This is Nintendo at its most "software toy" I think I've ever seen them — although I say this with the caveat that I never played the 3DS version of Tomodachi Life. It's a delight. It's like playing The Sims without having to do the boring and annoying bits. It's like playing a citybuilder without having to worry about complicated management things. It's what mobile and social games might have been if they had never been corrupted by greed and predatory monetisation strategies.

Above all, though, it's a medium through which you can express and play with your creativity and imagination, and I love that. While the first couple of hours or so are deliberately constrained to introduce you to the basic features of the game and its interface, it doesn't take long to get to a point where you've unlocked most of the main "mechanics", such as they are, and can start using them to play with your creations in the little world you gradually build for them.

It's possibly the best use of the "Miis" that Nintendo have had on their consoles since the Wii days, and the delightfully lo-fi synthesised speech they talk in — no AI-generated voices here — is a pleasant reminder of a more innocent age.

That can be said about the whole experience, really. It's a reminder of when we all had the capacity to play imaginatively, only now our imaginations can be supported by interactivity. No longer do you have to pretend your dolls are talking to one another, because now they actually do talk to one another — although you're not always privy to the details of all their conversations. (Rather charmingly, you can catch the odd word here and there, and most of these are things that you've previously entered into the game as subjects for them to talk about with one another, meaning my little collection of Miis likes talking about flatulence, eating sausages, cats and F-15 Strike Eagles.

I'll have some more to say about this delightful little game over on MoeGamer when I've spent a bit more time with it. But for now I can say confidently that I'm glad I decided to take a punt on this silly little game. The kind of silliness it offers is precisely what the world needs right now — much as Animal Crossing came along at the exact right time when the pandemic hit. (Even if I didn't get along with Animal Crossing personally, I at least appreciate what it represented.)

Anyway, I've peppered this article with a few screenshots from this evening's session. As I say, I'll have much more to say in the near future, but for now, I should probably go to bed rather than checking in on everyone one last time this evening…

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The post #oneaday Day 678: Chillin' with my Tomodachi appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Kirby Air Riders is out today, and I've spent the evening playing it. Specifically, I've spent the evening playing the "Road Trip" mode that I didn't know anything about prior to starting the game. This is a single-player mode that is presumably intended to get you up to speed on everything you might be doing at any point in the other modes, but it also unlocks a bunch of stuff in a similar fashion to Smash Bros.' single-player modes from over the years.

The whole package is very Smash Bros., in fact, including the way you navigate the menus, the way you adjust your settings for a play session and the overall structure of the game. It's a very customisable game, from the look of things, so I'm looking forward to investigating the other aspects of it soon.

Road Trip, meanwhile, that I can talk about. In this mode, you pick a character and initial "machine" to ride on, and progress through a series of stages, each of which is split into a series of "encounters" on the road. Under most circumstances, you have a choice of three encounters to choose from at any point, with different rewards on offer for each. Successfully beating an encounter generally rewards you with some Road Trip-specific currency and a stat increase or two. Outside of the competitive events, you may also run into shops (where you can, of course, spend the aforementioned Road Trip-specific currency) and weird things that determine which of several branching paths you will take at the conclusion of the current stage.

The events you'll compete in on the Road Trip are generally pretty short in duration — races tend to be one or two laps at most, and the events which aren't races are all time-limited. It's enough to give you a look at the different things you can do in the game's other modes, but in a way that you never get particularly bogged down in anything. You rarely do the same type of event twice in a row, and the difficulty curve progresses nicely from "very easy" in the early stages to "genuinely quite challenging, but not annoyingly so" as you get closer to the conclusion.

As you progress through the Road Trip, you'll gain the opportunity to earn "memory shards", which tell the unfolding story. This is surprisingly dark, considering this is a Kirby game, involving a mechanical creature that has sat for aeons without being able to move because it requires someone's "strong will" to allow it to do anything, a terrifying orbital satellite that, among other things, constructs an army of robotic ants to rip this aforementioned creature to bits and rebuild it into a world-crushing weapon, and the implication that everyone's vehicles in the game are like Pokémon, if Pokémon were forms of sentient transporation rather than creatures that liked to fight. So maybe not all that much like Pokémon at all, other than the fact that they clearly have "personalities" of sorts, and partner up with the people of Kirby's world, Popstar, in a quasi-symbiotic relationship.

