Nintendo Switch and Breath of the Wild part 1

 

A portable console? I never really felt I needed one. My early progression was Nintendo consoles (I had one about when Super Mario 3 came out in the early 90's), to Genesis, to PlayStation, to PlayStation 2, and on to being an XBOX guy with the 360 and now to the latest XBOX. . 

In recent years when away from home I was happy to play Poker on my iPhone or iPad when the moments were free. For about 10 years I have loved to play Governor of Poker, a great app. I started with 2, and they are on GOP 3 the last few years. In 2 you just played the computer AI, but 3 introduced playing with people from around the world. It actually seems to encourage trash talking and flirting. Fun for quick 10-minute breaks. 

And hell, I don't find the time to play on my consoles as much as I would like. It was the rare game that had me playing more than a couple hours a week. But there were great loves that had me going 6 hours a week or more. Final Fantasy 7. The Resident Evil games. Fallout 3. 

But in recent times I have been watching a lot of G4 and IGN and other video game related channels, content on Pluto TV streaming. Most of the programs are years old (besides G4 which is on a relaunch year, and just laid off most of their office and on camera people, including the odious FROSK), but I still like to watch. Nobody talks much about the Nintendo Switch lately, but it did come out half a decade ago. But the content on some of these channels is years old. And this year I have seen a lot of talk about Switch, albeit, again, from a few years ago. And some of these older bits included one of my current favorites, Scott the Woz. 

Scott does pretty funny little video game review and history skits, and I became a fan right away. And Every year since the Switch came out, he does a segment on it based on its existence up to that time. And this went a long way to perk my interest enough to nab my own Switch. 

So then came the long road the last several months of getting one. Yeah, I hemmed and hawed with myself. I'm not broke or anything, but with a couple games and a couple years of Best Buy Geek Squad replacement was well or 400 bucks. But I worked hard, at a hospital, during the height of the pandemic when most of my county sat home on their asses collecting fat Biden bonus Unemployment checks, and felt I needed to start rewarding myself.

Regular versions were around. But I wanted the OLED, which has a bigger screen and couple other nice upgrades. Better speakers and such. But the OLED had to be ordered. It is a popular version, there was a shortage due to pandemic demand and chip shortages (thanks again, Sleepy Joe!), and this was something I needed to impulse buy. I'm not going to wait a week and a half. 

This went on forever. But then it got a little better. Just a three- or four-day delay. I can have it by the weekend? Fuck yeah! I hit "buy." 

I was excited when it showed up. I wish I had done an unboxing video or something. But you can still watch one. 

Yeah, easy as pie. In less than a half hour I had a couple games downloaded. One was a scroller I had admired from afar for a couple years. It was Cuphead, a run and shoot side scroller that featured characters straight out of nightmarish old 1930's toons. It was originally a little indy game but got popular fast and you can find it in places like the XBOX game pass. And of course, in the Switch shop.

I got Cuphead to have a basic little game that does not need a big screen TV to enjoy (although it looks awesome on my 60 inch). This is what I would most likely play on a park bench or hotel room. But my epic game to enjoy at home would be the game most people buy the Switch to play. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Because I have a lot to say about this open world solo game, I'm going to do a part 2 about that in particular. But just a few words about the fun of the Switch console itself.

Less than half the size of my iPad, it seems weird to think of it as a console. But that is what it is. Unlike your iPhone or iPad, it is designed purely for gaming. And it seems a powerful little thing. 

The Switch surely gets the name for all the switching up you can do. First and foremost, the big feature is the portability of play, so out in the field you will play with the "joy Con" controller bits attached. 

When you slide the joy Cons in, you get a satisfying electronic "snap" sound. 

And when you want to play on the telly, you stick your console into the docking station where the HDMI cable goes to the TV. 

The dullest color pics I could find

When docked you stick your little joy Cons into the "grip, and viola you have a little controller. You can actually do this when not linked to the TV. The Switch unit has a kickstand so you can set it on a table.  The joy Con grip combo is fairly sturdy and does the job well, although if you desire the usual controller size that you are used to on other consoles you can actually get a variety of separate controllers. 

I may just get a basic controller if for no reason other than I play 90% of the time on my TV so far. I have travelled very little with it. I have used the console on its own usually kicking back on a Sunday to play Cuphead, a game that works well for a small screen. The joy Cons themselves have no battery, but the last a few hours when charged, and when attached to the console they are always charging. The Switch unit itself seems to hold a very good charge. 

Breath of the Wild? Well, it's a big, beautiful world in there. And such works best on a big screen. But I've had some moments with it off the big screen. You can get hundreds of games for Switch, but Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the big monkey in the room when it comes to this console. And I'll talk about my experience with it next post. 

Cheers. 

