Nintendo Thread: Nintendo Direct Mini 03/26/2020

Which Pokémon game will you be buying?

  • Let's Go Pikachu!

    Votes: 13 46.4%
  • Let's Go Eevee!

    Votes: 3 10.7%
  • Both!

    Votes: 4 14.3%
  • None!

    Votes: 8 28.6%
  • O.0

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    28
  • Poll closed .
 
#ZeldaBreathOfTheWild is dense, challenging, and full of wonder.

Here's our early preview: https://t.co/MtlqNgFBGc pic.twitter.com/ed2oupv2tM
— GameSpot (@gamespot) February 24, 2017



Looking like the buzz for Zelda is very positive as expected... I've heard it's possibly the best Zelda game to date.
frown.gif
 

*hype intensifies*
 
For those worried about the Switch's battery life, it's really a non-issue. If you've owned a Nintendo 3DS expect the same type of battery life for the Switch. That video posted by GameExplain was at max settings and he still manged to get 2.5 hours. If you play at regular settings or lower you should get 3 or more hours. That's actually awesome considering the graphical fidelity of the games the Switch can play.


Nintendo Switch’s alleged battery problems are an exaggeration

If you are thinking about buying the Nintendo Switch, I don’t think it’s battery life should play a big factor in your final determination.

Nintendo’s new console can play Zelda on battery power for about 3 hours, and that’s long enough for me so far. The $300 hybrid handheld/home system launches March 3, and maybe you’re thinking that 3 hours doesn’t sound like a long time. And maybe you have a lengthy daily commute or you fly across the country a lot. In those situations, 3 hours of Zelda isn’t enough. But even if those are the times you plan to play games the most, I don’t think the battery is the biggest concern.

I’ve already detailed some of the early problems I’ve spotted with the Switch, and I didn’t include the battery life among those issues. That’s because, in reality, three hours of game time on a portable device is not shockingly low. Maybe you’re thinking that your iPhone lasts all day with battery to spare, but I urge you to see the results if you tried to play a game nonstop on your phone. Did you play Pokémon Go over the summer? Remember how that ate through your battery in a couple of hours? It’s the same thing with the Switch, only Breath of the Wild uses much more power to run those high-def visuals and more complicated actions than Pokémon Go does for its limited gameplay. And if you put your Switch in sleep mode, it would last a couple of days.

Let’s get some perspective. Here’s a look at how long Nintendo and Sony have said that their respective portable systems last on a full charge:

  • Nintendo Switch: 2.5 hours-to-6 hours
  • Nintendo 3DS: 3 hours-to-5 hours
  • New Nintendo 3DS: 3.5 hours-to-6 hours
  • New Nintendo 3DS XL: 3.5 hours-to-7 hours
  • PlayStation Vita: 3 hours-to-5 hours

Switch sits comfortably alongside all of those devices in terms of battery life, and the results I’ve seen in real-world use reflect that. Playing Zelda from a full charge until the system died doesn’t feel all that different from wearing down the battery on my New 3DS XL.

In my tests, I got over 3 hours of use playing Zelda on the Switch at the lowest brightness setting. On auto-brightness, where the system adjusts automatically based on the ambient lighting in the room, I ended up closer to 2.75 hours. But it’s important to remember that Zelda started its life on the Wii U, and a lot of the games that are going to rub up against the 2.5-hour side of the spectrum are the ones that weren’t made with the unique capabilities of this hardware in mind. In the future, Nintendo may find a way to make games that look as impressive but are better at optimizing the Switch’s power.

Finally, if 3 hours won’t do it for you no matter what, I would guess that 5 hours wouldn’t make you that much happier. It’s unlikely that any device — whether it’s a laptop, smartphone, or tablet — could last for 5 hours while running a modern 3D game at 720p on a battery charge. That means the answer here is to take advantage of the Nintendo Switch’s USB-C port, which will accept a charge from a portable power bank. While I doubt you’ll use it often, you’ll still have the battery power when you need it in those rare circumstances.

But maybe I’m biased because I’m relieved that 3 hours is just enough to cover most of my trips to the bathroom.
http://venturebeat.com/2017/02/23/3-hours-of-zelda-on-nintendo-switchs-battery-is-fine/
 
Pre-review of BoTW from Polygon:

http://www.appy-gamer.com/Web/ArticleWeb.aspx?regionid=3&articleid=87261940
Several hours in, Breath of the Wild seems poised to bring Zelda into the modern era.
There's a literal list of things in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild I'm not allowed to talk about yet, but right now, a week before launch and about 20 hours into the game, there are really only two things I feel I need to talk about. First, Breath of the Wild respects your intelligence as a player more than any Legend of Zelda game before it (with the possible exception of 2013's 3DS release A Link Between Worlds).

