Month: July 2017

The Nintendo Switch as a handheld

Posted on by Nimgimli

Quick post this morning before work.

Last night I decided to head upstairs early, taking the Switch with me to play in ‘handheld mode.’ As a handheld, the Switch is awesome. It feels really good in the hands and all my concerns with the graphics quality vanish on the small screen. If I had to pick one thing to complain about, it’s that the tiny – and + buttons are hard to see/find in a dark room, but that’s just a muscle memory thing that will be cured via familiarity.

It is also a pretty cool feeling to be playing on the TV, then slip the Switch out of the dock and pick up right where you left off. I’ve done the ‘cross-play’ thing between the Playstation and the Vita and that was neat but it always required some kind of manual syncing. Since with the Switch it’s the same hardware, the transition is of course instant.

One last thing before I go. The Switch has a capture button like the PS4. For now it only captures screenshots (though if I remember correctly the intent is for it to eventually capture clips) and the only way to get them off the Switch is to share them to Twitter, Facebook, or save them on a MicroSD card on the Switch and then remove that card and pop it into a PC. Be nice if there was an easier way but what can you do.

What I didn’t discover until last night is that you can quickly add text to a screenshot. It’s super easy to do. You type your message, then you can scale it, color it, position it and rotate it. The only thing missing, I guess, is being able to choose a font. Still, I thought it was a really neat little bonus feature. Here’s an example (the shot is through Link’s “scope,” just for context. That’s why the colors are kind of muted — that is NOT a result of adding the text).

A weekend with the Switch, which you need to think of as a handheld gaming system

Posted on by Nimgimli

After playing around with the Switch Friday evening, the thing sat dormant for all of Saturday and it was then that I realized I’d need either a Joycon Charging Stand or a Pro Controller. The heights of my laziness are such that if I’m sitting on the couch and have the choice of grabbing an Xbox controller, grabbing a PS4 controller, or getting up, walking over to the TV, detaching the Joycons from the Switch (they need to be attached to charge), then attaching their caps or attaching them to that holder gizmo, I was almost ALWAYS going to play something on the Xbox or Playstation. I’m all about the path of least resistance!

That led to my second Switch revelation. The Switch is a portable console that happens to be able to attach to a TV and that’s how you need to think about it. I used to have a cable that let me attach my PSP to the TV, and the Switch is a modern interpretation of that idea. That’s important to keep in mind if you’re thinking about a Switch. Do you do a lot of handheld gaming? Do you often have to ‘fight for’ TV time? Then the Switch might be ideal for you. If you’re mostly going to use it as a handheld, the fact that the Joycons are always attached to it for charging is a non-issue.

I don’t do much portable gaming. I have a Vita and a 3DS, neither of which gets used much. I don’t travel often and don’t commute. When I do travel I’m generally driving. I’ve taken my handhelds with me when I do travel but rarely get around to using them. Usually I pack them before I leave and unpack them, untouched, when I get home.

I also don’t fight for TV time. Angela and I watch a couple hours of TV together during dinner, but otherwise the TV is “hers” during the day and “mine” at night. She’s more apt to watch the TV in the office (we have 3 TVs) while she does something on her computer rather than sitting in the living room and focusing exclusively on the TV anyway. So every evening the 60″ 4K TV in the living room is there for me to use.

One of the biggest Switch advocates I know responded (on Facebook) to my last Switch post with “I love mine. I just played it for the last four hours on a flight from St. Louis to Las Vegas. I can’t do that on my PlayStation Pro.” Clearly this person was in the market for a handheld gaming device so for him the Switch is ideal. For me, the portable-ness is a more or less a non-feature. It’s unlikely our Switch will ever leave our house. I might take it and play in bed once in a great while; we’ll see. It seemed odd to me to compare the Switch to the PS4 Pro, but hey if we’re going to go that route, I’d take the PS4 Pro any day.

Which brings me to Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It got delivered Sunday afternoon and I guess I put 3-4 hours into it. I just got off the starting plateau, though I puttered around some before getting to that point.

