scoot

I still wish there was a way to turn off your crewmates from talking endlessly. I think it majorly detracts from the game to have constant popup messages in the center of your screen. I keep hoping one of these patches will address it, but Nintendo seems fully committed these days to filling their games with characters that are wildly intrusive and never shut up.

I would love to see a way to turn off dialogue boxes popping up constantly in the center of your screen. Or better yet, turn off your yammering idiot crew mates altogether.

I really don't think Mario Kart needs a sprawling overworld that you have to wander around to find collectibles and unlockables. But I guess we'll see how it turns out.

I was duped into buying 1-2 Switch. Never again.

@BrazillianCara NintendoLife themselves wrote a whole article about it. Aonuma’s response was “Oh, yeah, good point, we’ll look into it.” And we can all see what they actually DID about it, which is precisely nothing.
https://www.nintendolife.com/features/soapbox-zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom-straight-up-fails-in-just-one-respect-accessibility

This is funny because I seem to remember people asking for very simple accessibility options to be added to Tears of the Kingdom, and Aonuma and Nintendo basically made a jerk-off motion in response.

I live within driving distance of SF (not in the Bay Area, but close-ish). I think I'll have to make the pilgrimage.

All the options he created seem equally or almost as terrible. Maybe Nintendo tried different methods like this and concluded that a single line is the least convoluted and easiest to navigate spatially. Plus, you can always just open the notebook.

I don't think leaks hurt it, but it was not a very interesting reveal. Look at the original Switch announcement. It was exciting—we got glimpses of this brand-new form factor and how people might use it, plus a preview of what games would be on the system.

Switch 2 reveal was mostly a tedious, cheap computer render of... a slightly bigger console, then some unfinished-looking shots of a new Mario Kart. It felt really rushed out. Why didn't they actually tease how the new mouse functionality might work? Or the extra USBC port? Or the mysterious C button? All they did was confirm all the leaks, and lazily and sloppily at that.

In short, Nintendo got caught with their pants down, and they 100% did it to themselves.

Honestly, I'm pretty inclined to believe IGN's criticism of "Characters talk too much but don't say anything interesting or useful or funny" and "The game holds your hand too much" and "Nintendo actively disrespects the player's time." Maybe it's an evolution of where modern gaming is going and I'm just a cranky old man, but that's exactly how I've felt about most Nintendo games lately, especially in games like Pikmin 4 and Echoes of Wisdom. I think I'm more sensitive to that kind of stuff than most, so if someone else is pointing it out like this, it must be really, really bad in this game.

Count me part of the group that believes Nintendo actually intends players to blab (i.e. the absolutely non-binding and consequence-free “please don’t talk”). But I think it’s been hilarious when the people in these comments sections absolutely freak out and say nasty things about you if you even mention that 1) you are a playtester or 2) anything already publicly known about the game (like what kind of game it is) or 3) you gasp have an opinion about the game. Like they personally have some sort of stake in it. It’s pretty easy to tell who the tattletales were/are who would go running to teacher for every tiny infraction.

I spent about two hours playing, and I find it to be a giant snooze and waste of time. I could never get into Minecraft-type games, though, so that’s on me, I guess. Overall, it’s just too opaque, as in there’s a ton going on, but it’s not clear at all how to do anything or even what you need to do after the first bit. I don’t think I’ll even open it again. If Nintendo had been more upfront about what this thing would be, I could have stepped aside and let someone else take my playtest spot who likes playing games like this where there’s almost literally no instruction or guidance.

I really hope it's not the case that we have over 100 echoes but only like 4 that will actually be useful and/or worth bothering to use more than once.

@GoldenBot Get back to me once you've worked on your reading comprehension, my friend. Paradoxically, online play seems pretty balanced. Single player, however, is just an unending barrage of items.

Stupid me. I was hoping they maybe did something to roll back the absolutely asinine, super overly aggressive item rebalancing they did somewhere around Wave 4 for single player that’s made it absolutely miserable to play anything but online. Nope. If anything, just from a few races, it seems to be somehow worse and more aggressive. Do other people somehow enjoy it just being an endless onslaught of lightning bolts, blue shells, unlimited red shell and green shells that just fall from the sky when there’s no one else around?

Online play can be brutal, for sure, but it really feels like something also changed dramatically in 1-player somewhere during the booster course pass. When playing solely against the computer, it's now just a relentless onslaught of items. I'm not exaggerating when I say there are literally often up to 6 lightning strikes per race, 3 or 4 blue shells, endless red shells, and green shells just falling out of the sky on you with no racers around. Am I imagining it? I swear it wasn't like that before the new DLC.

Wow. Didn't expect the Fox News contingent to show up so strongly in this comment section.

