Topic: Nintendo Switch --OT--

@ralphdibny I used to play DS games on my laptop with a graphics tablet and it’s not that dissimilar from the Wii U TV implementation. Mostly playable. Zelda was one of the better ones using that.

@Ralizah I lost my Spirit Tracks cartridge while moving houses about 12 years ago. It was an alright game but nothing special. So I just have a sad empty box.

@nessisonett what was that, with drastic? Like a normal graphics tablet that you just used a stylus on or did it have a screen like an iPad or something?

Would be good if there was a way to link the Wii U gamepad to a PC and use an unofficial emulator. I do have a random device with a largish touch screen I was going to butcher and make something to that effect out of but I don't really have the know how. I could probably make the thing but i doubt there would be an emulator that would be able to support it and I definitely wouldn't know how to modify one!

@nessisonett @Ralizah I didn't know it had got that expensive. I just checked and it's about £25 over here in the UK. I bought it about 7 years ago for about 10-15 quid I think. Unfortunately the case suffered a spilling accident and the cover art is all wrinkly 😭.

@ralphdibny It had a screen so it’s a bit like the GamePad but without buttons. I just had keyboard shortcuts to get around that. Bottom screen was on that and the top screen was on the PC. It was years ago so the graphics probably weren’t even really upscaled so it was pretty pointless 😂

@nessisonett haha sounds awesome, I'll have to look into that when I get the time. Might be a good workaround. If the bottom screen can be duplicated then it's not even a huge deal if the tablet itself doesn't have great resolution

@nessisonett I'm not expecting it to be amazing, especially considering the touchscreen controls in Phantom Hourglass annoyed me, but it is one of the holes in my Zelda resume I plan on plugging soon (alongside The Minish Cap and Skyward Sword).

@ralphdibny Seems more expensive in the States. $50 seems to be the average asking price for just the cartridge.

@Ralizah I beat The Minish Cap a couple months back and actually enjoyed it other than the final area which did my head in. I’ve avoided 2D Zelda for so long that I need to catch up on those. A Link Between Worlds especially I really didn’t like so I’ll have to replay that.

@Ralizah Spirit Tracks is better than Phantom Hourglass, I reckon, although I prefer PH’s ocean overworld. Spirit Tracks doesn’t have an annoying central dungeon that forces the player to go through the same sections repeatedly. The only thing about Spirit Tracks that irked me is the ridiculous panpipes, as you have to blow into the DS microphone while moving the stylus. It hardly ever picked it up, so some songs took ages.

@nessisonett I love ALBW. Probably my favorite 2D Zelda to date. It has been a criminally long time since I last played it, though. Once I'm done with 'new' Zeldas, I'll make that the first one on my replay rotation.

Actually just started playing The Minish Cap earlier today. It's... weird. Also, Zelda and Link are generic anime childhood friends or something. We'll see how it goes.

@mookysam Christ, it's one of those games that make you blow into the microphone? I'm really glad developers got this gimmicky crap out of their system by the time the 3DS rolled around. Nobody wants to have to blow on their game console to make it work! The lack of button controls is bad enough as is.

I love and hate Nintendo's hardware creativity. I will admit I always found it cool that blowing into the microphone made the icons for 3DS games spin around. That system had so many cool little touches in its UI.

Well, whatever. Maybe it'll be easier to detect on the Wii U GamePad? Maybe?

Man all this talk about Wii U Virtual Console has made me want to play more games on there. I'm halfway though M&L: Partners in Time but the reason it's taken me so long to finish the game is because it's not that fun to play anymore. It's really repetitive now and while I was enjoying it a lot in the beginning, it just hasn't introduced any new mechanics for a long time now. I do want to finish it though because it's still enjoyable in short bursts, but yeah it's just not grabbing me as much anymore.

I've been contemplating playing other titles in my VC backlog as well, such as Paper Mario 64, Phantom Hourglass, the Castlevania GBA games, Golden Sun, Donkey Kong 64 and many others. Still plenty of games left to play!

