After spending a bunch of time thinking about not having any ACTUAL Switch 2 games and having a weird experience trying to both play the upgraded Breath of the Wild on the Switch 2 while using my brand new 4K TV for the first time, I decided to cut to the heart of the matter and just buy Mario Kart World. For a decent part of my youth, I was a big fan of Mario Kart games. I played tons of Mario Kart 64 and Mario Kart Double-Dash, but I never really got into any of the games past that. I’ve played a few of them and might even own one or two more (I genuinely don’t remember), but most of the magic faded after the those two games. Once they started adding performance variability based on character mass and kart size and wheels and stuff like gliding and wall riding and all that, I just stopped feeling as invested in the game. They became just one more series of games that came out with incremental changes, slightly new features, and a whole load of new mechanics for me to learn. All of which is kind of antithetical to easy multiplayer games or party gaming, which was how I’d been playing all Mario Kart games since I started high school. They weren’t bad, ever, but they just didn’t feel like the experience I’d grown to know and love as a kid. They were closer to other racing games instead, all of them with an optimal strategy for winning based on the mechanics of the game (even if those mechanics could still be upset by the random items you’d get). The looseness and goofiness of my childhood experiences was gone, as was the days of firmly believing that green characters were faster and that yoshi had a slight advantage because of how far forward his face went.
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I’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 36
Today sucked. It sucked for a lot of reasons. It started bad, didn’t get any better, and left me feeling like a defeated piece of shit by the time I had the free time to start writing this (aka, take breaks at work). Rather than write about that (I need time to process), I’m going to talk instead about starting to replay The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild at sixty frames per second on a 4k TV. You see, I got a Switch 2 and a brand new TV, so of course the first thing I did when I got both those things set up (in a burst of nearly-manic energy on Sunday evening at 11pm) was plop in my BotW cartridge and load up the SECOND save file that the expanded Switch 2 version of the game gets you so I could start a new Master Mode playthrough. I was prepared to buy the expansions since I figured the at least 600 hours (632, precisely, according to the stats part of the new Zelda Notes acitivty in the Nintendo Online app) I have in justified spending another ten dollars, easily, but I apparently get it for free thanks to having a Nintendo Online + subscription (for those sweet, sweet N64 games, of course). I did have to wait a surprisingly long time for the game to update, but I was able to use that time to delete a number of games that were in the download queue that I had little to no intention of playing anytime soon, so it wasn’t entirely wasted time. Still, it felt weird that the download took so long (though I guess it was making some pretty major display changes) and the weirdness didn’t stop there.
Continue readingSwitch 2 Ownership Is Already Changing Me And I Haven’t Even Unboxed It Yet
I got my Switch 2 yesterday. It was delivered a day ahead of the earliest I thought I could get it (even with paying a small amount extra for expadited shipping), which caused me to scramble to make sure that there’d be someone around to receive the package since the scheduled delivery time overlapped with a physical therapy appointment I couldn’t skip. I didn’t want it sitting out on the stoop where someone might spot it, recognize it as possibly containing a Switch 2, and decide to break their streak of not stealing packages for this one special occasion. It turns out I needn’t have worried. Not only did the UPS driver have the ability to bring it inside, they brought it right to my apartment door, tucking it out of general visibility around the little corner hiding my door from the view of anyone but my across-the-hall neighbor. They also didn’t buzz or knock or anything, so I only knew it happened because I heard a jingle of keys followed by the gentle metal-on-metal clatter of my door jiggling in place. I wasn’t quick enough to thank this delivery person for going the extra mile, but I appreciated their consideration all the same. Especially because of how conspicously inconspicuous the package was. Every possible gap into the box was covered in enormous tape that screamed the phrase “ELECTRONICALLY VERIFIED DELIVERY” or something like that in massive block letters over and over again. The box itself was a non-descript brown cardboard number that was perhaps four or five times as big as it needed to be and the shipping label even avoided any mention of Nintendo save for the incredibly non-specific “NOA” at the head of the return address. Clearly, keeping the package discrete had been a part of their shipping plans for the console, which I appreciated.
