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Nintendo Switch

E3 2018 Highlights

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I was away travelling during E3 week this year and thus was only able to follow it secondhand. I’m busy processing my trip (and frankly wishing I was still on it) and getting over yet another horrific summer cold, but here are a few thoughts on the stuff that jumped out at me from what I caught of this year’s expo. As usual, I’m focusing on Bethesda and Nintendo as I’m no longer passionate enough about the industry on the whole to expend the time, space and effort it would take to follow all the other companies.
 
It was a somewhat quiet year for Bethesda and Nintendo, with not a lot of new announcements and much spotlighting of games that had been announced prior to E3, *leaked* prior to E3 or that had been open secrets that were all but confirmed already. Which is fine by me frankly: After a massively successful launch and a year of doing nothing by skyrocketing in popularity, the Switch has made it a *very* expensive few months for me (at last count the system has *over 700 games* already! I don’t own all of them, but enough that I feel it) and I have other things I need to spend my time and money on other than video games. So, I actually really appreciate the breather. But even so, there was some exciting stuff.
 

I suppose I should lead with the big news right off the bat, even though none of this is really “news”. The talk of the show was *of course* Super Smash Bros. Ultimate for the Switch. Indeed, Nintendo were so confident in it being the showstopper they basically didn’t talk about anything else, and bloody Smash took up over a half an hour of Nintendo’s presentation. And, much to my chagrin, they were probably right. That the Switch is getting a Super Smash Bros. should be a surprise to absolutely no-one, especially as it was announced in a Direct back in April. Slightly more interestingly is the notion that Ultimate is going to live up to its name and include basically everyone and everything that has ever been in a Smash Bros. game before, and that this may well be the final game in the series. To this end, the developers have made a point to include fan “requested” (read “demanded”) characters like Daisy and Ridley. So, if you every wanted to play as a space dragon unimaginatively named after a film director who directed the film his series is openly ripping off and who is most famous for being a woman’s primary abuser in a story all about abusing her and triggering her post-traumatic stress disorder, now’s your chance!
 
If I sound cynical and negative about this game, well, it’s because I am. I’m sure Super Smash Bros. Ultimate will be a great game and I do plan to get it at some point, but I am beyond sick of this series and its fandom. I have very fond and tender memories of the original Super Smash Bros.
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Frozen Sunshine

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In just a few short weeks, every game I bought a Nintendo WiiU for will have been made available for the Nintendo Switch, and in each and every case the experience has proven to be a dramatic improvement. This occasion has given me a lot to reflect on and think about and there’s a lot I could say about it, but there’s a particular set of emotions I want to focus on today. I’ve always believed that different sensations can remind us of memories and feelings connected to where and when we were when we first experienced them, and that this can be just as true for our media as it is for anything else. This is why we have to be cautious listening to a certain song when we are feeling a particular way (especially if we’re feeling sad) lest the two end up associated together in our minds forever. On the other hand, it’s also been my experience that, with care, those feelings can grow and evolve with us as we revisit them over the course of our lives.

I got my WiiU at the end of 2014, two years after it had launched. Even though it was usually not my style to buy a video game console as soon as it came out (the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo GameCube were my big exceptions), my delay this time was notable because I wasn’t even originally planning to get it in the first place. When it was first revealed in 2011 I initially thought the WiiU would make a good first step towards a future where mobile devices interacted with home video games, except within months Microsoft and smartphone manufacturers unveiled ways to literally do just that. This left the WiiU feeling a bit conceptually aimless and uncertain: The console’s concept was effectively that of a Nintendo DS tethered to a TV screen, which in hindsight seems inherently self-defeating (and this was far from the only thing wrong with the way that console was handled, but this is all water under the bridge), but more damningly for me there wasn’t a single game on the platform that seemed inspired, and this went on for *years*.

