an entirely new game.
Popping in Splatoon 2 after playing Splatoon 3 definitely highlights the QoL differences, but actually PLAYING Splatoon 2 highlights just how much better, overall, Splatoon 2 currently is. Gameplay is the meat and potatoes of the game and Splatoon 2 offers much more content, better balance, and better network stability. Splatoon 3 is going to take another couple of years to trickle out the same content S2 already has...
I'm still getting just as many communication errors as before. Matchmaking is still a coin flip on whether or not it will actually do anything or give a comm error. Mid-match comm errors are still far too frequent.
Unfortunately I don't have the space (or money) to collect many amiibo anymore so I'll probably just pick up the yellow inkling so I can have one from each of the three games. Original blue inkling boy, octoling girl, and the yellow inkling.
Though when they inevitably release a three pack of Shiver, Frye, and Big Man, I might have to buy it, lack of space be damned.
@ZapNCrap 3 is the king for Quality of Life upgrades, but 2 still reigns in terms of content, balance, and, most importantly, fun, IMO. Splashtags and badges and lockers are fun and all but the meat and potatoes of the game is the gameplay and Splatoon 3 feels like several steps backwards in terms of balance, maps, and weapon diversity.
It's going to be 2+ years before we have the same number of maps and weapon loadout diversity that already exists in S2.
@LiNeR Aerospray doesn't need a buff. It's too dominant as it is. To be specific, the Aerospray weapon itself is fine, but the Reefslider pairing is too much because it's far too easy to get specials even without ability modifiers. If anything, it needs a nerf to slow down the acquisition of Reefsliders.
The Aerospray has been one of my go-to's since the first game and this version is very reminiscent of the Aerospray RG with Ink Mine and Ink Strike from S1, which was a high level weapon that ended up dominating Turf War. Except this one is a level 4 weapon.
@Bald_Bull Not only is matchmaking a mess, I'm absolutely convinced the game has a hidden "catch up" mechanic in standard Turf War. It's the only thing that can explain why when one team is dominating they can fire off a bunch of specials and kill nothing while the enemy team manages to wipeout the lead team repeatedly.
I've been on both sides of this. Using Reefslider as example: When in a match that looks like a lopsided loss, I've splatted enemy players that are a good 4-5 squid-lengths away from the explosion radius; When in a match that looks like a lopsided win, I've been splatted by it even when it's gone WELL past. I've watched teammates with ink stamp inexplicably "whiff" when they've run right over multiple players — or, conversely, get credited for a splat against a player that wasn't even nearby. This isn't just connection oddities; I have 254 turf war wins, so you can safely assume I have at least 2.5-3x as many matches and this has been such an issue that I can pretty much predict when the team 'swing' will happen. Doesn't matter how well your team is working together, all of the sudden your hits fail to register or magically hit when they shouldn't.
I popped in Splatoon 2 for the first time in over a year, and, frankly, it's a better game. The only thing Splatoon 3 has going for it is quality of life upgrades. Splatoon 2 has better maps, better loadouts, better balancing, and, inexplicably, better connection stability.
It was, as I expected it would be when it was first announced, a balancing nightmare for the lead team. I'm afraid no matter what Nintendo does it's always going to be unfun for someone by the very nature of it being 2v4v2 rather than simply a 4v4v4 mode with larger maps.
But since they likely won't change that, a few tweaks need to happen:
Ultrasignals are too powerful. Essentially once either Rock or Paper got one, it was almost always a loss for Team Scissors. Those need some changes. Placement changes, or design changes, or a timer limit. Something.
If you're on the lead team, you don't get the option to queue specifically for tricolor matches, they're completely random when queuing for any of the "open" playlists. Meanwhile, the other two teams could completely ignore the tricolor matches if they wanted to because they had to queue for them individually. That doesn't seem right. It should just be random with "open" playlist queues for all three teams OR all three teams should be able to queue for tricolor only. Of course, again, being a 2v4v2 mode, this will be an issue for people who group with full teams of 4 on the second and third place teams. On discord, friends on Team Scissors were posting that they had discovered they could avoid Tricolor entirely by queuing for the pro splatfest playlist, which is also a problem.