Brace Yourself Games made an absolute mess of the Switch version with the Synchrony update, making a really fun game now virtually unplayable. It's so laggy and slow that it's just frustrating and not fun to play anymore, and it seems to actually slow down the Switch system overall to the point that you have to shutdown and restart to remedy before you play anything else. And from Reddit posts, they 100% KNEW they were doing it, too, released it anyway, and now don't seem to be in any hurry to correct it. So, essentially, intentionally broke a functional game and stole a bunch money from loyal players. I really have lost all faith in them as game developers and will be very wary of buying anything they make.

I picked up Pocket Card Jockey and Balatro based on what I heard here, and they’re both fantastic games. Who knew card games could be such a blast! But looking at them side by side, it's clear that PCJ, while super-fun, shoots itself in the foot with a pretty severe lack of polish. There are so many clumsy bits and pieces that add up and detract from the experience. I can only imagine what kind of game it could have been had the developers put as much care and attention as clearly went into Balatro.

This was not on my radar and I missed it on the 3DS, so really great that it's come to Switch. I ended up really liking it. The demo, too, is pretty substantial and lets you get a good feel for the game.

That all said, I have a few big gripes about it:

• The game is suuuuper unclear about some of the rules and how things work. It takes a lot of trial and error, and even then there are surprises sometimes because the game tells you almost nothing about what all the meters and icons mean or how certain mechanics work.
• It's very luck-based. There are times it just will not give you the cards you need and you're essentially dead in the water. And once a race starts, there's no going back or any way to try the race again with the same horse.
• Essentially, the game purposely screws you over, and there's no way to overcome the permanent damage it inflicts on your mount and overall game trajectory.
• The menus are very slow and sloppily designed. For example, you can tap on an item in Chirp's shop 5 to 10 times before it even registers. Not an exaggeration.
• There are way, way too many characters who never shut up but still manage to tell you literally nothing. Maybe they could use some of that endless empty dialogue to ACTUALLY EXPLAIN THE RULES of the game.
• The mechanism to skip those stupid, repetitive cutscenes and dialogue is far too slow.

In short, it is incredibly fun, but there are a lot of thoughtless design and game elements that severely detract from the experience. It could be a A+ game, but it's just not polished. I would give it a B- at the highest.

This is a $30 game at most.

I'm really on the fence about buying this. I never played the original GBA and DS games, and I only played one of the 3DS ones because I got it for free somehow. It would be a much easier sell if they had remade and bundled together, say, the first three games or something.

I read one review that called this version a schedule filler until Nintendo announces their next console—and I think that's a pretty apt description from what I've seen.

I'm really intrigued by the premise—I enjoyed that aspect of Tunic—so I tried the demo. I think this game is just a little too opaque for me. I think I figured out 4 of the ~13 glyphs you encounter in the demo.

Maybe the full game has more context to work from, but it's unclear if these codes are just 1:1 English (like Tunic) or if they have their own structure, etc. It just throws a bunch of stuff at you and then the demo is over. I have no idea what's going on. The end. Money please?

But beyond that, the demo is just a giant snooze. The movement is too ponderously slow and the controls are a little too screwy for me to bother with the full game. The sound design is also quite unpleasant.

Man, everything I read from Aonuma is always so dismissive of players' experiences. It speaks volumes about modern Nintendo.

Gotta agree with other commenters. It looks fantastic, and the gameplay is solid, but the story and characters are a bit dull. The dialogue, especially, is… not the best.

@SlasherZ What? Who said anything about Oatchi?

Honestly, ever since I read that story about him spending like 20 minutes trying to kick up dust clouds in an early build of DK Tropical Freeze, whenever I see something cutesy and pointless shoehorned into a Nintendo game, I assume it’s Miyamoto’s meddling.

Gameplay looks fun, but the sound design is extremely unpleasant. The sound effects are just absolutely grating across the board (that jump sound, wtf).

And why is every single Nintendo game now jam-packed with useless characters that NEVER SHUT THE HELL UP? TotK, Pikmin 4, and now they want to make Mario games insufferable. Maybe I'm done being a Nintendo fan.

I've come to grips with the fact that I didn't love this game as much as I wanted to. Like others have mentioned, the sense of wonder is not really there like it was in BOTW since it's just the same world except bigger, with essentially the exact same story progression and beats, and without much additional reward. I think its size maybe actually worked against it because there really didn't seem to be enough to fill this massive world to justify bothering to explore it. But that all might just be because I replayed BOTW fairly recently. Maybe I'll replay TOTK in a couple years when the memory has faded a bit and will like it more.

It's hard to tell from the photos. Do we know if this is actually red like the special joycons bundled with Super Mario Odyssey, or is it the weird, ugly orange-red that they inexplicably used with the other "Mario edition" of the standard Switch?

Kingdom Battle was a fantastic game, so when Sparks of Hope came out, it was an instant buy for me. Sparks, however, is kind of a slog, and I never finished it. It's so full of nonsense that blocks you from playing the actual game (endless cut scenes, dialogue, overworld layouts that are needlessly massive and sloppily designed, etc.) that I will not buy another title in the series unless it's on deeeeeeep discount.