Meanwhile, I’d been alienated by the XBOX One (in a console launch that was arguably even more bungled than the WiiU) and my longstanding enmity with the PlayStation brand and its fans continued to drive me away from the PlayStation 4. I’d been into Steam gaming for a couple of years already and was perfectly happy throughout 2012 and 2013 with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim as my only video game (although I decently enjoyed my time with Pokémon X at the end of 2013 too). In fact, I was starting to wonder if I ever needed another video game again, and got to thinking that maybe it was time for me to retire and leave this medium behind. I even deliberately skipped E3 in 2014, the first year I’d ever done that, because I was so dispirited I didn’t think any of the news would be worth the trouble of sitting through the press conferences.…

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To Switch a Witch

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With the re-release of her first two games on the Nintendo Switch, a third on the way and her creator already musing ideas for a fourth, Bayonetta is in the news again. And, as is typically the case with Bayonetta, she’s drawn quite a crowd and her fair share of controversy and anger. But of course, you can’t be a powerful, confident and self-assured woman and not.

Bayonetta is the modern day evolution of the archetype pioneered by Lara Croft and Rayne, and is the most honed, polished and refined version of that concept. She is an overwhelming, overclocked, unstoppable, inescapable feminine force of nature, and that confuses and frightens lesser people. The protagonist of an eponymous series of action games created by Hideki Kamiya and his studio Platinum Games (formerly Capcom Clover Studios), known for Resident Evil, Viewtiful Joe, Devil May Cry and Okami, Bayonetta is a witch who carves out her own niche in the war between Heaven and Hell by laying waste to legions of angels and demons as a one-woman mercenary army. She is pure magick, and, like all witches, she is liminal figure who stands outside of social norms and conventions. She makes the existing order profoundly uncomfortable because her very existence is an affront to their worldview and long-held assumptions.

From a video game history perspective, the best point in Platinum’s oeuvre with which to compare Bayonetta is the Devil May Cry series. A hallmark of the sixth generation, those games featured platforming and puzzle solving elements as a loose framework to show off their combat: An action system involving a complex mixture of light and heavy attacks triggering breathtaking combo moves. There was exploration, but the game generally progressed through a linear series of arenas where protagonist Dante would have to square off against wave after wave of enemies. The Bayonetta games are a spiritual successor to Devil May Cry and play the same way, but that’s not the only way they’re comparable: Devil May Cry’s story, and especially Dante, were known for being deliberately excessive camp parodies of melodramatic narrative.

Calling Bayonetta “over the top” is a horrible cliché that does not in any way convey the extent to which she absolutely revels in exaggerated camp. She is a magickally-infused exotic dance battler dominatrix who wears pistols for stiletto high-heels and summons Eldritch Abominations and medieval torture devices made out of her own hair. Hair that she also wears as a backless jumpsuit, and without which she is entirely naked. Bayonetta is the woman who codifies the phrase “orgasmic combat” par exemplar, she knows it, and she loves it: She spends every battle moaning and grunting in very specifically suggestive ways, her finishing moves all involve punishing her enemies in exactly the way you’re thinking and one of her in-game taunts involves her lying on her back, spreading her legs wide and shouting “Come On!”. And that’s not even just the beginning.

Obviously sexuality is a primary theme in the Bayonetta series.…

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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Buying Guide

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A combination of technical setbacks and my own incompetence ruined another recording session, so I don’t have a video for you this week. Instead, here’s something I’ve been sitting on that I’d planned to post here next year, so consider it another rough draft of sorts. I’ll update it with new info on Skyrim for the Switch and Skyrim VR for the HTC Vive as it becomes available to me.