In the events, Kirby Air Riders is chaotic. For those concerned that it might be a bit too much like Mario Kart: it's nothing like Mario Kart. My wife saw me playing it briefly and said it looked like "Wipeout, but Kirby" and honestly she's not far from the truth there. There's a touch of F-Zero, a bit of Burnout, even a bit of Twisted Metal in there, depending on the type of event you're playing. I can see it easily being overwhelming for some players, but there is clearly method in the madness.

Probably the most clever thing it does is use an incredibly simple control scheme, much like Kirby platformers tend to. There are only two buttons to worry about: characters accelerate automatically, and the only time you need to press a button is when you want to slow down (which also charges up your boost) or use your character's "Special", which can only be used when a particular meter has charged.

The "Boost Charge" mechanic has a nicely tactile feel. You're effectively "pulling back" your character, winding them up and then letting them twang forward, though the exact implementation of this depends quite significantly on the machine you've chosen to ride. Some are built for drifting around corners; others stop dead when charging a boost and can thus immediately change direction when going around 90-degree bends; others still can't drift or boost at all, but make up for this with other strengths.

These differences between the machines, along with individual machines' special capabilities (such as the "Vampire Star" machine's ability to "bite" opponents, damaging and slowing them down and stealing their power-ups) and the stat growth throughout Road Trip mode mean that there's a surprising amount of depth considering how simple the game is to control. Different machines are eminently suitable to different types of event, so it pays to try and build up a collection — indeed, I believe to get the "true" ending for the game, you need to collect all of them prior to reaching the final encounter, though this is made more straightforward through a New Game+ option that lets you carry over the stuff you've already acquired.

There are some other interesting little things, too. A significant portion of the Road Trip mode involves the "Top Rider" mode, which is racing from a top-down perspective on simplified tracks. This is a lot of fun, though obviously less spectacular and chaotic than the 3D races — and it's nice that this is a whole mode you can play given equal weight to the "main" game mode. There are even different control options, depending on if you prefer "turn left and right" or "push the analogue stick in the direction you want to go" for these top-down sequences.

All in all, it seems like a really solid game given that distinctive Sora Ltd. polish. I'll be interested to see whether it has the juice to go for the long term on the multiplayer circuit; I can see this being a really solid multiplayer game, but, of course, it needs a community for that to work over the long term. I don't yet know if the broader community will take to it in the same way as something like Mario Kart — but then, Splatoon came out of nowhere on Wii U and managed to be a big enough hit (on the Wii U!) to spawn two sequels, so there's precedent for a Nintendo game not called Mario Kart or Smash Bros. to have a thriving online community.

More than anything, it's nice to see the Switch 2 finally picking up the pace with some solid releases — and on proper game cartridges, too. Now, if they'd just quit doing that dumbass Game Key Card thing completely I'd be very happy indeed…

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The post #oneaday Day 531: Riding the air appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

In my head, I've had a bit of a weird relationship with the Legend of Zelda series over the years. There have been large tracts of time when I haven't played any games in the series, and there are still a number of entries (primarily handheld) that I haven't tried at all. I've known Zelda obsessives over the years, and I've never counted myself among them; likewise, I don't think I've ever bought a Zelda game on launch… with the exception of the new Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, which I'm sure someone will argue isn't a Zelda game, but it actually is — just a different kind of Zelda game.

Anyway, I think I've come to the conclusion, many years too late, that yes, I, in fact, do like the Legend of Zelda series, and I always have done.

I think I know where my hesitancy over this came from, and it dates back to the late 1990s. I had just discovered console-style RPGs with Final Fantasy VII, and then Ocarina of Time came out, offering a very different sort of game to Final Fantasy VII, and… I felt like I didn't like it as much. At least, not in terms of story. Final Fantasy VII's narrative was unlike anything I'd ever experienced in gaming at that point, while Ocarina of Time was basically reading from the same script as A Link to the Past, which I had played (and enjoyed a lot) several years earlier.

Link didn't speak, either, which made the narrative immediately less interesting to me.

Of course, I know this is a silly comparison now, because Final Fantasy VII and Ocarina of Time are so different from one another as to basically be completely different genres — and that's not getting into the interminably tedious arguments over whether Zelda is "an RPG" or not.

