The Nintendo Switch

yeah it's certainly not a hard or long game but i found it really satisfying. the movement is really fun once you get the hookshot

Finished Steamworld Dig 2 and was a bit bummed it was so short - as I (pretty easily) beat the final challenge, I half hoped it wasn't really the end - but I actually kind of look forward to playing it again and figuring out more tricks and secret rooms and stuff. In fact, there were puzzles I never solved and things I never found and I sort of worried that without them I couldn't win, but it turns out they were just there to, go figure, enrich the game.

On the plus side, this may be the first game I've actually finished since Luigi's Haunted Mansion on Gamecube.

if you liked the general style of dig, steamworld heist is on switch now too, it's a 2d tactics game that's sort of a cross between xcom and worms

oxenfree worth $5?

Huh, that looks awesome! I'd buy for $5.

haven't played it yet but it's got a good rep among story heavy gameplay light ("walking simulator") indie games

okay i'm in. my backlog is like twenty deep anyway, what's one more.

I bought it and also Shovel Knight, which everyone seems to love and which seems like a bargain, considering it bundles together, well, everything, including new/future releases. I've been curious about Doom (which I've never played) but I've heard different things about the quality on the Switch. I mean I'm sure it's fine, but there were rumors of needing software updates. Likewise the Sexy Brutale, which seems cool but has so many known problems the developers admitted it and said they were working on fixes, but there's been no new news on that front so far.

Being relatively new to actually caring about a system, I really like how Switch operates. There are big, immersive, expensive games like SMO and BotW and whatever, but then there are all these little indies that are sometimes just a few dollars, and when there are more, there's often a ton of content. What I don't like is what sometimes feels like price gouging to me. Like Snipperclips, it's cute but should not be more than $15-$20, imo. A bigger complaint seems to be something like Doom, which is over $50 on the Switch, despite being a few years old, a problematic (or at least controversial) port, and like half the price or less on other systems. I get that $50 is historically actually not that bad, but it's a price point high enough that I'm less likely to go for unless it's a must-have (like proprietary Nintendo titles like Mario Kart, Zelda, etc.). On the other hand, I will happily pay $5-$15 for a lot of these indies and take a risk.

school vacations ending tomorrow, I'm happy that my boy already beat Ganon. now I can take my turn!

we have been playing a lot of Jackbox Party Pack 2, to which Switch brings nothing new but an easier interface than beaming from my laptop from steam. (yes, I bought a steam link too for cheap but I've been too lazy to bother plugging it in, also who has that many hdmi ports?) I wish I could stream our Jackbox sessions directly from the switch by like twitch or whatever bc it would be rad to play with the grandparents / my brother / etc who all live on other continents, but I think switch'll get that stuff eventually

I should also note that I have Homebrew running on our old-school (at this point) Wii and have it stuffed with stuff I copied from the library, so that mitigates prices I pay for new Switch titles. Plus me and my kids still like playing the Wii titles. My younger one, for example, greatly prefers Animal Crossing to Stardew Valley, which she thinks it's just too much/hard/boring. And I still like Super Mario Galaxy.

Can't remember who said it now but s/o to whoever mentioned overlooked, I bought it ahead of my family xmas and it was an overwhelming success. Four player on the go for hours, first time in my life that my aunt / female cousins have not only taken an interest but have actively demanded to be inclusion, was amazing fun. A bargain at £15 or whatever it was

Overcooked*

+ *included, obv, always forget to proofread on phone

I'm the one who mentioned it, it was the reason I bought a Switch this year! But we haven't started it yet, been too cooked with Jackbox (the bomb defusing game is super great)

Overcooked is great, but the skill level of my family is all over the place (I'm best, wife is the worst, kids in between) so it leads to so much yelling it toes the dangerous line between fun yell and angry yell.

don't recommend the bomb game in Jackbox 2 then, it's a coop logic game that requires a lot of communication. funnnnnn though

xp you probably have the same situation we do which is basically the team is as good as you're able to accomplish mostly solo while everyone else runs around ruining meals

the anti-tombots

Time to call a family meeting

Shovel Knight is tons of fun. Just the right degree of frustrating and challenging. Like, it's so easy to mess up - is this what they mean by a permadeath game? - but each time I try something again I learn a new skill or trick and eventually get through, which is what a good game is supposed to be like.

permadeath means if you die once you start the game over from the beginning. mostly used in rpgs/dungeon crawlers. iirc shovel knight is not that, it's just a NES era platformer pastiche

I think it was accidentally that for me, because I kept mistakenly destroying the checkpoints and harvesting big gems instead of actually activating them (the checkpoints), so every time I died it sent me back to the beginning of the level!

