Nintendo Switch - Games You Can Play Right Now

charlemagne wrote:

By initial loading do you mean when you first boot the game, or is it a more regular occurrence?

I meant from the Switch main menu to opening My Time At Portia including loading your saved game. This is like a 2 minute process at least. A bit frustrating. I understand it used to be worse.

The 2 second delay on opening/closing inventory is annoying but tolerable.

The 1 second delay on killing a tree is annoying but tolerable.

I bought the PC version for $13 on the Epic store last week but after I started playing I decided it was good enough and my wife would quite enjoy it, so the Switch would be a far better platform for us. We cautiously purchased the Switch version and got a refund for the Epic version.

My thesis after about 5 hours on the Switch is that Portia, after the updates to date, is playable if a little irritating and I am glad that PC and Switch are now up to parity from a content standpoint.

Wife bought Yoshi's Crafted World for my bday. I thanked her for picking a game I can play in front of and with the kids.

The game looks way better when played on the screen as opposed to handheld. Much less aliasing going on and the upped resolution helps with general picture quality. Granted, the game didn't look bad in handheld, it just didn't look Nintendo-refined as I would expect.

That said, it's just another Yoshi game. Super cute, but I only ever enjoy the mechanics instead of love them. There's a lot of love and care put into the games, but it never seems to overcome the middling mechanics. It's a game designed for kids. I can appreciate it, I just wish I loved the series.

Sorry Clocky. I thought in the eShop and purchasable was good enough. My fault.

Stele wrote:

Sorry Clocky. I thought in the eShop and purchasable was good enough. My fault.

I'm mostly giving you a hard time because I saw Slay the Spire pop up in here and thought I could go play it right now. You broke my heart, Fredo!

garion333 wrote:

That said, it's just another Yoshi game. Super cute, but I only ever enjoy the mechanics instead of love them. There's a lot of love and care put into the games, but it never seems to overcome the middling mechanics. It's a game designed for kids. I can appreciate it, I just wish I loved the series.

Yup. I threw my copy up in the trading thread after getting the 2nd gem. It's very slow and plodding. The new egg mechanic is simpler than the old one, but it slows things down even more, particularly when you have to aim on a target in the distance instead of just in the right direction. It also feels less satisfying because there's zero timing or skill required to aim eggs now. It's cute and polished, and it's probably great for kids, but I mostly found it dull. Crafted World suffered even more in my mind because I played Yoshi's Island just a few months ago, and that game still plays beautifully in comparison. At least it makes me feel better about missing out on the Wii U version.

I had a long car ride over the weekend, so I played quite a bit on my Switch. Dragon's Dogma continues to be my current slow burn game. It's not a game I'm thinking about when I'm not playing it, but I always play for longer than planned when I do fire it up. I'm really starting to get into the combat now that I've opened up new classes and a range of abilities. I just wish the inventory management was a little less cumbersome. That's a recurring complaint for me in virtually every open world Western RPG though.

I picked up Resident Evil 4 for the trip. The $30 price tag is a little silly considering it's $20 max on every other system, but I've been itching to play this game on the go. 4 hours in, it seems like a great port. It runs smoothly and controls well. I've only ever played the Wii version before this, so I'm dying a lot on the Switch version. Those Wii pointer controls really were easy mode. I was a little disappointed to see that there weren't any motion controls or gyro aiming options for the Switch. It's still a great game though.

Eventually, it became too bright out for me to see anything in DD or RE4, so I fired up Wandersong for a bit. You play an upbeat bard that's out to save the world through song. The right stick is used to sing specific notes selected similarly to a weapon wheel in other games. It's an adventure game with some platforming elements, and so far the song mechanic has been used in some Simon Says like ways for platforming, conflict resolution, and language translation. It has a very bright and charming atmosphere, and the dialogue has been surprisingly good so far. I'm looking forward to playing more.

Getting into the groove of Wonderboy The Dragons Trap, you can see its 8 bit trappings (as its a remake of Wonderboy 3 The Dragon Trap released for the Sega Master System back in the day) but despite its problems & feeling a bit dated in its design choices the new art style/graphics engine is gorgeous.

