The Nintendo Switch

I guess they are going for a limited Netflix type model with old games then? I wonder if any 3rd party games will ever turn up, or other systems. Add in Gamecube games and I'll gladly pay!

i think virtual console as it was in the wii era is probably dead since all the 3rd parties realized they could make more money by releasing anthologies rather than a la carte. i can see this NESflix thing being expanded to SNES and GBA for first party titles but not sure we'll get N64 forward

Nintendo 2017 had it going on. But 2018 seems pretty rocky. Dearth of big titles, this pretty underwhelming online thing ... Only thing I'm looking forward to between now and the end of the year is Smash and I guess Wolfenstein (assuming Dark Souls and Hollow Knight stay MIA). Lets me catch up on stuff, but that's only because there otherwise just seems to be little but a constant stream of 8-bit styled retro dungeon/platform games clogging up the store.

dude at this point in 2017 switch had one game. chill out until e3 when they announce their second half lineup

fry's has rayman for $20 if looking for a platformer deal, josh

Nintendo will have published 9 games from Jan-July this year, plus labo and a game-length Splatoon single player campaign. that's pretty strong first party support if you didn't have a wii u and own all 4 wii u titles already, and still passable if you did.

More big things will come in the fall and 3rd party support will ramp up over the next year as we hit the point where games that started development after the switch was a confirmed Hit are being finished.

I got Rayman cheap, it's fun!

Given Smash is the only big Nintendo heavy hitter in the next several months, I don't know what else I'm expecting from them at E3. And yeah, a year ago there were barely any titles. Also, a year ago the Switch was barely one month old. The other titles announced, like Captain Toad and Tennis, I couldn't care less about them.

Tennis looks pretty fun tbh

I don't really like any of the sports games, save Mario Kart and Smash (if they count), but that's just me.

What non-port big Nintendo titles have there been so far? Odyssey? Anything else? Kirby? Splatoon?

what you should expect at e3 is the second half lineup with 1-2 releases per month as they've been doing so far. smash is one game out of a potential 5 to 8 or so things

no Virtual Console but there are a lot of NeoGeo games up. Metal Slugs, Magician Lord, KOF '98, etc. some good stuff

Wasn't it one of you guys that emphasized that Smash was the headliner, the heavy-hitter? I love surprises, but I don't know what else I should be expecting.

And it's not the pace of releases, it's the quality of releases. So many ports, and then disappointing titles like Kirby. From a selfish standpoint, I'm happy to save so much money. But I would love a few more appealing games.

smash is one of their most popular series though, it'll get top billing over pretty much anything except Mario and Pokemon.

I was not even a little disappointed by Kirby!

Kirby games are quality, they're just not difficult.

xpost Absolutely. And games like Smash and MarioKart and Mario and Zelda are why I have a Switch and not another system. Given its success I was just hoping for more third party stuff, and I'm sure we'll get it, but with little to nothing prominent on the radar except ports, sequels and the promise of stuff like (as I mentioned) old but new to Nintendo Dark Souls or Hollow Knight, it's just a bit of a bummer. Feels too early in the system's life for it to be this quiet. Stuff that appeals to me (like Metroid) and my kids (Animal Crossing) won't be until some time in 2019, I assume, which is a wait.

We downloaded the Kirby demo and even my kids, who like Kirby, were (the kid equivalent of) fuck this.

they are hiring for the new Zelda, so the follow up to BOTW is def going to be worth looking forward to

i'd say wait to panic until after E3. Nintendo has a habit of announcing games out of nowhere and saying, "Btw this is coming out in a few months). they first announced Dark Souls on Switch 2 months ago.

Nintendo wants to sell 20 million Switches in their FY ending March 2019, they need some sort of tentpole beyond Smash to achieve that probably.

I don't know, I just figured Smash was meant to coincide with their online system.

Also re Dark Souls, don't mean to be impatient, but yeah, they announced it, but within a couple months it was totally off the schedule again.

The service will launch with 20 games, with new games added regularly. Launch titles include:
Soccer Tennis Donkey Kong™ Mario Bros.™ Super Mario Bros.™ Balloon Fight™ Ice Climber™ Dr. Mario™ The Legend of Zelda™ Super Mario Bros.™ 3 And more to be revealed!

20 NES games is pretty cool, i'll take that. 20 dollars a year for 20+ NES games already pays for itself. kind of like a revolving NES Classic. if you can download the games to your Switch that would be a neat way to build up a library of emulated games over time.

i know for sure i am gonna play all the way through TLOZ for the first time (and probably try the Master Quest). Dr. Mario is a nice include. SMB3 is perhaps the greatest game of all time, now it will have extra online features.