No; I can see very clearly now that the intent behind the two series, and those entries in them in particular, is very different. Final Fantasy VII was all about delivering a spectacular, emotionally engaging narrative; Ocarina of Time was about being a well-designed video game. And, although Zelda plots have become more and more elaborate over the years — not to mention the series' timeline becoming ever more convoluted — this distinction has, for the most part, remained.

This isn't to say that Final Fantasy has bad gameplay or that Zelda has a poor story, mind. It's simply that their focal points are different, and, as with anything, if you go in with the wrong things in mind, you're almost certainly not going to resonate with it as much as you would if you had more realistic expectations.

Anyway, I think back over the years and the many Zelda games I have played, and I don't think I've ever had a bad time with a Zelda game.

My first ever encounter with the series was with Zelda II: The Adventure of Link on a family friend's NES. When I first played this, I didn't understand it at all, as I was very young and had never really encountered a game like it before. With how different Zelda II was from the rest of the series, I at least know I wasn't alone in feeling like that — although today I respect Zelda II immensely for having the balls to do something so drastically different from its predecessor.

I have a few oddly vivid memories of that first time I played Zelda II. The towns of Ruto and Rauru, both of which would lend their names to characters in the series many years later. The slightly wobbly melodic line on the music. The distinctive overworld map theme — which starts very similarly to the well-known Zelda theme before branching off in its own direction. The caves that are too dark to see until you get a candle. Link making a noise that sounds like he's going "whoops" every time he takes damage — a sound effect shared with Simon Belmont from Castlevania. The BLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBL noise and strobes when you lose a life. And the fact I always thought Link looks like a chef when he's doing his "damage" pose. I saw it once, I can't unsee it now.

A few years later, I got a Super NES, and one of the games I asked for one Christmas or birthday was A Link to the Past. I knew absolutely nothing about this game, save for the fact that magazines talked about it in tones of reverence, and I remembered quite liking my time with Zelda II.

I got it. And I was absolutely blown away by it — particularly the music. To this day, I'm still impressed that the game has full-on orchestral cymbal clashes in its music. Absolutely one of the best uses of the SNES' sound chip there ever was.

Anyway, I dutifully bought Ocarina of Time like every self-respecting N64 owner was supposed to back in the day, and I quite enjoyed it, with the caveats mentioned above. What I liked a whole lot more, though, was Majora's Mask, the direct sequel, which never seemed to resonate with the public in quite the same way despite getting good reviews — but which gets its dues much more frequently these days.

Majora's Mask basically corrected what I felt was lacking a bit from Ocarina of Time: the emotional engagement angle. Because it offered a story that wasn't just a retelling of the usual Link vs Ganon legend, it was immediately much more interesting — and its time-based mechanic allowed the narrative to go to some seriously interesting places. To this day, I'm yet to see anything quite like the conclusion of the "Anju and Kafei" questline, which resolves with literally seconds before the world ending.

I didn't get along with The Wind Waker when I first played it on Gamecube, but when I played the rebalanced Wii U version some time later, I enjoyed it a lot more. Likewise, I skipped Twilight Princess on its original release and played the Wii U version, enjoying it greatly.

I was late to the party with Breath of the Wild and it took me a long time between starting it and actually finishing it, but when I had done so, I was very glad I had taken that journey. I am having a similar experience with Tears of the Kingdom in that I have come to it very late, but playing it alongside the new Hyrule Warriors, which acts as a prequel and/or parallel storyline, is going to be very interesting indeed, I think.

I know some folks don't love the direction the series has taken with Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom and to an extent I get that — but then there has also been the excellent Link's Awakening remake and the equally good Echoes of Wisdom for those hungry for a more "traditional" Zelda experience.

All in all, it's a thoroughly interesting series, and one that very much deserves its long and proud history. And, at this point, I may as well admit that I think I'm a Zelda fan. Particularly as I've played 15 hours of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment since yesterday evening.

Now time for a bit of Tears of the Kingdom, I think…

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The post #oneaday Day 519: Hero of Hyrule appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment arrived today and, keen to see quite how wrong that awful review from the other day was, I booted it up right after work and have been enjoying it since. I'm not very far in yet, and there seem to be a lot of mechanics and structural elements that are still locked, but I like what I see so far.

