Nintendo Switch - Games You Can Play Right Now

I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo also drastically modified the UI to make it work better for regular controllers, either. Nothing says a new Mario Maker would need to have the same interface it had on WiiU and 3DS, and Nintendo is one of a few companies that would experiment and prototype until they found a new UI/UX for a controller that felt intuitive and easy to learn.

Remember, everyone was using shoulder-buttons for "next weapon" or "previous weapon", or limiting you to just two weapons, when Valve stepped in with their Half-Life 2 port and said "Hey maybe we should use this D-Pad for something".

Spoiler:

I know they weren't the first to do this, even in the FPS space, but it never really caught on until they did it because that's how this industry works.

garion333 wrote:
mrtomaytohead wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:

NSMB U isn't going to drop in price any time soon, and I doubt used sales will drop much. 2D Mario games are hugely popular, typically outselling their 3D counterparts. It being a Wii U release works to its advantage here: virtually no one has already played it, so it's effectively a new release.

Virtually no one is very relative, with 5.77 Million sold on Wii U, just shy of it's 3D counterpart 3D World at 5.80 Million. Actually, looking at the Nintendo Software sold numbers, the only time the 2D game has majorly outsold the 3D game was on the Wii. Both 3DS and Wii U they were in the same millions count. The DS did not have a proper new 3D Mario, just a re-release of Mario 64. I know that goes against the feeling that 2D Mario just does better in sales, but reality is not always what people think it is.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Well sure, if you decide that one of the times that happened just doesn't count.

But we have four instances where a 2D Mario game and a 3D Mario game were on the same platform. In three of those four instances, the 2D game sold more copies. Sometimes by a little, sometimes by a lot, but I am in no way incorrect in saying that, based on the evidence we have, that a 2D game will typically outsell a 3D one.

NSMB Switch has outsold NSMB Wii U by 25% in retail sales in the UK: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articl...

Definitely not looking at a price drop anytime soon.

Correction, there was an error and NSMB Switch has outsold NSMB Wii U by 56% at retail.

NSMB U Deluxe needs to put spin jump on its own face button. You have 4 face buttons, come on. The second B button press is just awkward as hell.

Yes, I get it, single joy-con control support, which, fine, keep the other methods of spin jump around, but that's by far the minority control setup people will play with.

It's not mapped to the shoulder button? That's where it was on Wii U.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

It's not mapped to the shoulder button? That's where it was on Wii U.

Which was a travesty!

Why? I thought it worked well. You could put your thumb across the run and jump buttons and use the spin without moving it.

Pretty sure we've had this discussion before. Completely moving it off the face buttons is aggravating. Way back in Super Mario World the shoulder buttons and A were spin, you had a choice. They changed it up and forced you to use the shoulder while all my muscle memory was with A. My response time and timing with the shoulder button has never been as good as with A. I've adjusted, but I truly believe leaving all the jumping to the thumb is superior to having mental pathways where one jump is with your thumb and the other is with your finger.

^ What he said.

One of my biggest beefs (and it might be my only one) with the Switch is that the controller buttons aren't configurable. My muscle memory is the Xbox controller and so all the main buttons all seem backwards to me!

garion333 wrote:

I've adjusted, but I truly believe leaving all the jumping to the thumb is superior to having mental pathways where one jump is with your thumb and the other is with your finger.

That doesn't make any sense. Your thumbs and fingers do a variety of actions in all manner of games. You've got some SNES muscle memory, and that's cool.

bekkilyn wrote:

One of my biggest beefs (and it might be my only one) with the Switch is that the controller buttons aren't configurable. My muscle memory is the Xbox controller and so all the main buttons all seem backwards to me!

It's a double-bastard as well, because after binging on Zelda, when I pick up the 360 controller attached to my PC, now I'm pressing the wrong bloody buttons on that one too!

Jonman wrote:
bekkilyn wrote:

One of my biggest beefs (and it might be my only one) with the Switch is that the controller buttons aren't configurable. My muscle memory is the Xbox controller and so all the main buttons all seem backwards to me!