Continue readingLiving In A Time Of Luxury (I Bought A TV I Didn’t Strictly Need)
After over a decade of resistance, I finally caved and bought a new TV. I’ve had the same old 57-inch TV (you can tell how old it is since they haven’t made anything in that size in forever) since my second apartment in my current city and, until very recently, I never felt an actual need to upgrade. I was never far enough away from my TV that I wanted it larger (and frequently felt that anything larger was too big for comfort). There was nothing wrong with my old TV, so there was no problems I had to put up with. Hell, it was even one of the last few TVs with both component plugs AND no “smart” features, so I had everything I could want in a TV and nothing more! It was a great model! Unfortunately, after splurging on 4K monitors for my computer, it has been difficult to go back to my old, HD TV and enjoy looking at what feels like a fuzzy picture. I’ve been able to not think about it sometimes, but anything that showed up on my monitors was impossible to enjoy on my TV afterwards, thanks to the noticeable drop in quality. Now, though, I’ve fixed that. I bought myself a 4K TV and a pretty decent one at that, thanks to some good sales. It is, unfortunately, a “smart” TV and it is, unfortunately, a bit too big for the space (as it is a 65 inch TV), but it doesn’t have any “AI” features and it’s a workhorse samsung model, so it should hopefully last me another decade unless some of the pixels start dying on me or whatever happens to “Crystal UHD” TVs.
Continue readingI Won A Chance To Buy A Switch 2 Via Nintendo Online
Amidst everything going on, I appear to have won the small lottery that is “getting the opportunity to buy a Switch 2 via my Nintendo Online account.” I’ll admit that I completely forgot that I’d signed up to particpate way back when they announced that it would be a thing, mostly because I saw the requirements for eligibility and I’m not eligible according to them. I don’t share any of my data with Nintendo, I don’t get advertisements or emails, and there is nothing in existence that would convince me to willingly give a company my data in exchange for a chance to pay that company for a product I’m only interested in purchasing if it doesn’t inconvenience me. When I realized that those were required, I put it out of my mind and resigned myself to taking a lackluster stab at ordering one from a retailer online, which I forgot about until it was too late at night to bother with that. Which really goes to show how unexcited I was for the Switch 2. Still, when I got the email telling me that I could now purchase one (within a seventy-two hour window) and verified that this was not some attempt at hacking my Nintendo Online account (which it could still be since my only way to verify that this was correct was looking for other people getting emails from that same address and this could just be a giant campaign meant to steal the credit card and account information of a lot of Nintendo Online users that has fooled tons of people), I decided to wait a bit to actually buy it.
Continue readingFeeling Ambivalent About The Switch 2
I don’t think I’ve ever felt as truly ambivalent about something as I do about the Switch 2. These days, the word gets used to mean “no strong feelings one way or another” or something similar that implies a certain amount of neutrality. The definition of the world does involve a degree of neutrality, which is where the confluence of meanings began, but it’s pretty specifically about a net neutrality as your mix of feelings about something essetially cancel each other out. All of which is a bit of a hair to split even for me, but I have never felt quite so strongly and truly ambivalent about something before in my life so it felt like the specificity was worth the pedantry. I mean, better that than to continue endlessly spinning my wheels about the unanswerable question of whether or not I want to get a Switch 2 any time soon. It’s a bit of a moot point as of writing this (not quite) a week ahead of time, given that all of the preorders have been consumed and, even faster than the original switch, everywhere has sold out, so it’s not like I need an answer right now. My current policy of “get one if it’s easy to acquire without going out of my way” will work just fine for this situation, so there’s really no need to religitate it all over again. But then again, I wouldn’t be me if I wasn’t always relitigating things in my head and then writing about them on my blog, would I?
Continue readingGotta Switch 2 A Different Way Of Economic Planing
Well, we finally got the Switch 2 news that everyone wanted. And a whole lot of news people didn’t want. According to the reactions after the fact, the Switch 2 is far too overpriced, the games are overpriced, and Nintendo has ruined everything! That’s quite a lot of responsibility this one console release has to bear, especially considering that a launch price of $450 is fairly reasonable considering the other consoles on the market. I mean, sure, Nintendo has, historically, been the cheaper option and the underperforming console in general (in regards to the technical specifications, I mean), but I figured it wasn’t going to last forever. Screens are actually really expensive and including one on a console is a pretty pricey part, even if the rest of the console has cheaper parts to make up for it. All of which is to say that I’m not surprised, this is what I expected given the price increase in some of Nintendo’s most recent games, but I was a bit surprised by the lack of anything that made me actually want to acquire one on launch day. I mean, I got the Switch on launch day because of the new Legend of Zelda game that was launching with it and while the Mario Kart game coming out as a launch title for the Switch 2 is interesting enough to make me break my habit of ignoring every new Mario Kart game, I don’t think it’s enough to make me want to go through the hassle of trying to get one on the day of release. A month and a half after that, there’ll be a new 3D Donkey Kong game for the first time in decades and THAT is definitely intriguing, but I’m not sure it’s interesting enough to contend with scalpers, waiting in line for several hours, or endlessly refreshing a webpage in hopes of getting a reservation.
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