Elder Scrolls games and Elder Scrolls Online - part 1

 

I'm usually about 5-7 years behind on video games and consoles. I guess that makes me not an avid gamer, but I never put more than an 2-4 hours of play into a video game a week. OK, there were exceptions. The oldest being Super Mario Bros 3. In the late 80's when I was in my first decent job (clerking in the MGM/UA studios legal department) I truly fell in love with what home video gaming could offer. I would come home and play it for a couple of hours every night. On the weekend it took up a ton of my time, that was only slowed down by me discovering my life time love of Renaissance Faire. 

"itsa me! Flying Squirrel Mario!"

A lot of my weekends were suddenly full during the year, but I played it fairly often for a couple of years. One of my older brothers, no longer living at home then, would come over to play it when he knew I wasn't around. I would come home occasionally on a lunchbreak to play (my drive to the house from Culver City was at least 15 minutes, but it was worth it for a half hour extra play) and he'd be there on it. I'd go out to the big den on a Saturday morning to play and he'd be there. At one point I just took the small connector cable and said it was broken. He immediately bought his own Nintendo. But that is the power of a great game like SMB 3 that you love. My brother coveted it and I became like Gollum with the ring of power. 

my precious

But there were also Silent Hill games, Castlevania games, Final Fantasy 7 (the first game I actually logged my hours...I put just under 100 hours into that one), Fallout 3, Knights of The Old Republic (one of very few games I actually played more than once all the way through...a total of 4 times). 

I love you, Bastila Shan. Especially in the dark side ending...

And then there were the Elder Scrolls games. Whoa. I discovered Morrowind at least a year or two after it came out. What a game. A new level. The type of play that had become famous for "see that mountain in the distance? Walk to it through lakes and forests and find a dungeon on it to delve into" swept me off my feet. In many ways I was overwhelmed. There was just too much to unpack. Just deciding on all your characters ability scores, aspects, and astrological signs could take a couple hours. So many quests. There was so much to do and I was so often blown away by everything I didn't even try blacksmithing and other crafting. My eventual home in Balmora was strewn with hundreds of alchemy and enchanting ingredients. I didn't know what to do with them, but I'd be damned if I was going to throw them away. I even loved the massive glitches. They were never game breaking. But you would come across a town you had visited before and all the people in it were now suddenly floating up in the sky. Another town suddenly was full of water like a great flood had happened, and the townspeople were swimming about their business instead of walking around. I always looked on such as huge curses or something from a mage. It was part of the fun. 

Oblivion was my next step up, and another level. Instead of ignoring the main quest like I usually do for a good while as I went about step and fetch quests, I dove right into trying to close all the Oblivion gates that were popping up all over. 

Again and again going through that portal and into that fiery realm of hell to fight the demons and get the Mcguffin. I was really playing it like a true role playing game. I would do things as I perceived my character would. My Redguard went to the amazing Imperial City, and worked his way up the gladiator ranks (I spent hours just betting and watching other matches from the stands before deciding on a gladiator career). The grand champion had to be killed in order for me to become champ, but I liked him (I helped the orcish champ with vampire trouble his family home was having) so I gave up on my championship dreams.  

Imperial City

Then of course came Skyrim. An amazing entry into the series. It was dumbed down and lost a ton of the character creation possibilities and depth of play, but the trade off was a beautiful looking setting with epic things to do, including the dragon related main quest. Again, I was a bit late to this game by a year or two, but when I started I was hooked. Another wonderful living world. I created a nord character and got him looking very much like Sean Bean. Fitting, as I had become a Game of Thrones fan by then. Skyrim was hella GoT in flavor. And by now I had started experimenting more with blacksmithing and other crafting. 

Around a year or so ago my friend "T" from my home town and long time player in my tabletop before I moved had gotten the gift of gaming head phones, and suggested to me that we start doing a little multiplayer online on weekends. Smashing idea! I had been playing my old XBOX 360 forever, and this was a good excuse to trade up to the latest. And the virus was just getting out of control so this seemed like a good time for it (even though since I now worked in health care I still had a job). T is a bit of a Hollywood socialite (former actress) and is usually out at big parties on weekends, but now she was stuck in like a lot of people. So I ordered a pair of gaming head phones from Amazon, picked up my new nifty XBOX at Best Buy curbside, and it was a go. 

So the search was on for a game I knew we could both like to play. My choice ended up being an indie game called Necropolis. It had a great, goth cartoony look I liked, and the play was based off the Dark Souls engine I think. It was only 6 bucks or so, so it wasn't a big gamble or anything. 

 It was fun, with your alien fighter or assassin slashing and bashing their way through a terrifying alien mega dungeon full of undead. 

A world so alien people don't even have feet

But in the end it was a frustrating experience. Not the game play, though there were glitches here and there. Often you might find yourself falling through the floor and plummeting down through the levels to your death, or get perma stuck on a ladder. But the killer was just trying to get together in multi player. It was hard as hell. It would often take up 20 minutes to log in together. And you more often than not did not restart with your gear from the last save. After a few weeks, with hat in hand I told T I was done with it. It was a waste of time if you could barely even get the game going. 

