As part of a new move to boost daily bonuses, Nintendo has patched in the rather cute Nintendo Switch G item. You can claim it from 26th April at 7am BST to 11th May at 6:59am BST. Question is, is this just an innocent way for Nintendo to celebrate its runaway console hit or a little bit of foreshadowing to a potential Switch instalment? Hmmm…
Have you logged in to claim your Nintendo Switch G in Pocket Camp? Let us know in the comments section below…
One of the Dragon Quest franchise’s most influential developers has parted ways with the publisher. Jin Fujisawa, who worked on nine entries on the series (from Dragon Quest VII on PS1 to Dragon Quest X Online) has moved onto pastures new and is now working with a different company on an as-yet-undisclosed project.
While it may have struggled to keep a place in the charts, that doesn’t mean Bayonetta 2‘s much-welcomed Nintendo Switch port hasn’t performed in terms of sales during the first nine weeks of release – especially so when you compare it to sales of the original Wii U version over the same period.
A report released by Nintendo in the wake of its most recent fiscal results shows just how well the Bayonetta sequel fared during its February release. According to the sell-through figures, the Switch port shifted almost 400K units, while the Wii U version didn’t even break 300K back in 2014. Both figures combine stats from North America, Europe and Japan.
Let us know what you make of these intriguing figures from the big Nintendo financial results. Are you still playing Bayonetta 2? Let us know below…
Despite being a little over a year old, Nintendo Switch already has more than its fair share of top-down action adventure games. The presence of Cat Quest, Kamiko, Ittle Dew 2+ and numerous others like it means genre fans are already spoiled for choice when it comes to the old hack-and-slash routine.
Jotun: Valhalla Edition is the latest to join the ranks and it’s a game that more die-hard Nintendo types may already be familiar with, since it previously launched on the Wii U eShop a year and a half ago. Since the Wii U was on the way out by then it’s probably fair to say most failed to notice it, so let’s treat this Switch port like we’re seeing it for the first time.
The game puts you in the hefty shoes of Thora, a Viking woman who’s not been having the best time of things lately. She’s recently died, you see, and naturally she’s a tad peeved at the inconvenience. What’s worse, because it was considered an inglorious death – a storm sunk her boat and she drowned – she doesn’t yet get the chance to enter Valhalla, the heaven for heroes who die in combat.
There’s hope for Thora yet, though. Waking up in a Norse version of purgatory called Ginnungagap (the Void), she discovers that if she can make her way through each of its realms and defeat the Jotun – enormous giants – located in each of them, she’ll impress the gods enough to gain access to Valhalla anyway. It’s basically the video game equivalent of when the One Direction boys failed their solo X-Factor auditions before Simon Cowell gave them another chance by putting them in a band.
The aim, then, is to travel from Ginnungagap (which acts as a hub world) to five different regions, each containing a couple of stages. After finding and activating the rune located in each of these stages, you’ll then get to fight off against that region’s huge Jotun in a boss fight. Beat them all and it’s a trip to Valhalla for you.
This structure results in a slightly disjointed experience, though not necessarily a bad one. Each region’s two stages tend to be fairly sparse, and with a couple of exceptions enemy encounters are by and large a rarity. Much of these stages are instead spend exploring the environment in a hunt for the rune you need to unlock the boss fight. This is made easier with a map on the pause screen, though it isn’t entirely spelled out for you: your location isn’t shown so you’ll need to use the environment to figure out where you actually are on the map.
After wandering through these relatively empty environments, the Jotun battles offer a huge change of pace as a result, offering lengthy boss fights with screen-filling opponents. This stark contrast in action also brings with it a hefty difficulty spike, meaning playing the game can feel like a bit of a rollercoaster at times with easy exploration levels followed by difficult boss fights. The second boss is a particularly good example of this: by the time you reach Fe you’ve just finishing strolling your way through a couple of straightforward cave levels, and now all of a sudden you’re fighting a stone goddess 50 times your size, who can summon literally hundreds of dwarven servants to attack you. You will get your ass kicked numerous times here, and given that you’ve just spent an hour in relatively peaceful surroundings it can be a little frustrating (especially with the slightly-too-long load times between deaths).
This way of offering two distinct playing styles also leads to another contrast, in terms of how the game looks. It’s always a visually stunning game whether you’re playing the stages or the boss fights, but in different ways. When you’re exploring the vast, generally empty stages the game has a tendency to occasionally zoom out, continuing to do so until your character is a tiny speck on the screen. This gives a true sense of scale, further puts across the feeling of being in limbo, and is a great way of showing off the beautiful hand-drawn environments.
On the other hand, when you’re fighting a boss the camera pulls in tighter to make sure you’re fully immersed in the action: when it’s closer in like this you can better appreciate the phenomenal character designs and animation. The bosses in particular are gorgeously animated, each frame hand-drawn as if you were watching a Don Bluth creation (such as Dragon’s Lair or The Land Before Time). When you first encounter them you’re treated to a fantastic animation of them discovering your presence and ‘awakening’ to start the battle, and when you finally manage to beat them – which is no mean feat, as previously explained – they die in a brilliantly satisfying, drawn-out way (literally).
Jotun is a fascinating take on the action-adventure genre. Written down it doesn’t sound like it should work: its controls are basic, most of the main levels are practically free of enemies and the boss fights range from tricky to knuckle-gnawingly infuriating. And yet, when it combines all its parts and brings them together, the result is a journey that takes in stunning landscapes, puts you in intense battles and blesses you with some of the most beautifully and professionally-designed characters and animations you’ll see in an indie game.
As long as you’re prepared for its erratic pacing and are happy to accept that there’ll be moments where you’re doing very little and moments where you’re cursing the game upside-down, you’re going to have a great time playing this visually stunning game.
