Nintendo Switch - Games You Can Play Right Now

garion333 wrote:

Rune Factory 4 Special is out now.

WHAT. I thought it had 2 days to go.

...ok checked my switch and it is still two days away on the Australian store.

charlemagne wrote:
garion333 wrote:

Rune Factory 4 Special is out now.

WHAT. I thought it had 2 days to go.

...ok checked my switch and it is still two days away on the Australian store.

Sorry, didn't realize diff dates for diff regions. Friday for you!

I ended up getting Rune Factory, I had it on 3ds but didn't play it that much, so don't remember anything at all. I mainly been looking for light hearted games to easy my daily stress and this hopefully will scratch the itch. I will probably end up jumping onto Animal Crossing train too when that gets closer.

garion333 wrote:
charlemagne wrote:
garion333 wrote:

Rune Factory 4 Special is out now.

WHAT. I thought it had 2 days to go.

...ok checked my switch and it is still two days away on the Australian store.

Sorry, didn't realize diff dates for diff regions. Friday for you! ;)

It's okay, I forgive you for the minor heart attack

Wow, this thread was buried.

I'm trying to decide if I want to get BG1&2 or the Icewind Dale/Planescape Torment dual pack for Switch. I've never finished ID or PT, though I've finished both BG1&2 (forever ago). I'm leaning toward BG1&2 with fresh eyes since I'm afraid reading so much text in PT is going to get old on the Switch screen.

I finished the first case (out of 4) of Murder by Numbers today - a hybrid of Picross puzzles and Phoenix Wright style mystery story. So far it's pretty good! They puzzles have not been too difficult, but the characters and the story are pulling me through.

garion333 wrote:

I'm trying to decide if I want to get BG1&2 or the Icewind Dale/Planescape Torment dual pack for Switch. I've never finished ID or PT, though I've finished both BG1&2 (forever ago). I'm leaning toward BG1&2 with fresh eyes since I'm afraid reading so much text in PT is going to get old on the Switch screen.

I just started BG1 on the Switch (first time going through) and it works rather splendidly. Only slight niggle is that the font on the overland map is tiny and I need to hover over the location to read its name. Otherwise the font size can be toggled.

I will ditto the sentiment about Murder by Numbers. Not particularly tough puzzles so far but the story makes it engaging enough.

I am now (finally) a switch owner, largely purchased to make playing games with my kids easier. Grabbed Overcooked on sale which was already a favourite but glad to have easy access to four controllers. Picked up l inks awakening for me as the original was a game I loved as a kid. We are eyeing off a few games I can play with my 6 year old and sometimes with my wife and 3 year old (3year old mainly thinking she's playing more than actual playing)

Unravel 2
Overcooked 2
Lego Harry Potter
Just Dance
Ori and the blind forest (i assume tok hard for 6yo, so I'll be controlling)
Yoshi's crafted world
Snipper Clips

If I'm missing any good games for kids or family play let me know

Animal Crossing!

It's out for you already. Here in the states in an hour.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for sure (and it has some auto steering features for the little ones)
Maybe the latest Mario Party, though people are divided on those games
And Animal Crossing, which comes out today (in Australia time)

If you like Overcooked there's a similar game coming out in April called Moving Out.

Stele, I looked in the Animal Crossing thread before I saw your reply and the multiplayer interests me, but I want to know more about Animal Crossing, it looks cute but pretty simple? What does multiplayer entail? How does the game differ from Stardew?

Moving Out looks good, Mario Kart has appealed to me since the 64 version, but I'll have a look.. Thanks for the recs

We tried playing Animal Crossing at the appointed hour. Not hugely surprised to report that it was not yet unlocked.

Also I want that Taiko game but man it's expensive!

polypusher wrote:

We tried playing Animal Crossing at the appointed hour. Not hugely surprised to report that it was not yet unlocked.

Worked for us.

I too have a 6 year old.

She loves Pokemon Sword/Shield, though I do plenty of the driving.
She loves Paw Patrol: On a Roll, despite it being an objectively awful game.
Mario Kart with the helper functions on is good too.
Mario Party is a good pull too, though she finds the minigames frustrating.

Jonman wrote:

Mario Kart with the helper functions on is good too.

I third this. My kids are 10 and 7 now, but we have had Mario Kart for about 2 years now. The assists are fantastic, my younger one in particular played the different battle modes for months.

Other picks, particularly ones my younger one enjoyed are:
Pokemon (Sword/Shield or either Lets Go) - Biggest downside here is the amount of reading (although it's easy to look at this as an upside too)
Zelda - He really enjoys games which just let him wander around and interesting world, rather than following a story or set path. He also seems to enjoy only engaging in combat when he wants too.
Arms - I think he enjoyed the fairly simple mechanics and fun/strange characters.