It's a double-bastard as well, because after binging on Zelda, when I pick up the 360 controller attached to my PC, now I'm pressing the wrong bloody buttons on that one too!

This is one of the weirder parts of gaming history, because if you go back and play older PlayStation titles then the confirm and cancel buttons will line up with where the face buttons were on the SNES and Nintendo systems following. However, at some point, they started swapping them in America and, I presume, Europe. So on the PlayStation, O continued to be "confirm" and X "cancel", but they changed them around in the states. If you play FFVII, confirm is O, which is where the A button was on SNES. But either FFVIII or FFIX swaps it around, even though I believe it remains the same as FFVII in Japan.

I have no idea if this is still the case or Japan adopted Western standards, though this article from Kotaku and this post on PlayStation's support forums suggest this remained the standard in 2012 and 2015. So in Japan, the button layout for PlayStation is largely the same as SNES was, and therefore as Switch is. I don't recall how the DreamCast controller worked, but I think it was the Xbox that has caused all this confusion of "A is on the bottom of the face button diamond".

Basically, we're all filthy Americans acting confused when someone else isn't using miles for distance or pounds for weight.

garion333 wrote:

My response time and timing with the shoulder button has never been as good as with A. I've adjusted, but I truly believe leaving all the jumping to the thumb is superior to having mental pathways where one jump is with your thumb and the other is with your finger.

I put up with it because I had to, but I always hated using the A button for an action button. Megaman X used A for dash, but thankfully they allowed you to remap the controls and I always remapped dash to the R (or sometimes L) button . You want your thumb to always be resting on the Y and B buttons, but to press A you had to move your thumb which was slow and prone to mistakes. The alternative method, The Claw, worked well, but was physically painful.

Djinn wrote:
garion333 wrote:

My response time and timing with the shoulder button has never been as good as with A. I've adjusted, but I truly believe leaving all the jumping to the thumb is superior to having mental pathways where one jump is with your thumb and the other is with your finger.

I put up with it because I had to, but I always hated using the A button for an action button. Megaman X used A for dash, but thankfully they allowed you to remap the controls and I always remapped dash to the R (or sometimes L) button . You want your thumb to always be resting on the Y and B buttons, but to press A you had to move your thumb which was slow and prone to mistakes. The alternative method, The Claw, worked well, but was physically painful.

I can't speak to Megaman X (been a loooooong time since I played it) but holding down Y to run and swinging my thumb over to A isn't that difficult. I don't have large hands either, though maybe that is why it's easier. Not sure.

In Mario you're never going to hit A and B at the same time, so having spin on A is fine. (Y and X are both used for running, fireballs, etc.) Megaman might be different because A and B were useful in conjunction with one another.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
garion333 wrote:

I've adjusted, but I truly believe leaving all the jumping to the thumb is superior to having mental pathways where one jump is with your thumb and the other is with your finger.

That doesn't make any sense. Your thumbs and fingers do a variety of actions in all manner of games. You've got some SNES muscle memory, and that's cool.

I figured you'd say that. Dismiss it that way if you like, but I can't recall any platforming game that defaults to jumping with a shoulder button instead of thumb. It's not a SNES thing, it's an Every Platformer Ever thing until Nintendo decided the lock the spin jump to a shoulder button with regular jump on a face button. I assume they think it's less confusing to people who might accidentally spin instead of regular jump.

Simply making A and L/R as spin is the best solution (other than remappable controls), but instead it's locked to L/R. Oh well. At least it's not a wrist flick anymore.

Sorry. You should know by now that you won't make much headway with me arguing that the way everyone handles a certain control concept is the best because everyone does it that way. The games industry and players are way too conservative with that, and it's prevented the development of newer and better ways of doing things.

Well, there's a reason the L/R3 are used for pretty much nothing because it sucks. I feel the same about the shoulder button for jumping in 2D platformers.

Yay controller griping! I was grumping about this last night so I'll join in. These controllers should be configurable at the system level for a lot of reasons. I'd switch A for B and X for Y in a heartbeat. I'd even look into actually popping the buttons off and moving them. I also hate that there's no color coding for the buttons. On Xbox and Xbox 360 I had a mental map more for the colors of the buttons than anything else, so it was so easy to see a button cue like the bright blue X and hit that.

