So I feel like by far the most interesting thing about the recent Nintendo Switch Online announcements has gone completely unremarked.

As a quick refresher - Nintendo Switch Online (NSO) is the paid subscription service for Nintendo Switch, roughly analogous to PlayStation Plus or Xbox Live Gold. Some of what NSO provides is standard for this space - the ability to play multiplayer games online, cloud-based backups of save files (well, mostly), occasional game trials and discounts and other little bonuses. The unusual thing is that it also grants access to a library of NES and SNES games.

Recently it was revealed that a higher subscription tier dubbed the Expansion Pack is coming. By paying extra on top of the normal NSO cost, you can additionally get access to a library of N64 and Sega Genesis games.

Now, there’s a lot to be said about the merits of these offerings and whether they are worth the cost and how they compare to previous-generation’s Virtual Console offerings and the approaches taken by Microsoft and Sony (not to mention how things work on PC) and so on and so on. I’m not here to talk about any of that.

What’s much more interesting to me is that the NSO Expansion Pack will apparently also include access to the upcoming paid DLC expansion for Animal Crossing: New Horizons. That’s fascinating.

Read more...

A bit over ten years ago, I started playing Dragon Age: Origins. It was a very highly-regarded game by the people who’d made Mass Effect, which I had absolutely loved, so I expected to enjoy it.

And I more or less did, for a while. I got through my chosen opening area and the first few hours of the main story, picking up a few party members along the way. The story and world were fascinating, but I wasn’t enjoying the combat - it was too slow and strategic for my tastes, especially as my party grew in size. Before long I stalled out, dropped the game, and never came back to it.

This bothered me. I was supposed to like this game! I’d gotten so into Mass Effect that I’d played it three times in a row and read the tie-in novels, and here I was giving up on the universally-acclaimed Dragon Age: Origins partway into my first playthrough! Was I not a man of culture?

I resolved the cognitive dissonance through a bit of denial. Clearly the reason I’d been able to get into Mass Effect and not Dragon Age was that I’d been unemployed when I played Mass Effect and not so when I played Dragon Age. It wasn’t a question of taste - it was a question of time and energy. So instead of moving Dragon Age to my “Meh” category on Steam, I made a new category for it: “Free Time”, for games I should come back to when I had more free time so I could enjoy them properly. (I no longer have this category so I can’t tell you all of the games that made their way into it over the years, but I’m pretty sure they included Before the Echo, A Valley Without Wind, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution.)

Of course, the “free time” I was waiting for never materialized, even in later periods of unemployment, and no game ever got picked back up from that category. Looking back, I think I now have a better idea of what was happening (and has continued to happen with an increasing number of games over time). It was related to free time, but indirectly.

Read more...

This morning while walking the dog, I stopped her from exploring into a neighbor’s yard and said, “That’s someone else’s house. We can’t go that way.”

I realized my dog is a video game protagonist and I’m the narrator throwing up invisible walls and forcing her to turn around when she hits the edge of the accessible map.

Gonna think about that next time I play a game and feel the designer tighten the leash.

I feel like a lot of Nintendo’s choices make more sense if you don’t think of them as a video game company but rather a collectibles company that happens to make video games.

The first Picross game I played was Pokémon Picross over five years ago. I’m curious how many people followed this pattern: when the My Nintendo loyalty program launched, its most intriguing reward was an exclusive game, My Nintendo Picross: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I was only dimly aware of Picross and wasn’t sure I wanted to plunk down 1000 Platinum Points to pick this game up, but Pokémon Picross had come out fairly recently and was free-to-play, so I used it as a Picross demo. I quickly learned that I liked Picross, abandoned Pokémon Picross, and started in on the many non-F2P Picross offerings on 3DS: the Twilight Princess one, Mario’s Picross on the virtual console, the PICROSS e series, Pic-a-Pix Color, and Picross 3D Round 2.

Between those and some other Picross games on mobile and Switch, I’ve now solved somewhere in the vicinity of two thousand Picross puzzles. And I can confidently state that the 3DS is straight-up the best place for Picross. The combination of buttons, touchscreen, and stylus in a light handheld are perfectly suited to the gameplay. Using just a mobile touchscreen or just buttons on Switch is so clunky by comparison. A lot of Picross games on the Switch don’t even support touchscreen controls, which is baffling to me.

When I got a Switch and basically stopped using my 3DS, I also basically stopped playing Picross games because they just weren’t as enjoyable anymore. This is one of the biggest reasons I’m sad about the loss of the DS/3DS/Wii U paradigm.

