Switch It Up - Part Two (2020.5)

I’ve recently written a number of posts about my Nintendo Switch. Here are the other posts about it, in case you missed them:

• The Old Switcheroo
  • about my Switch purchase and the first few games I bought for it
• Switch It Up - Part One (2019)
  • about the games that I bought for the Switch in the final months of 2019

I bought it pretty recently

compared to when the Switch first came out

in September 2019, and I absolutely love this thing. Having waited until the hardware update was (mostly) silently released has meant that the CPU can run at a sightly slower frequency than the OG hardware, meaning that the battery lasts a little longer. It also means that, should a developer want to enable it, some games have the ability to load faster than the OG Switch

keep rubbing it in

- Squidge

But first…

The One-In-One-Out Rules

As a short reminder, here are the rules that I have implemented for my Switch purchases:

• I can only buy one game per month
• I cannot buy any more games until I have finished the most recently purchased game
  • Even if I finish the game before the end of the month
• The only games which don’t count are sports games, or those without a logical end point

One Last Thing

We’ve always run this website with two rules:

• You can talk about anything relating to video games
• No reviews

We’re not reviewers, and we would hate to have to come up with a rating system. On top of that, what does 5 out of 5 (or out of 10, or 20, or 100) actually mean?

Anyway, that being said you need to know that I' not going to be reviewing these games. But I will point out whether I enjoyed playing the game or not

spoiler alert: there’s one game that I wouldn’t recommend

January 2020

As I mentioned last time, the final game that I’d bought in 2019 was Final Fantasy IX.

I had managed to get it finished in just over a month, and decided that I wanted some more RPG in my life. I also wanted to try out some more indy games

remember that I had bought Evoland in November, 2019

so settled on a game that I had been wanting to play for ages:

That’s right, I’d waited until 2020 in order to play Undertale. And I can honestly say that it was totally worth it, because it’s a fantastic game.

So far, I’ve only completed the story once

pacifist route, btw

but am planning to come back to it, in order to experience the other branches of the story.

One thing that I’ll say about Undertale is that I wasn’t expecting the story to be as deep, and for the game to last as long as it did. There was a period of time when indy games would be short affairs, but this title really has some life to it. I’m really looking forward to coming back to it at some point in the future, too.

February 2020

This next game didn’t get released until February, but I had pre-ordered it back in November

then promptly forgot about it

so it was a nice surprise when it arrived, just in time for me to start it:

I’ve been a huge fan of the Koei Warriors games for a long time, ever since I first spotted Samurai Warriors (for the OG Xbox) on a shelf at BIG UK VIDEOGAME RETAILER

which is the name I give for the company I worked for, back in my college days

I’ve written about Samurai Warriors in the past

here

and the series comes up on the pod quite a lot. In fact, Squidge, Ik and I are big fans of the series. So when the 3rd (ish¹) game in the Orochi series was released for teh Switch, I was champing at the bit to get my hands on it - it came out back before I had the Switch, but waited for the “Ultimate” version for reasons which may become clear in a moment.

Back when Warriors Orochi 4 came out, it had the ridiculous price tag of £75

seriously, what the heck?!

because it came with a whole bunch of DLC. About a year later Warriors Orochi 4 Ultimate was released, which is the original Warriors Orochi 4 release with all the DLC on the cartridge, and yet even more content specifically for the Ultimate version.

I absolutely love what Chief calls

it’s a smashy game

so I simply had to get this game. And Squidge and I still play it remotely to this day. It’s just that fun.

March 2020

March came around, and I wanted to try out something with a cartoony look, and what’s more cartoony than:

I’d wanted to get this game ever since playing the demo for it, back in November 2019.

one thing to point out is that the rules don’t take demos in to account

Monster Boy follows on from where the Wonder Boy series left off. I had no connection to the series, because I’ve never played a Wonder Boy title. But if this game is anything to go by, I’ll have to go back and play them. This game is tonnes of fun, and the graphics are amazing - it really is like playing a cartoon.

April 2020

Suddenly a sale happened. A bunch of games on my wishlist where cheaper than their standard price on the store. Which meant that I had a lot of difficult choices laid out before me. Do I pick Icey, get a copy of Dragon Quest XI? Do I take JZ’s advice and get Slay the Spire, or do I join the ranks of the millions playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons? It turned out that I didn’t do any of that.

