2017 My Year in Games

So as another year draws ever close to its end, as the skies darken the frost twinkles and most look forward to a nice christmas dinner I want to stop and take a look at what the year has been like in the world of Video Games. I wont mention every single thing thats happend I just want to gloss over a few key bits here and there and give my thoughts on them. I could talk all day about things of this nature but instead here are just a few things from the world of games this year and what I think about them.

2016 was very much seen as a year absolutly filled with celebraty deaths but we had one in the world of Video Games very early on in January of 2017, as Masaya Nakamura, the founder of Namco, died at 91 years old. He established Namco in 1955 and as most will know Namco is responsible for the birth of Pacman one of what can be considerd the earliest Mascots in the world of gaming.Lets face it even if your the most casual of gamer Pacman will probably have come into your life at some point in some way, I type this with my daughter playing Pacman in the background on an Amazon Fire stick she recieved for Christmas. I have been a very big fan of many Namco games including the Rolling Thunder and SplatterHouse series as well as Pacman in all its various form during my time so before I go on Thank you Masaya Nakamura may you rest in peace.

Also in January Sony closed Guerrilla Cambridge the developers of Killzone Mercenary and the PSP version of Little Big Planet and Nintendo announced that they had officially stopped global Production of the Wii U, which I guess you can pretty much call the last nail in the consoles coffin, even if it has had a few post death twitches since. I really enjoyed my Wii U and feel that its a real shame the console never got the attention it deserves still I hope that one day people will look back on it and it will gain the same intrest the Cube did after its demise.

In February, Ghost Story Games was officially founded. It’s Bioshock creator Ken Levine’s new studio for those who missed the news. Also Peter Moore stepped down as head of EA Sports and left the company to become the CEO of Liverpool Football Club. Or for a game fan like me who cant stand football he left the world of games to do some crap I dont care about.

On March the 3^rd: Nintendo launched the Switch it had the advantage of launching with a Zelda title The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as well as a few other games, After floundering back and forwards on wether I should get one or not I ended up grabbing the very last machine from the HMV near where I work. I then Grabbed Zelda from Tesco's and Bomberman R from Argos. As of now I have about six games and havent really played it as much as it proberbly deserves, but in all honesty I have felt far more drawn to other machines. Breath of the Wild also recieved a release on the Switch which I think was a good move by Nintendo seeing as they had always promised it would come to the machine so it was good to see them keep there word. I have written a lot about the Switch this year and a lot of it has been about my lack of conection with mine, I havent personally bonded to mine really but I do think Nintendo have done a lot of things well and I hope that one day I gain a bigger appreciation for the platform I guess 2017 wasnt my year for this but I will have to see how 2018 goes.

At the end of March, Square Enix withdrew from IO Interactive. With a managment buyout happening in June, IO have retained the rights to the Hitman Franchise and announced that now its independent there will be plenty more Hitman to look forward to. This has made me very happy as although I was very late to the party with the last Hitman title waiting for the full season to relase on Disc I have been greatly enjoying it. Any move which helps the Hitman franchise is something I am going to be supportive of, I hope this is the start of something new and that we can all look forward to many high quality titles featuring agent 47 in the future.

March also saw the release of Mass Effect: Andromeda, I had been a huge fan of the Mass Effect games so I got this game near release but it turned out to be a bit of a letdown. It had a lot of the same gameplay as the older Mass Effect games but a lot of issues and well it just didnt have the same magic. It looks like this title has possibly killed the Mass Effect series which would be a real shame.

April was also a month which brought a lot of dissapointment for people , the dissapointment was brought by the release of Yooka-Laylee a spiritual sequal to the old Banjo Kazooie games. I had been looking forward to this but I saw some of the poor reviews that had come in for it and well I decided to give it a miss until I could get it stupidly cheap, so far I havent gotten it.


Skipping forwards a bit August saw the release of Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle a tactical strategy game in which Mario teams up with some of his typical friends as well as some of Ubisofts Rabbids. It is a bit like Mario meets XCOM with Rabbid crazyness thrown in for good measure. When it was annoucned it seemed like a really weird idea but in my oppinion it really works on so many levels. I am slowly playing this is bits and pieces here and there and recognise it as a great game but it hasnt been quiet enough to make me go hardcore Switch addict or anything.

Septemeber saw the release of Destiny 2 but in all honesty I didnt really see the fuss, sure I had played and enjoyed the first one a bit but I just didnt think I needed more of it this soon, not when the first one had been updated again and again with DLC but then again I have already said I am not a big multiplayer fan.I did nearly buy it at £20 but I knew my daughter would most likly end up playing it and she has been doing mock exams lattly so I went all responsible and decided not to bring something in to the house that I thought might distract her.

