Topic: Nintendo Switch --OT--

@nessisonett Tom Nook would make a pretty good Pontius Pilate. Redd could even sell The Stations of the Cross.
My interest in Horace was piqued by your reference to Coronation Street. I'll check it out.

@RogerRoger Didn't it have a Thanksgiving Turkey Day event? Aspects of the game are pretty targeted towards the US market.

@nessisonett Yep, 'those garbage indie games' as someone keeps commenting, I find a bit bizarre.

I've heard good things about Horace, and the Britishness of it all, especially the humour appeals to me. I saw it was dirt cheap on the e-shop and almost took the plunge, but I've got a few unfinished games on my switch I would like to try to finish first.

So I fired up Ori and the Blind Forest and I managed to get quite a bit further. It's a wonderful little game, full of charm with some of the best animation I've seen in recent times. However, I'm finding the Joy-con's face buttons really uncomfortable to use. I've never found this before and I played Zelda BOTW for over 100 hours. Ori can have a lot of multiple fast reflex actions though, so maybe that has exaggerated the issue. I've had the hori split pad Pro recommended as I use it in handheld mode all the time, so the Pro controller is out of the question (plus being more expensive).

@mookysam You're right, they did have Turkey Day. Which is more than a little harrowing when you consider that all the islanders are anthropomorphic animals (we have several bird residents, including a chicken, which is scarily close).

My partner's island still boasts a sizeable pumpkin patch; they had a dual purpose after Halloween, as I think there was a quest for making pumpkin pie, as well.

@RogerRoger As long as there wasn't a quest to capture and roast one of your bird residents! It reminds me of how in Pokémon, the Pokémon are everything, including the things the humans eat.
One Animal Crossing event I'd like to see is a reenactment of the Salem Witch Trials.

Dopey me forgot to add that Age of Calamity is the Breath of the Wild prequel, but has Dynasty Warriors gameplay.

@mookysam Cool, thought it was; thanks!

That 51 Worldwide Games is a proper laugh, especially after a few drinks. Had a great game of bowling on it, got beaten 156 to 152 by my mum. It really brings back great memories of the glory days of Wii. I, for one, really enjoy gimmicky motion controls as long as they work and the darts and bowling work really well in this collection. I can’t say the same for the stick based games though, my right Joy-Con is drifting so I’ll have to replace that if I can be arsed.

New Bravely Default 2 demo is good. I only played an hour but I am sure I’ll get it at launch now.

Adelle is sexy. She might be my new waifu.

I’ve been watching my brother play the Link’s Awakening remake and the performance is bizarre. I have no idea why the frame-rate dips to PS1 levels, it can’t be that taxing a game, can it?

@nessisonett It happens only when loading between map chunks.

So you can replicate it real easily.

But people have also examined that overclocking the system doesn't really fix it. So no one knows exactly why it happens.

@Haruki_NLI It also happens inside the side-scrolling sections. And when in the swamp. And when in the forest. It’s bizarre.

@nessisonett The swamp is an odd one, but everything else is sections when the game loads something.

Gotta remember that in that side scrolling section the game has both what's next, and where you just came from being loaded and unloaded most likely, or at the very least chunks of the dungeon around those rooms.

But again, bumping the system spec all the way up does nothing. It's likely not something that can be fixed with just more powerful hardware.

@Haruki_NLI Well... not really with the side-scrolling sections. In the overworld, sure, the chunks will be loaded as you move around. In the side-scrolling sections there’s a full black screen in between entering and leaving those rooms. That is a perfect opportunity to load in the next area, meaning that the slowdown in those rooms surely can’t be to do with map streaming. Grezzo seem to have gone about this very very wrong. It would be perfectly ok if the slowdown was intermittent and wasn’t that noticeable but it gets pretty bad and combined with the blur effect, it’s liable to give people a headache.

@nessisonett I believe this may be the first HD game for Grezzi, or at the very least in a very long time.

Looking at their stellar art direction, I imagine part of the problem is ambition without optimising properly.

We also don't know the engine. A lot of features would indicate UE4 like Yoshi's Crafted World, but no mention of that being the case exists.

Just found Pat Butcher in Horace. This game rules.

Don't like the idea of owning multiple consoles and especially buying one just for one game but I'm considering getting a Switch after watching some MHRise videos today. Are the rumours true that Nintendo will release an enhanced console this year?

I played the demo for Monster Hunter Rise and it seems pretty decent. It really does just feel like 4U and Generations, both in a good way as those games are great, and in a bad way in that it absolutely does not feel like a brand new game in 2021. If you’d told me it was an upscaled 3DS port then I wouldn’t have been shocked. Visuals are decent if slightly muddy and lacking slight visual clarity as if it’s been put through a filter or watched on a bad stream on YouTube but the upside is that the game runs at a solid 30 FPS which I appreciate. It feels like a good game which only comes undone by the fact World pushed the series forward a lot despite a couple of missteps. I understand that it’s a Switch exclusive and the scope will be reduced as a result but its setbacks are amplified when you look at not just the PS5 games coming out which are a lot grander in their ambitions, but even the PS4 games which already came out last year and feel a generation or two ahead of this game. Perhaps I shouldn’t be playing docked, my expectations might be skewed and I should be approaching this game as a handheld game first and foremost.

Never played World, but Rise is pretty gorgeous (undocked, anyway; haven't played it on a TV yet) and a really solid follow-up to MH4U, but with some cool new mechanics and QoL stuff cribbed from World (changing loadouts in quest; connected map; etc.).

Palamutes, climbing around environments, and using the wirebugs are all really fun, but are going to take some getting used to. I get the feeling they're going to add a ton of dynamism to fights when used properly.

@nessisonett @Ralizah Yeah, the first thing I noticed when watching last year's TGS trailer was that it didn't looked as good as MHWorld but that's to be expected from a Nintendo game anyway. Not saying that Nintendo games are bad looking but we're never gonna get games with the level of detail the other two consoles can achieve. They mostly go for more a cartoony and cel-shaded look.

I saw Wyvern Riding feature and I think it's a really cool addition. The Palamutes are cool too.

I'll mostly wait till last minute before deciding just incase they announce a new Switch console. Only downside is if I do get a Switch is that it'll probably be a expensive paperweight after once I'm done with MHRise.:/

lol The MH Rise demo crashed the eshop. I suppose that's a good sign.

@Ralizah I didn’t have any problems with it last night to be honest. Put it onto download, played a bit more of Horace and it popped up to say it had downloaded!