And finally, since the game clearly keeps track of the scores in real time to determine the leader at the half, it needs to reevaluate the "leader" every 2 hours during the map rotation switch. It seems very unfair for the team in the lead at halftime to be put into defense for the ENTIRE second half. Especially since there's no transparency as to how big their lead is when halftime hits. If Rock had surpassed Scissors in wins and clout by the next rotation, they should have been swapped into the center, and so on. That seems to be the only really fair way of doing this. And this was only a 12 hour splatfest, imagine if it was a regular 24 hour one and Scissors had to defend for a full 12 hours... Ouch.
Was playing this on the Series X, realized I could get it on Switch for when I felt like being lazy in bed. I expected the load times to be worse, I expected the menus to be laggy, I expected lower performance. But what I did NOT expect was absolute dog poop performance. If Splatoon can run mechanically well in handheld, I figured this would be able to as well. But no.
The review says 30 fps in handheld. That depends entirely on map. Some maps, like Treetop Twister, you'll be lucky if you can stay stable at 20-25fps, with frequent dips, especially if it's the first map of the show and you're in with the full field of beans. There's also input lag and it's atrocious. Doesn't matter if you're using joy-cons, pro controller, or a third party solution, they're all equally bad. On XSX there's zero input lag at all. I push right, I immediately go right. On Switch, pushing right you can feel, and sometimes see, the delay between input and action. In a game where trying to navigate obstacles or avoid falling into pits, this lag is no bueno.
Matchmaking takes forever, which is ridiculous since it's crossplay. But speaking of crossplay, since the game launched I've already had to report half a dozen cheaters — all with the PC icon in their banner, of course. Half of them have been on the hex map where you are trying to be the last one standing. But I've seen speed hacks and flying hacks on seesaw and other maps as well. The only option is to turn off crossplay entirely, which is garbage. There should be options for full crossplay, console only crossplay, or no crossplay.
Already uninstalling it from the Switch. A waste of space waiting endlessly for a match only to get in risk having a PCMR cheater or get saddled with bad frame rates.
@JaxonH You are obsessing WAY too much about frame rate and ignoring the rest of that sentence, specifically "...crisp visuals...".
If I'm playing at 4K/60 with full anti-aliasing, better texture resolution, better shadowing, AND better frame rate, I'm going to absolutely be able to track hits better than someone playing on a Switch in handheld resolution at 30fps with muddy textures and scaled down visuals. It's not just frame rate, it's the total package.
And if you really believe that the difference between 30fps and 60fps in an online game is nominal, you're out of your mind. You can write walls of text as much as you want, it doesn't change how wrong you are.
Just like you're absolutely wrong when you say that 900p/30fps is acceptable in 2022. It just isn't. It wasn't on the PS4 and Xbox One 3-4 years ago, it's not acceptable now. To say it is just shows your bias. The Switch's performance hasn't been acceptable IN YEARS. (LOL 372p for Xenoblade...)
$19.99 digital or $24.99 physical and I would have considered it just to have the game on the go even though I recently bought the remaster on an Xbox One sale a few months back (and I bought it new last gen [back when all the in-game billboards were loaded with real world "dynamic ads"]).
But I actually got to sample the game via handheld mode thanks to a colleague who purchased the game and it looks bad to my eye. I'm sure it looks fine to some but, to me, the handheld version barely looks as good the original X360 version from 12 years ago. It doesn't benefit from the remastered treatment well compared to other platforms.
If it ends up on sale for 66-75% off, I might pick it up. But since I'd only be playing it mobile, which is the game's most inferior form on the Switch, it's not worth the current asking price.
Both Target and Best Buy will have some pretty good deals. If you're still looking to pick up a physical starter edition of Starlink for your own Arwing display piece, Best Buy will have it on sale for $9.99. If you've been on the fence about the Switch Overwatch port, both places will have it ("physical") for $24.99.
