Nintendo Switch - Games You Can Play Right Now

Stele wrote:

Spikeout would probably enjoy that.

I think you might be right Stele! Will have a look at Rolling Gunner on the eshop when I get in.

I'm enjoying Slay The Spire atm, more addictive than you first think & very tactical game once you start building up your deck.

I haven't put significant time into the PC or console versions of Dead Cells, and if the Switch version ran poorly by comparison, I've never noticed.

Bloodstained has a bit of a rough launch, in general. I'm staying far away from it for a while.

Stele wrote:

Jumped on Slay the Spire as soon as reviews confirmed it ran well. And the only quirks I've noticed in probably 15-20 hours already is some minor stuttering on a couple boss attack effects, or if my hand gets too big and I scroll through a lot of cards.

Slay the Spire has hard crashed on me several times, and sometimes it will freeze for a full 2-3 seconds before starting a complicated animation. Thankfully, it's a turn based game and progress is saved mid-battle if it does crash, so these issues haven't really bothered me.

Also, my Switch has become a dedicated Slay the Spire machine since I bought it. This game is extremely good, ya'll.

Dyni wrote:
Stele wrote:

Jumped on Slay the Spire as soon as reviews confirmed it ran well. And the only quirks I've noticed in probably 15-20 hours already is some minor stuttering on a couple boss attack effects, or if my hand gets too big and I scroll through a lot of cards.

Slay the Spire has hard crashed on me several times, and sometimes it will freeze for a full 2-3 seconds before starting a complicated animation. Thankfully, it's a turn based game and progress is saved mid-battle if it does crash, so these issues haven't really bothered me.

Also, my Switch has become a dedicated Slay the Spire machine since I bought it. This game is extremely good, ya'll.

Oh now that you mention it I did have one crash. But yeah no progress lost.

Spikeout wrote:
Stele wrote:

Spikeout would probably enjoy that.

I think you might be right Stele! Will have a look at Rolling Gunner on the eshop when I get in.

I'm enjoying Slay The Spire atm, more addictive than you first think & very tactical game once you start building up your deck.

There's a dedicated StS thread where you can talk strategy and reminisce on good/bad runs.

I hope they work the Bloodstained issues out. The Switch was the only platform I was interested in buying it on.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
Blind_Evil wrote:

I’ll report in tonight. I find now that I play 99% of things on Switch, my standards are lower than the journalists that play multiple versions of a game.

Yeah, I don't give a lot of weight to journalists' complaints, but it sounds like there are some complaints bubbling up from Switch-focused communities from non-journalists.

I’m about an hour and a half into the game, past the first boss and into the third area. I think it’s totally playable but I can see where the frame rate would bug people if they care about that sort of thing. I’m more bothered by dropped frames, and while this games frame rate is low, it is consistent. So none of the dreadful input lag.

From a more qualitative standpoint I’m loving it so far. I’m a sucker for the post-SotN Castlevania games and this feels like the lost evolutionary step. The leap forward is graphically, as the gameplay functions a lot like Order of Ecclesia, except with the sprawling open castle of the other DS games.

If you’re like me and love Castlevania specifically , and mostly play games on Switch, I don’t see a good reason to avoid Bloodstained. If you can enjoy other games in the genre as much as Castlevania, there are a lot of great ones on Switch. Elliot Quest, Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight, Hollow Knight, and Gato Roboto are some of my favorites. Play those til this gets patched.

Are you playing docked or handheld? Or have you tried both?

Just heard about Gato Roboto this week. It's now tops on my wishlist.

ccesarano wrote:

Are you playing docked or handheld? Or have you tried both?

I only play handheld. My dock isn’t even attached to a TV. Livin that new dad life.

Blind_Evil wrote:

Livin that new dad life.

Yeah I can't remember the last time I played docked with a 7 month old. Maybe once when the wife and baby went to visit her mother for a few days.

Stele wrote:

Just heard about Gato Roboto this week. It's now tops on my wishlist.

It's a great game, but I want to give you one piece of advice so you don't make the same mistake that I made. Before the final boss the game will mention that this is a point of no return, and it's not joking around. If you beat the final boss the game will autosave and you'll be unable to explore for that precious 100% completion rate.

A lower frame rate isn't a big deal to me and that your playing handheld is a bonus because that's how I play my Switch like 75% of the time. Bloodstained is back on the menu!

Stele wrote:

Just heard about Gato Roboto this week. It's now tops on my wishlist.

It's fine. It's very charming when it's not talking, but it's also very basic. It gives you exactly the upgrades and hazards you would expect in exactly the order you'd expect them, and other than some bonus palettes to discover, there's not really much to find or collect. I played through it in a couple hours, and it was a nice detour, but it left me wanting a more robust game in that genre.

But it's a cat in Metroid inspired armor.

A cat.