While you’re at it, why not check out some of the other things I’ve done on Skyrim and The Elder Scrolls with Ben Knaak?

http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/spirit-tracks-the-elder-scrolls-chapter-i/

http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/spirit-tracks-the-elder-scrolls-chapter-ii/

http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/elder-kings-crusader-kings-ii-mod-with-ben-knaak/

 

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is one of my absolute favourite games, and I cannot put into words how formative and important it’s been to me over the years. So I’m not going to try. Instead, I’m going to encourage you to explore this world for yourself if you haven’t already, and thankfully, TESV is such a modular and flexible game and is available on so many systems you can now experience it pretty much regardless of what your current setup looks like. But because all the many different releases spread out across so many different platforms can be confusing to a new player, I’ve broken down a list of every single release of The Elder Scrolls V to date, with my personal advice on which one is best for which platform. If you were interested in checking out one of the most acclaimed games of all time in spite of me never shutting up about it, but didn’t know where to start, hopefully this list has a solution that’s right for you.

If you have an XBOX 360, PlayStation 3 or low-end PC…

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – Legendary Edition

This is the final, complete edition of the original 2011 classic, containing all the patches, updates and all three expansion packs: Dawnguard, Hearthfire and Dragonborn. It’s all collected on one disc, although on Steam the “Legendary Edition” is just a bundle with the main game and all its downloadable content. This version is also how Skyrim is represented as part of The Elder Scrolls Anthology, a collector’s box including PC DVDs of all five current Elder Scrolls games, although you’ll still need a Steam account to access the games anyway.
 
If you at all have the option, I do recommend the PC version as the best of the three, if only for mod support and the ability to push the resolution and texture detail above and beyond what the XBOX 360 and PlayStation 3 were capable of. After that I recommend the XBOX 360 version: The PlayStation 3 had a notoriously unfriendly development environment, and sadly many PS3 versions of third-party games like Skyrim were oftentimes the worst ones. Skyrim itself ran infamously terribly on the PS3, to the point Bethesda weren’t even sure for a scary while it would *ever* get the DLC expansion packs, particularly Dawnguard. Thankfully those issues were eventually resolved and the PS3 got both the DLC and the Legendary Edition, though as I’m unfamiliar with the PS3 I’m not sure how it’s version of the Legendary Edition stacks up to the XBOX 360 one.
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Nintendo at Gamescom and QuakeCon, 2017

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This is the first year I’ve paid serious attention to Gamescom, which basically amounts to Europe’s E3. Perhaps it’s because I’ve even less chance of getting to go it than I do to E3, but it’s kind of a blank spot in my games journalism career, if you want to call it that. But with a suite of teases at this year’s E3, not a lot of solid details and a whole slew of games all coming out in the next 2-4 months I’m actually interested in, I figured it was time to give the big game show on the other side of the Atlantic a try. With Bethesda saving most of its content for QuakeCon, which ran at the same time last week (which I’ll get to later on), and me not being terribly happy with Sony and Microsoft it was naturally only Nintendo I cared about, so here’s a rundown of what they did at Gamescom this year.
 
I’m not sure if companies do the big press conferences at Gamescom like they do at E3-If they did I didn’t see anywhere to stream them, and either way Nintendo seemed to once again go the route of releasing information directly to its fans through its own social media profiles. So strap in, it’s time once again to overanalyse some trailers.
 

 
Fire Emblem Warriors is a game that I’ve gotten progressively more interested in as the months have gone by. I don’t know much at all about Fire Emblem as a franchise: The earlier games’ permadeath turned me away from what basically amounts to Medieval Fantasy Advance Wars, but the corner it seems to have turned as of Fire Emblem Awakening on the 3DS, making the permadeath optional and adding in a visual novel/dating sim style relationship mechanic (clunkily implemented as it is) seems to have made it into something that seems marginally more up my alley. I was all ready to put down cash for Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE on the WiiU in spite of my total disinterest in Persona, Shin Megami Tensei, Fire Emblem and JRPGs in general simply because that game looked and sounded freaking awesome, but the collector’s edition turned out to be *way* more money than I wanted to spend at that time, especially with the WiiU at death’s door in 2016 and other releases causing me to have an existential crisis about the video game medium. I do still kind of want to at least add that to my collection given its critical acclaim, possibly if I can get it at a budget price, but it’s definitely not a priority anymore.
 