@The7thHokage1995 At risk of sounding like a jerk, there's really not much to appreciate about this game. As a collection of mini-games, it's somewhere between mediocre and passable. The games that have a finite timer or finish line are over within 1-2 minutes. Games like table tennis, karate and fencing can last a bit longer since they're directly tied to player performance.
The length of the events would be fine if they were structured in any kind of party mode method where you play multiple events in a row. But they're not. They're all just one-and-done affairs that feel about as lacking as a cell phone mobile game. Without any method of setting up a series of events, the gameplay slows to a crawl as you have to back out to the main menu every time.
As a party game, people will want to move to something more robust after a few minutes. As a solo endeavor, it's not worth the time whatsoever. The AI is dreadfully bad even on the hardest difficulty. As an example, here's a video capture where I am playing the Canoeing event against 3-star, Very Hard, AI. I smoke them four strokes off the line. Most of the events are this way — there's just no challenge from any of the AI.
@Folkloner Those other reviews are, sadly, accurate. I was really looking forward to this game and picked it up this morning. Multiplayer boils down to pick an event, play the event, either replay the event or return to the main menu. That's it. There's no marathon style mode, no custom tournaments, nothing like that. Just one at a time. A lot of these events last less than a minute, so you end up spending more time in the menus choosing events and characters than you do actually playing the game.
As a local party game, it has no staying power. After 20 minutes, people will be bored with it and looking for something else. I can speak from experience here as it was barely half an hour of play before my family started drifting off and wanting to go back to other games.
@Razer While the repeal of Net Neutrality is a big deal, I think you're A) conflating P2P gameplay systems and P2P file sharing systems and B) overestimating the impact the repeal will have on online gameplay.
Comcast throttled peer-to-peer file sharing and high bandwidth VoIP systems. Yes, likely as an anti-competitive move. But the key phrase there is "high bandwidth". The amount of bandwidth being consumed by your average P2P multiplayer game is TINY compared to the huge chunks of data being moved when, say, you stream a 2 hour movie on Netflix at 1080p.
Throttling online game data would almost cost more to implement than it would save the company doing it.
Where it gets sticky is in the form of modern day game updates. Depending on the game, those updates can take a good chunk of data and may become subject to data throttling by an overzealous ISP.
To the topic of games, no, you're not alone. As an old fart gamer who grew up with Nintendo, I played all of these games when they were initially relevant and have watched Nintendo milk them through continuous repackaging since Super Mario All Stars on the SNES. They've been repacking and reselling those games ever since. It's almost as much of a joke these days as Square Enix's constant reselling of the Final Fantasy franchise. I see a lot of differing opinion on the Virtual Console among the comments and I can understand the pros and cons but at least the VC was continually growing and making inroads into Nintendo's larger library. With this, VC is dead and buried and we've all taken two massive steps backwards from where VC was even in 2006.
As for the service itself... The people claiming "It's only $20, that's 1/3rd less than Microsoft or Sony" are the very people Nintendo is preying on with this service. A deep dive comparing what each service offers — not just the 'free' games component — illustrates how what Nintendo is offering isn't worth $20. Period.
On Xbox Live, cloud saves are free for everyone. Not just Live Gold subscribers. EVERYONE. Sony is the only other company that paywalls their cloud saves. Both allow all games with local saves to be backed up to the cloud, not just some games with caveats like Nintendo's half-arsed system. Both also allow users to manually back up their own saves on external devices, also unlike Nintendo. Neither Microsoft nor Sony hold your save data hostage like Nintendo is attempting to do.
Xbox Live and Playstation Network offer a significant network of social tools for gamers. Clans/communities, calendars, and LFG on Xbox Live just to name a few. This is on top of the decade-old standard social functions of on-system text messaging, voice chat, and party systems. Nintendo's online system is STILL a decade behind, not even allowing us to send messages to our friends on-system. On the Switch, the "Friends List" is aptly named because it's quite literally JUST a list as we can't interact with friends from it in ANY meaningful way. Can't join them, can't message them, can't group up with them, can't send game invites.
