The Nintendo Switch

[Sildani]

Post in the Mecha thread...

[Mommar]

14 hours ago, jenius said:

It wasn't meant to be offensive. As I explained, when you're a parent (or a caretaker) there are a lot of things you don't have time for and you use those 5 minute windows the best you can. Sure, you can make gaming a priority to get in some side or vertical scrolling shooting, but often times, even with as easy as a Switch makes it, there are other things you choose to do with those 5 minutes (like grab a coffee, read the news, shop for toys on eBay, check MW)....

I wasn’t offended.  Chalk it up to my poor english skills if there was any tone.

I agree you won’t always have the time to use it.  I have it with me right now but it hasn’t been turned on in three weeks.  But when I get five it will be.  That isn’t something possible with a PS4 or XBOne.  My point was only if tjere’s a game you want to play on the system its very nature makes it possible if at least in only tiny slices of time.

[Black Valkyrie]

 

 

 

[UN Spacy]

 

[Seto Kaiba]

Gave Dying: Reborn a go today... and this is one of the worst-designed games I've ever had the displeasure to play.  

I don't know if this game was developed by NEKCOM Entertainment's office in Wuhan, China and crudely localized via Babelfish or if the team in Los Angeles decided to farm the dialog out to an illiterate hobo.  I'm two chapters into this game and I've legitimately got no idea what's going on except that some guy is in some... place... looking for his missing sister(?) and it's an escape the room type puzzle situation.  Despite being a horror-themed puzzle game ala Zero Escape, it's impossible to feel any sense of dread when the dialog brings the protagonist's reaction to being kidnapped, locked in a decaying building full of traps, and repeatedly knocked out across as mild annoyance rather than fear.  I don't know what this guy's deal is, but either this is an epically bad translation or this guy has less emotional response than a pre-Star Trek: Generations Commander Data.  It's also rife with typos... my favorite so far being the game's loading icon, a cheerfully bouncing Jeep (because why not?) atop the word "LOADYING".

The game design is appallingly bad.  There's this weird oval filter over everything like you're wearing a pair of goggles that block out the corners of the screen, your footsteps are so loud it sounds like you're wearing tap shoes, and the interface is so fussy it's rather like this fellow is less man and more inebriated moose.  The physics engine has some interesting, downright Aristotlean, ideas on the subject of inertia and motion.  They couldn't be bothered to render a player model, so every time you walk in front of a mirror there's nothing reflected and any object you may be holding is just hovering in midair like you're a freaking poltergeist.  I'm not sure why they apparently believed a guy in a leather jacket wearing what appears to be a Big Mouth Billy Bass on his head would be an intimidating enemy figure either.

Dying: Reborn's scenery is supposed to be a creepy, dilapidated hotel... but unless conditions in China are even worse than I'd been led to believe, the structure they designed for the game looks a good deal more like a prison, a police station, or a really old YMCA.

[Chronocidal]

You know the trouble with writing reviews like this?

I really kinda want to play the game now to experience this nonsense first hand.  

[Mommar]

17 minutes ago, Chronocidal said:

You know the trouble with writing reviews like this?

I really kinda want to play the game now to experience this nonsense first hand.  

I share this same sickness.

[Seto Kaiba]

29 minutes ago, Chronocidal said:

You know the trouble with writing reviews like this?

I really kinda want to play the game now to experience this nonsense first hand.  

Wait 'til it goes on sale, at the very least... I finished it last night, and discovered to my charign that Dying: Reborn for the Switch is a censored edition.  I guess it's not all that surprising that a horror game for a Nintendo console was censored but the censorship in the Switch edition of Dying: Reborn is incredibly scattershot.  Somehow huge amounts of blood and and disembodied organs were not a problem but a plot-critical dead body was censored by turning it into a mannequin, rendering the game's ending completely nonsensical.  Not that the story made any sense to begin with, mind...

Fortunately (or not), the Switch version also apparently omitted the Playstation 4 version's hilariously bad voice acting.

Also pretty sure the game was developed and made in China and just localized in LA, which would explain the awful stilted dialog.  (The wall outlets on a few of the room textures are Chinese outlets.)