So the search for a new game was on. T wasn't really into looking at the games in the XBOX online store, so it was really on me. And I had to pick something good that would not be a controller throwing experience like Necropolis ended up being. So I looked at the reviews, and even games that looked amazing had lots of bad reviews, especially about the multiplayer experience. But then it struck me.

I had known about Elder Scrolls Online since it had come out. Years ago. But never heard much about it. World of Warcraft was the 800 lb. gorilla in the room. They even made a movie about it. But hey, T was a big Skyrim fan. I was an Elder Scrolls fan in general. So that simple math added up. Was an MMO the way to go?

My doubts were many. This was a higher level of multiplayer. What if one of us had internet that wasn't strong enough? Though T runs an office, she can be a bit of a non-techie. Would this require a lot just to get up and running? Plus games like this tried to constantly sell you on expansions. How intrusive would that be? Also in an MMO you had to play with people you didn't know. Not sure T would appreciate dumbshit, horny 14 year olds doing what they do in games. This might have been especially problematic in the MMO I was considering besides ESO. I loved stuff I saw of the game play of a game called Sea of Thieves, where you and friends pilot ships around various islands looking for treasure and chickens or whatever. But this game was automatically player v. player. Beginners usually end up being attacked by pirate gangs who kill you and sink your ship. No, this game was out. 

Female characters are a thing on
the seas (80% run by 13 year old boys)

As a fan of Red Dead Redemption I also considered Red Dead Online. But I knew T would probably prefer something with magic and spell casing. 

Is a boomstick magic?

So I went ahead and pitched T on Elder Scrolls Online. The basic game (that currently comes with the Morrowind expansion) was only around 20 bucks. She was intrigued. We decided to give it a shot, download it, and play it the following weekend. 

My worries remained till then. Also, I thought that there was not way they could have anywhere near the deep experience of the solo releases I had come to know and love. 

What happened next was totally unexpected.

to be continued...

Zombie Invasion Dream (sans zombies)

Last night I had an interesting zombie dream. It had no zombies in it.

Now, I should have been dreaming about Mickey Mouse. I’ve had a couple of people offering to buy my Nintendo Wii (see this recent post) from me, since it has been sitting in the closet collecting dust since I won it at the office Xmas party last year (this year I just won a shiatsu massage pillow from Sharper Image). I decided yesterday that I had better try a real game out on it, so I went to Blockbuster and picked out Epic Mickey to rent for a few days. Now, I am not a huge fan of the Mouse from the Disney House. I find him bland and lacking in any kind of depth (unlike the always awesome Goofy), nothing more than a corporate shill. And I haven’t been to Disneyland since I was a teenager there on a date (I hate lines and crowds and phony baloney cutesiness, so there ya go).

Anyway, I got it because of all the hype, and I played over three hours of this Mickey Mouse game, and that much video gaming at night will usually lend itself to dreams inspired by that game for me, but no go. It was zombie apocalypse all the way.

But this is the weird part. No zombies. Oh, they were out there all right. I mean, my dream self knew it for a fact. I don’t know if this was because my mind did not want to scare me. I’m pretty zombie-out, actually. I’m enjoying The Walking Dead on TV, but really, after I saw the excellent Shaun of the Dead, and then read World War Z (and also listened to a lot of the audio book for that), I figured I had experienced all I needed to in the world of animated corpses. So I’m thinking my brain just decided to go for the human element. It was all about dealing with other survivors.

Early on I was alone on an office building rooftop. I started out with a handgun. It was a glock at first I think, but at some point when I checked the bullets it was more like a revolver. But either way there I was, looking down on the city and seeing other people running around, or on other rooftops. The zombies I guess were down on the streets where I wasn’t looking.

Soon I was joined by a hot blond chick. I liked that. I lead her around by the hand as we left the roof and went down into the building, which seemed to be not an office building, but made up entirely of stairwells, hallways, and huge indoor parking areas. Nameless blonde and I were soon joined by others, and we all discussed our options and things to do. At one point a side door was opening, and I ran over to cover the door with my gun. I tried to shoot, but I didn’t know about the safety. Good thing, because it was a big black security dude. He drew on me, but luckily he did not shoot. Maybe he didn’t know about the safety either.

My group and I came across some other folk in the parking area, and it was on the verge of violence. But I spoke up as the voice of reason. “We need to come together. We are the survivors, and maybe the last humans around. We need each other.”

That was about it. What a gyp. I can’t fly in my dreams, and I guess I can’t run n’ gun on zombies either. Maybe this was a lesson for me though. Maybe my brain wants me to think things through and take a more peaceful path. But shit, I really would have loved to have shot that gun at least once in my dream. I bet I would have, if I had been playing Halo instead of a damn game about a helium-voiced rodent.