It's 2018 and both Microsoft and Sony have (somewhat) gotten with the times pioneered by Steam; Both of them regularly have deep sales on their games and flash sales throughout the year. Nintendo's eShop sales have been lackluster at best on first party games and I doubt they'll ever embrace flash sales. Both Sony and Microsoft's online storefronts are far more robust than Nintendo's eShop on the Switch as well.
I'm sorry but if you think what Nintendo is offering is worth $20 a year, you're not paying attention. Because what they're offering is a "service" that isn't even up to par with what we had in 2007 from everyone else.
PS: Anyone who's paying $60 a year for XBL Gold or PS+ is doing it wrong too. Plenty of sales to be had on those throughout the year. I haven't paid more than $40 since forever.
Comments 16
Re: Review: Sonic Frontiers - A Bold But Ultimately Failed Attempt At Something New
I'm playing on PS5 on 60FPS mode and while the gameplay itself is okay, I'm already sick and tired of fighting with the camera. The shoddy, wonky camera is the leading cause of my deaths in this game. Trying to swap between platforms or rails, camera goes stupid, dead.
The texture pop in and world draw distance is equally awful. I hate to think how infuriating these elements would be on the Switch at half the FPS and lower visual quality.
Re: Review: Splatoon 3 - The Pinnacle Of The Series And Switch's Slickest Shooter
After a couple weeks of playing, I don't think I can agree that this is the "pinnacle" of the franchise.
Sure, Splatoon 3 adds a LOT of needed quality of life changes but it also strips out a lot of maps and weapon loadouts which makes the game feel like several steps back from Splatoon 2. They've also completely retooled the balancing, which is, frankly, a mess.
A lot of the QoL updates could have easily been added to S2 as a premium DLC pack. The new primaries, specials, and secondaries could have easily been added as new loadouts in Sheldon's shop. They could have easily integrated the Sheldon License currency in S2 since the game already supports multiple currency types. There's only 5 new maps and 2 new Salmon Run maps, none of which have anything that really necessitates an entirely new game.
Popping in Splatoon 2 after playing Splatoon 3 definitely highlights the QoL differences, but actually PLAYING Splatoon 2 highlights just how much better, overall, Splatoon 2 currently is. Gameplay is the meat and potatoes of the game and Splatoon 2 offers much more content, better balance, and better network stability. Splatoon 3 is going to take another couple of years to trickle out the same content S2 already has...
Re: Splatoon 3's Latest Update Is Now Live (Version 1.1.2), English Patch Notes Released
I'm still getting just as many communication errors as before. Matchmaking is still a coin flip on whether or not it will actually do anything or give a comm error. Mid-match comm errors are still far too frequent.
Re: Video: Get A Closer Look At Splatoon 3's Upcoming amiibo
Unfortunately I don't have the space (or money) to collect many amiibo anymore so I'll probably just pick up the yellow inkling so I can have one from each of the three games. Original blue inkling boy, octoling girl, and the yellow inkling.
Though when they inevitably release a three pack of Shiver, Frye, and Big Man, I might have to buy it, lack of space be damned.
Re: Splatoon 3 Players Discover Sloshing Machine Exploit That Allows You To Splat Through Walls
@ZapNCrap 3 is the king for Quality of Life upgrades, but 2 still reigns in terms of content, balance, and, most importantly, fun, IMO. Splashtags and badges and lockers are fun and all but the meat and potatoes of the game is the gameplay and Splatoon 3 feels like several steps backwards in terms of balance, maps, and weapon diversity.
It's going to be 2+ years before we have the same number of maps and weapon loadout diversity that already exists in S2.
Re: Splatoon 3 To Receive New Update This Week, Here Are The Full Patch Notes
@LiNeR Aerospray doesn't need a buff. It's too dominant as it is. To be specific, the Aerospray weapon itself is fine, but the Reefslider pairing is too much because it's far too easy to get specials even without ability modifiers. If anything, it needs a nerf to slow down the acquisition of Reefsliders.
The Aerospray has been one of my go-to's since the first game and this version is very reminiscent of the Aerospray RG with Ink Mine and Ink Strike from S1, which was a high level weapon that ended up dominating Turf War. Except this one is a level 4 weapon.
