Topic: Nintendo Switch --OT--

Played through wave 3 of the Mario Kart 8 DLC today with friends. Didn't like this wave as much as the previous one. I'm getting fed up with all the tracks based off on real-world cities. They all look the same, except for a few that stand out like Tokyo and Sydney. The new Christmas track wasn't as good as I expected it to be. It looks great, but it's way too short and generic in design. Shouldn't come as a surprise that the ones I liked are returning tracks like Maple Treeway, Peach Gardens and Rainbow Road from 3DS. Alpine Pass is pretty good as well. So at least 50 percent of this wave was good.

I just wish they would stop with the bloody city tracks. I'd rather have more retro tracks like DK Mountain, Peach Beach, Bowser's Castle from 64 and so on.

I started Pokémon Scarlet yesterday and can definitely see myself enjoying it despite all its issues. The world just seems like it’s going to be fun to explore and I love how upbeat and colourful Pokémon games are. I’m looking forward to finishing Dragon Age: Inquisition and getting into it properly.

Yesterday, me and my friends decided to check out some N64 games on Switch Online and we chose Pokémon Snap because I thought it'd be fun to play a game where we compete for a high-score. That didn't work out as I thought since the game tracks a cumulative score, so instead we decided to just play through the entire game. The game isn't as long as I thought, it only has six main levels with a seventh bonus one. We managed to unlock all main levels and played through them in just two hours. After that we felt pretty much content with the game. It's fun but there's just not much to do, so I'm glad we experienced it through Switch Online instead of buying it.

As a side note though, I think it's awesome how versatile the online component is in the N64 Switch Online app. You can obviously play N64 games with multiplayer online, but you can also swap out the controlling player so that everyone gets a turn to play. That's how we played through Pokémon Snap, we played one level each. It's just such a great system, not only can you play through multiplayer N64 games but also single-player ones with other people. Because honestly, I don't really have the motivation to play some of these older games alone. So it's nice to play through them with friends.

It's also made me interested in buying New Pokémon Snap on Switch. Maybe I'll get it if I find a cheap copy of it.

@LtSarge That online controller swapping/playing against each other is part of the emulator for all 4 current NSO systems. It's what will allow Goldeneye to have online play while Xbox won't, because the emulator itself assigns controller ports to network ports. Pretty nifty, if obvious to do.

And yeah, experiencing these games via this way does really add something, especially getting stuck and swapping control to someone on the other side of the planet. And they don't even advertise this festure

Been playing the Harvestella Prologue Demo. Despite the Switch’s specs, I still find myself being impressed with how a lot of Switch games look.

I’m enjoying the game enough that I’m tempted to buy it once I’m done with Pokémon Scarlet.

Lol, took some screenshots of a mobile game ad that was blatantly stealing XC2 character models.

EDIT: game's name is EDGE: Mech-Ascent.

Got Pokémon Violet, I’ll start it sooner rather than later but I still have a little bit left of Arceus and Xenoblade 1!

Even my brother-in-law who has played maybe three console games in his entire life has been playing through Pokemon Violet. The sales for this generation are going to be absolutely monstrous.

So that's Pokémon Violet wrapped up. It took me 49 hours and I pretty much explored everything.

This was a phenomenal experience and easily the best Pokémon game ever made. For the first time, it actually felt like you were on an adventure. There was also so much stuff to do in the world. Usually, Pokémon games take around 20 hours to finish (at least for me) but you can easily spend 50+ hours in Scarlet/Violet.

I'd also like to retract my previous criticism about the lack of level scaling in this game. The fact that you can wander into an area with high-leveled Pokémon, or tackle a gym that has a gym leader with high level Pokémon makes the experience more challenging. People have complained about the lack of difficulty in Pokémon games for ages now. Finally, we have a game that's actually challenging. This should absolutely be the new direction for the series. The only thing I'd like though is for the devs to add indicators on the map showing which level you need to be for each area, kinda like in Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

Furthermore, I really enjoyed the story and characters this time around. There wasn't much story but what was there was really emotional. It made me care about the characters a lot. This is the first time I've ever cared about the characters in a Pokémon game.

The ending was so freaking cool. Didn't expect the story to go in a direction like that lol. If this is what we can expect from Pokémon stories in the future, I'm definitely excited for what comes next.

So yeah, I'm really glad to have played this game. It finally feels like Game Freak has produced a game that doesn't feel like an experiment but a full-blown entry with a new direction for the series. If they just take their time with the next game, they can easily top Scarlet/Violet. Either way, I'm actually excited for the future of Pokémon.