My 3 year old loves Mario Kart. First she just liked the character selection screen where you can use your finger to touch around and pick all of the different characters and then the next screen where you can customize the cars. She would spend 30 minutes just picking them all. Later she moved on to actually 'racing' which is really just the character picking plus watching as the race happens with all of the assists turned on. She has learned to do the power up button so if she gets a mushroom or something she likes to blast off.

Minecraft in Creative Mode taught my oldest how to use a 3D camera. Lots of frustration and failure, but no stress from the game itself.

Tsum Tsum Festival is generally awful, but worth a rental from the library, which is what we did. Curling ended up being what we played the most.

My daughter (6) absolutely loves Minecraft in creative mode. She likes Super Mario Party but finds some of the minigames frustrating. Mario Kart is fun for her with the assists on.

Luigi 3 is the prettiest Nintendo Game of all time.

Fight me!

Abzu is a great game to play with a young one watching. Bonus points if they like ocean life. My son watched me play it in 2 sittings while he was sick. ~3hrs

Kirby Star Allies can be enjoyed co-op with young ones. Just finished it 4 player with the wife and kids (5/6 and 8).

Any switch gurus out there know much about the store sales? Are they predictable at all? I've been scouring the store and have almost 40 games on my wishlist, ha! Not in a rush for games but given the Aussie dollar I want to get the most for my $.

troubleshot wrote:

Any switch gurus out there know much about the store sales? Are they predictable at all?

Predictable? Not really. Sales are run by individual publishers, so there's not a weekly or daily set of deals like you'll see on other platforms. A lot of publishers tend to put their stuff on sale around holidays and such but nothing more regular than that.

For North America, weekly eShop deals happen every Thurs, same time as Steam, 1pm Eastern, 10am Pacific. There's a thread at CAG that gets updated every Thurs afternoon.

But yes outside of that other publishers can do deals anytime. And not sure if Australia has its own sales schedule or follows Europe.

Also the wishlist is definitely the way to go, as Nintendo will send you email anytime something is on sale.

Finally Deku Deals is a really great price tracker. You can use the wishlist feature there too. But I just like to check it to compare price history. You can see lowest price ever and compare.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
troubleshot wrote:

Any switch gurus out there know much about the store sales? Are they predictable at all?

Predictable? Not really. Sales are run by individual publishers, so there's not a weekly or daily set of deals like you'll see on other platforms. A lot of publishers tend to put their stuff on sale around holidays and such but nothing more regular than that.

That's not what I see. Nintendo tends to be like that, but lots of other publishers tend to put their stuff on sale monthly. There's not much in the way of rhyme or reason, but NIS, THQ and Bamco are on sale all the time. Square Enix isn't quite as frequent with their sales, but I'd say it's comparable to how often they're on sale on PS4.

Take a look at the chart for Civ 6: https://www.dekudeals.com/items/sid-...

A lot of these game can be found much cheaper physically. Not Nintendo games, mind you.

garion333 wrote:

There's not much in the way of rhyme or reason

This is what I meant.

Sony and Microsoft do weekly sales that are highlighted on their websites and in their storefronts. They run themed sales from time to time, as well, like "Editor's Choice" or "Big in Japan" or things like that.

Nintendo doesn't do those things. The "weekly sales" that Stele mentioned aren't anything done by Nintendo. Publishers just tend to update their discounts on Thursdays because that's been a pattern in the past. Individual publishers run sales at different times---some of them frequently, some of them infrequently.

But it's all publisher driven and it's all irregular. You can't count on a fresh crop of deals every X days.

Edit: It's also worth mentioning that the "sales and deals" section on the Switch storefront is a total sh*t show. It lists everything that's discounted without any segmentation, and there are at any time around 400 or more games on sale on Switch because a lot of indies basically keep their games "on sale" permanently. There are also a lot of indies that have started trying to juice their standing on the charts by dropping their prices down to a few cents. It's a mess.

Oh, well, I've always seen "Editor's Choice" and the like to be nothing more than an extra layer of BS marketing that means little more than "Here's what sells well already." I mean, is there really any difference between what's on sale Week 1 of a Spring Sale and Week 3? How about when there's overlapping sales of different Sales? Or games outside of the Sale that are also on sale? To me it's just another layer of marketing to drive eyeballs. Doesn't change the fact that stuff is on sale all the time, all over the place.

The Japan week stuff is helpful, but mostly because I know it's of interest to me personally.

Otherwise, there's still no rhyme or reason to most of the sales on PSN.

And, yes, the eShop store sucks for sales. The forever-on-sale crap has been going on for a while. 3DS has the same issue. Not sure why some companies do that. I guess it drives revenue...

Really, on both places I'm living and dying by my wishlist and ignore the rest. It's muuuuuuch simpler. Thankfully we can finally access that from a browser in re eShop. That was a glaringly weird omission for a while.

The Nintendo web site is good too. If publishers have sales it will list them there in a group. And you can click see more (I think) and get the full list for that particular sale.

But then I still check Deku Deals usually to see if that's actually a good price.