One thing you can do is switch back to retro mode in both music & graphics, its a nice touch but it really shows how bland it was in its original state, they have added so much detail in the background of each level/area that it feels like completely new locations.

The best bits so far are finding secrets, gaining access to new areas with each of the animals you are turned into (mouse, piranha etc) that each have a unique ability. The combat for its day is actually decent with the timing of strikes paramount against jumping enemies or when your the mouse it becomes a true lesson in precision with its extremely short sword attack coming out about 2mm from its body.

The boss fights have been extremely simplistic, with one called the zombie dragon who needs vaulted over a couple of times as he swims below you, once that happens he pops up, you need to jump & strike him in head straight away, it dives back down & you just repeat this over & over. The first boss was similar too, head strike & dodge one or two attacks.

Still though this will be a cool little intro until when I get my hands on Monster Boy & The Cursed Kingdom which even from the demo seems an upgrade in every way.

The art in WBTDT nearly makes me weep every time I look at screens or video but I have tried the TurboGrafx/PCE version and found it frustratingly dated... and by all accounts they didn't touch the gameplay, only the art.

If only Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom had the Dragon's Trap remaster art. (Not that Monster Boy's art is bad by any means, just personally doesn't strike as much of a chord with me.)

Edit: I re-read this and realized I didn't make it clear that the weeping mentioned above is a joyful "they should have sent a poet" sort of weeping.

Middcore wrote:

The art in WBTDT nearly makes me weep every time I look at screens or video but I have tried the TurboGrafx/PCE version and found it frustratingly dated... and by all accounts they didn't touch the gameplay, only the art.

They definitely didn't touch the gameplay. In fact the reason you can switch back and forth freely between the 8-bit graphics and the modern graphics is because they didn't change anything about the physics, gameplay, hitboxes, etc.

I played The Dragons Trap as a kid. I was a Sega kid, so I played this as a kid. This is exactly how the game played back then and it's a testament to the game's original design that it's so playable (IMO) in 2019.

That's not entirely true. While the movement mechanics, platform placement, and the like are untouched by the transition between art styles, the modern art inserts a lot of cues for players about where to go next, the locations of hidden doors, and the like. It's a much easier game to navigate with the modern art because of those things, and that smooths over the difficulty. You don't spend nearly as much time wandering aimlessly only to find out that if you pushed up in the corner of this one room, you went into a hidden cave that was vital for progression (as a not-real example).

DSGamer wrote:

I played The Dragons Trap as a kid. I was a Sega kid, so I played this as a kid. This is exactly how the game played back then and it's a testament to the game's original design that it's so playable (IMO) in 2019.

Conversely, as someone who didn't play it as a kid, I found it so anachronistic by modern standards to be unplayable.

YMMV.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

That's not entirely true. While the movement mechanics, platform placement, and the like are untouched by the transition between art styles, the modern art inserts a lot of cues for players about where to go next, the locations of hidden doors, and the like. It's a much easier game to navigate with the modern art because of those things, and that smooths over the difficulty. You don't spend nearly as much time wandering aimlessly only to find out that if you pushed up in the corner of this one room, you went into a hidden cave that was vital for progression (as a not-real example).

I’ll have to search for where those touches are because I didn’t notice them, to be honest. Of course it was decades between playthroughs.

Middcore wrote:

The art in WBTDT nearly makes me weep every time I look at screens or video but I have tried the TurboGrafx/PCE version and found it frustratingly dated... and by all accounts they didn't touch the gameplay, only the art.

If only Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom had the Dragon's Trap remaster art. (Not that Monster Boy's art is bad by any means, just personally doesn't strike as much of a chord with me.)

Edit: I re-read this and realized I didn't make it clear that the weeping mentioned above is a joyful "they should have sent a poet" sort of weeping.

