Gaming on the Nintendo Switch - Skyrim, Zelda, Gear:Club and More

A few months ago I decided to take the dive and purchase the only console I didn't own, the Nintendo Switch. This was based on at least four factors:

1. The Switch had gotten consistently good reviews from most interested parties, and Tobold on his excellent blog talked enough about it (and Legend of Zelda) to convince me that this wasn't a game to miss, and also that maybe the Switch wasn't another Nintendo dud.

2. The concept of a portable Skyrim was overhwhelming my common sense.

3. I had come to the conclusion that the reason I rarely engaged with my old PS Vita was that the screen was too small, and that it had no easy way for me to hook it up to a TV (and that the one option that existed was difficult and limited in functionality).

4. Finally, it was the only gadget console I didn't own and that just wasn't gonna fly in my house!

Anyway, the Switch has proved to be a really fun device, and possibly even more fun, overall (even if in smaller bursts) than the Big Two that tend to dominate my house thanks to their specific offerings (Destiny 1 and 2 for the family, The Divsion for dad, Monster Hunter: World for mom and pretty much Everything Else but especially Lego games and Minecraft for Marcus). The Switch has instead held sway as a portable that works really, really well and doesn't induce eye strain like the PS Vita, as well as being sufficiently portable that we could pack the whole thing up, docking station included, and take it on trips where we hook it up to the hotel TV. It's battery life as a handheld has also been much better than I expected, and one evening my son managed to run it down after about five hours of play.

For my own purposes I played many games on it (and a lot of Skyrim and Xenoblade Chronicles 2) well before I dabbled into the deep waters that is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which is a contentious game since everone else in the house also wants to play it, but do not want me playing it where I can accidentally spoil it for them. Luckily my wife's been playing a lot of GTAV on a special roleplay server (yeah, that's a real thing that exists) which keeps her distracted, and I caved in and got Minecraft for my son on the PC so he could play AlienvsPredator mods in the game which has left me safely ignored, and enjoying what I would describe as a more colorful, vibrant open world exploration experience that is like a mellowed out version of Skyrim....or maybe to use a further analogy, Zelda is to Skyrim like The Hobbit (the book) is to its successor The Lord of the Rings (also talking about the book here).

Picking it up and playing on the go is a lot of fun, but docking it and playing on the available TV is even better. Being able to pull the whole system and move it to a different TV is actually quite handy in my household, which is dominated by 2 UHD TVs and an HD TV (and two of these TVs are also serving as monitors). If my son wants to play on the PC, and I allow it, then I can move to the living room TV and plug in the Switch, no issues at all. If I want to lounge in the safety of the bedroom where there are no televisions and play anyway, the Switch makes this possible.

So far the only negatives I've encountered with the Switch are as follows:

720p Resolution is more normal with the Switch, and wouldn't be much of an issue if I didn't also have an Xbox One X and PS4 Pro. Playing a game like Doom or Skyrim on it for the portability is awesome, but if you happen to have Skyrim Remastered on PC or Xbox One X then it's hard to want to invest big screen time in the Switch version of either game. However, being able to play either game on the go is priceless.

The Switch also doesn't currently appear to have any "family sharing" feature similar to the Xbox, which means I am not sure if I get my son or wife a Switch of their own that they could play my games on their account. Currently I can log in to my son's Xbox One S and he can play my games, even if its on his account, so long as I'm logged in (with a few notable exceptions). Even the PS4 allows this, although it has fewer family-friendly features than the Xbox environment does, but the Switch seems to lock these to your account. However, there's an upcoming online service that Nintendo intends to implement which may well provide for a family account sharing option, so fingers crossed.

Finally, the Switch has limited memory options. I have a 128GB mini SD card loaded up, and I think I can get a 256 GB card down the road, but while many of the games are small loads of less than 1 GB in size, all the really good games tend to lean toward 10-25 GB in size, and that means having just a few from the digital store can eat up your space. This is a very personal issue, though, and if you're like me and tend to buy many more games than you can find time to play, then you may notice it....but if you're a more focused and non-obsessive collector type of gamer who likes to finish one game at a time, then you may never notice the issue at all.

So what games have I been enjoying the most on the Switch? Well, the one's I've found the most overall fun and time consuming so far, in no particular order, include:

Gear:Club Unlimited

This racing game is no Forza Horizon 3 but in terms of general racing games its a lot of fun with just the right sort of depth for a game that plays well in both big screen and handheld mode. In fact, if you play it in both modes it feels (to me) like the handling of your vehicle adjusts in response to the way you are playing, making handheld and pro controller play equally smooth and comfortable. The game is designed around buying and upgrading cars and your workshop and racing various circuits of different types; it's a "lite" version of Forza, but the result is a great experience, and playing this while on my recent airplane trip was quite satisfying (pro tip: playing a car racing game while the plane is ascending or descending is not a good feeling, though!)

Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Yes, everyone has raved about this game already, but I will add my two cents and suggest that it's a game with the compelling style of play from Skyrim, but with a more faerie-tale driven element to it, and a escalating series of mechanical elements in the gameplay that one can easily obsess over. Nothing about this design fails to tick the checklist of "things I love in a game" and it's mythology makes for a healthy introduction to the Zelda universe for people who may not know much about it (and considering the last time I delved into a Zelda game it was the Ocarina of Time on the N64, I think I count). If you like Skyrim, and don't mind if most of the violence is exclusively aimed at various goblinoids and monsters, then you will love Breath of the Wild.

Skyrim

Duh, but also, yeah, Duh! The existence of this game on Switch was for me the main selling point on a Switch, if only just to see it work on a portable, and boy, does it work. The graphics are low on a full screen version, and you can tell it's at the low end of the scale compared to Skyrim Remastered on the other consoles, but on a small screen it's hard not to argue that it looks great. Even on a big screen the game is a lot of fun, although it lacks the workshop and ability to load mods, unfortunately.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2

Ordinarily this is a genre of Japanese RPG I might at best dive into for an hour and then get really annoyed with and move on from. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a different breed of game, however, in that it has meticulously careful voice acting with great voice actors who really improve the game over others of its type in dramatic ways, and the game is structured around expansive open world exploration mixed with focused quests in a way that I feel better reflects the genre and play people like than, say, Final Fantasy XV (which I feel tries to hard to be something it is not). I'm still plowing through this game (and likely will be for months to come) but it is definitely recommended.

Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion

This is not a game I thought I'd be playing, and I bought it because I thought my son would get in to it (he's been obsessively playing the Switch version of Lego City Undercover). Instead, he got a little frustrated with this one after a while and dad tried it on a lark. Well, I can see why he got frustrated....the game has a really interesting mastery curve, and even lets you skip hard levels in the single player "Octo Expansion" campaign, although I have not bothered to do so. The design and feel of this game is what I'd call a version of Saints Row (stylistically) if it had been done by Nickelodeon with Cartoon Network and a dollop of Adult Swim mixed in for good measure; the storyline about humanoid inklings, half human/polymorphic squid things which generate copious quantities of ink that they use as both weapons and transportation is hard to fully digest as a concept, but if you just go with it and accept the game for what it is, there's a compelling hybrid shooter/platformer experience to be had that is a ton of fun.

Honorable Mentions

Honorable mentions go to some remastered classics that are on the Switch, such as Bayonetta 1 and 2 (and you can only find Bayonetta 2 on Nintendo!), Resident Evil Revelations 1 and 2, Payday 2, and of course Doom. Doom is a game I have had my ups and downs with, but I have really had fun with it on the portable end....I don't bother to load it up for a big screen event (I have it on PC, after all) ordinarily, but as a fun thing to play in portable mode it's hard to beat.

The Elder Scrolls Online: Sitting in Troubletown?

If Elder Scrolls Online is going to have a hope and a prayer they need to get the following problems fixed:

1. periodic 6-8 minute loading screen wait periods need to stop. I can be playing WoW, Rift or GW2 in 30 seconds, but I'm lucky if I make it into TESO in 6 minutes.

2. The lag has got to go. The server instability has got to go. When 2 out of 3 times I try to log in and play but can't, or find that I get kicked and the server seems to have croaked....bad sign, Bethesda! I want to play your game, please let me?

3. This is more a pet peeve than anything, but lets get a little more color in the palette, for a change. The colorful environments of other MMOs stick out in sharp contrast to the perpetual drabness that is TESO. This could also be a side effect of being a spin-off of the decidedly prettier looking Skyrim, but bottom line is it needs something....some color, better modeling/textures...something.

4. This is more of a personal deal, but I do get worried that if I play TESO to the end all I'll encounter is an endless schedule of PvP focused content. I get nervous with any game that supports a ruling "king" of PvP and did not discover this was a big component of TESO until recently. Nothing wrong with PvP....but not really what I wanted out of an Elder Scrolls game, y'know?

As an aside, if PvP is a big component of the game, I can only imagine just how ticked off the PvPers must be with the sort of lag this game exhibits. Death by lag in PvE is infuriating enough....dying due to lag in PvP is dangerous for your blood pressure!

Other than that I do love this game, if only it would work right. But the technical issues are so bad I am thinking I'll cancel my sub before the free time is up next week and wait a couple months to see if they iron out their problems. Way back in the day I did something similar with Rift, which was technically flawed but interesting at the start....I came back a year later and it ended up being my main game for a good two years. With TESO, though, if I give it a year...odds are when I come back it'll be F2P anyway, I suspect....

