Day 149: Switch impressions (cont.)

I'm just home from a leaving do for a colleague from work, beautiful bar filled with beautiful people dancing and drinking and becoming angels in the lambent light. I skulked home to write my blog post about videogames, as is my wont.

So yesterday I ran through my gaming habits and the titles I've been playing on my Nintendo Switch. Now for the hardware itself...

I couldn't imagine a better console for the type of gaming I do these days. After a long shift I can play it for twenty minutes in bed. I can play it in the passenger seat of Steve’s van while he drives us to some exhibition centre at some ungodly hour of the morning. On my days off I can drop the Switch into its dock and play it in higher resolution, with the Pro Controller, on my TV, sat languorously slumped in my chair.

It is an elegant, robust piece of kit. It exudes style, unlike recent Nintendo products that have felt like cheap plastic tat. The lines and curves are still playful, yet seriously so; it feels expensive, exquisite, carefully manufactured.

At heart the Switch is a rugged tablet, housed in reassuringly thick plastic. The screen is a capacitive touchscreen, like phones and tablets, and unlike Nintendo’s previous Wii U and 3DS, which used far cheaper and clunkier resistive touchscreens. Its resolution is 720p, which is lower than most phones, but absolutely high enough for gaming. Nintendo’s approach here is for more colour and complexity in their game worlds, running at lower resolution to maintain smooth frame-rates and extend battery life, and it is the correct choice. At 1080p the games would have to pare back their textures and effects to such a degree to get the experience playable that it wouldn’t be worth it. The display is bright and clear, and games look fantastic in portable mode; it all works a treat.

But so what’s the difference between the Switch and a small tablet or large phone, apart from access to all Nintendo’s proprietary software, including its exclusive games? Well have you ever tried playing properly involved games on a phone? Not puzzle games, casual games, things where you prod lazily at the screen and wait while your villagers harvest more minerals or your garden grows. Complex 3D environments that you must navigate, real-time combat systems with nuance and depth?

It’s a mess. Poking a finger at a flat panel with no feedback is not a recipe for control. Think of how many mistakes you make while typing a sentence on Whatsapp. Imagine if every one of those mistakes resulted in the death of your playable character. The margin for error is too high, and there’s not enough variety in what you can do.

Nothing beats physical controls. Buttons and joysticks. So with the Switch you get two halves of a physical controller that slot onto each side of the tablet, turning it into something more akin to a very high-tech Gameboy. The Joy-Cons, as the controls are called, can be slid off and held independently of the unit and of each other, with the screen balanced on its kickstand, on a tray table or a kitchen counter or whatever you’ve got nearby. And best of all they can be turned 90 degrees and each held as a tiny rudimentary controller in themselves, giving you access to two-player multiplayer wherever you go.

The Joycons look lovely, elegant little boutique items, and they’re nice and clicky, and the joysticks are good. They’re not up to the standard of a proper controller, and, yes, you can’t get round the fact they’re a little cramped - but compared to other portable console controls they’re in a league of their own.

And when you’re by your TV it doesn’t matter, because you drop the Switch into its dock, with AC adapter and HDMI lead, and it becomes a home console, played over your TV, using the Pro Controller, which I prefer to the Sony PS4 controller, and like about as much as the Xbox One offering.

The Switch is underpowered as a home console next to the PS4 and Xbox One, certainly so compared to a £1500+ PC, but the parity feels closer than between the Wii and PS3. And anyway, the Switch is a different beast. I’ve got my PS4 for the two or three major releases (the games industry calls them triple-A games, like Hollywood blockbusters, your Call of Duties and Grand Theft Autos et al) each year that I’m not too overcome with boredom to actually play, and for all the more interesting indie and lower-rung titles the Switch is more than up to the task. And of course there are the Nintendo games, Zelda and Mario and the like, that you can only get on the Switch, so the question of comparable power is moot.

So yes. I love my Switch. Nintendo need to really push the indie angle for the machine to continue to be a success - their own release schedule is too sparse, and too beholden to established franchises. If they threw a load of money into new IPs I’d be over the moon, but the prospect of yet another Mario Tennis and Mario Golf and Mario Party and Mario Screams into the Void for Twenty Hours Straight doesn’t exactly fill me with excitement.