There's no doubt about it, the mechanics do feel very dated, the platforming doesn't feel precise enough, you almost get dragged down a little too quick when you jump. There is a part I'm at in Mouse form that highlights it shortcomings, think it's called the unknown land & there's some very tricky platforming required to get across a certain section, its downright infuriating, this is from someone who loves very challenging platforming games.

The cheap shortcuts they have to bring you back to certain places, enemy placement can feel very repetitive, getting stun locked by enemies in certain situations is annoying, the mechanics do hold the game back massively but I suppose what can you really expect from a game that was originally on the master system.

I'm weirdly still finding fun in it, it just sort of starts to click & you adjust your gameplay style. Hollow Knight & Steamworld Dig 2 have spoilt me silly with their brilliant, modern & flawless controls & overall great mechanics.

r013nt0 wrote:
charlemagne wrote:

By initial loading do you mean when you first boot the game, or is it a more regular occurrence?

Every time the game has to load anything, it takes a pretty long time. Even going in/out of your inventory causes a 2 second stutter to the game.

It's incredibly poorly optimized. I regret choosing this platform to play an otherwise decent-seeming game. I kinda have about zero faith in them fixing it, to be honest.

Damn. I was really wanting the portability of the switch but it sounds like it’s just not the way to go.

charlemagne wrote:

Damn. I was really wanting the portability of the switch but it sounds like it’s just not the way to go.

Adding that I also had the game hard crash three times this weekend. Always toward the end of the day, thereby losing ~20 minutes of progress. Twice when loading after going through doors and once just trying to put a hat on.

Team 17 should be ashamed, publishing something like this.

My Portia game is getting slower and slower as I progress. I'm into the 2nd month and sometimes I get some pretty bad chugging just running around now, which never happened before. So far it's still been stable. I haven't crashed ever. (way to jinx it)

I'm in month 3 now. Had a few chances to see how long the game takes to get going from a fresh boot this weekend.

About 3-4 minutes from launching the game to the initial menu
About 5 minutes to load into the game - into the house
And then about 2 minutes to go outside the house on the 1st load.

So, over 10 minutes to actually get to play the game.

Have I mentioned how much I regret choosing this platform for the game yet?

It's still available for $14 on Epic store... not that starting over has any appeal to me even only at month 2.

Yeeeeeah, yall let me know when Portia gets a ton of patches on Switch. I'm not buying it until then.

Is Hyrule Warriors worth the high price it still apparently fetches?

Slay the Spire did release yesterday and it's awesome. No issues with Switch port so far

Vrikk wrote:

Is Hyrule Warriors worth the high price it still apparently fetches?

Do you like musou games? If you do, it's a really good one.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
Vrikk wrote:

Is Hyrule Warriors worth the high price it still apparently fetches?

Do you like musou games? If you do, it's a really good one.

I just bought it last week from eBay for $34.33 shipped for my wife. She saw it in some store and played it for 5 minutes and decided it would her new "I'm home from work, I'm frustrated, and I need to kill sh*t" game.

She hasn't touched it, yet, but I've played through around 8 of the areas. I don't know what "musou" is and have never played Dynasty Warriors(?) that my friends tell me it's like so it's my first foray into this kind of game.

What what I've seen, this is the game:

-- You play an area with a character, sometimes having the option of choosing between a couple characters.

-- In the area, there are control points, small ones guarded by 1 slightly-better-than-grunt guy, and large ones (forts?) guarded by a bunch of grunts and sometimes higher level guys. You take the control points and your guys spawn there.

-- Bad guys spawn all over the place. You wade through them with your weapon, mowing down the mooks like trash, and spending a little more time killing the harder semi-named and named guys.

-- Each level has a final goal; so far it has been to kill so-and-so, although you don't know that goal when you start I don't think.

-- Some areas let you swap between characters on the fly.

-- Most areas so far have introduced new characters that are playable on other levels.

-- You pick up a bunch of things that the mobs drop as you go and use these to upgrade your characters

-- There's a system with the weapons you find that determines their power and what specialty bonus they have, and it appears that you can move the bonuses around at the smithy if you want at a cost but I haven't done that.