It's going to be interesting playing this alongside Tears of the Kingdom because, as anyone who has played the latter will know, a plot point in that is Zelda being sent back in time to the founding of Hyrule, and through a sidequest, Link can get occasional visions of key events during her time in the past. What Age of Imprisonment provides is a complete story from Zelda's perspective, from the moment she arrived in the past and was discovered by King Rauru and Queen Sophia, up until… well, I don't know, yet, but I assume some form of "imprisonment" will be involved, likely with Ganon(dorf) at the middle of it.

Thus far the game feels like it's taking some elements from previous Hyrule Warriors games (I say this with the caveat that I've not actually played Age of Calamity as yet) and combining them with some fun new(?) elements. Of particular note is a counterattack system, where major enemies do heavily telegraphed attacks, and you can use your characters' cooldown-based special abilities to interrupt them. This is never not satisfying, particularly when combined with the "weak point" mechanic introduced in the first Hyrule Warriors, where after certain attacks, some enemies reveal a weak spot and, if you batter this down enough, you get to perform a fancy cinematic attack on them.

There are also giant enemies, much like in the original Hyrule Warriors, and these have their own ways of being dealt with. They're not quite so rigid in their "solutions" as the original Hyrule Warriors, though, which is nice. You can, in many cases, jump on them and wail on their weak points while standing on top of them, though, which is always a delight to do in any game that allows you to do so.

The characters seem like fun, too. Particular highlight so far has been Mineru, sister of King Rauru, who is a Zonai scientist lady who commands constructs to do her bidding. Her "run" animation is her riding a motorised unicycle type thing, and most of her attacks involve summoning giant mechanical things, cannons and all manner of other fun stuff to cause chaos over a wide area. I think she's going to be enjoyable to play with, though I'm also intrigued to see what other characters are on offer and how the game incentivises you to play as them.

Mecha-Link has made an appearance, too, and he's predictably fun to play as, handling much as he did in the older Hyrule Warriors. He did conclude his first appearance by literally turning into a spaceship and flying off into the sunset, though, so I am looking forward to the first of his apparent Star Fox-esque sequences, whenever that might arise.

My concern with Age of Imprisonment (and indeed Age of Calamity, when I eventually get around to it) is that neither of them will live up to the original Hyrule Warriors in terms of Stuff To Do. For the unfamiliar, the original Hyrule Warriors, particularly in its Definitive Edition incarnation on Switch, not only had a lengthy story mode to play through (multiple times if you want to get all the rewards), but also had a brilliant mode called Adventure in which you gradually unlocked cells on pixel-art recreations of classic Zelda maps and took part in various battles in each space. Some of these were full-scale battles similar to what you do in the story mode, while others were battles that had some sort of special conditions or rules in place. The sheer amount of stuff to do in the Adventure mode, across a variety of different maps, meant that the original Hyrule Warriors had near-infinite replayability, and with the way Age of Imprisonment seems to be structured, I suspect it doesn't have anything like that.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, though. It means that Age of Imprisonment might actually be completable. And if and when I'm done with it, I can always return to the original for more of that sweet Adventure mode action.

In the meantime, I'm having a lot of fun with it, and learning today that its soundtrack is by MONACA, best known for their work on the Nier series, has made this game all the more interesting to me. And so I'm off for another battle or two before bed, I think…

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The post #oneaday Day 517: First impressions from Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I finished Donkey Kong Bananza this evening. I know I said I did that the other day, but I properly finished it this evening — all 777 collectible bananas and all the fossils (collecting all of which is, I was dismayed to discover very late, a prerequisite for getting all of the bananas) then completing the game's monstrously difficult final challenge in order to get… a slightly underwhelming "true" ending, to be honest, but I don't begrudge the game the additional time I spent with it. In fact, some of the game's best platforming challenges are found in the endgame sequence, so it's very much a case of "the journey is more important than the destination" here.

I mostly stuck to my desire to not use a guide for Donkey Kong Bananza, and I'm glad I did that, because dear Lord, a lot of the guides, even from "big" sites out there, are full of wrong information, or outright handwaving away the possibility of providing helpful information, largely because I suspect the author hadn't actually completed the game in some cases. I know this because the absolute final challenge in the postgame is something that could really do with a helpful walkthrough, and all one guide from a big site offered was a paragraph basically saying "use everything you've learned to clear these challenges" without going into any detail whatsoever. Good job!