I’d agree it left me wanting more, but I prefer that to overstaying its welcome.

Stele wrote:

But it's a cat in Metroid inspired armor.

A cat.

Yes, but that's literally all the game has to offer.

Blind_Evil wrote:

I’d agree it left me wanting more, but I prefer that to overstaying its welcome.

Oh, for sure. It's just definitely more of an appetizer than a main course.

It's $8. And knowing me I'll buy it on sale for 4 or 6, with eShop money I got buying $50 for $40. I'll get my money's worth.

Cat.
Battle suit.

Played past the first boss of Bloodstained tonight docked, and there the performance seems fine. I'm guessing it's just handheld that has issues.

I tend to play both so I'm sure I'll give handheld a try as well, but of all the things I expected to want to play docked all the time, an indie side-scrolling game was not one of them.

Vrikk wrote:

I beat Axiom Verge this weekend. Really loved the different guns and abilities, but the constantly required backtracking that caused me to get lost, coupled with some infuriating difficulty spikes keeps it from being a Must Play to me. I feel like the controls for the Switch version were not very intuitive either - for example, having to click in a thumb stick to change weapons was very annoying.

The story was surprisingly good though for a one man show. It wasn't a masterpiece, but I was expecting only "scientist dude goes back in time to kill an alien menace".

The controls sound the same on PC with a gamepad (x360). I pulled up a guide for the last stretch of the game and just used my 2nd monitor to tell me where to go. Turned out, I was most of the way done with boss fights, and just had a lot of things to collect. Was not a fan of the aesthetic, but otherwise a good game.

I’m looking for a good poker or spades game. Any recommendations? I’m a beginner player so looking for just the basics. Thanks!

Dragon Quest Builders 2 demo downloading...

Picked up Mario Maker 2, but I'm not sure why. Probably because it says "Mario" on it.

I liked the first one well enough I guess, but I feel like only Giant Bomb and a few streamers actually got the most of out the game.

Still, will probably be fun for a bit.

I mean, there was so much to be mined out of the first Mario Maker that getting "the most" out of it is a pretty high bar. You could barely scratch the surface and still get your sixty bucks' worth.

r013nt0 wrote:

Picked up Mario Maker 2, but I'm not sure why. Probably because it says "Mario" on it.

I liked the first one well enough I guess, but I feel like only Giant Bomb and a few streamers actually got the most of out the game.

Still, will probably be fun for a bit.

This is my worry as well. I'm up for playing clever levels, but most of the fun I have watching people play hard levels is just that. I enjoy watching someone else get frustrated by hard levels. I don't think I'd enjoy that personally.

And since I know I probably won't create levels, I don't see how much I would get out of it.

It's raining here so my daughter and I have had an afternoon in just playing the endless mode on easy and it's been pretty satisfying. She wanted to jump in and start creating stuff but that seems more involved then we has time for right now.

The Nintendo made levels seem really good and it sounds like there are 100 of them and we haven't even tried multiplayer yet. If you like Mario especially the side scrollers there is alot to like here .

DSGamer wrote:

This is my worry as well. I'm up for playing clever levels, but most of the fun I have watching people play hard levels is just that. I enjoy watching someone else get frustrated by hard levels. I don't think I'd enjoy that personally.

And since I know I probably won't create levels, I don't see how much I would get out of it.

I think what made me feel comfortable spending the money was, as Rave mentioned, the 100 Nintendo-made levels. I figure that between those, a few fun community levels, and poking about with creating my own (like you probably not very much) there should be enough.

hbi2k wrote:

I mean, there was so much to be mined out of the first Mario Maker that getting "the most" out of it is a pretty high bar. You could barely scratch the surface and still get your sixty bucks' worth.

True enough, but I feel like the enjoyment "famous" or whatever people get out of seeing that ~tens of thousands of people have tried their level is something I'll never know because I was lucky if 5 people stumbled across what I made, given Nintendo's horrible discoverability tools.

Hopefully it's better this time around.

On easy mode there haven't really been those crazy puzzle levels people make. It feels more like an actual Mario game. So of the levels aren't great but I've been surprised more then once by how well some are designed.

It bears repeating (because this just keeps coming up) that the player-made levels in Mario Maker are not all super hard levels. There's a whole range of difficulty from super easy to super hard, and it looks like they made to easier to find levels by difficulty.

Yeah, I played 50 levels in Easy Endless mode today and was pleasantly surprised by the variety. Only a few autoscrollers, and quite a few "Mai Firts Lvl"s that were obviously just people playing around with slopes and such, of course, but also some legit clever (but not taxing from a gameplay sense) puzzle levels, and one really cool Bowser's Castle level that was clearly using every trick in the game design handbook to make the level SEEM intimidating while actually making it almost impossible to actually die. Things like lava monsters that leap out at you while never actually clearing ground level, stuff like that.