I really liked the demo, so I'm looking forward to this one.

Yikes. I absolutely adore the other three Pikmin games, but this demo makes me really not want to bother with 4. Just from the brief time I spent with it, it's stuffed to the brim with all of Nintendo's worst impulses. The screen is constantly cluttered with tutorials and useless messages, the game literally stops you every 10 seconds for sloooooooow, extremely pointless cutscenes (jfc, having to watch Poochy dig for like 30 seconds... why???), and all the characters talk and talk and talk ad nauseum while saying nothing at all (just like every single character in ToTK!). You have to press the A button 500 times just to get back to playing the game for 10 seconds before it interrupts you again--except now there's also a pause after each dialogue screen that prevents you from proceeding, so it also takes even longer to get through all that pointless nonsense. Why are so many modern games like this now? Why do they all think they need these endless cutscenes and to interrupt you constantly to slowly explain things they've already explained like five or more times? It's supposed to be a game. Why won't you just let me f'ing play it?

I would have liked to see them update Pikmin 1 to make how the pikmin control less infuriating. I know to some it makes them seem more “real,” but to me it’s maddening to have your pikmin constantly, CONSTANTLY splitting off to do their own thing, tripping, randomly stopping for no reason at all, getting stuck under ramps and bridges, etc. It’s overly cutesy and ultimately does nothing but waste time and sanity.

I'm super-excited for Pikmin 1+2. I've been itching to replay them (especially 2) and didn't want to have to drag out and setup my Wii to do it. That'll tide me over until 4 comes next month. Also very excited about all the Marios.

It's amazing that Nintendo still approaches things like this, and it's evidence that they're getting cocky again. They very much think they are above changing or doing, really, anything to be accessible or to make the player experience better or customizable. These recommendations would be relatively easy to patch in, but we all know they won't. Aonuma's total dismissal—"Yeah, whatever, we'll look into it"—is proof of this.

It’s been downloaded to my system since last week, sitting on my home screen taunting me. It’s just a matter of waiting for it to unlock.

I was so excited for this game, but I'd say it's a 7, maybe even 6.5. It's pretty shocking the game isn't more polished, given we're now about a year and a half past its original release date. And, in classic Nintendo fashion, it's missing even rudimentary online and matchmaking capabilities.

And add my +1 to being able to skip CO power animations. Sonja's is practically long enough that I can run to the store and get back before it's over.

@iDidSomething If you have access to another console, I'd play it on that. On Xbox, this game is sharp-looking and responsive. On the Switch, the visuals are quite blurry and the controls are kind of laggy.

I'm seeing comments in a lot of places that people didn't really like this game--despite the glowing reviews it got across the board. I'm definitely in the camp of being really disappointed, and I loooved Kingdom Battle. This game just has too much garbage that gets in the way of actually playing the game. I want to play the battles, not aimlessly wander around some gigantic, poorly designed stage where everything looks exactly the same, or STOP EVERYTHING every 20 seconds to listen to the characters just blather on and on. Kingdom Battle balanced that pretty well, where Sparks leaned hard into endless dialogue, cutscenes, lazy puzzles and other nonsense. I got about a third of the way through the game before realizing I just wasn't having much fun and haven't picked it up since.

Sadly, Advance Wars comes out 21 April, not March.

Color me surprised to see so many positive comments about these. They feel pretty scammy to me. Save for a few notable exceptions, Nintendo is notoriously tight-lipped about their release schedule. If I remember correctly, these vouchers expire and fairly quickly. Unless you want games that are already out or that are coming soon and you miraculously know about them far enough in advance, it’s a big gamble that you’ll even use them before they expire on something you actually want. And I won’t even get started on the fact that these are digital-only.

Bring back Super Mario Bros. 35

I wonder why they bothered having a Direct right now. Why not hold out until you have anything at all to announce? Pretty much anything noteworthy is coming at some ill-defined point in the future, things that were coming soon are now coming at some other undefined later date, and to cap it off, they showed so insanely little of anything. Sure, TotK has an actual release date, but with how things have been going for Nintendo, I won't believe that date is real until we actually reach May. Beyond that, I guess we're getting more farming simulators than anyone could ever want or play... But again, why did they bother wasting everyone's time with this pile of absolutely nothing? Put a still screenshot on Twitter and say "Pikmin 4, coming in 2023, maybe, if you're lucky, but probably not" and call it a day.

I have a problem with Portal 1 on the Switch where there doesn't seem to be any consistency to where "I" am in relation to my view, and it makes it really difficult to line up portals on the floor or to do anything that requires timing. I don't remember this being an issue when I initially played it 100 years ago or whatever. Is anyone else running into this?