In the end, it took Omega Force releasing a musō game based on the franchise to get me to really pay attention to Fire Emblem for the first time. My hunger for any and all things musō cannot be satiated, and I’ve been desperate for another game like this I can take on the go with me and play without an Internet connection since grinding Hyrule Warriors Legends into dust last year, and in lieu of a proper Dynasty Warriors Empires or Samurai Warriors Empires release on the Switch I initially thought I’d have to settle for this.
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Digital Landfill

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Update 8/29/2017: And now the original XBOX One has been discontinued to make room for the XBOX One S (which is *different* from the XBOX One X). Only two years and nine months after it was released. Think about that, and remember how the SEGA Dreamcast was considered a colossal failure.
 
 
Can I make an appeal to the video game industry? Can we cool it with the technological determinism shit already, please?
 
Just…stop it.
 
I want to apologise in advance if this turns into more of an angry, ranty polemic than what I’m comfortable presenting these days, but I’m deeply upset this week. I’ve always been exasperated and annoyed with the line of thinking in games criticism that graphics tech is the most important thing in the industry and needs to be privileged above all else, but at this point I’ve officially had it. The state of the current industry is so out of control I don’t really even have words to express how stunned and aghast I am by the aggressive, mindless technofetishistic lust that seems to be driving almost everyone on both sides of the Pacific right now. The most blatantly obvious example is the grotesque display that is the current console market: We’re supposed to have hardware cycles of 5 years or so between revisions and new machines, but then somebody told Microsoft and Sony about Apple’s business model with smartphones and suddenly we’re in an era of “mid-generation hardware revisions” for $500 computers. We didn’t even get 3 years between the PlayStation 4, touted in 2013 as the most powerful thing to ever anything, and the PlayStation 4 “Pro” that supports 4K resolutions, which Sony seemed so embarrassed about they didn’t even announce it until it came out. Meanwhile, Microsoft is about to unleash the XBOX One X, a machine that is so obscenely overpowered I’m convinced it comes from some outer space futurescape and that mere mortal humans aren’t worthy to wield it. Certainly nobody I know is rich or crazy enough to be able to get it to do what it’s supposed to do.
 
(Meanwhile, Nintendo came out with the Switch after just managing to squeak five years out of the WiiU, but that’s primarily because with the WiiU and 3DS Nintendo momentarily forgot absolutely everything they learned about branding and marketing in over a century of trading. I’ll come back to them a little later.)
 
None of this is of course new. Microsoft’s strategy with the XBOX One X to push 4K reminds me of what they they tried to pull with the XBOX 360 in 2005 to push 1080p (the one that forced them to rebrand and slash prices a couple years later). And there is, of course, a precedent for this going back decades. I like to pick on Sony here for how they set the discourse for the fifth generation with the original PlayStation, but I probably also have to blame SEGA of America for how they marketed the Genesis in the United States, openly bullying Nintendo and Nintendo’s fans by saying that faster processors and better graphics chips were blatantly, objectively better in every instance and anyone who thought otherwise was a dumb crybaby.
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The Nintendo Switch Presentation: The Beginning and the End

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Edit August 207: Well, several months after the official launch of the Switch and I’ve been proven wrong on pretty much all counts here. I may even get a Switch myself by year’s end. However, in my defense, I will say my opinions in this essay do accurately reflect the climate of MISinformation that was being spread about the Switch in those early months. Somewhat unsurprisingly, fake and misleading news isn’t limited to politics and video game journalism is a theatre of the larger cutural struggles we’re all going through these days.
 
I was right about oen thing though. I’m sure never doing any game journalism again.
 
Here’s the thing about cycles. The wheel turns, but that does not imply that history will repeat wholecloth. Time, of course, does not exist. History doubly so: History is a patriarchal fiction. There are endings and new beginnings as the seasons change. Recognisable archetypes reiterate and reincarnate, but each spin of the wheel is an event of its own. Impermanence is all part of the cycle.
 