And second? Breath of the Wild demands your respect. And if you forget that for longer than a few minutes it'll remind you by knocking you flat on your ***.

A quick bit of housekeeping: these impressions are based on a lot of time with a final, retail version of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the Nintendo Switch. This isn't a review exactly — these thoughts aren't final, as I'm not finished with the game. Nowhere close, in fact. But I have played enough to have some very strong opinions that are solidly formed, big surprises or changes of pace notwithstanding.

Lets get Breath of the Wild's demand that you take it seriously out of the way first, in case you haven't been following the interviews and narrative surrounding it in the last year or so. Breath of the Wild is, without question or debate, the hardest Zelda game of the last twenty years. In fact, as an “old” who literally grew up playing the original Zelda games on NES and SNES when they came out, I'd argue it's the hardest Zelda game period. The first twenty minutes or so are pretty low key — you can kill the scrub bokoblins and other minor enemies you meet without much trouble using nothing more than a tree branch picked up off the ground. But once you leave the initial learning spaces and venture into more typical zones, you're probably going to die.

Breath of the Wild will knock you flat on your ***

And, like, you're probably going to die a lot, honestly. Often without much warning. Or at least I did, and still do, if I'm not careful.

This is in large part because Breath of the Wild gates off areas of the world behind specific kinds of equipment less than any third-person Zelda game. The geographic options in front of me felt almost overwhelming right from the start, and that was just in the opening plateau that serves as the game's tutorial space. Once you obtain a specific item that allows you to leave that plateau, Hyrule is your oyster. It just happens to be an oyster full of really angry monsters and ancient death machines that will murder you if they see you.

Often, the only indication Breath of the Wild might give that you are under-equipped for the space you're in is an enemy taking you from, say, six hearts to a quarter of one in a single axe swipe or spear lunge (assuming, you know, they don't just kill you outright). Or, like I said, they'll just kill you with no real fanfare or warning, and the game will reload you fairly close to where you were, hopefully having learned an important lesson about Hyrule's ecosystem and its desire for you not to exist in it.

Comparisons to games like Dark Souls are probably inevitable, but they're not exactly fair. You don't lose anything when you die, other than the time lost getting back to where you were. You do have to contend with equipment with a finite lifespan however, and resources will often be scarce unless you gather ingredients to make potions and meals. This is something I've typically avoided in open world action RPGs in the last several years — I find this kind of thing incredibly boring. But for whatever reason, cooking and mixing in Breath of the Wild feels a little more loose and a little more immediately rewarding, and, well, it's an absolute necessity.

There's a practical reason for this. While spaces in Breath of the Wild aren't item gated exactly, aside from the aforementioned enemies that will smash you, they can be beyond your physical capabilities. While Link is physically capable — he can climb most walls and use a sort of hang glider, and he can swim right away, no items required — more strenuous activity depletes Link's limited stamina bar. However, if you cook the right things together, you can create meals and elixirs that, say, refill your stamina completely, or even give you temporary extra stamina that might allow you to reach a spot you otherwise couldn't.

Also if you don't make meals that give you more than a heart or two back — or, eventually, that give you bonus temporary hearts — you're not going to survive against more powerful common enemies you'll find out in the world.

At first this all feels like a lot to keep track of and consider while playing a Zelda game, but it quickly became second nature for me. And it all ties into the first idea I talked about above, that Breath of the Wild feels like the first third-person, big budget Zelda game to eschew a meandering, elaborate, incredibly extended tutorial section. Breath of the Wild teaches you to play it, don't get me wrong. The plateau you start on gives you the powers and abilities you'll use for much of the game's puzzle solving via shrines, and each shrine is a series of instructional scenarios for a particular ability. But you can also screw around and kill Bokoblins and climb and explore the area to your heart's content if that's what you want to do, and you could spend hours doing it before you left for the rest of Hyrule.

Put another way: as I was playing the first few hours of Breath of the Wild, I was capturing gameplay for Polygon's coverage. At a certain point I considered restarting the game to get better footage. I considered restarting a Zelda game's first hours without hating life. Breath of the Wild, in respecting your intelligence, also respects your time.