Re: Splatoon 3 Players Labelled "Cheaters" For Abusing Special Weapons
@Bald_Bull Not only is matchmaking a mess, I'm absolutely convinced the game has a hidden "catch up" mechanic in standard Turf War. It's the only thing that can explain why when one team is dominating they can fire off a bunch of specials and kill nothing while the enemy team manages to wipeout the lead team repeatedly.
I've been on both sides of this. Using Reefslider as example: When in a match that looks like a lopsided loss, I've splatted enemy players that are a good 4-5 squid-lengths away from the explosion radius; When in a match that looks like a lopsided win, I've been splatted by it even when it's gone WELL past. I've watched teammates with ink stamp inexplicably "whiff" when they've run right over multiple players — or, conversely, get credited for a splat against a player that wasn't even nearby. This isn't just connection oddities; I have 254 turf war wins, so you can safely assume I have at least 2.5-3x as many matches and this has been such an issue that I can pretty much predict when the team 'swing' will happen. Doesn't matter how well your team is working together, all of the sudden your hits fail to register or magically hit when they shouldn't.
I popped in Splatoon 2 for the first time in over a year, and, frankly, it's a better game. The only thing Splatoon 3 has going for it is quality of life upgrades. Splatoon 2 has better maps, better loadouts, better balancing, and, inexplicably, better connection stability.
Re: Poll: What Did You Think Of Tricolor Turf War In Splatoon 3?
It was, as I expected it would be when it was first announced, a balancing nightmare for the lead team. I'm afraid no matter what Nintendo does it's always going to be unfun for someone by the very nature of it being 2v4v2 rather than simply a 4v4v4 mode with larger maps.
But since they likely won't change that, a few tweaks need to happen:
Ultrasignals are too powerful. Essentially once either Rock or Paper got one, it was almost always a loss for Team Scissors. Those need some changes. Placement changes, or design changes, or a timer limit. Something.
If you're on the lead team, you don't get the option to queue specifically for tricolor matches, they're completely random when queuing for any of the "open" playlists. Meanwhile, the other two teams could completely ignore the tricolor matches if they wanted to because they had to queue for them individually. That doesn't seem right. It should just be random with "open" playlist queues for all three teams OR all three teams should be able to queue for tricolor only. Of course, again, being a 2v4v2 mode, this will be an issue for people who group with full teams of 4 on the second and third place teams. On discord, friends on Team Scissors were posting that they had discovered they could avoid Tricolor entirely by queuing for the pro splatfest playlist, which is also a problem.
And finally, since the game clearly keeps track of the scores in real time to determine the leader at the half, it needs to reevaluate the "leader" every 2 hours during the map rotation switch. It seems very unfair for the team in the lead at halftime to be put into defense for the ENTIRE second half. Especially since there's no transparency as to how big their lead is when halftime hits. If Rock had surpassed Scissors in wins and clout by the next rotation, they should have been swapped into the center, and so on. That seems to be the only really fair way of doing this. And this was only a 12 hour splatfest, imagine if it was a regular 24 hour one and Scissors had to defend for a full 12 hours... Ouch.
Re: Review: Fall Guys - The World’s Most Chaotic Game Show Lands On Switch, Now F2P
Was playing this on the Series X, realized I could get it on Switch for when I felt like being lazy in bed. I expected the load times to be worse, I expected the menus to be laggy, I expected lower performance. But what I did NOT expect was absolute dog poop performance. If Splatoon can run mechanically well in handheld, I figured this would be able to as well. But no.
The review says 30 fps in handheld. That depends entirely on map. Some maps, like Treetop Twister, you'll be lucky if you can stay stable at 20-25fps, with frequent dips, especially if it's the first map of the show and you're in with the full field of beans. There's also input lag and it's atrocious. Doesn't matter if you're using joy-cons, pro controller, or a third party solution, they're all equally bad. On XSX there's zero input lag at all. I push right, I immediately go right. On Switch, pushing right you can feel, and sometimes see, the delay between input and action. In a game where trying to navigate obstacles or avoid falling into pits, this lag is no bueno.