In October  EA shut down Visceral Games, and cancelled the awesome looking Star Wars game that they had been working on, this was very dissapointing, I have always been a huge Star Wars fan I have also never been much of a fan of mutli player online stuff, so to see this game die and yet to see Battlefront 2 launch instead well it was a heck of a pain. October also brought us a raft of new trailers, including one for The Last of Us Part II and also one for Detroit: Become Human a game which I have recently written about and feel could be very intresting.It was also in this month if I remember correctly that EA acquired Respawn Entertainment, the makers of Titanfall. I was pleasently suprised by TitanFall but havent had the chance to try its sequel yet. I hope that they do well under EA and dont suffer the fate other studios have after having been purchase by EA.

I havent had much time for reading about games in the last few months but I have grabbed a hold of a few titles around Christmas that I will hopefully be talking about in the near future.

Merry Christmas one and all.

My Oppinion on the price of Spare Switch Docks and Splatoon 2's no cart version

Ok so the first thing I want to talk about is the fact that Nintendo Europe has revealed that Switch owners can buy a second dock for their console in the UK as of June the 23rd. This is potentially great for people who would like to have a dock sat waiting either at your partners house or on another TV so that you can pick up the Switch and dock it in another place without having to move stuff about. This is Nintendo though so you knew that there had to be a catch, the catch is that a second dock is going to cost you £79.99, which apparently is a good price as you also get a HDMI lead and a power supply. Ok well a HDMI lead can be got for as little as £1 from pound land and you could get a power lead and a USB plug from pound land for £2 so how about you just cut those out of the box and charge a realistic price for it one thats not like £77. I know that there will be die hard Nintendo fans defending this but personally I am waiting for a third party to get there hands on one of these reverse enginer it and come up with a much cheaper alternative.

So in Japan Nintendo is releasing several diffrent retail versions of Splatoon 2 one of which is a boxed version which doesnt actually have a cartridge. So what you will get for your money is a case which doesnt contain a cart, it just contains a download code. Now I just cant see the point in this, if you collect games then really you want the physical copy of it, if you prefer download copies then usually this is because you want to buy the game but dont want to fill your house with crap. The even crazier thing from my point of view is that the code version costs exactly the same as the version with a cart, they only had to print a code on a piece of paper which cost them far less than making a cartridge would have cost but hey its the same price. This raises the whole question of why the heck are downloads the same price as a physical copy anyways? I guess thats best touched on another time though.

Why the Nintendo Switches e-shop is a little boring and what they could do to change this.

So I was looking at the Switch's eshop and I noticed there were some Neo Geo games I would like I was going to grab Garou Mark of the Wolf and King Of the Fighters 98 which would have been £12.58 for the 2 games, might not sound too bad but hey, figured Id check on the Xbox One first afetr all I always like to try and get the best bang for my buck. So I checked and there was a BackWards Compatability sale on and guess what there was a whole bunch of Neo Geo games on it including the two I had been looking at on the Switch's eshop.

So while looking at the backwards compatability sale I decided that I would spend the £12.58 on there on games to play on my Xbox One and So I got Garou Mark of The Wolf, King Of the Fighters 98, King Of the Fighters 2002, Samurai Showdown 2, Neo Geo Battle Coliseum, Double Dragon Neo, Bomberman Battlefest and Alien Hominid HD for £14, yes this was a tiny bit more than I intended to spend but well who minds paying about £1.50 more to get 6 more games? This made me stop and think is Nintendo really handling the whole Virtual Console thing correctly this time?

Dont get me wrong I love the Neo Geo and its games and £6.29 is a darn site less than the games went for on cartridge back in the day, the thing is though that the games have come out so many times in so many diffrent places by now that they are just very old hat. I have Metal Slug 3 on the PS2 and Xbox on disc, then I have the SNK collection Volume 1 on both the Wii and PSP as well as having the Metal Slug Anthology on the Wii, all of these were gotten for very little and I have played them to death. This is before you realise that lots of people have been emulating the Neo Geo back before the whole Virtual Console/ PSN store and various other stores became a thing. Heck I even donated to charity to get a Neo Geo humble bundle from the popular charity donating video game bundle site Humble Bundle.

One of the issues is that if you look on any service that lets you download retro games you are likly to see the same titles again and again, Steam, the PSN Store, Xbox Live all of them will have for example the same 40 Megadrive games, the ones that usually fill up compilation discs. Nintendo's switch can not hope to compete with these services as the games have been available on them for a long time so people will have either already purchased them or will be able to grab them for much less during sales like I have.