Gameplay-wise. Zelda is fine so far. I like a lot of the systems in it, but so far combat is pretty simple and it’s missing some obvious quality of life features. For instance one of the first things you’re taught is how to cook stuff. Combining stuff to make a tasty dish is fun once, and trial & error-ing your way to discovering new recipes is fun too. But cooking a stack of 10 things, one batch at a time? Not fun.

Then there’s eating food (which heals you). OMG what were they thinking? To eat food you open your main menu, then your inventory, then you scroll over to the Food category, then you scroll to the food you want to eat, then you open the context menu for that food item and finally choose EAT. Seriously? Thank goodness time stops while you do this but I sure wish there was some kind of quick menu to access food.

But having other things kind of just work was cool. You can chop down trees to cross chasms, you can shoot ropes to lower bridges (and the ropes don’t have a big sparkly “SHOOT ME” effect, you just have to think “Well logically I should be able to shoot them” and you can). You can roll bombs into enemy camps to blow them up. You can quickly kill sleeping enemies. All this stuff kind of ‘just works’ and even the illogical stuff, like powering a raft by waving a palm frond to create a breeze to push the sails…well that kind of thing works the way you WISH it would in real life.

I’m hoping, though, that once I get off this plateau the world feels a little more alive. So far it’s been me, some old dude, and small camps of cannon fodder enemies to practice combat on. And Link himself is a blank slate so the world feels very quiet.

But my one big issue is the graphics. The art-style of the game is very nice and was chosen, I think, to cast the Switch in its best light. I’m sure the game looks great on the Switch’s small 720P screen. But blown up to 60″ I can’t help but think how much nicer the game would look if the Switch had more horsepower. I’m not even talking about pushing it past 1080P, but if there were more processing cycles to enhance the anti-aliasing it would be very welcome.

As you move through the game world there’s a lot of noticeable ‘movement’ along edges. Shimmering or creeping as the jaggies migrate along a line as the world draws in. Here’s a still image of what I’m taling about. It’s hard to see in the small embedded image, but click for full size to see what I mean, then imagine that image at 60″.

There are also a lot of textures, particularly bare earth and rock faces, that look very flat. Again, you probably don’t notice on the small screen but they actually made the game feel incomplete on the big screen, like something hadn’t drawn in properly and I was still seeing the lower resolution “distance” textures.

Anyway, point being it’s clear the target experience is playing on the Switch screen, so keep that in mind. Luckily I’ve been playing some old 360 and PS3 games so I’m in a mood to forgive low-res textures and jaggies.

By Sunday night I had purchased a Pro Controller for the Switch and OMG what a difference that made. Playing Zelda went from being this kind of awkward “why am I running in a circle when I’m trying to turn?” experience to controlling like a dream (aside from the fact that Nintendo and Sony use reversed “Action” and “Back” buttons so I keep hitting Back and I mean to be hitting the “Do it” button, but that’s on me). I do suggest turning off the motion controls and I switched jump to be on the B (I think?) button. The one at 6 o’clock. The Pro just feels much more familiar, if you’re a Playstation or Xbox gamer and in my experience it’s an integral part of the “Switch on the TV” experience; it’s just a shame that it adds $70 to the price of the console. I’d give a lot to be able to reverse the Action and Back buttons, though.

Regrets? Maybe a little bit. In a way I’m asking the impossible of Zelda: I’m asking it to be a game that’s worth spending $430 to play (Switch = $300, Zelda = $60, Pro Controller = $70). What game is worth that much!? But I AM looking forward to playing more, and I’m looking forward to some other Switch exclusives coming down the pike, so I don’t have the kind of regrets I have for the Wii U. That was a BAD decision. Switch is never going to be my main gaming platform but I think it’s popular enough that it’ll get the support it needs to be an auxiliary device. Heck I downloaded a demo-thingie for Splatoon 2 and I might end up getting that!

Nintendo Switch…GOT!

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m a Playstation fanboy, and a bit of an Xbox fanboy. I am most definitely not a Nintendo fanboy, so when the company first announced the Switch I was pretty dismissive of the device. Didn’t pre-order, didn’t care. Then it came out and everyone I knew who did get one, loved it. Soon enough I was coveting my neighbor’s console, but by then it was too late. Nintendo, being Nintendo, couldn’t seem to keep the Switch in-stock.