Another guide even promised to "explain the ending", after there was some pre-release discussion on where this game might fit in "Nintendo canon", if such a thing even exists — then went on to post an entire article that basically shrugged its shoulders and went "I dunno, it's all speculation really". Clickbait at its absolute finest. No wonder the games press — and indeed the whole Internet — is dying.

But anyway. One of the nice things about Donkey Kong Bananza is that it has built-in hint functions. You have to pay the in-game price for them, but by the time you're doing the "cleaning up" required for the postgame, you will generally have plenty of the currency required to purchase these hints, along with a selection of powers that make 1) searching for hidden items and 2) acquiring more of said currency much easier. Consequently, on the few times I did peep at a guide, I found it didn't really help matters, and I inevitably found myself better off just exploring the game for myself and stumbling across things. The game is well-designed enough that you can just piss around and discover pretty much everything it has to offer, and that's testament to Nintendo's skills at making games like this — even with the added wrinkle of almost entirely destructible levels.

So, yeah. I really enjoyed Donkey Kong Bananza. I'm glad. I had a feeling it would be good, because I really enjoyed Super Mario Odyssey, and the same team worked on this. I had my misgivings, because I've never really had a lot of time for Donkey Kong as a character, but I must say, spending a considerable amount of time in his company has brought me around on him. Granted, he's almost as much of a blank slate as his stablemates Mario and Link in terms of characterisation — he has no dialogue whatsoever, despite the other "Kongs" you encounter being able to talk — but his goofy facial expressions and his interactions with Pauline are consistently delightful. Not only that, but they evolve over the course of the game as a whole; the eventual close relationship between Pauline and DK by the end of the game is rather heartwarming to see — even if in the "normal", pre-postgame ending, DK comes across as a bit of a selfish dickhead. It's at times like that you have to remember that he is, in fact, a gorilla.

Donkey Kong Bananza is a great addition to Nintendo's pretty flawless record of first-party games, then. It's definitely a good showcase of the Switch 2, even if other titles in this regard are a bit thin on the ground, and absolutely worth the money, time and effort to fully enjoy it. I'll remember this fondly for a very long time, I feel. But now I need to go to bed!

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The post #oneaday Day 455: The Last Banana appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I finished the main story of Donkey Kong Bananza last night, and I've been playing through the postgame today. I will do a proper full post about the game as a whole over on MoeGamer in the not-too-distant future, but suffice to say for now that I have had an absolutely lovely time with this game, and I'm very likely going to "100%" it. Or, at the very least, get all the collectible bananas; I haven't decided if I'm going to try and max out the skill tree (which requires a touch of grinding other collectibles to purchase even more bananas that aren't scattered throughout the game world) — probably not.

Donkey Kong Bananza is one of the best examples to date of how Nintendo still understands what makes video games a distinct medium all their own. It tells a story, sure, but that story is brief, to the point and never obtrusive. There is no point in Donkey Kong Bananza where more impatient types will find themselves mashing buttons to bypass dialogue; the emphasis is firmly on keeping you playing, exploring and having a good time.

And the very nature of Donkey Kong Bananza's mechanics means that it is more of a toybox than even the most recent Super Mario games. The fact that a significant portion of each level is completely destructible means there are a lot of challenges you can approach in very different, creative ways. There are obvious "intended" ways for you to solve things, but the game is open to you trying other things and experimenting. Even more so than Super Mario Odyssey, Donkey Kong Bananza rewards you for asking questions of it and going in search of answers. Almost everything you do will reward you somehow; curiosity and creativity are encouraged, and it's very difficult to get "stuck".

That's not to say it's easy. It strikes a good balance between accessibility and challenge factor. Blasting through the main story will probably be fairly breezy for most players, but each of the game's areas has numerous optional challenges that test all sorts of different skills. Donkey Kong is capable of quite a few different actions by the end of the game, but crucially, the game never overwhelms the player with options and obtuse button combinations. Instead, the control scheme is simple and straightforward, and new mechanics are introduced gradually, one at a time, with plenty of opportunity to practice them in a "safe" environment before having to contend with them under more challenging circumstances.

This is, of course, the same philosophy that modern Super Mario games are designed around, and there's a reason: it works. It gives the game a good sense of pace, means it never gets bogged down, but also keeps things constantly interesting. And, by the end of the game, having all these options available to you doesn't mean "pick the right one to succeed"; it instead, under most circumstances, means "pick the one you think will succeed, and you can probably make it happen".