We in video game journalism appropriate some of this truth when we use terms like “hardware cycles” to describe the passing of the console generational torch (“generation” and “torch”, of course, both being metaphors taken from patriarchal master narratives). Video game consoles do not so much go out of date as they get supplanted. A history of invasions and conquests, or a season for everything?
 
Were I to do this normally, I would go through my notes and recap the Nintendo Switch Reveal Event Presentation beat-for-beat. But on this occasion, normality doesn’t seem appropriate. Nintendo did indeed flip a Switch with this event, but I doubt highly it’s the Switch they wanted to flip. Over the course of about an hour, my entire world was turned on its head, and I’ve been in shock trying to cope ever since (of course, I should be used to this by now-Shock, trauma and loss is apparently what my life is now as it’s been this way for three straight years). Within the span of not even 24 hours, my entire perspective changed entirely. I walked into the reveal super excited for the next new Nintendo console, and I left it seriously considering walking away from everything, starting with video games.
 
The console itself, it should be stressed, looks marvelous. As a piece of gaming hardware, it’s just about second to none. Much time and emphasis was spent during the presentation demonstrating the Switch’s impressive tech specs and functionality, such as its detachable JoyCon controllers, both of which boast highly sophisticated motion sensors and haptic feedback. The two controllers have independent left-right motion control, near field communication read/write capability (or at least the right one has that), and something Nintendo have obnoxiously decided to call “HD Rumble”. Basically, it’s a haptic feedback system that can emulate highly detailed acoustics, like (for example, as was demonstrated) ice cubes being dropped into a glass, and then the glass filling with water.
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Nintendo Switch Reveal: First Impressions

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This past week Nintendo finally put over a year of rabid speculation to rest by revealing its next console, previously known only by its codename NX, as the Nintendo Switch: A high-end handheld game console that can be plugged into a dock for home play. Nintendo forwent the expected routes for hardware reveals, even the famously unorthodox Nintendo hardware reveals-In lieu of a press conference or media event of some kind, Nintendo revealed the Switch to the world by way of a 3-minute teaser trailer on their YouTube channel. Although the video re-confirms the system’s previously announced March 2017 release date, Nintendo later stated that this is all the information on the system we’re going to get until then, so let’s jump on the hype bandwagon and play armchair speculative analyst with the Nintendo Switch.

First of all, the trailer confirmed most of what the many rumour mills were saying about what we then knew as NX in the months leading up to the reveal, and I for one couldn’t be happier about what we saw. The Nintendo Switch is a handheld console that rather resembles a tablet computer, except with controllers on the side. Those controllers, called JoyCons, are detachable, and use an advanced form of motion control and force feedback similar to what was used on the Wii Remotes, except they can also double as traditional gamepad inputs by being snapped onto a kind of controller shell (and can I rave about how thrilled I am they finally got the controller layout right this time?). The system uses high-capacity cartridges instead of optical disks, which is going to be a godsend for storage and loading, and Nintendo has also kindly left us the headphone jack. Although Nintendo seems to be trying to sell this as a home console first and foremost, it really isn’t: While it does have a dock so you can play games on your TV, it doesn’t offer the system any additional processing power, so the Switch is fundamentally a handheld that can be played at home instead of a home console you can take with you. This is a great idea in my opinion, and for a whole lot of reasons.

I’ll get the uncomfortable truth out of the way right now. The home console industry is dying. From the start of this generation, publishers were extremely reluctant to support even the XBOX One and the PlayStation 4 with new releases, primarily wishing to focus on smartphones, tablets and, weirdly enough for anyone who’s followed the industry for as long as I have, the PC. A lot of this was initially due to the plateaued sales of the XBOX 360 and PlayStation 3 at the end of the last hardware cycle, but that hardware cycle was abnormally long and need not have been a barometer for how this generation was going to fare. Publishers started to take notice once the PlayStation 4 began selling like gangbusters and there’s been an uptick in support as a result, and yet even so…Home consoles on the whole have failed to get a real foot in the door in the three years since then.…

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