I still think this is a marketing ploy because I acted immediately when I saw this tweet from the Amazon Games account:

I figured the only reason they’d be promoting ARMS was if they had the Switch to sell, given that ARMS had been out for a bit. I was right, but even after I saw the Switch was in stock I didn’t really trust it. I put it in my shopping cart and checked out immediately, half-thinking I’d get a “no longer available” error somewhere along the way. But nope, I was now a Switch owner.

Thanks to the magic of modern online shopping, the Switch was delivered the same evening. Right now I only have ARMS to play on it. ARMS is fun but not a system selling. Zelda, the game everyone raves about, is due to be delivered tomorrow, so for now I’m kind of in a holding pattern when it comes to “Did I make the right decision buying this thing?”

One thing that surprised me (though it shouldn’t have) is that the Switch is pretty big for a small device. There’re a couple reasons for that. First, in ‘console mode’ it sits vertically in it’s docking station. This makes it the tallest console I own (by a large margin). My TV sits on a table flanked by the PS4 Pro on one side, the Xbox One on the other (gotta keep the squabbling kids separated!). I had thought to put the Switch in front of the TV (I was swapping out the never-used Wii U and that’s where it was) but it’s too tall for that. Even though my TV is on legs the Switch in its dock blocked part of the screen.

Another possibility was in one of the 4 storage spaces under the TV. These are roomy enough (and open in the back) that airflow isn’t generally a problem, but again the Switch was too tall. The dock would fit in there but you need vertical space above the dock to lift the Switch out of it since the dock is nearly as tall as the Switch itself.

In the end I wound up perching it on top of the PS4 Pro. The Pro runs pretty cool and it vents out the sides so it should be OK (the Xbox One runs pretty hot and has cooling vents on the top surface), but it’s a little ugly sitting there. From the front it isn’t too bad (though apparently it’s a dust magnet given that it’s been there for less than 24 hours, but Angela WAS dusting during setup…I guess I’ll be dusting again today now that everything is settled):

But I’m not a fan of the cable routing when seen from the side. I might try sliding it back. I have it towards the front just for wireless connectivity and accessibility reasons. (The other box on the PS4 Pro is the Pro’s external hard drive, in case you’re wondering.)

The ‘size’ of the Switch doesn’t stop with the console itself. There’s also a lot of parts associated with the Joycons. The big thing is meant to convert the Joycons into something like a traditional controller, the thin bits slide on the ‘connection’ side of the Joycons when used on their own. So I’ll need to find a place to store these when they’re not in use.

The good news is that once I came to terms with all the stuff I had to find locations for, everything else went well. I ran into one glitch where the setup process asks you if you want to link the device with a Nintendo Account, but that won’t actually work until you do a system update. It wouldn’t complete and I couldn’t back out of it. Had to reset the Switch and doing so was accomplished the way I assumed it would be: by holding down the power button for a bit. Nice that I didn’t have to look that up.

Once I’d updated the system software (the d/l timed out once but took up where it had left off after I restarted it) linking the Nintendo Account was pretty fast. It’s nice that you can take the Switch out of the dock and use the touch screen for pecking in usernames and passwords. The Switch feels really good in handheld mode and I may find I use it more as a handheld than as a TV-based console.

I knew I had money in my Nintendo account but it wasn’t initially showing up. For some reason you have a separate step of “merging” your 3DS/Wii U wallet with your Nintendo Switch wallet. Weird, but no big deal as it was a 1-time thing.

Oh, and I bought a microSD card for storage. Happily I knew from reading reviews that the slot for the memory card is hidden behind the ‘kickstand’ for the Switch. I don’t know how long it would have taken me to find it otherwise.

My last concern is that Switch feels really loose in its dock. There’s a lot of wiggle room in there and it just kind of sits on the connector at the bottom. It doesn’t feel locked in. I guess it’s not a huge deal since once it is in the dock there’s no real reason to touch it much, but I still worry about the long-term life of that connector at the bottom of the unit. I worry a little about the Joycons constantly sliding in and out of things too, but I guess you can replace those. The little thin parts in particular seem pretty hard to put on and pull off.