Matchmaking takes forever, which is ridiculous since it's crossplay. But speaking of crossplay, since the game launched I've already had to report half a dozen cheaters — all with the PC icon in their banner, of course. Half of them have been on the hex map where you are trying to be the last one standing. But I've seen speed hacks and flying hacks on seesaw and other maps as well. The only option is to turn off crossplay entirely, which is garbage. There should be options for full crossplay, console only crossplay, or no crossplay.
Already uninstalling it from the Switch. A waste of space waiting endlessly for a match only to get in risk having a PCMR cheater or get saddled with bad frame rates.
Re: Review: MLB The Show 22 - Sony's Switch Debut Isn't Just A Sinker Feeling, Thankfully
@JaxonH You are obsessing WAY too much about frame rate and ignoring the rest of that sentence, specifically "...crisp visuals...".
If I'm playing at 4K/60 with full anti-aliasing, better texture resolution, better shadowing, AND better frame rate, I'm going to absolutely be able to track hits better than someone playing on a Switch in handheld resolution at 30fps with muddy textures and scaled down visuals. It's not just frame rate, it's the total package.
And if you really believe that the difference between 30fps and 60fps in an online game is nominal, you're out of your mind. You can write walls of text as much as you want, it doesn't change how wrong you are.
Just like you're absolutely wrong when you say that 900p/30fps is acceptable in 2022. It just isn't. It wasn't on the PS4 and Xbox One 3-4 years ago, it's not acceptable now. To say it is just shows your bias. The Switch's performance hasn't been acceptable IN YEARS. (LOL 372p for Xenoblade...)
Re: Review: Burnout Paradise Remastered - Thrilling Open-World Racing Tempered By Blurry Visuals And A High Price
$19.99 digital or $24.99 physical and I would have considered it just to have the game on the go even though I recently bought the remaster on an Xbox One sale a few months back (and I bought it new last gen [back when all the in-game billboards were loaded with real world "dynamic ads"]).
But I actually got to sample the game via handheld mode thanks to a colleague who purchased the game and it looks bad to my eye. I'm sure it looks fine to some but, to me, the handheld version barely looks as good the original X360 version from 12 years ago. It doesn't benefit from the remastered treatment well compared to other platforms.
If it ends up on sale for 66-75% off, I might pick it up. But since I'd only be playing it mobile, which is the game's most inferior form on the Switch, it's not worth the current asking price.
Re: Nintendo Reveals Its Best Black Friday Deals For 2019 (North America)
Both Target and Best Buy will have some pretty good deals. If you're still looking to pick up a physical starter edition of Starlink for your own Arwing display piece, Best Buy will have it on sale for $9.99. If you've been on the fence about the Switch Overwatch port, both places will have it ("physical") for $24.99.
Re: Review: Mario & Sonic At The Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 - Great Multiplayer, But A Step Backwards For Solo Athletes
@The7thHokage1995 At risk of sounding like a jerk, there's really not much to appreciate about this game. As a collection of mini-games, it's somewhere between mediocre and passable. The games that have a finite timer or finish line are over within 1-2 minutes. Games like table tennis, karate and fencing can last a bit longer since they're directly tied to player performance.
The length of the events would be fine if they were structured in any kind of party mode method where you play multiple events in a row. But they're not. They're all just one-and-done affairs that feel about as lacking as a cell phone mobile game. Without any method of setting up a series of events, the gameplay slows to a crawl as you have to back out to the main menu every time.
As a party game, people will want to move to something more robust after a few minutes. As a solo endeavor, it's not worth the time whatsoever. The AI is dreadfully bad even on the hardest difficulty. As an example, here's a video capture where I am playing the Canoeing event against 3-star, Very Hard, AI. I smoke them four strokes off the line. Most of the events are this way — there's just no challenge from any of the AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnrWXXRY1pY
Re: Review: Mario & Sonic At The Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 - Great Multiplayer, But A Step Backwards For Solo Athletes
@Folkloner Those other reviews are, sadly, accurate. I was really looking forward to this game and picked it up this morning. Multiplayer boils down to pick an event, play the event, either replay the event or return to the main menu. That's it. There's no marathon style mode, no custom tournaments, nothing like that. Just one at a time. A lot of these events last less than a minute, so you end up spending more time in the menus choosing events and characters than you do actually playing the game.