It's a truly magnificent game, and absolutely a good reason to grab a Switch 2 — even if other reasons to have one are still a little thin on the ground right now. (That said, don't discount the Switch 2's improved performance on a significant number of Switch 1 games as a selling point; it really does make a difference, and is a worthwhile upgrade for that alone.)

I've got a week to finish the postgame before we go on holiday. Nothing bad will happen if I don't — and I will probably be taking the Switch 2 with me — but it would be nice to have it all wrapped up before then. I think I've done a lot of the hardest, most challenging/annoying (delete as applicable) postgame objectives already, so now it's just a case of working my way through and cleaning up the remaining objectives on my way to the grand finale. Easy, right…?

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The post #oneaday Day 450: Ooh, banana appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

My copy of Donkey Kong Bananza arrived today, and I've spent most of the evening playing it. It's really good! As with most things video game-related, I'll likely do a full write-up on MoeGamer once I've beaten it, but for now I wanted to give a few immediate impressions based on a few hours' play this evening.

The first thing I'll note is that in exploratory games, I am almost certainly absolutely insufferable to watch, because I will never go straight for where I'm "supposed" to go. You drop me into a discrete level, the first thing I will do will be turn around and see if there's anything behind the starting point. I will deliberately run off in the opposite direction to any objective markers, and in many cases find myself running into obstacles well before the game considers that I'm "supposed" to encounter them, often resulting in me having to work out how to use controls that haven't been explained to me yet — or in some cases, finding creative exploits to overcome obstacles without the player's full toolset available.

The reason I note this is because Super Mario Odyssey, the spiritual precursor to Donkey Kong Bananza (they're by the same people), was absolutely built for me. At every point I went climbing around the levels into places I wasn't "supposed" to be going, I'd find a Moon waiting for me, rewarding my curiosity. It felt like the game's designers had anticipated players like me exploring the game to the fullest, and they had ensured that there were plenty of rewarding things available if you did choose to play that way.

Donkey Kong Bananza is, it will doubtless not surprise you to learn, exactly the same. Only this time, you have the option of pummelling a significant portion of the level geometry into oblivion while hunting for hidden secrets. While bashing a tunnel through a mountain often isn't the best way to get somewhere — and the game does have enough "indestructible" materials to mean you can't just dig your way around the whole map — it is often an option. If you have a general idea of where to go but are struggling to find the route you're "supposed" to take… just make your own. Nine times out of ten, you can do that.

Another Nintendo series that I'm very fond of due to it catering to my very worst, most obsessive tendencies in this regard, is Splatoon. While the various single-player campaigns in the Splatoon games and their DLC were all discrete, relatively small levels, they again rewarded player curiosity and willingness to diverge considerably from the critical path. There's some of that DNA in Donkey Kong Bananza, too, because as well as the large, quasi-open world "layers" you explore for the majority of the game, there are also a variety of special challenge missions that you access through special doorways and hatches around the place.

While the combat-centric challenges are usually pretty straightforward — and there's usually a "trick" to each one to complete it efficiently — the more "platformy" challenges typically have three Banandium Gems, the game's main doohickey, to find. Two of these will usually be straightforward: there's usually one at about the halfway point of the challenge and one at the end, the other one is typically concealed a little more deviously. You'll need to peer over the edge of levels, look under things and get creative with your exploration, just like tracking down the optional objectives in Splatoon campaign levels. And it's great.

So yeah. I'm having a lovely time so far. Down to the second "layer" now — didn't quite get all the bananas in the Lagoon layer, but I think I was only missing about four or five in total, so I'll go back for them at some point. That's my weekend sorted, I guess!

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The post #oneaday Day 406: Kong for me appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm looking forward to playing Donkey Kong Bananza. I say this as someone who has always found Donkey Kong himself to be one of Nintendo's least appealing characters, and who has never played any Donkey Kong games past Donkey Kong 3. Yes, that's right; I am a bad enough person to have never played any Donkey Kong Country games, nor did I ever play Donkey Kong 64 back in the day — although there are, I'm sure, some who would say that, DK Rap notwithstanding, I dodged a bullet on that one.