Diablo tells me to press X to drop something. Not only is X in the 'wrong' place from my perspective but I have to literally look at the controller every f'ing time after a year of using the controller far more than the Xbox controller I have associated with my PC. Its not that I am hitting the wrong button from years of training that X is in a different spot, its that I have no concept of what any of the button labels are.

Also, clicking the thumbstick should never be a control for anything except sprint. If its not an FPS, pretend it doesnt exist, developers!

Double-clicking the left thumbstick in The Witcher 3 to summon your horse is the worst control input ever.

This stuff always surprises me. Maybe I got lucky in terms of age, but when I was little I had an SNES, then an N64, then a PlayStation. Those three couldn’t have more different controllers and button labels. It taught me to commit button location to muscle memory, rather than what they call the button.

Any game post-2000 that doesn't allow you to remap the buttons is poorly written.

-BEP

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Double-clicking the left thumbstick in The Witcher 3 to summon your horse is the worst control input ever.

ANY clicking ANY thumbstick in ANY game is the worst control input ever.

I unconsciously white-knuckle the controller in moments of stress. Which means I'm forever making uncommanded inputs at the least opportune time in any game with stick-clicks.

Yes, but there's something especially awful about having to try to double-click the damn things.

One of the things I've loved most about the elite controller on the Xbox One is being able to remap all thumbstick clicks to the grip paddles (and disable the thumbstick clicks themselves) whether the game supports it or not. I was sad to see that the PowerA pro-style controller for the Switch that has grip buttons doesn't allow you to map the thumbsticks to them.

And here I prefer melee to my right stick click whenever I play FPS games.

Forget color coding the buttons. The SNES had the right idea what with making the sets of buttons feel different. I don't work a controller with my eyes, after all. But no, everybody has to get all nostalgic for the colors on the Super Famicom version of the controller and a good idea had to go die (with the notable exception of the GameCube controller).

As for the button layout on the Switch, I think the last thing Nintendo should do is change away from their established older standard in order to copy Microsoft. That just feels wrong. They should do system-level control remapping though, because that helps folks with limited use of their hands. And it would let my GameCube controllers work better in games like Towerfall and Guacamelee.

Vargen wrote:

The SNES had the right idea what with making the sets of buttons feel different

You what now?

Everything would be solved for all controllers everywhere if we could only configure all of the buttons ourselves to our individual liking!

I just find all this discussion amusing because the only controllers I've ever been unable to adapt to comfortably are the Xbox Duke and Dreamcast controllers.

That said, I do think being able to remap at a system level could be useful, especially if you're also using different kinds of peripherals for differently abled players.

Jonman wrote:
Vargen wrote:

The SNES had the right idea what with making the sets of buttons feel different

You what now?

On the SNES in the US, the X and Y buttons had NES-style concave tops while the A and B buttons were convex like all 4 Super Famicom face buttons. You can tell them apart by touch. I think the idea was the NES had gotten people used to the two buttons, so if you could feel which set of two you were on then you'd be good to go.

Then Super Mario World's developers realized that it was better to use Y and B instead of B and A, and all of that planning went out the window.

In that light, ain't nobody got the button labels right. We ought to take the Xbox controller and swap the X and B buttons if we want the labeling to make sense...

...to folks who are used to the NES...

I'll shut up now.

ccesarano wrote:

I just find all this discussion amusing because the only controllers I've ever been unable to adapt to comfortably are the Xbox Duke and Dreamcast controllers.

I have a soft spot in my heart for both of those controllers.

I have large, wide receiver sized hands though.

ccesarano wrote:

I just find all this discussion amusing because the only controllers I've ever been unable to adapt to comfortably are the Xbox Duke and Dreamcast controllers.

That said, I do think being able to remap at a system level could be useful, especially if you're also using different kinds of peripherals for differently abled players.

I think one problem is that I am not playing one console at a time along with PC, and sometimes I'm even playing the exact same game on multiple systems as well. So having one controller configuration for that game on one system and a different one on another system...well it's super easy to keep getting things mixed up!