I want every worthwhile indie game to come to Switch, as soon as possible after its release on Steam, and I want the larger studios to dedicate teams specifically to Switch development, to create titles faster and cheaper than triple-A, with more focus on experimentation and unique mechanics than on ray-tracing water reflections at 4k resolutions on the supercharged Xbox One X.

And I want Nintendo’s back catalogue of SNES and N64 and Gamecube games to come out on the Switch’s eShop, or even as freebies for subscribers to the online service. At the moment we’ve got a handful of NES games from three-and-a-bit decades ago, that don’t even play well on the Joycon’s little buttons (and they’ve mapped the controls for Super Mario Bros. 3 wrong for the Pro Controller, which you can’t grapple sideways like you could the original NES pad). I want Super Metroid and I want Metroid Prime and I want them now!

But in honesty there are ten or fifteen beautiful looking indie games I’ve already got my eye on for a download when I’ve played through what I’ve got - Celeste and Golf Story and Thimbleweed Park and Night in the Woods and Stardew Valley and Sonic Mania and Axiom Verge, and on…

And I’m going to be playing Breath of Wild until I’m 90 anyway, so screw it.

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.

Day 89: Switching

I'm definitely going to finish this gaming history tonight. Getting it done.

So this current generation of home videogame consoles is the eight generation. The uniformity between the latest Sony and Microsoft systems is as great as it has ever been. The costs of entry into the market, and therefore the price of failure, is so high at the moment that both companies have played it extremely safe this cycle, with the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One (nomenclature) sharing similar technical specifications, feature sets, and design language. Both have excellent controllers, sturdy and precise, with the only key difference being that the PlayStation's thumbsticks are, as ever, symmetrically placed, where Microsoft's left stick is pushed northwards, trading places with the D-pad. Meh.

There are exclusives on each console, but most mainstream games come out on both machines, looking and playing virtually identically. With development costs rising exponentially for modern games, and players split equally between the two platforms, publishers are loath to cut out half their audience with an exclusive release.

What I've seen with your eyes

The one major attempt at a shakeup came from Sony's experimentation with virtual reality. With a couple of expensive VR devices coming out recently on PC, and then Google Cardboard and a raft of entry-level alternatives at the bottom end of the spectrum, it looked a year or two ago like virtual reality was finally becoming a, erm, reality. Sony's PSVR was designed to sit somewhere in the middle of the pack, less expensive than the kits on PC, but more involved than the phone-style glasses.

But though everyone who experiences VR comes away impressed, the technology, and the games, aren't quite there yet. The headsets are all clunky, with too many wires. The games are mostly novelties, breathtaking for five minutes, empty after a few hours. The problem with looking through the eyes of a virtual character who leaps and spins through space, as you sit stationary on your chair, is that it induces revolting motion sickness. The most expensive VR kits come with sensors that you set up around a play-space so that you can actually move around with your character - but then your character is limited to only the moves you can pull off, in a metre or so squared arena in your room.

The thrill of doing even this, of course, is still genuine, but the fact is that none of the units have sold enough this generation, PSVR included. Perhaps VR needs a Nintendo to slice away the air of nerdiness and bring out something cheap and accessible to push the tech into the mainstream. Google Cardboard did it with hardware, but there were no killer apps (titles worth buying the platform for) to back it up. VR is still looking for its Wii casing, and its Wii Sports to set the whole thing alight.

Beating yourself

Speaking of Nintendo, while a kind of equilibrium, and even stagnation, has been reached by Sony and Microsoft this generation, the big N have been characteristically unpredictable over the last seven years.

They followed up their Wii with something they were calling a Wii U. Was it an add-on for the Wii? An upgrade? A new system entirely? Consumers weren't sure. Nintendo did a terrible job of explaining the concept, right from its initial announcement, and the thing never took off.

The Wii U was, in fact, a brand new console. It was HD, finally, roughly on par in specs with the PS3 and Xbox 360 (though years too late), and its unique feature was that it came with a gamepad, a big chunky controller that had a second screen built into the middle of it, with touch-controls and a gyroscope. But you could also use your old Wiimotes with the Wii U. And it was backwards-compatible with your old Wii games. And you could buy traditional controllers for it as well.