Pretty sure the other publishers only figured out Switch was going to be a big success about 6-9 months ago, and are now rushing to get titles ready. But making a good game can take years, so it might take a while to fill the pipeline.

yeah any 3rd party game releasing right now is a port that was added late in development or after the fact. third party support will look a lot better once we get into the third year or so of Switch's existence and devs have had time to build games that target it from the start.

But why not just announce you're working on something, especially if it's a port? Wolfenstein, for example, was announced with little to no warning, and certainly at the time no release date. It keeps people engaged and invested. If I knew (insert AAA game here) was coming, I'd be more excited. That's why I was looking forward to Dark Souls. Never played it, wanted to, finally coming to Nintendo, and was going to carry me through until the end of the year, when I would get Smash. And then ... poof. But at least I know it's coming!

again, wait until e3, most publishers will hoard announcements for e3, it's not uncommon to have a lot of silence in the first half of the year

best way to market a thing is to announce it far in advance so that it's not a surprise and is boring by the time you can make money selling it

to sustain the people

How is "Death Road to Canada?"

xpost Oh, come on, there are lots of anticipated games that were revealed or announced months ago, like Metroid and Hollow Knight.

And Celeste guy announced he's working on a Switch port of TowerFall, for example. Give you something to look forward to!

i think Dark Souls on Switch will be worth the wait. the 5 mins of Undead Burg from PAX East look amazing. it is being handled by a different team than the PS4/PC remaster, which getting some criticism for flat textures & lighting. Switch one may visually stand out more even if running at 30fps.

https://media.giphy.com/media/LTVVZwbfXMPB1AiMfl/giphy.gif
PS4

https://media.giphy.com/media/2la3EJ92D3bqrJZdcq/giphy.gif
Switch

Announcing long in advance is also practical, since the Nintendo eShop is a mess (imo) and awash with crappy indies, so it's nice to know to look out for stuff like, say, Don't Starve or Kentucky Route Zero, which I might not have heard of or noticed otherwise.

Nintendo likes to announce stuff as close to release as they feel they can get away with, it's just how they operate

it's a good way to avoid missing announced release dates that's for sure

definitely prefer Nintendo's MO of waiting as long as possible to announce stuff compared to everyone else

yeah fuck waiting four years between announcement and release

i got Sonic Mania and Celeste. Sonic is really good. the gameplay is super smooth. the music is excellent. the level selection is like a mashup of the greatest 16-bit sequences w tweaked designs. like they went in and found spots (not all of them lol) where player momentum gets interrupted by bad enemy placement or whatever and fix that. so the level design is nice, the coding is VERY nice, very fast. these devs know what they are doing, and Sonic was very nearly as fast as i remember it on the Genesis.

Celeste is cool but it is a single screen insta-respawn Meat Boy type game where you die over and over figuring out how to get past a one screen full of traps at a time. does it have vertical scrolling or linear levels at all? also it mixes pixel art with vector art and that always bugs me heh but thats fine whatever. the levels are very cool and the game pixel art is very nice.

Celeste is cool but it is a single screen insta-respawn Meat Boy type game where you die over and over figuring out how to get past a one screen full of traps at a time.

yep. if you keep going, you will die hundreds of times.

does it have vertical scrolling
yep

or linear levels
all levels have a beginning screen and an end screen, and although there are tons of secrets and sidepaths to discover, you're essentially following a main path to the end of each level.

I never did unlock the Core but beating the regular game was very satisfying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of9GOMM9HPg

This revelation that dunkey is white is a little concerning

I am racist enough to assume that someone that unfunny can only ever have been white.

This time of year's always a lull for new releases. It will ramp up again in October/November.

I think Dunkey is funny. Also, fwiw he may be Puerto Rican.

getting the calipers out to speculate on the ethnicity of a youtuber is def a valuable direction for this thread to go in imo

Yeah, it's not a good thing. Tbh, it's sort of a meme among his fans, and it sucks there, too. Anyway he's funny.

I bought Death Road to Canada because it was discounted to $11, I think, which is not bad. I wasn't interested at first because it seemed like another 8-bit dungeon crawler rogue like whatever, but then I saw it described as Oregon Trail with zombies, and learned that it's infused with tons of weird humor, so I decided, what the heck.

for me Monster Hunter works best on portable so I'm happy to see this finally getting localized

HUNT ANYWHERE. HUNT ANY WAY. HUNT ULTIMATE.

Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate arrives on Nintendo Switch on August 28th. #MHGU pic.twitter.com/pU2wqji7ft

— Monster Hunter (@monsterhunter) May 10, 2018

I’ll probably try that, I have never Hun’d Mons and I am not gonna get a PS4 ever probably and who needs “quality of life improvements” anyways