But I'm finding a lot appealing about Donkey Kong Bananza. Chief among this is the fact that it's the Super Mario Odyssey team working on it, and Super Mario Odyssey was superb. Not only was it simply an excellent Super Mario game, but it also remains one of the most technically impressive, visually stunning Switch games. Given how good that game looked on the original Switch's underpowered hardware, I'm confident that Donkey Kong Bananza is going to be particularly pleasant to look at.

It also looks like it's going to be really fun. The super-destructive nature of the gameplay and the fact that you can seemingly smash the absolute shit out of each level is very appealing to me, but it seems like there's going to be plenty of depth and exploration, too. With the various special abilities and collectibles on offer, the game looks almost like it's going to hew closer to a Zelda than a Super Mario game — or perhaps it will be its own distinct thing, which I'm suspecting will be the most likely outcome.

The trailers so far have been pretty spectacular, too, and it sounds as if the music is going to be outstanding. Since the game features a teenage Pauline, whose song Jump Up Super Star! from Super Mario Odyssey was a real highlight of that game's soundtrack, I'm anticipating that there will be at least a few vocal numbers, and indeed the trailers would appear to back that up. In fact, and this feels like a very strange thing to say about Donkey Kong, it looks like this game might actually be quite emotionally engaging.

To be clear, Nintendo is absolutely capable of making a game that can grab you in the feels and make you cry. It's just the absolute last place I would expect to encounter such a game would be in the Donkey Kong series — but you watch the most recent trailers and listen to the soundtrack revealed so far and you tell me that there won't be at least a couple of tearjerker moments throughout.

On top of all that, if the Nintendo eShop is to be believed, the whole thing fits into just 10GB, which is dinky wee tiny by modern game standards, particularly on a 4K-capable console. (For context, Super Mario Odyssey is 5.7GB, so if Donkey Kong Bananza is a project on a similar scale, being roughly twice the file size would track considering the jump in hardware generations. For further comparison's sake, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is about 15GB, as is Xenoblade Chronicles X.)

Given modern triple-A games typically break the 70-100GB boundary these days — and even smaller-scale affairs such as the Tony Hawk remakes are pushing 40GB — it's impressive to see what Nintendo is apparently capable of with a fraction of that file size. Because I'm willing to bet that 10GB will have plenty of substance to it.

Having finished the Switch version of Link's Awakening today, I now have a few days to burn prior to Donkey Kong Bananza arriving. Perhaps it's high time I actually tried some of those older Kong games…?

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 401: Kountdown to Kong appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Come on, Nintendo, "Switch 2sday" was right there and you blew it. Sega had this shit sorted back in the '90s… although given the trajectory they took shortly afterwards, probably best not to take too many cues from them on the hardware front.

Anyway. Yes! It is the Nintendo Switch 2 launch day and I have been fortunate enough to get one on launch day. I ordered from Argos when pre-orders first went up, and I was half-expecting my order to be cancelled. But no! It arrived mid-afternoon today, so I went through the whole "transfer" process from my original Switch, and I've been happily enjoying Mario Kart World and Ridge Racer this evening.

I'm going to write something more substantial about both of those games over on MoeGamer at some point in the very near future, so I thought today I'd talk a little about my initial experiences with the Switch 2 in general.

Overall, my impressions have been very positive. Outside of the thing refusing to connect to my Wi-Fi on one side of my study (a problem that is by no means exclusive to the Switch 2), everything has gone pretty much as smoothly as you would ever want.

If you're upgrading from an original Switch, there's a straightforward transfer process you can run. This involves putting the two consoles physically close to one another, presumably so they can establish a direct wireless connection between one another, and then triggering the transfer process from both ends, perhaps with a login or two along the way depending on how you have your accounts set up. It even asked for the microSD card from the original Switch to transfer over captured screenshots and videos.

When it was finished (about 15-20 minutes later), all of my saves, settings and account details had been transferred over to the Switch 2, and the Switch 2 made a start on redownloading all the digital software I had on my original Switch. This was fine for my purposes, though those who have larger digital libraries may have run into issues, since the largest microSD Express card you can get for Switch 2 (and it will only take microSD Express, except for the aforementioned screenshot library transfer process) is 256GB. OG Switch, meanwhile, would happily take 512GB or more.

The auto-download thing was fine, but for some reason it did stop partway through and didn't resume. I assume this is because I started doing something that talked to online — that's what generally happened with downloads on the original Switch — but I would have expected it to start downloading again afterwards. This didn't happen. Not a huge issue, since I can easily manually redownload anything I want to put back on the system, because the icons for those pieces of software are there, but it would have been nice for that to be fully automated.

