The Nintendo Switch

Haven't played a life sim since Animal Crossing on GameCube I think and that didn't get nearly as much love from me as Harvest Moon 64 did so I'm excited for Thursday

yeah I've put off playing Stardew waiting for this port, i'm excited

yeah i'm in there as well

Should be a hit at our house, I suspect I'm not going to be the one playing

music and art look cool, but second-job-as-game has never appealed to me

IN FRONT

Finished Golf Story just in time for Stardew Valley. Lots of good jokes and a decent if somewhat easy golf game. The camera pullback to show the entire map at the end was a great moment and made me laugh.

Today's agenda is
Work
Haircut
Stardew Valley

I'm skipping the haircut

My hairdresser is hard to book so I gotta keep that appointment D:

the solution is to not have hair imo. more time for gaming

no time for IRL work until the Stardew Valley work is done, imo

I am honestly so jazzed to start breaking rocks

some good prognostication lols upthread re: the Switch's chances in the marketplace btw

ecstatic to be proven wrong tbh

lol yeah I just re-read the start of the thread this morning, good stuff

I want sold on it until I saw it in person for the first time and then it was pretty immediate

lmao the reveal at the end of golf story, can't believe i didn't notice that

bought Stardew Valley on my laptop 7 months ago, played an hour, never played it again because laptops are heavy and hot and run windows 10.
got it on Switch, can pull it out of my work draw and play 10 minutes whenever. gonna play a shit ton.

been holding off on playing axiom verge until the switch version came out, sunk a couple of hours into it over the weekend. it's real good! love a metroidvania

stardew is surprisingly great, been fun.

Bootstrapping my farm is a lot of work, worried that that first chicken coop or fruit tree sapling will be perpetually out of reach

after playing through about 5-6 seasons on the PS4 version, i got a lot little burned out playing by myself. but i've been patiently waiting for the multiplayer patch, which seems to be on the way:

https://stardewvalley.net/stardew-valley-multiplayer-news/

multiplayer stardew seems like such a nobrainer

is there any ilx hivemind consensus on --

axiom verge?
lovers in a dangerous spacetime?
golf story?
oxenfree?

i played axiom verge on PS4 and can confirm that it scratches the metroid itch, if that's what you're looking for.

lovers in a dangerous spacetime is v cute but somewhat shallow game that is definitely intended primarily for 2 players

Golf story is pleasant and very much an unofficial successor to the game boy Mario golf games, though in the end I didn't feel it was as good as those. It's twee, unpolished, and not very deep, but it doesn't overstay its welcome. I felt the courses were too gimmicky to have replay value as a pure golf game after finishing the story mode, unlike Mario golf which i replayed endlessly as a kid.

Re: Axiom Verge, is it mostly a Metroid clone or does it have it's own unique mechanics? It didn't grab me visually when I looked at it in the eShop.

on the other side of the metroid spectrum, Steamworld Dig 2 is the most enjoyable indie game I've played on switch so far

others might want to weigh in, but i would say it leans toward metroid clone. it's about 80% as good as a metroid game, at <50% of the cost, so it comes out pretty well. it's the kind of game that you tell people is pretty good, and mean it, but then late at night you think "will they be disappointed? probably not. but maybe. probably not though"

the graphics have that NES-and-a-half look that suggests that, while aiming for a distinctive look would have been too much work, so would have been accepting the actual aesthetic constraints of 8-bit visuals. anyway while looking at pictures on gis to determine how i felt about this is found this:

http://res.cloudinary.com/lmn/image/upload/c_fill,h_169,w_300/e_sharpen:100/f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto/v1/gameskinnyc/a/x/i/axiom-45cef.jpg

and yeah no, i feel dumb enough playing videogames already without them insulting me in the name of self-awareness

especially when whoever wrote the dialogue thinks they've earned semi-colons and can't get their adjective order right

Started Castlevania 4 on the snes mini and was disappointed to find that it isn't a metroidvania.

Golf story is pleasant and very much an unofficial successor to the game boy Mario golf games, though in the end I didn't feel it was as good as those. It's twee, unpolished, and not very deep, but it doesn't overstay its welcome. I felt the courses were too gimmicky to have replay value as a pure golf game after finishing the story mode, unlike Mario golf which i replayed endlessly as a kid.

i am enjoying this game so far, i think not having mario golf to compare it to helps

did you hear that the NES golf is i. built into the the Switch as an Easter egg ii. only available on the day of Satoru Iwata's death?

(this is the most uncle-who-works-at-Nintendo-sounding thing ever, but apparently true)

What is the date and means of access then?

July 11 and doing Iwata's hand gesture with the joycons. It only works on version 1.0 of the switch OS though apparently, the first time you connect to the internet and update it gets locked away permanently.

I think people determined that it was included by the devs as a sort of digital 'omamori', a good luck charm that's not supposed to be opened.

that's pretty wild

http://switchbrew.org/index.php?title=Flog

OK so the port of Tardew Valley is fucking atrocious and I'm not fixing that typo. I am having a hard time remembering the last time the control scheme was this frustrating and I've played a lot of ported stuff on iOS (well documented elsewhere). There's no tutorial, just mashing shit and hoping it works, and no rhyme or reason to most of it either. We basically gave up after realizing we couldn't figure out how to actually buy anything from the store. I have to assume all the glowing reviews are just based on the PC edition and people assuming the transitive property of fun would automatically flow to the Switch port. Ugh.

Mario Kart 8 on the other hand is something we can all enjoy together so that was at least $60 well spent

I am really enjoying stardew, though i'm taking a break. it is not real clear what you need to do, yes. I kinda thought that was part of the appeal

xpost that's a bummer to hear about the control scheme, because i had heard it was better than the PS4 version? at least on the PS4, you were required to move around a mouse cursor using your analog stick, which was incredibly annoying in a game that involves tons of inventory management. i that that on the switch they replaced that with the normal system of just using the d-pad to navigate menus and inventory?

It is clear you should be allowed to buy things from the store if you have enough money. overcoming completely nonintuitive control mappings should not be the most challenging aspect of any game.

I've been enjoying stardew valley by listening to the soundtrack at work. feels like it must be at least 25% of the appeal.

there's still a fucking mouse cursor on the switch edition

I might start my own stupid farm to see if I can help the rest of the fam get un-stuck. right now the girls team is coping with ptsd from looking up help online and finding answers only applicable to the PC edition.

welcome to games made by literally one person

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1yrVPSvl1s
instabuy

that looks awesome

this console is so good it has me on the verge of being interested in a freaking Xenoblade game

I'm getting the Xenoblade, because I want to do combos and collect Pokémon Blades

Are the Xenoblade plots anything like the mind blowing all-genre stone soup of Xenogears

I don't know any other games in this family but I do know one of the trailers for this one described something like 9 factions that play into the plot if that's any indication