[UN Spacy]

 

 

[Seto Kaiba]

Wow, so soon we can revisit the experience of hunting badly-rendered dinosaurs in pea soup fog?

[Mommar]

Not sure what to think of that.  It looks better, but not good.  Also, despite the pain of all of the fog to overcome hardware limitations it was also kind of a feature of the gameplay.  Pulling it out so far almost makes the game seem worse.  That obfuscation kind of gave the game a certain feel that's missing now.

[Duymon]

Welp. That's an easy skip for me. 

To be honest I think I've got Port Fatigue. With work and the wife my game-time is limited to my train commutes and I prefer to play new games and experience new stories; not repeat the old ones I played to death years ago when I had more free time.

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, Mommar said:

Also, despite the pain of all of the fog to overcome hardware limitations it was also kind of a feature of the gameplay.

If so, it was certainly the game's most mocked feature.  I remember many reviews from game magazines (golly, remember when those were a thing?) that mentioned the fog as a worse enemy than the actual enemies.

[Duymon]

#CoreValues

 

[Seto Kaiba]

2 minutes ago, Duymon said:

#CoreValues

Yeah, hearing that Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 was coming to Nintendo Switch was a surprise considering Nintendo is normally so obsessed with being family-friendly.

The order of the universe reasserted itself when I heard that Koei Tecmo won't be releasing it outside of APAC.

(According to ANN, the JDM release for Switch is going to come with English subtitles for those who want it badly enough to import it.)

[Mazinger]

1 hour ago, Duymon said:

#CoreValues

Ha! Didn't think I'd see that meme crop up here!  Context for you non-Evo watchers:
https://kotaku.com/evo-japan-cuts-sexual-dead-or-alive-6-stream-short-iss-1832654072

[Mommar]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Yeah, hearing that Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 was coming to Nintendo Switch was a surprise considering Nintendo is normally so obsessed with being family-friendly.

That hasn't been a thing since the N64.

[Seto Kaiba]

13 minutes ago, Mommar said:

That hasn't been a thing since the N64.

There've been a few aberrations over the years like Conker's Bad Fur Day, but unless I missed something Nintendo (esp. Nintendo of America) still likes to be seen as squeaky clean family fun.  (Surely I didn't imagine the fuss they made over the whole Bowsette thing.)

[Mommar]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

There've been a few aberrations over the years like Conker's Bad Fur Day, but unless I missed something Nintendo (esp. Nintendo of America) still likes to be seen as squeaky clean family fun.  (Surely I didn't imagine the fuss they made over the whole Bowsette thing.)

They really haven't made an effort since the end of the N64 era.  Bowsette was more of an issue with someone using a specific Mario-like IP.  They might like to keep their own IP's with clean images but the systems themselves have been able to get away with violence, etc... for a long time.  They even allowed a game like BMX XXX to be fully uncensored on the Gamecube when SCEA banned it unless it were censored for the PS2.  It's been awhile since they've cared.

[Sildani]

Meanwhile, why can’t we get a NORMAL DOA game? Or Tekken? Or Soul Calibur?

[UN Spacy]

 

 

[Seto Kaiba]

11 minutes ago, Sildani said:

Meanwhile, why can’t we get a NORMAL DOA game? Or Tekken? Or Soul Calibur?

They've got BlazBlue: Central Fiction and Cross Tag Battle, Dragon Ball Fighterz, Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, Guilty Gear Accent Core Plus R, Mortal Kombat 11, and Ultra Street Fighter II?

[Mommar]

8 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

They've got BlazBlue: Central Fiction and Cross Tag Battle, Dragon Ball Fighterz, Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, Guilty Gear Accent Core Plus R, Mortal Kombat 11, and Ultra Street Fighter II?

None of those are proper 3D fighters though.

[Seto Kaiba]

15 minutes ago, Mommar said:

None of those are proper 3D fighters though.

That probably has a lot to do with the Switch's hardware limitations.

It definitely doesn't seem to be a port-friendly console when it comes to current games.  Doom 3 and Dying: Reborn had some very evident graphical downgrades (and Dying: Reborn jettisoned all of its dialog audio) compared to versions from other consoles.

