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Sunday 23 September 2018

Day 148: Switch Impressions

I've had my Nintendo Switch for a couple of months now, I've lived with it and played with it and rubbed the sheen of novelty fully off its plastic exterior. What are my impressions?

I love it. Adore it. It's where I do all my gaming now. I've settled into the groove of a casual, yet discerning, gamer over recent years, a groove in which I'm entirely comfortable. And the Switch fits this perfectly.

I know a fair amount about games, I stay au fait with the industry, and when I play I am alert and thoughtful and curious. But I do not play a lot. I'm not addicted. I don't game every second of the day, play right through the nights, wired on energy drinks and sugary snacks, have the constant bags under the eyes of a hardcore gamer. I don't consume games voraciously and unthinkingly.

I work a physically demanding job, with early starts and late finishes. I write this blog every day. At the moment I'm helping my joiner friend set up trade shows on my days away from the pub. I read books. I watch good films. I take photographs. I meditate, I try to bring myself into the present moment as much as possible, try to be mindful, to pay attention to my life as it is happening, even when my life is painful or boring or difficult.

I have plenty to occupy me, is what I'm saying, and my gaming habits have to fit around this. There was a time when I was depressed and out of work and my acne was really bad, and I would play World of Warcraft with my friend from uni for eight or so hours every day. More recently when I was drinking too much and smoking too much and not writing, I would use games like junk food, buying bright alluring new titles like a fat kid let loose in a snack shop. I'd binge on the openings to games as a way to distract me from my unhappiness and loneliness, play until that wore off - usually after the first hour or so - and then grow bored and stop playing and go back to being miserable until the next New Thing came along.

But these days I'm hiding from less, allowing myself less to use drugs or videogames or the like to self-medicate when I'm unhappy. I'm not attempting to game the pain away.

I still like games, I still like having them in my life, but they're like photography now - something I can do here and there, when there's time, and not get too obsessed over.

So the Switch is great for me. I've got only a handful of games - Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey, Hollow Knight that I've recently downloaded, Mario Kart for multiplayer - and when I get the chance I'll have a little play on one of them.

Breath of the Wild is great for days off, for running around a big open world fighting monsters and collecting apples and climbing mountains. It's like a warm bath. I completed it on Wii U, and now on Switch I'm picking through it slowly, finding it easy, poking about every nook and cranny, turning over every stone, letting my brain go slack while I glide off into the wilderness. It's fantastic.

Mario Odyssey is a decoction of fun, and scales beautifully. You can play for two minutes or two hours, and it's pretty much the same experience, just stretched. You run around in levels that are large playgrounds, and in every direction you find something bouncy or squishy or colourful or surprising with which to play. Maybe there's a bird flapping around with something shimmering in its wings, so you scramble up trees and leap at it to catch whatever it's got. Maybe there are girders hanging above empty space, so you jump across them as they crumble in order to reach the shiny reward at the end. Or you play maracas with Día de los Muertos skeletons in an Aztec desert. Or you twang up tightropes above a cartoon city. Or possess the body of a gloopy lava enemy and use its residual heat to warm a pot of stew for the race of animated forks who inhabit the level. I think it's important in life to keep an element of childlike wonder, to work to retain that simple joy we find from the world around us, from pulling and twisting and running and jumping, and Mario provides this better than any other game. Long may he reign.

Hollow Knight is exacting and frustrating and scary and glorious. It asks you to descend deeper and deeper into forgotten catacombs in which you become terrifyingly lost, and to push onwards until you map the space and overcome obstacles and emerge victorious. It is a difficult game, with bosses that force you up against your own failure, huge monsters with powerful attacks that crush you time and time again, with sometimes long, frustrating slogs from the checkpoint back to where you died, and it's like the game, in that Dark Souls tradition, is shoving your weakness and lack of skill in your face, saying, Look, you are not good enough - but saying it with zero attitude or malice, simply stating the fact, a Zen master hard and implacable, presenting you with the problem, offering you the chance to, in the parlance of the form, git gud. You watch your anger spewing out of you as that screaming demon smashes you apart for the fiftieth time, you watch the toddler within you wailing, sobbing that it's not fair, and you think... wait - it is fair. It just is what it is. This is the game. What do you want? Mummy to come and make it better? A bottle, something to slurp, a hand to pat your head and swaddle you in blankets. You're an adult now. No one is coming to save you. So breathe out that anger. Analyse what went wrong. Try again. Watch for the enemy's attack patterns. Let familiarity drain fear from the encounter. Practice, train, try, try, try. Git gud. And eventually you'll land that finishing blow, right into the boss's skull, and blood will rupture in torrents, and the corpse will crash to the ground, and you'll stand there tall and mighty, master of this arena, knowing it was all you. No one gave you this to pacify you. You earned it. You overcame. It is a good feeling.

Mario Kart I have not played much of, fifteen hours or so, but it is foolproof multiplayer fun. Staying in a hotel room with Steve the night before an early morning set-up, we lay on our beds clutching our respective Switches and spent a couple of hours with the game's battle mode, collecting coins and popping each other's balloons (they are not euphemisms!!!), and it was like being thirteen again and having a sleepover, and it was brilliant. Also I won four out of five tournaments, so therefore Mario Kart must be a Very Good Game.

It's mega late now, after a gruelling Saturday close at the pub, so I'll stop there, and tomorrow I'll discuss the Switch as a piece of hardware, and its strengths and weaknesses. Nice.

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