So finally I had the thing set up. Now what? Now…not much. Without games the Switch doesn’t do much. There’s a “news” service that you can use to view some Nintendo videos from the Treehouse and stuff, but that’s about it. There’s no YouTube or Twitch to kill time with. No Mii Plaza to dork around on. Time to unwrap ARMS.

And ARMS, as mentioned above, is pretty fun. I was playing it using the motion controls, one Joycon in each hand, and it felt pretty good. Not as precise as a Playstation Move controller, but way better than the old Wii controls or the Xbox Kinect controls. Was it worth spending $300 for a Switch to play ARMS? No. But Zelda will be here tomorrow, and I’m looking forward to Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and that Mario & Rabbids strategy game coming from Ubisoft: both of those are due in fall. I didn’t get the Switch in anticipation of owning a HUGE library of games for it. I got it to play games I can’t play elsewhere, and I’m looking forward to the experience of playing on the TV, then undocking and continuing to play in bed or (when the weather is cooler) out on the back porch or something.

Finished Assassin’s Creed Revelations. Hated it, but liked it

Posted on by Nimgimli

I have to admit I almost walked away from Assassin’s Creed Revelations a few times. I found the gameplay super frustrating a lot of the time. But I stuck with it long enough to get through the main storyline and I’m glad I did.

My biggest issue with the game was the city it takes place in: Constantinople. This place is a maze of narrow streets and buildings constructed on top of each other, and the streets teem with people. For the first hour it’s an amazing place to explore. Then it starts to get annoying since the quests have you having to cross and re-cross the city. Normally in an AC game you’d take to the rooftops to make your way around quickly, but in Revelations the ‘roof guards’ are both much more numerous than in earlier games, they’re much faster to react and call for help too. As often as not heading up to the roof led to either a battle or a long escape sequence that wound up with me farther from my goal than when I started.

There are “fast travel” tunnels but they’re pretty spread out and so not as helpful as they might be. Having to travel around the city was not fun, and since it’s a huge part of the gameplay, it made the whole game not fun.

The ‘raising a guild of assassins’ gameplay returns in Revelations but the towers you have to use to send your assassins on missions are so few and far between that again, it all feels more like a chore than fun.

Then there is notoriety, which works differently than in earlier AC games. In Revelations there are two opposing forces that Ezio has to deal with. The city guard and the Templars. Notoriety only impacts the Templars. The city guards will leave you alone unless you set foot on a rooftop for 2 seconds, or you get into a fight on the streets. But if your notoriety goes up, the Templars will attack one of your “assassin dens” which you will have to defend via a truly awful tower defense mini-game.

What compounds the problem is how notoriety increases. If you renovate a building or buy gear, your notoriety goes up. It takes 3-4 actions to max it out and open you up to having to play the mini-game. To lower it you can bribe a herald or kill a Templar official if you can find one. (No more tearing down posters.) That led to a pattern of renovating two shops, then finding a herald to bribe to bring down notoriety. Repeat. Over and over. Very tedious system.

They added a crafting system for crafting all kinds of bombs. All the little treasure boxes you find hidden around the city contain components for building bombs. I’ve never done much with the smoke bombs in earlier AC games and wasn’t interested in this bomb system in Revelations either.

Lastly, I guess this reflects the values of the people of Constantinople, but after a fight if you loot the bodies of your victims people around you start hurling insults about what a vile piece of human filth you are. That got old really fast. I stopped bothering to loot soldiers or to loot treasure chests. I never upgraded my gear much and didn’t really have to. What money I needed I got via real estate or completing quests.

Look I could go on and on. I really didn’t enjoy the gameplay in Revelations.

Let’s take a break from the constant murdering to have a nice picnic!

As for the story. I spent next to no time outside the animus (you can collect items that let you do Desmond missions but I hate Desmond so I didn’t bother). Ezio, now a grey-beard, is in Constantinople looking for the 5 keys to Altair’s library in Maysaf. Each key he finds leads him into a memory of Altair’s. So we’re playing as Desmond reliving Ezio’s memories of reliving Altair’s memories. So meta. I didn’t play AC 1 so didn’t have a strong connection to Altair, but if you did you’d probably enjoy these bits. In each one Altair is older. We meet his wife, and his son, and eventually see his death.

