Mario Kart locally is a hell of a lot more fun than I thought it would be - especially the new Battle mode.
Even with just two people sitting around, battle was tons of fun thanks to bots.
Judging by the test punch weekend, I think the soon to be released Arms will be the killer multiplayer experience. Kart seems good too, but feels less directly interactive to me.
The Switch might be a total bust for me. I wrote earlier about Mario Kart. Zelda isn’t faring much better, at this point it’s mostly something I’m forcing myself to play in the hopes of “getting it”.
As far as I can tell it’s the most sterile and empty open world in a decade, inhabited by things so shallow that they aren’t even worth calling characters, rendered in beautiful low-res textures and mist. The melee combat system feels just plain bad, but that’s ok since the draconian weapon durability makes combat totally pointless anyway. The traversal is dull, slow, boring, tedious, and sluggish. The puzzle shrines are ok, in a dime-a-dozen indie physics puzzler way. Well, except the motion control puzzle shrines, which are basically unplayable since the motion controls make no sense at all. And hey, you can’t even know if the monotonous trudging toward a shrine is worth it at all, since it might turn out to be a miserable combat shrine instead.
If Mario Kart and Zelda are total misses, I suspect that Nintendo games just aren’t for me. And there probably aren’t going to be that many non-Nintendo major Switch releases. But maybe it’ll work as a indie platformer console, when traveling.
@jsnell Join me in the Zelda thread! I’m a lone voice of dissent there ;-) I’ve not really gone into much detail since my first impressions there but I share some of your sentiments.
The greatness in Zelda is exploring and getting lost in a masterfully handcrafted world and enjoying the emergent moments the world creates. If that doesn’t click with you then it kind of collapses.
I would also argue the moment-to-moment gameplay in Zelda is tight as a drum.
I also appreciate it’s probably the only open-world game that leaves all the jank behind. I didn’t run into any myself, at least. Just last night my son was playing Skyrim and ran into a hilarious bug where he dismounted off a horse but the camera did NOT and so he was playing the game from the perspective of the camera situated above the horse, watching himself in some sort of strange out of body situation. He tried to walk his character (tough in this situation, but doable) to a furnace to craft, got into his inventory, even walked all the way down the street (while his horse would sometimes wander around, and change the camera angle he was working with) to a locked door to try and pick it. That just moved the camera up into the sky, so he ended up having to load a previous save. Stuff like that never happened to me in Zelda, and I really appreciated it’s technical acumen.
My experience with Zelda thus far has been flawless. It’s feels like the freedom of Skyrim with the combat of Dark Souls and the polish of a Nintendo (or Blizzard) game. But, if you fundamentally dislike adventure games then I can see it not exciting you. I don’t like car racing games so the best Forza game ever made isn’t going to sell me a system.
Sure, I’ll take the Zelda-specific discussion to that thread :)
But it’s interesting what happens to what’s effectively a single-game system, when that game turns out not to work for you. The difference between 0 and 1 feels a lot larger than the difference between 1 and 2 :) It was easy for me to feel good about the PS4 despite only getting one game for it in the first 18 months, since it was a game I really liked. And eventually the pipeline of interesting PS4 exclusives filled up. With the Switch I’ve already struck out twice with extremely highly lauded games, so the odds are that I won’t be happy with future Nintendo releases either. It’s probably up to third parties to make this a useful console for me.
Zelda bounced off of me too. Many love it, but to me it had zero continuity by design. If you love cresting a random hill to try to solve whatever situation you find with your bag full of expendable tools…then it is a treasure chest of endless fun. I however could not find much meaning between any given hour of play over another hour other than one artificially inserted by my by the direction that I pushed Link. It’s a geographical scattering of millions of 10 minute puzzles that are disconnected. I also found its world and characters laughably barren, but that was probably because I played it right after Horizon. However, my reaction is in the minority.
Online is 20 dollars a year starting in 2018, includes downloads of classic Nintendo games like SMB3, Dr. Mario and Balloon Fight with added online multiplayer. The phone app and voice chat will launch sometime this year and be free until then. Like the other consoles, there will be no online play or voice chat without a sub.
In order to play online games with voice chat while also hearing the game you need some goofy dongle you plug into the phone and the Switch. Maybe you just need a really long extension cord to play while docked. idk seems like a mess, glad I don’t care about voice chat.
If you are going to charge me for online multiplayer, you had better well give me a freaking real gamertag and not some kinda numeric friend code.
20 dollars a year is not cheap at all! But it all depends on how much content you get.
I will pay 20 dollars a month with my eyes closed if it brings a Playstation Plus like VC library, and that’s without touching the online stuff.
That seems to be what they’re doing. No word on the size of the classic library yet but at least it no longer seems to be a different game each month:
“Nintendo Switch Online subscribers will have ongoing access to a library of classic games with added online play. Users can play as many of the games as they want, as often as they like, as long as they have an active subscription.” (kotaku)
But it’s only NES at this stage:
“At launch, the classic game library will include NES games. Super NES games continue to be under consideration, but we have nothing further to announce at this time.” (ign)
Hmm it’s worth it if I can play the NES games offline.
One-third the cost of the other two services with classic games I actually want to play? Sign me up.
I’d really like to see SNES games, but if the online works then $20/yr is great by comparison.
If they keep adding games to the catalog each month this service will be amazing. I’ve been wishing for Nintendo to offer this for a long time, essentially Netflix for their back catalog.
Their online has been superb in the games that really require it like Splatoon. Seamless is not an overstatement.
And their online for Smash (both 3ds and WiiU) has always been horrible. Just the worst. It would be unacceptable to charge for the likes of this going forward.
And Splatoon was anything but seamless in its hey day. But things improved as popularity waned.