As a local party game, it has no staying power. After 20 minutes, people will be bored with it and looking for something else. I can speak from experience here as it was barely half an hour of play before my family started drifting off and wanting to go back to other games.
Re: Soapbox: Why I'm Not Excited About Playing NES Games On The Nintendo Switch
@Razer While the repeal of Net Neutrality is a big deal, I think you're A) conflating P2P gameplay systems and P2P file sharing systems and B) overestimating the impact the repeal will have on online gameplay.
Comcast throttled peer-to-peer file sharing and high bandwidth VoIP systems. Yes, likely as an anti-competitive move. But the key phrase there is "high bandwidth". The amount of bandwidth being consumed by your average P2P multiplayer game is TINY compared to the huge chunks of data being moved when, say, you stream a 2 hour movie on Netflix at 1080p.
Throttling online game data would almost cost more to implement than it would save the company doing it.
Where it gets sticky is in the form of modern day game updates. Depending on the game, those updates can take a good chunk of data and may become subject to data throttling by an overzealous ISP.
E: Beat by NEStalgia with the same comment!
Re: Soapbox: Why I'm Not Excited About Playing NES Games On The Nintendo Switch
Warning: Long post ahead.
To the topic of games, no, you're not alone. As an old fart gamer who grew up with Nintendo, I played all of these games when they were initially relevant and have watched Nintendo milk them through continuous repackaging since Super Mario All Stars on the SNES. They've been repacking and reselling those games ever since. It's almost as much of a joke these days as Square Enix's constant reselling of the Final Fantasy franchise. I see a lot of differing opinion on the Virtual Console among the comments and I can understand the pros and cons but at least the VC was continually growing and making inroads into Nintendo's larger library. With this, VC is dead and buried and we've all taken two massive steps backwards from where VC was even in 2006.
As for the service itself... The people claiming "It's only $20, that's 1/3rd less than Microsoft or Sony" are the very people Nintendo is preying on with this service. A deep dive comparing what each service offers — not just the 'free' games component — illustrates how what Nintendo is offering isn't worth $20. Period.
On Xbox Live, cloud saves are free for everyone. Not just Live Gold subscribers. EVERYONE. Sony is the only other company that paywalls their cloud saves. Both allow all games with local saves to be backed up to the cloud, not just some games with caveats like Nintendo's half-arsed system. Both also allow users to manually back up their own saves on external devices, also unlike Nintendo. Neither Microsoft nor Sony hold your save data hostage like Nintendo is attempting to do.
Xbox Live and Playstation Network offer a significant network of social tools for gamers. Clans/communities, calendars, and LFG on Xbox Live just to name a few. This is on top of the decade-old standard social functions of on-system text messaging, voice chat, and party systems. Nintendo's online system is STILL a decade behind, not even allowing us to send messages to our friends on-system. On the Switch, the "Friends List" is aptly named because it's quite literally JUST a list as we can't interact with friends from it in ANY meaningful way. Can't join them, can't message them, can't group up with them, can't send game invites.
It's 2018 and both Microsoft and Sony have (somewhat) gotten with the times pioneered by Steam; Both of them regularly have deep sales on their games and flash sales throughout the year. Nintendo's eShop sales have been lackluster at best on first party games and I doubt they'll ever embrace flash sales. Both Sony and Microsoft's online storefronts are far more robust than Nintendo's eShop on the Switch as well.
I'm sorry but if you think what Nintendo is offering is worth $20 a year, you're not paying attention. Because what they're offering is a "service" that isn't even up to par with what we had in 2007 from everyone else.
PS: Anyone who's paying $60 a year for XBL Gold or PS+ is doing it wrong too. Plenty of sales to be had on those throughout the year. I haven't paid more than $40 since forever.