Ezio meanwhile meets a woman named Sofia and falls for her. He also pals around with Suleiman the Magnificent back when he was just Suleiman, son of the sultan. And he fights the Templars. His story is kind of dull, though I liked Sofia quite a bit.

The game wraps up both Altair and Ezio’s storylines (I’m presuming that is the case for Ezio though he is still alive when the story ends) and we get another glimpse into these people who came before, but not until the very end of the game.

Really, the last “memory sequence” was what saved the game for me. And now I can say I’ve played all the Ezio AC games, I guess.

One who came before decides to explain it all to Desmond.

Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood fini, on to Revelations

Posted on by Nimgimli

It took me like 3 weeks to play through Assassin’s Creed II and two days to finish Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood. Part of the reason is that ACB is somewhat shorter, but mostly it was because I was hooked on the story and skipped a lot of the side missions. Plus it being a long, lazy 4th of July weekend didn’t hurt, either.

I liked AC Brotherhood a lot. I liked how it continued the story of both Ezio and Desmond in a very “chapter 2” kind of way. This time around Ezio stays in one city, Rome, but it was large enough that I didn’t find that to be a problem. They also greatly expanded the system of upgrading your infrastructure. In AC 2 you spent money to improve your villa. In ACB you’re improving all of Rome. At the start of the game the Borgias have Rome in a vice-grip but Ezio and his fellow assassins can take back control by killing the Borgia Captain who controls a district, then putting a tower to the torch. Once that is done you can spend money to renovate stables, blacksmith shops, tailors, art dealers and the like.

The more shops you renovate the more income you earn and the larger the discounts you get. It was a fun system but I would’ve liked to see it taken even further. Aside from income there didn’t seem to be any gameplay benefit to renovating the districts. Fortunately my OCD just enjoyed improving districts for the satisfaction of doing it.

Another cool system was being in control of the assassin’s guild. You run around and save citizens from the Borgia, after which they join the guild. You then send them out on missions to level up and bring back goods and gold. If you’ve playing Black Flag it was like the system that let you send ships out on missions. The better part of the assassin’s guild was being able to call on them to help you. Target an enemy and hit L1 and suddenly from out of nowhere your assassins appear to take out that target. That NEVER got old.

I really enjoyed Ezio’s part of the story. Desmond’s was just so-so. I’m having trouble relating to Desmond (he’s the guy in present day who sits in the animus to relive Ezio’s memories). Part of the problem is that he’s voiced by Nolan North who uses the same voice he used for Nathan Drake. In fact there’s a section of the game where Desmond and Lucy (voice by Kristen Bell) are climbing through a ruin that felt very reminiscent of Drake and Elena (voice by Emily Rose) moving through Uncharted. It felt kind of unsettling to me.

Yussef is the guild master in Constantinople

Anyway, glad I played it. I have a lot of side content I can (and may) go back to still, but once the credits rolled I jumped right into Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. And honestly, so far I’m not feeling it. ACB felt like the end of Ezio’s story and so far Revelations kind of feels like an extended epilogue. Ezio is in Constantinople so we’re dealing with a fresh cast of friends and enemies. They’ve also changed a lot of the controls just enough to drive me crazy. L3 is now used where Triangle used to be, for instance.

They’ve also added bombs to the game. Ezio and craft and toss bombs, and at least early on there is a huge emphasis on this. Bleh. I played through most of ACB with a big-ass 2-handed weapon, cleaving my way through swarms of enemies. Now I’m supposed to hide and lob bombs? I say again, bleh.

Worst of all, they’ve managed to wedge a tower-defend mini-game into Assassin’s Creed. Ugh ugh and UGH. If I wanted to play a crappy Tower Defense game there are plenty to choose from. Hopefully I don’t have to do that too often.

We’ll see though. I’ve only got a few hours into it so far. Maybe it’ll get better.