One of the biggest upgrades is to the eShop. No longer a slow, annoying mess to navigate, the Switch 2's eShop seems perfectly functional, and it already has some hentai shovelware games ready to go. So the curation issue isn't exactly solved, but the painful user experience side of things is, at least, fixed now.

I briefly fired up the new Gamecube app you get with a Nintendo Switch Online subscription, and boy, those games sure do look lovely all HD-ified. I'm looking forward to having a play with Soul Calibur II and F-Zero GX in particular; I'm in no hurry to replay Wind Waker, meanwhile, since I played the Wii U version a few years back and while I enjoyed it, I also don't have much desire to play it again just yet.

Handheld, the screen looks lovely. While not OLED, it's bright, large and smooth. Games look great on it. I haven't tried any original Switch titles on it as yet, but Switch 2 stuff looked pin-sharp and super-slick. It's also a bit bigger than the original Switch, meaning it'll probably be more comfortable to play more complex games in handheld mode than the original Switch was. I will likely still keep it connected to the TV for the vast majority of the time, but I feel more inclined to play handheld with that lovely screen than I do the original Switch. No shade on those who primarily played OG Switch handheld; I just preferred the TV experience by quite a considerable margin.

Thus far, then, I'm happy with my purchase. I still have plenty of concerns about things like Game Key Cards, software prices and suchlike, but we'll see how things pan out long-term. I do find myself wondering if Nintendo will be able to capture the same lightning in a bottle that the original Switch was — historically speaking, they've tended to follow an astronomical success (Game Boy, SNES, Wii) with anything from middling-to-solid commercial performance (N64, Gamecube) to catastrophic failure (Virtual Boy, Wii U), so it will be interesting to see where Switch 2 falls on that spectrum… or if it will continue a run of good luck for the company.

Anyway, it doesn't really matter. I have one, I like it and I'm looking forward to playing with it some more. So I'm going to do just that before I head to bed. Mario Kart World calls me!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 363: It's Switch Twoursday appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I think I pinned down what I want to do for some videos. As I've noted a couple of times recently, I've been feeling a bit short on inspiration and motivation of late, and I've been wondering how I might shake things up a bit for myself.

The answer is to do something a bit different to usual! So I'm going to do just that. Specifically, I've set myself the goal of doing two main things this weekend: one, a pre-scripted video on the subject of PS3 racer MotorStorm, which I've only just played for the first time and really like, and secondly, an "Exploring Together" Let's Play-type video on one of the Game Boy games that has just been added to Nintendo Switch Online: a Kemco title called The Sword of Hope.

I'm really interested in the latter. I've never heard of it before — although I must confess that's not hard with me and Game Boy games, since I only had a limited library when I was younger — but I saw someone describe it earlier as a cross between a conventional RPG and the Icom Simulations adventure games. You know, Deja Vu, Uninvited and Shadowgate.

I really like those games! And I really like the NES and Game Boy ports of them, even if they lack a fair old chunk of the text found in the computer originals. So the idea of playing something that appears to be inspired by them, but which adds some additional mechanics over the top rather than just killing you every five seconds, sounds very appealing to me indeed.

I'm going in as blind as possible because I want to include my immediate reactions to the game in the video. And I think, long-term, I'd like to cover some more Game Boy stuff — not just the stuff on Nintendo Switch Online, but in general, too. The Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance each have vast libraries, and there are some thoroughly interesting titles among them. Presumably because development for these platforms was so cheap — and because they didn't have nearly as much critical scrutiny on them as the TV-connected consoles — developers were, seemingly, quite keen to be very creative with their work on the system. So there's some wonderfully experimental Game Boy (Color/Advance) games out there, and I think there's plenty of scope to explore those through both Nintendo Switch Online and the MiSTer Multisystem 2.

So that's my plan for this weekend. Some of it, anyway. It's a long weekend here in the UK, so I can take my time and enjoy it, then it's back to the ol' grindstone from Tuesday. We've been enduring a particularly busy and stressful period at work for quite some time now, so it's nice to have an extra day off to decompress a bit. It'll all be worth it in the end, though.

Before that, though, bed. Sleep! Sleep is good.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 350: What I'm doing this weekend appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.