@LtSarge Paper Mario’s on that N64 app thingy on the Switch now! I’m enjoying it but TTYD was clearly a big jump forwards.

@nessisonett Yeah I saw that, really cool that you're able to play it now. Even if TTYD is better, there are still only two traditional Paper Mario games in the series so it's great that we're able to play at least one of them now. Hopefully TTYD will be re-released in some way on Switch because I don't have a GameCube or a Wii and even if I did, I wouldn't want to pay €150 for a physical copy, lol.

Who needs a Metroid Prime Trilogy Switch port if you have a Vita! Interestingly, the colours look better on the Vita screen than my laptop due to the OLED screen, they’re way more vibrant.

@Ralizah I'm honestly not sure how Spirit Tracks got through development with Nintendo thinking the microphone usage was actually a good idea. Was it perhaps a joke? A simple act of spite? Who can say for certain. One thing's for sure, I looked like an absolute wally playing it in front of people on Boxing Day one year, and kept running out of breath. Here's hoping the Wii U gamepad's microphone is more sensitive or it'll be rather uncomfortable to hold!

Nintendo's hardware innovations are often hit-and-miss: some are genuinely great, but the way games like Spirit Tracks felt they had to utilise features like the microphone often felt forced and unintuitive.I prefer their hardware when it's generally unfussy, although did like the touchscreen on the DS. Then on the 3DS when it was mostly used to keep the top screen uncluttered.

@Kidfried I played far too much Wii Music. It was terrible but I dunno, part of it was weirdly enjoyable.

@Kidfried Sometimes I just think Miyamoto is playing a joke on us all. I cannot fathom what the thought process behind Wii Music was. It's not so much that the game existed, more that it was treated as their big release that year. Maybe the executives lost a bet where they had to perform it at E3 that time? I dunno. There's also this weird thing where parts of Nintendo still view themselves as being a toy company, almost like they resist comparisons to other parts of the industry.

@Bentleyma Have you been getting the gold points from each physical game? They do expire eventually so I always make sure to get them as soon as I get my hands on the games.

It would be a good idea to browse the eShop and look for any digital titles that you also might be interested in getting and use your gold points when buying them.

@Kidfried I guess you've never heard of Tampon Run then.

@Kidfried Ah that's great man, I'm glad that you're enjoying it! I've only played it for a few hours but it's definitely up my alley as I'm a lover of both visual novels and Picross. It's a fairly lengthy game at around 15 hours I think, so hopefully the puzzles will get harder over time.

New Kirby looks fantastic (kinda has this mix of nature & tech that really worked for me in Planet Robobot, just now in 3D with HD visuals). Maybe there'll be some sort of connection or reference to Planet Robobot, even if it looks like the suit itself isn't in the game.

More gameplay footage for Pokémon Legends: Arceus came out today:

It still doesn't look like it will be any fun. The main thing I wanted to know is what you will be doing in the game in terms of missions. And as the video shows, the missions consist of discovering Pokémon, collecting items, battling Pokémon and catching Pokémon. As we've known for a while now, the goal of the game is to create the first ever Pokédex and that seems to be the primary thing you'll be working towards. There won't be any trainers to battle, no gym leaders to fight, no conventional story. You're basically just playing Fetch Quest: The Game.

Moreover, the game just looks like an expanded version of the DLCs for Pokémon Sword/Shield. And that's what's bugging me with the new Pokémon games: everything just feels like an experiment. Sword/Shield was an experiment for open areas, the DLCs made it completely open world and Legends is going to be an open world game (even though you only travel to certain open areas rather than explore a massive open world). But it still doesn't look like we're quite there in terms of what we want an open world Pokémon game to be and that's just annoying. It genuinely feels like Game Freak are just pumping out new games as quickly as possible instead of taking their time making one great game and using it as a base for future titles.