Of couse Ezio has to find at least Western woman to romance

Assassin’s Creed, past and future

Posted on by Nimgimli

As of January 1st of this year I owned 6 or 7 Assassin’s Creed games for some reason. I’d never finished any of them so I’m not sure why I kept buying them, but I did.

Earlier this year I finally did finish Black Flag but at the time I attributed that to it being 1 part Assassin’s Creed, 1 part pirate game. But I did note that the sense of history grabbed me too.

Now I’ve finished my second Assassin’s Creed game, Assassin’s Creed II, and I think I’m hooked. Once again knowing the characters (and the locations) from my limited historical knowledge definitely played into my enjoyment of the game. I’m sad to admit that knowledge actually came from a couple of dramas I’ve been watching on Netflix (“Medici: Masters of Florence” and “Borgia”), but at least I knew the broad strokes about which families hated which other families and how corrupt things were. Borgia in particular taught me to dislike Ezio’s main enemy, Rodrigo Borgia.

Contessa Caterina Sforza

The writing/characters were great too. In one scene, hot-tempered Caterina Sforza is on the roof of her keep, shouting down at enemy soldiers. The enemy commander says he has captured her children and he will kill them if she doesn’t open the gates. She blusters back “Do with them what you will!” Then she hoists her skirts to expose her knickers and shouts “I have the means to make more!” And of course then turns away and bids Ezio to please save her children. When Ezio finds her daughter, the little girl has her mother’s spirit. She is constantly berating the soldiers keeping her captive and one of my favorite lines is “I’m bored! I need something to do until you are killed!” Minutes later Ezio, of course, kills them and saves her.

I dunno how well this translates, but even with the dated graphics I really felt attached to these characters and wanted to help them. I also found myself looking up the characters on Wikipedia to see what had happened to the real people these characters represent. Pretty cool stuff.

I remember when the first Assassin’s Creed was coming out, the developers talked about how they’d tried to make the city of Acre as historically accurate as possible. While I thought that was cool, I didn’t even know Acre had been a city. But AC2 goes to Florence and Venice; cities that have at least a bit of resonance with me. I think that helped too.

Leonardo’s latest work-in-progress

I don’t think I’ll ever play through the original Assassin’s Creed unless they do some kind of re-master at some point. People seem to think the series took a big jump in quality with AC2 and it’s hard to go backwards in a series’ history (for me). But after I finished AC2 I jumped right into Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood where Ezio continues to pursue the Borgia family, this time in Rome. Again it’s fun to be in this world…I mean I’m climbing around on the Coliseum right!? I’m notoriously fickle but as of now I intend to keep with the series through AC: Revelations once Brotherhood is complete, and I’m happy to know AC3, AC: Unity and AC: Syndicate are all out there waiting for me (though I only have AC3 as a backwards compatible title on the Xbox One so we’ll see if it’s actually playable).

Now all that said, I’m a little concerned about Assassin’s Creed: Origins coming out this fall, for a few reasons. First it’s set in ancient Egypt, which I know nothing about. I mean I know the pyramids and a couple of pharaoh names but beyond that? I fear it’ll be a bit like Acre was in not hooking me historically. Second, they seem to be veering away from the historical side of things. I’ve been watching some previews and interviews and the assassin in Origins has things like a shotgun bow (shoots 5 arrows at once) and weapons with elemental effects, like a knife that sets enemies aflame. There was also a monster in the reveal trailer iirc: a giant snake or something. Though that could have been in a hallucination or something.

Ezio and Machiavelli walk and plot together

I’m still looking forward to Origins but not so much from an “Assassin’s Creed” point of view as just for an open-world adventure point of view, if that makes sense. Other changes I’ve noticed are swapping out the mini-maps for a Fallout/Skyrim-style compass with icons, the addition of some kind of crafting system, RPG-style levels and a pretty robust loot system with tiers of rarity. So I think it’ll definitely be a fun game, but I don’t think it’ll have that historical connection that I’m suddenly enjoying in Assassin’s Creed games.

As always, I am late to the party. But at least I still have a bunch of the old AC games to play!

Ezio recruits for the Assassin’s Guild
Sometimes you just need to hit the taverns.
DaVinci’s workshop in Roma