In seven years, Switch changed the industry
Plus WWE 2K24, Donkey Kong Country, The King's Dilemma and more!
Hello there! This week we’re looking back at the Switch on the occassion of its seventh birthday, playing poker roguelites and WWE 2K24, finishing up the legacy-adjacent boardgame The King’s Dilemma, and remembering the epic marketing misdirection that was Donkey Kong Country.
I’ve been more into tinkering than gaming lately, for unkown reasons that I’m not prepared to probe too deeply; there’s just something about working down a list of methodical or mechanical tasks that’s very pleasing. I’ve never really got into Linux before so I’ve built a retro emulation box from a mini PC and a distro called Lakka, and I’m also making a Plex server out of old laptop guts. The best part is having to find and meticulously attach thumbnail images to everything. Yeah, that’s the stuff. Everybody needs a hobby away from their hobby.
Lessons learned from the Switch
By Tim
The Nintendo Switch turned seven years old this week, and I struggle to think of a system that's had as big an impact on the industry overall during its lifespan.
I was lucky enough to have the console a few weeks before launch, and I remember the true brilliance of its design occuring to me gradually; new HD console games on the TV or on the go, no more delinieation between portable and console software, all local processing and storage so not futzing around with clouds and weird wireless issues.
The only question was whether developers would support it, but Nintendo putting 100% of its first-party focus on the machine drove a momentum that meant they soon couldn't ignore it; it's the third best-selling game machine of all time.
It's easy to forget that before the Switch, conventional wisdom said portable games were done for. After the heights of the Nintendo DS, phones took over as the time-waster of choice, the 3DS didn't come close to the success of its predecessor and Sony abandoned its own portable platforms.
The Switch showed that demand was still very much there, people just wanted more freedom, fewer gimmicks and a truly comprehensive library of games. So it's no surprise that, following the Switch, we now have an explosion of handheld PC gaming devices, and rumours swirling that an portable Xbox is waiting in the wings. Not to mention an uptick in more boutique handheld devices.
But the Switch has more to teach us than the fact that people still like dedicated handheld games machines. The industry in general is suffering due to a focus on the highest-end technology and performance, which has made game development more expensive and resource intensive than ever before. Games created over many years with armies of developers and budgets in the hundreds of millions are barely profitable, and companies are desperately gambling on new monetisation strategies that more often than not don't work out for anybody.
Nintendo isn't completely insulated from this, but the Switch does show a different way forward; people will still pay full price for good games without ray tracing, which run under 1080p and 60 frames per second. I’m not saying other companies should move to outdated portable hardware instead of new consoles, but they might consider whether a few extra million in the budget for extra technological bells and whistles, and a constant cycle of hiring and firing, is truly necessary.
What to play
The inimitable Vanillaware (Odin Sphere, Dragon’s Crown) has a new game out this week in Unicorn Overlord. As expected from this team it is absolutely gorgeous, but it’s also a tactics RPG that should appeal to Ogre Battle or Fire Emblem fans. I (Tim) have only played the free demo so far but it’s very satisfying. Progress carries over to the full game so you have nothing to lose giving it a try.
I’ve also been obsessed this week with Balatro, a rougelite where you make increasingly powerful poker hands. I was skeptical at first, but everything that makes a good rougelite is there — building synergies on each run with upgrades and rule-changing Joker cards, so for example you’re set up to buff all picture cards and you’re also converting lesser cards to pictures — and pulling off a win against a powerful boss blind is surprisingly rivetting.
The PlayStation Plus monthly games are here for subscribers at all tiers. Sifu is the highlight of the pack; a kung-fu brawling rougelite where you age every time you die. Then there’s streamer bait stealth horror Hello Neighbor 2, racing sim EA Sports F1 23, and The Witch Queen, 2022’s Destiny 2 expansion which could be a good excuse to discover or return to the online shooter.
Two additions to Game Pass this week. Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun is a boomer shooter set in the Space Marine universe, and honestly the first time I (Tim) have seen a Warhammer game and wanted to play it. Also Paw Patrol World.
New to Apple Arcade this week are Crayola Adventures, Bloons TD Battle 2+ and The Battle of Polytopia+. My first assumption about Polytopia was that it was a tale of how the greater Seattle polycule accidentally ingested the other, smaller polycules in the area, but it turns out it’s a civilisation-building strategy game (though, same thing I guess). I’m (Alice) particularly excited for Bloons TD Battles 2+ as I have been woefully addicted to the previous games and can’t wait to become addicted to the new one.
Do I like wrestling now?