It's fun for just running around and killing stuff. There's always something going on on the map that gives you a short-term goal, like saving a person, or taking back a fort, or killing a named. The map is real hard to read to me. I'm playing docked on a 60" ( or 65" can't remember ) TV in the living room and have a lot of trouble seeing where I am on the map and what direction I'm facing.

If you are into the Hyrule universe, the story is probably interesting. It's interesting to me and I'm not a huge fan or anything. There are callbacks to the different games and characters from the games. I like some of the characters and don't like some others. I met and I guess unlocked Agitha last night and I just want to punch her. I'm not into Anime that much so the silly little Anime stuff she does is aggravating to me but is probably endearing to someone who is into it.

If you like killing stuff (like, a LOT of stuff, sometimes 50 mobs with one attack), like Hyrule-themed stuff, like fast-paced games, like running around a lot, like managing 500 different upgrades across 29(?) characters, and like a weird game mode where you play the game as an adventure game through the other Zelda games maps but not really, then you'll like this game.

I buy almost all games as physical carts since we have 2 switches so I can always resell mine. You can buy it used physical and sell it if you don't like it.

-BEP

Musou (or muso) is basically just any game with this type of gameplay, where you run around a big battlefield hacking through large numbers of mooks like a scythe in a field of wheat and then occasionally fight an enemy hero character or boss. The name comes from the Japanese name for the Dynasty Warriors series and then the term got applied to anything that plays broadly the same way.

There's an upcoming Persona franchise musou game called Persona 5S and people were very disappointed because they were hoping the S meant a Switch port of the main game.

Middcore wrote:

The name comes from the Japanese name for the Dynasty Warriors series and then the term got applied to anything that plays broadly the same way.

For good reason! Most of those games (Dynasty Warriors, Warriors Orochi, Hyrule Warriors, Fire Emblem Warriors, Dragon Quest Heroes, One Piece Pirate Warriors, Persona 5 Scramble, etc.) are made by the same developer: Omega Force. Their whole shtick as a company is that they license other properties and make a game using that property that conforms to a fairly narrow, easy to produce template. They're like the Telltale of Japan except, you know, still in business.

I can only think of a couple musou-style games that aren't made by Omega Force.

Middcore wrote:

Musou (or muso) is basically just any game with this type of gameplay, where you run around a big battlefield hacking through large numbers of mooks like a scythe in a field of wheat and then occasionally fight an enemy hero character or boss.

I was going to say "imagine fighting Dead Rising hordes except they all have 1 HP and your sword is the length of two city blocks", but yours is better.

I've never really looked into Musou games before, but these descriptions have me a little bit interested.

They sound a little bit like a 3rd person, rather and isometric, Diablo game. I'm thinking particularly of modern entries of this style like Diablo 3 or Path of Exile, which seem to have more or less done away with story in favor of killing masses and occasionally getting new loot/skills. Are they in the same vein at all?

Sorta, but with less interesting loot. It's more about doing crazy looking special attacks with 70 different characters than it is about getting loot and upgrading your characters, which there is some of that.

Fans will tell you there's strategy involved in Warriors games, but it's paper thin.

And I like some musou games, but not all. YMMV, but the spinoff games are my favorites because they get to do whackier things than the historical games.

Yeah games like Diablo aren't just about mindlessly attacking through waves of enemies, they're about finding loot and optimizing your build so you can mindlessly attack through waves of enemies more efficiently.

Musou games don't really have that optimization puzzle/loot treadmill element at all.

Which is probably why I prefer musou games to Diablo. I know I'm in the minority, but when games start talking about fountains of loot and loot pinatas, I stop caring. I know you're supposed to use the loot you get in Diablo to fine-tune your characters, but the sheer volume of it means that I don't even look through it before I dump it all on a vendor. I could throw away a super rare sword that was perfect for my build, but it's in a pile with seventy other swords. Who has the time?

Apparently right now-ish on Switch you can play Contra Collection and Collection of Mana

Contra Collection: $20

Collection of Mana: $40