[Sildani]

 

They've got BlazBlue: Central Fiction and Cross Tag Battle, Dragon Ball Fighterz, Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, Guilty Gear Accent Core Plus R, Mortal Kombat 11, and Ultra Street Fighter II?

Respectfully, none of those are what I asked for. I like those specific fighting game franchises, not just the genre as a whole. 

[Seto Kaiba]

 

Respectfully, none of those are what I asked for. I like those specific fighting game franchises, not just the genre as a whole. 

My apologies, I thought you were expressing frustration with a lack of AAA fighting games in general rather than just those specific titles since the Nintendo fighting game scene hype is usually dominated by Super Smash Bros.

That said, have there actually been Dead or Alive games for a Nintendo console besides the rather lamentably bad Dead or Alive: Dimensions for the 3DS?  I'd thought that franchise was more or less wedded to the Playstation in recent years, though I do recall playing Dead or Alive 2 on the Sega Dreamcast back in high school.  Soul Calibur 2 as well.

[mikeszekely]

 

That said, have there actually been Dead or Alive games for a Nintendo console besides the rather lamentably bad Dead or Alive: Dimensions for the 3DS?

It's been years since I played it, but I don't recall it being bad.  I remember appreciating that it had a pretty decent single-player story mode.  And I see it's Metacritic rating is a respectable 79 (not that I put a ton of stock in Metacritic ratings).

 

I'd thought that franchise was more or less wedded to the Playstation in recent years

The just-released DoA 6 is PC, Xbox One, and PS4.  DoA 5 was released in multiple versions on PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PC, and Vita.  So it's safe to say the series is pretty multiplatform now, but if they were married to anyone for awhile it was Xbox.  DoA 3 was an original Xbox launch title and exclusive, DoA Ultimate was an Xbox exclusive featuring an enhanced version of DoA 2 rebuilt on the DoA Xtreme Beach Volleyball engine, and DoA 4 was an Xbox 360 exclusive.  DoA 5 was the first on a PlayStation console since DoA 2: Hardcore on the PS2.

[UN Spacy]

WHOA.

 

 

[UN Spacy]

 

[Chronocidal]

I feel like them porting Cuphead to the Switch is a marketing ploy to increase controller sales, after more and more people chuck them across the room.  

[Tking22]

5 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

I feel like them porting Cuphead to the Switch is a marketing ploy to increase controller sales, after more and more people chuck them across the room.  

Quoted for truth. I loved Cuphead to death, it was phenomenal, but damnit if it didn't get REALLY hard at a few parts, like, too hard for me sometimes. I like a challenge, but Cuphead took real trial and error, and patience, patience for days. Glad to see it coming to Switch though, this whole buddy-buddy thing between Nintendo and Microsoft is interesting, another amazing indie game, Ori and the Blind Forest, is supposedly coming to Switch too, plus I finally got to play Minecraft with my younger second cousins and nieces and nephews and what-not, me on my X1X and them on their Switch.

I wonder if this will go the other way and we'll see something Nintendo related on Xbox and PC? Honestly, I'd take Bayonetta 2 remastered in 4K on my X1X, that'd be amazing. Also, rumors are flying, and once again these are just rumors, Cuphead could come to Smash. Wouldn't that be something?

[Seto Kaiba]

11 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

I feel like them porting Cuphead to the Switch is a marketing ploy to increase controller sales, after more and more people chuck them across the room.  

Or console sales, when people start chucking the damned things in frustration.

Still, I'm glad Cuphead is getting broader exposure with this Switch port.  It's one of the better cases for Games-as-Art in recent years, being a beautifully-executed tribute to vintage western animation that doubles as a controller-snapping monument to the frustration of old-school "Nintendo Hard" games.

[UN Spacy]

...had to cop.

 

[mikeszekely]

Well, Square Enix has already dumped their mobile ports onto PC and PS4 (and Xbox One?).  Seems like they're dumping them onto Switch now, too, instead of localizing Switch games they already released in Japan like the Seiken Densetsu collection or Dragon Quest Heroes.

[UN Spacy]

All signs pointing to a Switch revision this year.

https://youtu.be/DoVf6Q5bv8I