There was no clear message, no clear concept, when compared to the Wii. You felt that Nintendo had been wrestling with the question of whether to hold onto the Wii brand or move away from it. With whether to continue to court the Wii's casual audience, or attempt to win back the "hardcore" gamer.

The final device saw them grasping backwards with one arm to the safety of the Wii, and reaching forwards with the other for a new gimmick with which to repeat the Wii's success. And in the end they got a firm hold of neither, and fell between the cracks.

The Wii U was the worst selling mainstream Nintendo console since their nascent rise before the NES. After shifting 101.63 million Wii's, the Wii U couldn't even hit a paltry 14 million sales.

Golden age

And yet, while the hardware was tanking, Nintendo's software divisions were quietly putting out some of their best ever work. Not that they've ever exactly had a bad period, but their first-party releases on the Wii U felt like they were coming from a studio at the top of their game. Super Mario 3D World was an absolute riot, mixing elements of the 64 and Galaxy titles with mechanics from the NES and SNES-era games, introducing four-play multiplayer, taking game design cues from Japanese poetry, and generally just bursting with colour and vigour and warmth.

Mario Kart 8 won many "game of year" awards when it was released in 2014. New IP Splatoon was Nintendo's way of taking the ultra-macho first-person shooter and turning it into an approachable yet devious team game. And Mario Maker gave players the opportunity to design their own Mario levels, if nothing else proving how difficult that truly is.

Couple these with some great exclusives from other developers - Yoshi and Donkey Kong games, and best-in-show RPG Xenoblade Chronicles X - and you ended up with a system that, yes, was confusing and somewhat fiddly, but also was markedly cheaper than the competition, and arguably had a handful of games that were better than any handful of games you could take from those rival consoles.

I picked one up second-hand, and never regretted it. I might even have clocked more hours on it than on my PS4.

The wild

Mind you, a lot of that was down to Zelda.

Oh man. Zelda.

So, as I mentioned, Zelda titles had fallen into a slump over the past decade. While Mario had gone from strength to strength, his stablemate was not faring so well. Essentially, the Zelda formula had not evolved since 1998's Ocarina of Time. Majora's Mask, released a year or two after Ocarina, remixed the same art assets into a tale that was darker, more sombre, and rightly adored. Wind Waker then introduced that fresh visual style I talked about. Twilight Princess, four years later, after backlash in some quarters over Wind Waker looking too childish (idiots), retreated into rehashing Ocarina, very much to its detriment. By now what had once been innovative gameplay had ossified into something rigid and constricting. And then Skyward Sword, for the Wii, was filled with motion-control gimmicks, with twee sidekicks, with areas and enemies reused over and over to artificially draw out the play time. It was a small, bitty game, constantly wrenching control away from the player for interminable tutorial cut-scenes explaining game rules, where once the series had thrust a sword in your hand and told you to have at it. The wonder was gone. The mystery was gone. The team behind it - and this I would say was Nintendo at their worst - felt insular, eating out off past glories, refusing to look around at what the wider industry was achieving, and where it was going - namely, into open-world games.

So when the new Zelda was announced, before I got a Wii U, I could barely be bothered to watch the trailer for it. I thought I was done with that rubbish.

But then... hang on. Here was longtime producer Eiji Aonuma discussing how they were throwing out all their templates and starting afresh, with that very first Legend of Zelda for the NES as their guiding light. They wanted to refocus on adventure and exploration, to give players freedom to approach scenarios from any angle, in any order, rather than presenting them with linear sequences to be worked through in the one correct manner. Skyward Sword had been like a fairground ride where you were strapped into a cart; in this new game the team wanted to get you lost in the woods. It would be open-world, huge and expansive. Aonuma showed a clip, and it looked incredible.

Just when you think you're out, eh...?