Conclusion
Graphically, it’s a masterpiece, but Jotun’s action is too imbalanced to allow the same to be said about the game as a whole. Exploring its environments will be a treat for some players and getting stuck into its difficult boss battles will be a treat for others: if your tastes are wide-ranging enough to appreciate both scenarios, this is a winner.
Eurogamer recently conducted an interview with Giles Goddard, one of the few foreign programmers who worked at Nintendo HQ in Kyoto in the 1990s, the man who also happened to create the famous interactive face that introduced the world to Super Mario 64. You know, that major turning point in gaming history.
Goddard, who also worked with the late Satoru Iwata when he was still a programmer, reveals the early days of working with Nintendo 64 was a time for fun experimentation:
“When we got the Indys, they came with a camera. I put ping pong balls on my face and I thought it’d be cool to use the camera to control the face. And the justification was to test out the skinning – at that point, if you had two joints they’d be two separate objects. There was no smoothing. That’s what I was experimenting in – how to do skinning. And a good demonstration of that was the Mario face. If you have a boss there that’s seen this iteration of skinning, of facial animation – it’s dicking around with a purpose, it’s progressive and it’s new stuff.”
It wasn’t made for publication, either. Goddard didn’t expect the game to make it into the final game, even when Miyamoto requested he add an elasticity to Mario’s skin.
“Miyamoto just saw it as he walked past. It didn’t really change, either – the only thing was the elasticity. They wanted you to pull the face, but after that what happens? That’s where you got the springy stuff.”
Tell us your memories of playing Super Mario 64 back in the ’90s and how it influenced your love of gaming…
Swery65, the man who gave us the cult classic Deadly Premonition, re-launched the Kickstarter campaign for his latest project, The Good Life, last month and now he’s teasing a potential Switch port in the future. In the latest update on the game’s crowdfunding page (which has just over a week left to run), Swery65 reveals one of his team has experimented with a version running Nintendo’s handheld console.
“We love the Nintendo Switch. And while we cannot commit to making a Switch version for now, our main programmer couldn’t stop himself from doing a few experiments with our current build and the console. They have been surprisingly successful so far, much to the whole team’s enjoyment… It gives us extra motivation and more drive than ever, and the will to make the campaign successful. I hope it excites you too!”
So it’s nothing concrete, and just because a developer can get part of their game running on Switch doesn’t mean it’s a dead cert – but it’s great to see Switch remaining a relevant platform for many a developer. However, with just under $200K left to meet of its target goal, we wouldn’t count on its handheld appearance just yet.
Let us know what you make of this little tease from Swery65. Share your thoughts with the Nintendo Life community below…
May is shaping up to be quite the sports month for Switch retro enthusiasts, with yesterday’s announcement just a mere glimpse of the sports variety to come during the next month. HAMSTER has confirmed the following five titles as the next Neo Geo Arcade Archives releases on the Switch eShop:
With the exception of 1994 Super Sidekicks 2, all the others games were released in the distant year of 1990 so you can be sure this lot truly brings in the true vintage AES experience. We’re certain a chunk of our readers must be ecstatic with the news of Baseball Stars Professional on the horizon, but will you pick anything else along with it? Or the break from one-on-one fighting means you will be staying away from the eShop next month? The comments section is yours.
Johnny Turbo’s Arcade returns next week with another beloved Data East classic up for grabs on the Nintendo Switch eShop. Johnny Turbo’s Arcade: Sly Spy drops into service on 3rd May (priced $6.99 in the US), bringing along nine levels of playful variety that wooed arcade goers and those who were lucky enough to pick up Ocean’s home computer conversions back in 1989.
In the year of 19XX, President Ronnie was having a nice stroll with his family when his caravan was intercepted by the Council for World Domination, a bunch of jet pack-wearing terrorists! Only one man can possibly be up for this task: the spy named Sly! Are you a bad enough secret agent to rescue the president?
The game features a ‘Golden Gun’, a boss possessing inhuman strength and another of diminutive stature that attacks by throwing his hat around. We can’t quite figure why all of this sounds terribly familiar…
Any memories of this Data East homage to MI6’s finest among our veteran readers? Share your thoughts with us below…
Nintendo Switch is becoming the new home for indies both new and old, with Three Fourths Home: Extended Edition falling comfortably into the latter category. This minimalist visual short story places you in the shoes of Kelly, a woman in her mid-20s caught in a story on her way back to her home in Nebraska.
While travelling through a stylised representation of rural Nebraska, you’ll navigate an extended conversation between Kelly, her parents, and her younger brother. Through dialogue choice and simple driving mechanics, the story delves into a specific moment of these characters’ lives and their relationships with one another.
Check out the trailer above for a snippet of what it has to offer when it arrives on 10th May. Let us know what you think below…
South African developer Robot Wizard has revealed that Jengo will launch on Nintendo Switch following a successful Fig crowdfunding campaign.
Jengo is said to be full of wacky characters and improbable turns of events, with many puzzles and mysteries for you to tackle along the way. You will play as Jeff, a disgruntled gaming veteran who is seeking new challenges, as he gets taken into the gaming world of Pixelverse. Suddenly, Jeff finds himself needing to find a way to save this universe from the Apocalypse.
As you can probably tell from the trailer above, and definitely from this one should you be interested, the game features an over-the-top, utterly bonkers vibe that will hopefully provide a great sense of charm should it make it to Switch. At the time of writing, the project is 26% funded with 27 days to go. If you’re interested in backing the game and finding out what perks you can grab for doing so, check out Jengo’s Fig page here.
What do you think? Does this look like something you’d love to add to your Switch game library? Let us know if you’d like to see the game reach its goal in the comments below.