But I’ve been picking my 3DS back up recently and have been tucking back into Picross there. I still have three more PICROSS e games to get through (apparently there’s a final Japan-only one? and the 3DS is region-locked, so I can’t just sign in to the Japan eshop to pick it up? how expensive can it be to localize a friggin' Picross game when you’ve already localized all the UI for it? sigh) plus Sanrio Characters Picross, but that’s about it - there were a couple other Japan-only games and nobody’s putting out new Picross on the 3DS anymore.

So I figured I might as well take a second look at Pokémon Picross too. And it definitely lands a bit differently with me now. When I was using it to learn Picross, I considered its time targets aggressive - five minutes for a 10x10 grid stressed me out. Now I solve those puzzles in about one minute. I also wrote that “the Pokémon are mostly just a way to cheapen the core puzzle gameplay” since their abilities were either just assist features or shortcuts to solve part of the puzzle for you and “[i]f you don’t want to solve the puzzle yourself, why play Picross?” Now, after solving thousands of puzzles, I find those features add some interesting variety and flavor to the game, where before they were a crutch that robbed me of much-needed practice.

But the fact that I now actually enjoy the game only makes it that much more frustrating that, a couple days in, I’ve run into the monetization wall. The game quickly got a lot less fun to play and I have no desire to monetarily reward a design that so clearly sacrifices the quality of the experience to persuade me to open my wallet.

Unlike most F2P titles, there at least is a cap in how much you can spend, after which the “fun pain” goes away. But my understanding is that while the game is about twice the size of a PICROSS e title (about 300 puzzles as opposed to 150) that spending cap is five times the cost of a PICROSS e game ($30 in the most efficient method and of course the IAP structure is confusing, compared to $6 for a PICROSS e title). The non-spending alternative makes use of a daily reward (which I dislike) that has to be earned every day for about a year to unlock everything, and that’s if you are careful to optimize rewards in ways that make the game less fun to play.

So, ultimately, my review of Pokémon Picross stands. It’s best used as a demo to see if you like Picross before moving on to better-priced and more-respectful options.

But being honest with myself, I think there’s a real possibility that once I exhaust the other options on 3DS, I will sigh, roll my eyes, and plunk down the $30 to be able to enjoy Pokémon Picross. Because it’s still going to be better than Picross on Switch.

After seeing me play Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Allie was intrigued by the story and characters and suggested we could finally watch the Ratchet & Clank movie.

We didn’t like it.

As a quick reminder - in 2016, there was a Ratchet & Clank movie which rebooted the franchise’s story, changing at least as much as it kept from the plot of the original game. Alongside this was a game called simply Ratchet & Clank, which was sort of a remake of the original 2002 game, but also a direct adaptation of the film, which was itself loosely based on that original game.

I’d previously understood, thanks mainly to Super Bunnyhop’s analysis, that the 2016 game was technically solid but had its story and characters substantially worsened by needing to conform to story beats from the film, which itself was a mediocre and generic kids' movie. After seeing the film, I think this was a generous assessment or that I’d overestimated the quality I could expect from a mediocre kids' movie. The film’s storytelling and characterization is also quite weak (weaker than most of the games; Allie’d been intrigued by Rift Apart and was bored by the movie) and there are multiple out-of-place-feeling scenes that seem to only exist because of the tie-in game.

While I’d previously been frustrated by the negative impact the movie had on the game, I’d assumed this was due to Sony and others prioritizing the movie and so at least the movie had probably basically achieved its goal. This doesn’t seem to have been the case. The movie lost several million dollars, which resulted in the Sly Cooper movie getting shelved. So this was a purely destructive trade-off. The story reboot doesn’t even seem to have stuck; while Rift Apart doesn’t directly contradict anything from the 2016 film/game, it also doesn’t acknowledge any of its events or characters but does directly follow up events and plot threads of other previous games.

What a waste that movie was.

In looking into this, I found out there’s also an upcoming TV series. Based on the pilot, it’s not quite in line with the canon, tone, or characterization of the games but is at least better constructed than the film and more like what I had pictured as mediocre kid’s media. I don’t think it’ll do as poorly as the film, but I don’t think Allie or I will want to watch it.

(Also it’s weird to me how many references to the games are in both the film and the TV pilot. I feel like the people who catch them are also the people who would be upset at how much those adaptations change the canon and the characters.)