By Alice
I think by now, we all know that annual sports (or “sports entertainment”) games aren’t brand new experiences every year. The best you can hope for is a bunch of small improvements and perhaps a cool event to justify the cost of the new game when you still have last year’s (or can buy last year’s used for a few dollars).
This year’s WWE 2K24 follows this tradition pretty perfectly. But while my tip is normally to skip every second year with these kinds of games (particularly my beloved NBA 2K series), I think the 40 years of Wrestlemania special event makes it worth picking up, even for the most casual fans. It’s implemented in such a way that even if you don’t know what was going on in all the story lines, you get enough of the gist, and enjoy the spectacle enough that it will get you swept up in the enthusiasm for the sport. The difficulty levels of the playable portions could perhaps be tweaked a little, but they’re high enough that they give players extra respect for the difficulty level of pulling off the moves these wrestlers make look so easy.
While wrestling as an industry might not be great at a lot of things (workers’ rights, allegedly not sexually harassing people, plots that fully make sense), what it is good at is creating a spectacle and getting people willing to risk life and limb for our entertainment. The hype surrounding the 40th anniversary of Wrestlemania mode has a frenetic magic to it, it drew me in enough to make me want to find out more about these stories, and has me considering tuning into an episode if I see one come up on Binge. 40 isn’t even a particularly special number of years, and yet somehow this mode carried more weight than the NBA 2K Jordan Challenge which took us through the history of arguably the greatest basketball player of all time.
If you get a chance to play, I recommend it. It’s worth your time.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
My friends and I have been working our way through The King’s Dilemma for more than half a year now. It’s akin to a Legacy game, in that the decisions you make impact the games you play in the future. For example, I was out-voted on whether or not to implement slavery in our kingdom, and somehow that meant that half a dozen games later, our kingdom started gleefully draining slaves to turn their blood into gold.
Well, this past weekend our campaign finally came to an end, and I must admit that the abruptness of the end left me feeling a bit like the designers didn’t actually know how to end the story.
There was a really cool mini game introduced towards the end, a maze with a puzzle to solve, which we all loved. I wondered why there hadn’t been more of that throughout the rest of the campaign, it seemed a shame to save all the really cool minigames and puzzles for the end.
The mechanics of the way the game ended was interesting. I’m not going to spoil it, but had we played the rest of the campaign differently, there were ways to risk losing despite your points, and ways different players could team up to make sure anyone with an obvious lead could be disqualified. Our game was a bit too lopsided to really take full advantage of that, which was good for me, because my dominance in the earlier games meant I won by a narrow margin. But there were an anxious few minutes where I thought it might all have been for naught, which made it exciting.
Despite my disappointment with the way the narrative ended, I loved the experience and thought it was a good game. With legacy games, it’s always difficult to tell if it was the company or the game that you loved, but I think in this case it was both. It had more structure than an RPG, but not as much as, say, a traditional board game, and if that sounds like something you might be into committing to, I recommend it.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
Aside from being one of the greatest games of all time, Rare’s Donkey Kong Country is something of a historical nexus. The 1994 game brought a Nintendo franchise back to relevance after DK had more or less disappeared a decade earlier. It helped the Super Nintendo compete against the Sega Mega Drive with its Sonic 3 & Knuckles. And its faux 3D graphics successfully convinced the game-playing public the machine could hold its own against the incoming PlayStation and Sega Saturn, even if it mostly turned out to be smoke and mirrors.
DKC takes some elements of the old arcade games, like barrels and vines, and smushes them together with a Super Mario style of 2D platformer that focuses on variety and flow. But, Rare being Rare, it’s also filled with secrets, collectibles and technological wizardry.
The developer had purchased powerful 3D graphics workstations in anticipation of the Nintendo 64, but discovered it could also use them for the Super Nintendo, by creating impressive renders of characters and elements before flattening them to 2D. Notably this effect has been thoroughly ruined by modern pixel-based displays, but if you ever see the game on an old-school CRT (or with a filter fine enough to achieve the same texture) it remains a sight to behold.
Along with the so-called 3D graphics, the game featured a brilliant cast of characters and animal helpers, innovative level design gimmicks and an instantly iconic David Wise score unlike anything else on the system; DK Island Swing and Aquatic Ambience in particular are unavoidable classics
So successful was DKC that it spawned two best-selling sequels despite the arrival of a new generation of game consoles. Strangely neither feature Donkey Kong as a playable character, sticking with Rare originals only, but each is an incredible expansion of its predecessor with bigger ambitions, fancier graphics and more stuff to do.