Winter of 2020 was probably the most cold I had ever been. I spent the entire winter, heatless in my San Francisco apartment holding out day after day under plenty of blankets for a single purpose – to save up enough Christmas money to purchase a Nintendo Switch. I bought the console a few weeks before the Holiday and spent my entire Christmas vacation glue to the first console I had ever bought.
See growing up, my parents bought us the consoles, which the last one I had was a PS2. I liked TV gaming but my parents didn’t. So over time, I lost interest in being caught in front of the TV playing my favorite game and instead learned how to hide it with portable gaming. My gaming nearly has always been either on a GBC, GBA, DS, 3DS, or a PSP. Then the Wii came out, Wii U, Xbox(s), and all the PS increments and I never bought into one. Even though I had moved out long ago, I still couldn’t be bothered to sit in front of a TV. Gaming for me had died away. Even to this day, I don’t own a TV because of my parent’s constant berating of the act of being in front of one.
So when the NX rumors were spreading, I knew I needed to get one. I just wasn’t sold on the games, yet. I waited a few years when I finally bit the bullet, I settled with buying two games to dip my toes; BOTW and Skyrim. I beat BOTW in like a few weeks but Skyrim took over my life for well over a year — I still pick it up and get sucked right back in, it’s the perfect game.
Since BOTW and Skyrim, I’ve bought a couple of indie games here and there (check out our Subliminal review in Issue 6) but really haven’t found a game that had excited me. I heard Witcher (Switcher joke here) 3 is incredible and because of that, I’m not ready to play it — I don’t want to run out of incredible games to play.
February 9th, 2022, at the Nintendo Direct, things changed and I might be getting Witcher sooner than I thought. I was so impressed with the releases list, I want to share my thoughts on which games are coming out that excited me.
Mario Strikers: Battle League
Since the GameCube release, I’ve been a massive fan of the soccer variation of Mario sports. My cousin always had this game loaded up and we played countless hours together. The new graphics look fantastic and the super shots remind me of Viewtiful Joe, which is cool. I’m glad it has Wifi play, as I think I’ll be trash-talking my cousin on the side side of the country.
Advance Wars: 1 + 2 Re-Boot Camp
My GBA had three games in it at all times; Pokemon Ruby, Fire Emblem SS, and Advance Wars 1. At some point, I lost the Advance Wars and forgot all about it. I wanted to pick it up on the DS but it was too expensive, even now it’s like a $40 game. I’m not too much of a fan of the new graphics, one of the biggest reasons Fire Emblem and Advance Wars were so engaging was because of the pixel art, but the new “build-a-map” feature more than makes up for it. I can see myself now spending hours building fancy maps and fine-tuning interesting combat scenarios.
Portal 1 & 2
I didn’t fall in love with Portal as much as my high school friends did, but I watched plenty of hours of them screwing around with the cube. I really enjoyed Subliminal on the Switch, and it reminded me of Portal in a lot of ways, so maybe this time around I’ll get a copy and see what all the fuss was all about.
MLB The Show 22
After I got a little bored of Skyrim, the first game I wanted to buy on the Nintendo Store was a Baseball game… but a triple-A game was no where to be found. I absolutely love Baseball video games. I love how slow baseball is in general and playing a video game version of it is calming and relaxing. But really, how weird is it to see Nintendo’s logo and then Sony’s logo in the same trailer. This is a day one buy for me. I can’t wait to travel on an airplane and play a full 3D baseball game. It’s going to blow my mind.
No Man’s Sky Is Traveling
I absolutely saved the best for last. I have an interesting story about NMS, but I’ll save that for later. Needless to say, I’ve never played the game and I bought it on release day back on August 9 of 2016. I guess I dodged a bullet on that one, but it seems the studio’s redemption arc has made up for everything they let us down on. I never thought I’d see the game come to the Switch, really, I was thinking Skyrim was going to be the biggest game ever ported to the console — Thank you for proving me wrong. I haven’t kept up to date on what NMS is really like these days, but that’s really exciting because I get to come into it with the knowledge it’s a fantastic game and experience for myself (hence why I’m happy I waited, like, 10 years to play Skyrim on the Switch).
I don’t know if NMS will require Nintendo Pass, I hope not, I want to play it offline, so that might be the only reason I don’t buy it. Still, if they can port NMS to the Switch, maybe we can get Red Dead Redemption 1 or 2 on the system!
It’ll be interesting to return to this post a year or two from now and see what held up and what I actually bought. I’m loving the Switch, and seeing such releases makes me hopeful for a longer life with my Switch. Thank you Nintendo, you brought the gamer in me back to life.