The game, when it was eventually released, was appositely subtitled Breath of the Wild, and, oh boy, was it good. Really, really good. Like, insanely good. Like, everything I'd ever wanted from a Zelda game good. Like, my dreams as a kid sat staring longingly at the illustrations in the NES Zelda instruction manual now brought vividly to life good. It was good.

Contemporary, invigorating, exhilarating, bizarre, it drew from outside itself, taking tropes and concepts from many other popular games, improving upon them, adding things no one had thought of, lashing it together into a world that felt fully-formed like nothing else I had played.

It was as if this giant beast within the heart of the franchise that had been slumbering for years had finally awoken, finally stretched and pushed outside its safe bounds, finally gone back on the prowl. As if it had looked at what the rest of the industry had been doing while it was sleeping and said, Guys, that is not how you make an open-world game. This is how you make an open-world game.

It also felt specifically designed for me. I do not play games to get lost in stat sheets and upgrade trees. I play to climb mountains and creep through forests, to stand by ponds in the rain, watching frogs leaping, listening to the splash of raindrops, feeling very much there, very much alive, very much at peace.

Breath of the Wild had upgrades, a robust combat system, reams of side quests - but it also had fireflies to collect at dusk, villagers to pester, horses to tame, fields of swaying grass through which to ride, the music swelling, the land rolling endlessly before you, intrigue and adventure and the unknown waiting out there to be seen, to be touched, to be felt.

This Zelda, more than anything else, has reaffirmed that whatever else I move on to, however old I get, there will always be a place in my heart for videogames. Long live Nintendo. Long live Zelda. Long live Link.

And that is why I'm buying myself Nintendo's brand new, and already more successful than Wii U, hybrid console, the Nintendo Switch, tomorrow. I don't plan to do much gaming any more - maybe writing all this nonsense was a way to get it down and out of my head - but when I do game, I'd like to do it on Switch, with a company for whom that magical flame we all hold in childhood has not altogether been extinguished.

My eyes have gone funny now. It's way too late, once again. But I think I'm done with this. Hurrah. See you tomorrow.

Day 64: Like frogs in the rain

Yet another hot one. The heat was a wall, it had a physicality, it pressed up against you and lay across you and forced you downwards. I sat in a chair out on the patio with my back against the kitchen door, completely still, and I raised my arm to turn the page of my book and already I was sweating.

But it was good. Good to have a day off, good to read, good to just do nothing. I came in when the temperature became too oppressive and I wrote a little and played the new Zelda and waited for Fran.

I love the new Zelda, Breath of the Wild. The subtitle is apposite. The game engenders adventure and exploration better than almost anything else I've played. I love creeping through forests seeing what there is to see, and then a rainstorm sets in and raindrops plop down through the leaves and everything is wet and sounds are muffled and the frogs come out and you can catch the frogs. I love riding my horse through open fields with the wind rustling the grass and a few delicate notes from the main theme are introduced into the score and you want more but there isn't more and you ride and ride and the land passes beneath you. I love climbing up as high as I can get and looking out at the vast landscape splayed below, seeing sleepy towns nestled in the distance, rivers, mysterious rock formations, and thinking that it all is out there, all alive, and you are above it for a moment, removed, looking in -- and then you leap and pull your paraglider and you soar downwards wanting to find the moment when you enter that world you were just above but you cannot, it is one long moment and it is always now and you are gliding and then you are touching ground and you are back inside the great roving thing of life and you are off running to your next fabulous adventure.

So that was my afternoon before Fran arrived. When she turned up, having shaken off her hangover, we went to the shop and bought ingredients for Mexican wraps and then came home and napped together and made the food and ate the food, and then came upstairs with bowls of Vienetta and good strong Yorkshire tea and watched the 100 on Amazon Video and lounged in bed. The survivors of the 100 had to defend their new home from the Grounders by bombing a bridge and Fran kept rising onto her knees and putting her hands between her legs and clutching pillows because she was too anxious about whether Raven would die and what would happen between Clarke and Finn and who would make it through.

The series is trash. It's young-adult, post-Hunger Games silliness, dumb and formulaic, but it's also great. Sometimes you just want to switch off and sip Yorkshire tea and lie in bed with your girlfriend watching silly television, you know?

So that's what I'm going back to do. Good night.