That respect radiates outward. The puzzle logic in Breath of the Wild feels legitimately logical, and smartly physics-based. There are optional shrines scattered throughout Hyrule that act as mini puzzle dungeons, and almost without exception, they've all been a lot of fun to figure out. After more than two dozen of them, Breath of the Wild also doesn't seem out of ideas.

And so far, this is the thing I'm most struck by. Breath of the Wild has so far managed to integrate a steady stream of new ideas and twists on existing Zelda concepts, including weapon durability and variety. Example: boomerangs are now dual use tools that can be wielded as melee weapons or thrown in traditional Zelda fashion, but if you do the latter, you'll need to be quick and catch it on the way back. Every weapon I've found so far is a finite tool as well, so I've learned not to get too attached.

But even with these and other, bigger changes, Breath of the Wild has never stopped feeling like a Zelda game — and what's more, it seems poised to establish itself as the first current, vital feeling Zelda title in longer than I can remember.
 
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Got charged for both my Target and Best Buy pre-orders so I guess I'm in the clear. Can't wait to pick this joint up at Best Buy next Friday. These BOTW articles got me pumped.
 
My GS is doing a midnight release, but they dk about non pre orders. I'm just gonna go to target a little before they open
 
Couple things if you haven't PO'd yet. I just talked to my GameStop guy and he told me 2 things that go for all GameStops nationwide

1. Store will be receiving extra stock (no word on the numbers) on launch day so there's an opportunity to cop if you show up early. He said 1st come 1st serve

&

2. All POs that have not been picked up by Saturday night MUST be put out to the floor before closing so show up to your local GS around 8 or so to try and claim any POs people have bailed on 
 
Couple things if you haven't PO'd yet. I just talked to my GameStop guy and he told me 2 things that go for all GameStops nationwide

1. Store will be receiving extra stock (no word on the numbers) on launch day so there's an opportunity to cop if you show up early. He said 1st come 1st serve

&

2. All POs that have not been picked up by Saturday night MUST be put out to the floor before closing so show up to your local GS around 8 or so to try and claim any POs people have bailed on 

When you say early you mean before/around midnight?
 
No clue really. I'd imagine they won't sell em at midnight so i'd say in the early morning but people are wild so who knows when they'll start lining up :lol

Oh ok so it's separate from midnight release. The GS told me she didn't know what their non PO stock looked like so the best option would be the midnight release
 
Does anyone know what's up with the American Switch launch of I Am Setsuna? Online the rd is listed on several game sites as March 3, but the Switch version isn't on either Amazon's or GameStop's sites, and my local GameStop says it's not in their system. I just decided this week that I wanted it, and now can't find it to preorder. Was it delayed? Anybody know anything?
 
I think it's a launch title in Japan but later coming

I literally just 30 seconds ago found a blurb in a link off Wikipedia that it's going to be a physical release in Japan and a digital release everywhere else, which SUCKS considering the extremely limited amount of memory on the Switch out of the gate aside from the space the OS takes. Which is the whole reason I'd rather have all physical releases on the Switch if I can help it.
 
Also found some literature on IGN that further confirms I Am Setsuna will in fact only be a digital download in America. HOWEVER, I came across a different article that claims it will only be approximately a 1.4 GB download. So that puts my mind at ease a little regarding how much Switch memory I'll be using on rd and how much will be left over for when the VC gets up and running, but 1) it's still silly that only Japan gets an I Am Setsuna physical release, and 2) they better get some higher capacity SD minis on the market, pronto.
 
A 128gb Samsung class 10 is like 60$ I'll buy that down the line

So this won't be like Xbox n PS4 where I own the physical but it takes up memory of my system? So while playing Zelda I'll still have 32 gbs available
 
A 128gb Samsung class 10 is like 60$ I'll buy that down the line

So this won't be like Xbox n PS4 where I own the physical but it takes up memory of my system? So while playing Zelda I'll still have 32 gbs available

If you get the physical Zelda cartridge, I assume only the save data will take up space on the internal memory, and that should be very little.

If you get Zelda as a download, the whole game is said to take up about 13.4 GB of the 32 GB of internal memory. That's over a third of the stock Switch memory. It's also been said that the OS takes up about 6.1 GB, so you don't really have 32 GB of free space to begin with, you have about 25.9 GB. Zelda would then actually take up over half of the free space that you start with.

But like I said, if you get the physical media, the game itself won't take up any internal memory, just the save data will and I can't imagine that being more than a few hundred MB if that.
 
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