Friday Meanderings - Amazing Adventures, Mass Effect Leviathan, Dead Space 3 and More

I haven't gotten my act together with regards to reporting/discussing some of the numerous RPGs I am reading through right now, but I'm working on it. Amazing Adventures is on the top of the list, as I plow through Jason Vey's take on the pulp genre, as powered by the SIEGE Engine. While the core conceit of the C&C-powered D20 mechanics are here at the heart of it all, AA has enough changes to make it stand out on its own. It's got some interesting design choices. I'm hoping to have some more detailed analysis of the system next week.

After a hiatus from Mass Effect 3 I have resumed the Leviathan DLC and picked up the Omega DLC. I've enjoyed Leviathan, despite two distinct hang-ups early on. Sometimes putting something aside for a while and coming back to it later lends clarity of vision to what needs to be done. Anyway, it's  fun resuming the adventures of poor doomed Shepard once more. Still interested in seeing what Bioware Montreal's vision for the next Mass Effect is going to be...I enjoy being a non-toxic fan who actually appreciates the level of work it took to make these games, can you tell?

I also picked up Strike Suit Zero and the preorder for Skyrim Dragonborn DLC as birthday presents for myself. You know you're getting entrenched when two out of three of your purchases are just expansion content for existing games! As it is, Strike Suit Zero looks potentially interesting but the controls were terrible (for me, YMMV). I'm going to give it another shot when I feel the urge to experiment with customizing them to taste, but right now, despite the fact that SSZ harkens back to a day when we all loved Colony Wars and Free Lancer, it's control scheme feels nothing like them. I'm not someone who normally uses a joystick and traditional flight control schematics, though...and am also left handed, so maybe those are where my issues are coming from.

Skyrim is probably the game I really need to sink myself into next. I've only played a few hours of it according to Steam, and the game has been out for over a year, as well as the source of a great many internet memes. I'd like to have the campaign under my belt in time for the Elder Scrolls Online to arrive, as well (even if there's a thousand year gap between the two games).

I also picked up "Map Pack B" for Resident Evil 6. Not sure why, to be completionist, I guess (it was 160 Microsoft Points...$2, so cheap). I've played some RE6 multiplayer now, and while I enjoyed it (and was actually fairly engaged and even doing well) it didn't strike me as having the sort of legs the ME3 multiplayer (or even Max Payne 3 MP) has.

Outside of the above DLC packs and one indie game (SSZ) that got greenlighted, there's the looming specter of Dead Space 3. Some noise has been circulating about the in-game cash shop it apparently comes with. I may wait a few days until after the reviews are out to see just how much of an impact this cash shop feature has. It's yet another unwelcome boogie man from the EA monetization process, but one I'll happily ignore if its not "in your face" or built around a tedious in-game mechanic designed to encourage you to buy coins or items from them to avoid being punished by the game.

Dead Space 3 doesn't arrive until February 12th, so maybe I'll change my mind by then and grab it. We'll see. Two other games are on the horizon which I must get: Crysis 3 and Gears of War: Judgement. Man, I am such a mainstream gamer, aren't I? Dissing in the indies, buying into the big fully-monetized triple-A titles. Defending Bioware. Sigh.

I have Zero hipster cred!

Skyrim vs. Dark Souls, or, "I tried Dark Souls once, until I took an Arrow to the Knee..."

There's an amusing article here comparing the storytelling between the two. It's a good article in the sense that it tells me two key things:

1. I am not really playing Skyrim the way this guy does, because I like reading all the books and see them not as stopping the game but as demonstrating that Skyrim is just a bit more than a game. Also, the names mean a lot to me, and like Dragon Age and Fallout I can tell that with time Skyrim will get progressively more engrained in my psyche as a "place" worth visiting and knowing much about.

2. I should give Dark Souls one more try, because apparently if you can learn to take the game's continuous abuse from abyssmally difficult respawning foes who unrelentingly depants you and rape your corpse then apparently there's a story to be had in there somewhere. A story I'd like to see, if only the damned game would let me.

Anyway, interesting article, and the commentary that follows is all over the board. I have to admit, I deeply wish I was one of those people who could say, "let me tell you about the amazing, deep story of Dark Souls and how it slowly revealed itself to me like an inscruitable onion." But all I can do is marvel that anyone got past those goddamned undead in the beginning of the second act, because I had to stop playing before I damaged my controller, Xbox, TV or wall. So far I've resisted the intense desire to simply sell the game....so far. We'll see. The Silent Hill HD collection comes out tomorrow....now Silent Hill, that's the sort of video game abuse I can take!