The Nintendo Switch

I rolled a ball through a stanislaw lem story. Then i looked at some blood stains and died.

I forgot all about Katamari! But $20 I can deal with, so bought it. I've never played, but it looks like stupid batshit fun.

It’s subtle zenlike fun mostly

the song...is catchy

Yes

thats the most famous part of the game tbh

I've never played the game and I have the song stuck in my head a lot.

ok, played it for the first time and, well, this game is pretty weird. I could barely figure out the tutorial. I'm going to set it aside for now and go back to cuphead though.

It started weird for me and then i was hooked. Headphones are a must if playing portable.

Josh

lol

local video gamer struggles with new game, goes back to notoriously easy game cuphead instead

Ha. But I know what to *do* in Cuphead! I literally can't figure out the tutorial of Katamari. Like, the actual controls on my Pro. For example, when I'm supposed to press r (I think) to jump, I'm not sure if I'm actually jumping. Or when I think I'm supposed to press both sticks down to quick turn, it ... doesn't do anything? I literally can't tell! These are just the empty room instructions, fwiw. I played the actual 10cm tutorial level and that worked out ok, but I'm worried I will need those other controls at some point. (Same with Cuphead, btw, doing OK at the start but can't tell if I'm not beating the slot machine level because I'm not using something I'm supposed to use or just ... not beating it. I think the latter! I can't jump through the stupid bouncing yellow balls right).

Currently taking a very brief break on Zelda, btw, for anyone wondering! Then I'll get camel and fire mountain monster. I have the master sword and everything else I want/need, I think.

dark souls feels like zelda on hbo

That's funny, because I played Dark Souls first and it made me feel like Zelda was Dark Souls on Disney.

I rolled over a patch of cymbal playing toy monkeys and my 3 year old absolutely lost it

katamari may be the better of these two very similar games

there's a lot of rolling in both

fuggit, i just rebought katamari for like the fourth time

yeah i bought it the other day too. first time to own it, though!

i may have mentioned this before but last year i found out the demo disc for "katamari damacy" has a shoegaze song on it

it's a pretty good shoegaze song too

I got a little carried away with the latest sale and picked up Katamari, Rocket League and Disgaea 5.

This is my first time playing a Disgaea game, I've only played a small handful of tactical RPGs, but about 10 hours in and this is pretty fun so far.

katamari switch is, weirdly, buggy as fuck and the controls are particularly wonky... of course, i'm aware the wonky controls are part of the gameplay but they're especially stubborn and prone to getting you stuck in corners.
that said, i beat it and i suppose i'd recommend it. It's katamari!

I could have sworn when it was released I saw a whole bunch of reviews recommending remapping the controls or something. Anyway, good to know it wasn't just me!

Anyone know anything about that Darkwood game coming in a couple of weeks? It looks pretty cool, sort of a top-down survival game?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7i65PybwKw

I didn't have a WiiU, but I've been watching MarioMaker streams for years--I cannot wait for MarioMaker 2.

Mario Maker has the temerity to release the same week as 2 of the few games i want to play more than it so i'm probably gonna be late to the Making party

Katamari's terrible controls are a deal-breaker for me! The game has never been so un-fun to play

can't argue with that.

Takahashi may have been right that the game doesn't really work with offset sticks

switch katamari is the only katamari i've ever known (outside of playing a demo in Target/Best Buy/etc. many years ago, probably), and this feels like an advantage for building control hell tolerance

also i can cite the poor controls for my undergrown katamari in arguments with my dad, the king

i don't remember the controls on the originals being particularly sharp either

Finally got to play some Switch games. P.S. If you don't have Baba Is You you're doin' it wrong.

i don't remember the controls on the originals being particularly sharp either

yeah, same.

you're rolling a big asymmetrical chunk of awkwardly-shaped stuff around spaces littered with more awkwardly-shaped stuff, maybe the controls should be clunky and frustrating

oh they're not sharp on the ps for sure! but they are NOTABLY more awkward on the switch. and not just for precision; I can't even play it for very long as it ends up hurting my hands.

For a game that mostly involves rolling around, it's astounding how weird and counterintuitive the Switch controls are. Shit like push up to turn left or whatever.

the fundamental dual-analog controls are the same as they ever were, and they make sense to me. you just pretend like you're the little dude holding the giant ball with your arms out in front of you. if you wanted to spin the ball in place to the left, you would push forward on the right side while pulling back on the left, and that's exactly what you do with the analog sticks

yeah, they feel kind of good to me. the weirdness of them also complements the overall experience.

and of course, just as in real life, if you wanted to do a turbo boost forward you would wildly and rapidly push your arms forward and backwards until it happens, suffering through multiple false-starts and accidentally facing the wrong direction in the process

my only control beef is with that stupid turbo boost, which i've never been able to pull off with any consistency on any platform

the ultimate would be a golden tee style fixed spinning ball that you could walk around with AR goggles

but we simply aren't there yet

yet

you're rolling a big asymmetrical chunk of awkwardly-shaped stuff around spaces littered with more awkwardly-shaped stuff, maybe the controls should be clunky and frustrating

yeah, they feel kind of good to me. the weirdness of them also complements the overall experience.

Both exactly right. These controls aren't unwieldy because they're badly designed, they're unwieldy because a) what you're doing is unwieldy, it's a laughably awkward feat you're attempting and it feels laughably awkward on purpose, and b) because if katamari worked on a simple and frictionless single stick push-left-go-left control system there'd be literally no game left, 100% of the fun here comes from struggling to get this big dumb sticky ball to do what you want it to do. If your response when that goes wrong is "grr" instead of "lol" then yeah you're just playing the wrong game.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_(1980_video_game)

jim otm

I respect your opinion, but it is kind of bonkers to me that anybody would defend clunky controls as intentional, in keeping with the game.