It would be cute of them to secretly put download codes for Virtual Boy games in the box for this
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by cute i think you mean
utterly essential
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I personally find the form factor terrible for a handheld. Every time I use it this way I get hand cramps. I mostly play docked with an arcade stick (I mostly play arcade archives and such on my switch).
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I just want to play metroid prime on that thing tbh
I drive everywhere because Ohio, so I have no use for a portable. I’m only ever playing games at home, and if I’m at home, I’m sitting on the couch using my TV rather than being hunched over a tiny screen.
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Multiplayer with actual physical human animals
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it’s nice playing games on a big screen sometimes idk
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I mean, I think this conversation shows how amazing the Switch really is. It’s a perfectly serviceable home console that doubles as a perfectly serviceable portable device, at least for short bursts.
I tend to be 50/50. I play a lot of Tetris/Mario Kart with my wife on the TV, but I play portable when I’m playing solo for the most part so that I am not taking up the TV, or I just want to play for like, 5 minutes at a time.
I’ll also bring the Switch up to the office sometimes and play between tasks.
It’s a good machine.
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I found the kickstand form factor totally unusable when a friend brought theirs by recently but the handheld and the TV connection are no brainers
I played some rounds of smash bros using the kick stand with my brother recently and it was fine
it’s a definitely flimsy and should be better built but I’ve never had it fall down unless I’m like actively rocking the table that it’s sitting on
I wonder if there’s some variance with how sturdy it is between units
I just meant that I could not figure out a comfortable height or distance to look at it when it was like that
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yeah I don’t think it works well for extended play of anything
having had a magnifier thingy for my OG Game Boy as a kid, I know that that’s a quick and surefire way to fuck your eyes up, so nothankyou.jpg
I hope that has a light built powered by plugging it into the USB port
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After analyzing my favorite handheld games, what they had in common, and what made them different from my favorite games on consoles, I became more skeptical of the Switch and the impact it may have on handheld game design.
Why do people have less trouble getting through RPGs on the go than they do on home systems? Games you play in higher-distraction environments, like a bus approaching the terminal you transfer at, benefit from having a wide range of activities for different levels of focus. Idly grinding on the overworld might not fly when you’re spending the limited time you have in front of your TV at home, but you might choose to grind when you’re out and about because its lower-stakes nature is a better fit for the concentration level you have in that moment. Another example would be item fetch quests in Monster Hunter games: they were nice little quests I appreciated on handheld because they fit nicely into the end of my commute, but when you’ve only got a few hours to game on the TV at home (or if you primarily play your handhelds at home), you feel like your time is being wasted and should be spent on something more exciting. Handheld games need to be more versatile because of the range of environments they are played in, whereas console games largely do not.
My frustration with the Switch is that an overwhelming amount of games on it are designed as console games first, and therefore expect a higher level of concentration than what I am able to give them when I’m out and about. Instead of making developers have to choose which games make sense for which contexts, it puts the burden of that choice on the player, who might not even be aware of these things and choose incorrectly, giving the player a worse experience than had they just been limited in where they could play it in the first place. Part of why Breath of the Wild and Odyssey did so well in handheld mode is because they’re built around exploration, and that can be a low-stakes at-your-pace activity that is much more amenable to handheld use cases.
Beyond just font sizes and UI elements being unreasonably sized when games are designed for console play first, there were readability advantages to graphical limitations. The 3DS Fire Emblems have some really good sprites that made major story characters easily recognizable on the map screen, but the new Fire Emblem uses character models that are incredibly hard to tell apart from the overhead map. If your readability goes down, your required concentration level goes up, and that makes it a less versatile handheld game.
It’s kind of maddening that nobody else seems to care about any of this.
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i can’t understand how anyone could play botw in handheld mode
it’s perfect and easy
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It has this barely-HD crispness to it that I think is kinda of beautiful. But I generally prefer playing it on the TV.
@Sakurina, there’ve been times when either handheld or docked mode has been my primary way of playing because of various circumstances, and that’s definitely affected the types of games I’ve felt like playing. But you mention the GBA, and I think another appeal of that handheld was playing SNES games on the go. And the Switch offers a very similar appeal, only expanded to include games from the PS3, X360, PS2, Steam, Wii U, etc.
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that’s fair. beyond the shrinkage of visual grandeur i also just don’t care for the way the system handles in handheld mode. my fingers are too long or something. it’s ok for marble it up or other simpler stuff but i feel like zelda/mario would suffer