Anyone who knows both Squidge and I will know that we’re big fans of the Resident Evil series. I still remember when Squidge first got his GameCube, and it came with the RE:Make

which is what we sometimes call the 2002 remake of Resident Evil

so when I spotted that the RE:Make was on sale, I jumped at the chance to get it:

I remember when the RE:Make first came out. It was an amazing refresh of the storyline from the first game

the remakes have their own canon, did you know that?

It was amazingly fun to play, and I don’t think I ever beat it on GameCube. It provided just enough of a challenge to keep me guessing, but it was easily beaten by Squidge

he really is the true brains of the outfit

and long time friend of the site Ik.

It seems as though I’m still as naff at playing the RE:Make as I was back then… or possibly even more so.

So much so that I’ve arranged for Squidge to help me play it, in person, when all of this lockdown nonsense it over[2^]. Because I’m that terrible at playing it.

Which meant that I had room for another game in my April list

you can bend it, and if you get it hot enough, you can even bend it into a circle. But you cannot break it

something something Pratchett reference

and that’s where this monstrosity comes in:

Take a look at the trailer for the game, and tell me whether it looks like a lot of fun based on how it’s presented:

I’ve cheated slightly because that’s the trailer specifically for the Xbox One version of the game. But still, the gameplay is the same.

The game is similar to that video, in that you drive a bus around and that bus takes on the properties of the snake from the classic game, but it isn’t nearly as much fun as that ad makes it out to me. Sure, I stuck with it until I’d finished it, but that took all of 37 minutes

and that includes the 8 minutes it took me to get the controls and concept of the game

In short: if you took everything which made Crazy Taxi fun and chucked it in the bin, replaced the taxi with a bus, and changed the soundtrack for one made up of vaporware/chillhop

two genres I usually like

then you’d have this game. It’s fun in the same way that an ball is when you’re stuck in a doctor’s waiting room: it’s eventually going to get on everyone’s nerves, and you’ll get kicked out.

I’ve been told that the multi-player mode on this game can be fun, but I really can’t see it. The fact that it took almost 80 seconds to load the “press start” screen should give you a clue about how much fun this is to play on the Switch.

May 2020

With Snakeybus having been sent to it’s room for outright lying about itself, I was then left with nothing to play for the rest of April. But it was soon May, and with it came the surprise release of Streets of Rage 4

we were actually recording a soon to be released episode of the pod, when the release date was announced

our guest had to cut he recording short because he had to go be part of the announcement, too

how cool is that?

I was originally very reluctant about this game. I had said things like

The most egregious case of trading on nostalgia I’ve ever seen

and

So they’ve lied about having Yuzo Koshiro involved in the soundtrack? There’s a shocker

I really didn’t see how a SoR 4 could hold a candle to the originals, or even the unofficial remake by Bombergames (i.e. Streets of Rage Remake). That was until I saw Swuidge playing it on his Saturday afternoon stream

we’re live streaming games on a Saturday these days, did you know?

I’ll live an embed for his 3 hour long maiden play-through of it here:

Watch no more than 5 minutes of that video and tell me that it doesn’t look like fun.

And oh boy, is it ever fun.

I’ve played it, practically each day since it came out

it’s worth noting that I write these posts way in advance

and Squidge an I have played it over the web several times with almost not slow-down (connection issues bring this on, but we both have pretty high bandwidth connections). If you either:

• loved the original two Streets of Rage games

we, at Waffling Taylors HQ, don’t talk about the third game

• or love side scrolling, arcade beat ‘em ups

you’ll love this game. Seriously, it’s amazing. If you’ve somehow managed to miss picking this up, I would urge you to remedy it right away.

Also, since this has been a resounding success, can we have a Golden Axe 4 or Comix Zone 2 in the same style Sega?

The End?

So now you know which games I have bought and played for my Switch since I bought it. Have you got a Switch?

SW-7401-6655-2809, by the way

If so, which games do you have? If not, are there specific reasons why you don’t?

Which games would you recommend that I check out?

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• naff
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