@LtSarge I was pretty happy with the level of challenge in Scarlet's endgame. And Legends: Arceus was challenging throughout. It's very nice not being able to sleepwalk through their more recent games. I've never wanted, like, SMT levels of difficulty, just something that'd keep me on my toes, and both of their recent games have accomplished this.

@Ralizah It's good to hear that Arceus is challenging as well. I'll have to give it a go soon, hopefully next year as long as Game Freak doesn't release a new game lol. I'm glad that I skipped it in favour of Violet as I would've been absolutely burned out on Pokémon at this rate.

@LtSarge It's most likely that 2023 has DLC for Scarlet/Violet, that's how they approached Gen 8 (the mainline Pokemon content in 2020 was the Sword/Shield Expansion Pass).

So, a few of Nintendo's games get... well, pretty much the game equivalent of an anime theme song. Well, the English version of the Fire Emblem Engage opening leaked, and... uh...

It's 100% cringe, but I... kinda like it? Reminds me of when I was a kid and watching the butchered 4Kids dub of an anime, complete with an entirely altered English-language theme.

@Ralizah I never got into anime anywhere near as much as a lot of people, so I can safely say I don't like the song. Still, if I ever played the game, I know it would eventually get stuck in my head whether I like it or not. I guess it at least somewhat accomplishes what it is intended to then.

@KilloWertz I'm playing Shadows of Valentia right now, and the tone couldn't be more different, even down to the opening movie, lol.

Fire Emblem is such a weird series, since new entries keep oscillating between anime cringe and tragedy-ridden dark-ish fantasy narratives.

The next game in the series is supposedly a remake of Genealogy of the Holy War, which is a sweeping and (for the series) fairly grounded war epic, so it seems like this process is going to continue!

@Ralizah And that is an opening I can get behind. That was actually really good, and impressive looking for a 3DS game. I obviously also liked the opening for Three Houses even though I only played it for about 15 hours.

I don't mind the actual intro for Engage. I just don't like the song, but like I said before, it'd probably still get stuck in my head regardless. The alternating tone for the series is pretty weird though.

Played Kirby's Dream Buffet with a couple of friends tonight. It's honestly a very fun game! It's like Nintendo's own version of Fall Guys and it's really good. For a tenner, it's certainly worth the money. Definitely going to keep playing this with my friends from here on out. Be warned though, don't play this game without some snacks since it's really easy to get hungry after you start playing it lol.

We also played some of the Kirby 64 mini-games and one of them was like Bomberman, which was surprisingly really fun. We played it for like half an hour lol. Really addicting.

@Ralizah It would make my heart explode if they cringeified Genealogy. It would suit an 80s anime style á la Legend of the Galactic Heroes but modern Japanese gaming seems obsessed with shoehorning the exact same anime art style into every series when anime is an incredibly diverse medium. I’m not expecting a game to look like Belladonna of Sadness or something, but less of this hyper-clean beige art style would be great.

@nessisonett I mean, it's the same with all mediums, right? Certain aesthetic styles or approaches become popular and permeate the landscape for a period. Most Western animation on TV has the horrifying thin line, low-detail animation style. Pretty much all animated movies out of the West, with a few rare exception, have that generic Pixar/Dreamworks look now. The same logic applies to video games as well, with many, many games looking similar to other games.

In the case of Fire Emblem 4, they could go for a well-known illustrator with a unique style like they did with Echoes, which has some of the loveliest character portrait art in the series. A hybrid modern/retro style like in the new Urusei Yatsura anime would be cool as well.

I just... don't know how they're going to do Genealogy's gameplay flow justice, given those humongous maps aren't as impressive now as they were back in the day. They need to be able to convey an immense sense of scale to do the project justice.

@Ralizah Now I’ve got the Dreamworks Smirk on my mind!

In all seriousness, I don’t think Genealogy would survive a port unscathed gameplay wise, it’ll be cut to ribbons so that it’s in much more manageable chunks as that suits the audience that they’ve cultivated since Awakening. There’ll always be the original and the fan translation is brilliant but it really would be nice for the game to be taken to a modern standard while maintaining its unique charms. For me, the massive maps make it feel almost like a tabletop wargame, with individual skirmish areas set around a map and smaller objectives leading to a main goal giving it a much more military feel. The ‘horrors of war’ angle would probably survive intact in a Genealogy remake compared to Three Houses which undermines its own seriousness at least. I do think that a 3D engine could make the maps feel appropriately impressive though, perspective in the original flattens the more vertical maps. Echoes really is underrated given how well it manages that exact task, the game is modern enough while still being quintessentially classic Fire Emblem.