I absolutely love (having been out of the game - so to speak - for so long) that the stuff I grew up with as a first generation Nintendo user has become design touchpoints. The whole lexicon of roguelike, permadeth, platformer, dungeon crawler, bullet hell, etc. - it's like I locked my copies of Contra and Mega Man and Castlevania and Legend of Zelda in some vault and opened it up decades later to see that they've mutated and given birth to hundreds of babies.

I like Shovel Knight a lot! but didn't feel compelled to return to it

My favourite old game is Starfox and it's really annoying that the series has been de-prioritized, and the most recent entry got it all so wrong.

I got Skyrim for my Switch and it's insane how much I'm enjoying replaying it. The experience of exploring that games' 100s of dungeons that are fairly rote-by-design is much, much more enjoyable than Zelda's 120 shrines

and the shrines are so much better than the divine beasts* and labyrinths**
* only through gerudo beast. maybe the last one saves it.
** labyrinth music is still great.

want very badly to get skyrim (never played), but will prioritize a game I can play online with niece and nephews over it.

i like the puzzle shrines a lot! could do without so many test of strength ones

and the divine beasts are basically just big puzzle shrines so I like those too. certainly not as good as the better traditional Zelda dungeons though

yeah, the puzzle aspect is good. the shrines are generally so much prettier than the divine beasts, though.

Are the Skyrim game ending bugs in the Switch version too?

my wishlist for the next zelda is to keep the open overworld design and the new physics/interactions engine but bring back the GameCube era dungeons and have some bigger-feeling towns

that wishlist otm. forgot about the yiga hideout. I actually enjoyed that one very much because I wasn't stuck in a small beige animal.

really I think the biggest lesson is not that dungeon items e.g. the hookshot are lame, it's that gating overworld exploration behind having them is lame. outside of their dungeon they should just be tools, not keys.

^Absolute heresy, tools have always been overworld keys, right back to the first Zelda, Alundra.

first zelda had nintendo power subscription gating overworld lost woods exploration

To be more precise: I enjoy the whole Zelda/Metroid thing of showing you an item or entrance you can't get to and making you think 'oh I can come back here when I have the hookshot'. I don't enjoy as much when I can't explore an entire quadrant of the map until the second half of the game because it's behind a ravine you can only get across with the hookshot.

botw got rid of both these things by giving you every tool up front, I think you can still have a open world feeling game without getting rid of the first but you always have to get rid of the second

BotW uses that thing you don't enjoy beautifully with the glider, actually

sure, that's essentially the tutorial though. I'm okay with that

I loved BotW btw, and thought "I like this as much as I liked Skyrim" and then decided to go back and replay Skyrim

Skyrim vs. BotW is like PC vs. Mac, lol

Skyrim has an inelegant battle system that is still weirdly fun, features a lot of "Quicksave, then take on an overpowered enemy" moments, "press A frantically to get through a tedious exposition about yet another splinter group/betrayal", and cool systems of resource management where I'm taking a moment to level up my Smithing and Enchanting abilities in between dungeon raids. The variety of play styles is super fun (I played a battlemage on my first run-through in 2012, now I'm playing pure assassin, sneaking up behind giants and one-hitting them). I haven't come across any bugs just yet, but the loading screens (which lengthen as the game progressed on my PS3 version) still take a long time when you're doing fetch-y stuff.

In comparison, BotW is just a sleek, gorgeous, endlessly delightful. I just wish they had ten-to-twenty proper dungeons instead of 120 shrines

Oh and Skyrim more than pretty much any other game is addictive. I've started bringing my Switch with me on public transit on my way to meet friends

Bought Thumper on sale today, that game is cool and would probably be really awesome if I was on drugs. Also got Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime and Thimbleweed Park, because they looked fun. Busy with Shovel Knight right now, though, that game is super unforgiving!

Darkest Dungeon on the 18th!

Ppl online are losing their shit waiting for Nintendo to announce a Direct. Nintendo of America is tweeting things like this:

pic.twitter.com/BkhTYDNnpY

— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) January 10, 2018

I have no idea what that means...?

They’re just seemingly fucking with people by tweeting enigmatic nonsense

i think i remember that game.

ah yes, here it is: chibi-robo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chibi-Robo!

Cool thx for the explanation...

https://twitter.com/i/moments/951143807093035010

Yeah, man, I am afraid to even start with Stardew. Younger kid has been really into Animal Crossing for Wii, though.

Speaking of Switch, Shovel Knight is so stupidly unforgiving, I think I might be playing it wrong. Like, touch a spike, die instantly. Maybe I need to buy better armor? But there doesn't seem to be a place just to mess around and amass gems, only levels that you have to beat to bring anything back to the town and trade later. But the levels are so hard! Grrr.

git gud