The Nintendo Switch

Man, I thought I was facing a boss in Hollow Knight but it just turns out to be a hard to beat Husk dude, lol. This game is challenging!

finished shovel knight first campaign. great fun! gonna leave a little break before hitting the followup ones.

sorry if i missed this discussion upthread, but do you all typically use switch as a handheld, dock it and use a larger display, or back and forth? i've been doing about half and half.

Ours rarely leaves the house because it’s the family’s but pulling it out to use handheld on the couch right in front of the TV is a great way to take up less space in the living room with whatever nonsense I’m playing.

i play about half and half. when docked i go through a big monitor or on the wall w a projector. but it's so great to be able to play some quick games before i go to sleep without sitting in front of a huge monitor. or on the bus. i don't have a car & use public transportation so lots of opportunities to play Switch there.

I play mostly docked and exclusively at home. Well, I sort of take that back, certain games lend themselves to portable more than others, and it's useful when my family is watching something on TV. But other games I need the big screen to see what's going on.

quick games before i go to sleep

i tried this once but couldn't figure out how to be comfortable. i ended up laying down pretty flat, holding the screen above me, and nearly dropped the whole thing on my face

https://cdn.thewirecutter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/nintendo-switch-accessories-lowres-8614.jpg

this seems like the business for bed-switching

I keep the dock in a cabinet and the weak wireless controllers seem to struggle with it. I'll use the kickstand with detached controllers for some games, but I mostly act like it's a new DS. Finally got Mario+Rabbids. Feels kind of like Zack and Wiki felt on wii -- a different kind of game for me but probably good?

xpost i wonder if that thing could be attached to my nose or ears somehow - would be nice to position the screen a couple feet away from my head at all times like a steadycam

i mostly play docked at home but use the portability a lot when I visit my parents etc

god I'm excited for Smash

tbh Nintendo didn't leave you much else to be excited for. they didn't even mention online at E3, surprisingly.

they didn't mention online because they already provided an update about it last month, and it's basically a shit sandwich anyway so why draw attention to it in that setting

e3 mostly made me excited for fire emblem which is gonna be a long wait

Daemon X Machina could be pretty sick. I’m not familiar with Armored Core, maybe I should look that up and see what they’re like.

it's what from software used to make before they invented dark souls. mech action games. kinda bland visually

When I first got the Switch I almost never played in handheld mode, always Docked - especially because I only played Zelda - but as time went on I got too lazy to turn on the TV and just played it in handheld

valkyria chronicles 4 out on september 25. hopefully the switch version is good

Speak of the devil, Inside and Limbo coming in a couple of weeks, but no idea what they are going to charge.

unless they say otherwise, i'd assume they're not changing anything. they're just ports, right?

probably will be 15 or 20 bucks that's become pretty standard for small scope indies

maybe cheaper for limbo since it's pretty old now

That's not hindered game prices on Switch. They come late, higher priced and, sometimes, degraded in quality. I mean, I've complained before, but DK: Tropical Freeze was an old game and a Nintendo port, but it costs MORE on Switch than it did on Wii-U!

Hollow Knight is running like a charm though.

I want to say also that Dark Souls Remastered seemed priced the same across the platforms, though of course, it came out for other platforms last month and remains MIA for Switch. Which makes me suspicious of what they are doing to it to fix whatever problem they were having.

Nintendo's whole strategy is "protect the selling price of our games" which has a halo effect on indie devs of allowing them to do the same. $20 indies seem unjustifiable to steam shoppers when AAA games are 75% off three months after launch or whatever but they look like a good deal on the eshop

anyway I would've paid $60 for Celeste

would have paid that for Golf Story, Brodus

games are not expensive software for the amount of resources that go into making them, even at $60

'full price' has held at $60 through 2 decades of inflation and games have like 20x the content they used to at that price

lumines remastered is out next week, kinda feeling like I might need something meditative like that in my life right now

I'm gonna get that. I hope Tetsuya Mizuguchi's Expensive Tetris Tetris Effect comes to Switch. Announced for PS4/PSVR but nobody has said the word "exclusive"…

lumines is like the one puzzle game that's even more primal & hypnotic than tetris

'full price' has held at $60 through 2 decades of inflation and games have like 20x the content they used to at that price

We've gone over this before. In the case of Donkey Kong specifically, "full price" means more than the more or less same game cost just a couple of years ago for the previous Nintendo system. I totally get why God of War or whatever would cost $60, but when we're talking smaller indies ... if Hollow Knight can be $15, more indie titles can be $15. And if Dark Souls Remastered can be $40, more games can be $40.

if someone thinks they can make more money charging $40, they will do it. but i suspect there are more axes than old/new and nintendo/indie when you break down game pricing.

maybe imagine that ganondorf is in charge of nintendo switch game pricing if that will help inspire you to actually play zelda

also any game with a physical release is hard to price under $40 because of the manufacturing costs and Nintendo doesn't like it as the platform holder when there's a difference between physical and digital price

"doesn't like" I believe here means "strictly forbids"

they allow it sometimes with indie games if it's like an after the fact limited print run thing for the small subset of people who want physical copies of every game they play

switch is apparently very popular w.indie devs because it's easier for them to make money on it. are nintendo less aggressive in taking a cut ?

I hypothesize it's (1) land-rush effect, (2) less price-sensitive customer base than Steam shoppers. I certainly expect indie sales on Switch to regress to the mean somewhat as the eshop gets more crowded, especially if its discovery experience never improves, but on the other hand all the reasons to prefer a console to a PC for gaming when all else is equal apply to the Switch and the "portable" hook is a hell of a hook.

inside is so good btw. if you've never played it, you should definitely pick it up

Depends on the price!

I'd love to know what the eshop is up to, crowd-wise, because there seem to be a million games in there! It's pretty poorly designed, too.

And anyway, I get that there are costs etc., but I still haven't heard a good explanation for why Tropical Freeze was more money on the Switch than it was on the Wii-U, other than "because they can."

it's capitalism, there doesn't need to be another reason

the question is more 'why did tropical freeze get discounted on the Wii u' and the answer is pretty stupid, there was a big backlash against it pre release because people felt they were entitled to metroid prime 4 from Retro and it was not that, it even got slammed in some reviews for not being a completely different game than it was.

im still waiting for a good explanation why a 720p game upgraded to 1080p and playable on an entirely new system complete with portable functionality should be cheaper than the worse initial version

usually old games get discounted because they age but that game would look & play exactly the same if it was made today. the wii u port thing is a weird situation where it was a console that no one bought but had a ton of good exclusives so why not just rerelease them as if they're new

I'd be more ok with these money grabs if they'd at least offer a discount to those of us who were stupid enough to buy a Wii U and buy them the first time around.

wii u probably had the 3rd best game library of all time after 3ds and ps2. i Believe in the switch's ability to surpass these though

been playing a ton of rabbids but spend most of that time wondering if I'm actually enjoying it.

Looks like Limbo is listed on the eshop (though not for sale yet?) at $19.99. Limbo is $9.99. Maybe that seems about right?