What Nintendo should have done for the release of the Switch is looked for titles they could put up which have not been so easily available already. They should have reached out to companies who have less touched back catalogs and they should have dug into there own archives. I for one would love to see them finally release Star Fox 2 onto a Virtual Console, its never had a proper release despite being finished so surly there is money and equally importantly headlines to be made there. They should also take a good long look at what has been done elsewere. People have hacked SNES roms for example and added better more high quality music, emulators have been able to let you play snes games in multiplayer over the internet, textures have been smothed, fans have translated import titles. Why not use this, grab these translations, check them and if there good then release previously unreleased games on the virtual console giving some credit to those who have done the work for you, just stop and think outside of the box for a moment instead of offering something that every single company going has already done, surly Nintendo with your Wii-motes and touch screens and just general inovation you could apply some of this to the virtual console scene and not only make it something to get excited about but also use it to plug some of the holes in your release scedule.

I got a Switch, how well Nintendo sold it and my first impressions

So with about a week to go until the release of the Nintendo Switch and everyone seeming to be super excited about it I sat there wondering why? It was going to cost more than I had wanted it to cost, it wasnt going to come with a game included and the main title that it was launching with was also getting a release on the Wii U on the very same day. I had made my plans to try my very best to ignore the Switch and grab one when there was more out for it. I had originally ignored the release of the Wii U after all only getting one when I could get it for £50 less than its recomended retail with an extra full price game thrown in for nothing (It wasnt long after release a month maybe two but I got a cracking deal due to HMV nearly going under).

I knew that the switch coming was pretty much curtains time for the Wii U, Nintendos previous home console and I kind of think its a bit of a crying shame, as the machine never really got a chance to fly, sure some might argue that its not really the end as Zelda Breath of the Wind is releasing on it as well as on the switch but thats mostly just because Nintendo promised that it would and its more of a last Hurrah than anything. I had pinned my hopes of not caving in and buying a Switch on the fact that I have a PS4 and an Xbox One and that with the new Mass Effect and South Park the Fratured But Whole coming out well I thought I would be able to just throw myself into games like that and ignore the Swich. It was a nice idea but with a few issues, the main two being that the Switch released before those titles and the other being that I could never have dreamed that I would have had the Switch pushed at me so hard.. The Switch appeared in adverts everytime I tried to watch something on youtube, it was there on bus stops and billboards as I was leaving work, and even when I would sit down with my girlfriend to watch some TV every add break there would be a Switch commercial. What can I say to Nintendo other than I take my hat off to you, yes some of your ideas and practices can be very stupid and you screwed up the release of the Wii U but by joe did you do good this time when it comes to pushing this thing. I could justify it by saying I have a child in the house or that I wanted it for the purpose of having all the latest systems for my blog for reviews and such but yeah that would just be BS, I got excited like I was still young and I needed it, thats how simple it is.

Nintendo essentially managed to talk me, an individual who has a rocky relationship with the big N, one which has swayed from Love to Hate into buying there new machine on launch day, and to put it out there in short hand I have had a great time with it so far and I am very happy I grabbed one. I cant say getting one was easy, fortunatly I was working a very early shift, I had tried to last minute preorder one for collection and all sorts but in the end I had to depend on running out of work the second I finished and rushing from shop to shop asking eventually finding the last remaining Switch HMV had in stock in the store relativly near my work and purchasing it but they had no games left, so I ended up getting Zelda from Tesco's and Bomberman R from Argos, it proberbly took an hour and a half of running about to get sorted and then get home but it could have been far worse. For example there are people who have had one preorderd for ages from all mannor of diffrent companies even directly from Nintendo themselves who I know are still waiting for either the machine or the games they have orderd to arrive, but this is Nintendo after all, if stock was plentyful and everyone who wanted one could just get one straight away I would wonder what had happend and think that body snatchers from deep space were proberbly involved and trying to use the console to take over mankind or something.

So first on impressions with the machine itself, well its smaller than I thought it would be but it looks very smart, the portable part is a lot more portable than I thought, the two joycon controllers are a little tiny when used on there own as seperate controlers but when put togther with the middle piece they make a pretty darn fine pad, I was certainly jumping into Zelda with them and loving every second of it. I had the sort of usually Nintendo frustrations setting it up, they certainly havent quiet go to the point Microsoft and Sony has were you easily lift the user ID from one console to the next and carry on within minutes but thats a minor gripe as its only a hoop your going to have to jump through once when your setting it up for the first time. In reality a machine is only as good as the games on it, now it needs to be said that the Switch does not have a massive launch line up, there are a few retail games then there are a few download only ones and a handful of sort of virtual console old NEO GEO games to be getting on with currently, but so far I have to say Zelda is a real beauty and if you dont have a Wii U already I think its well worth picking a machine up just for this game if you can afford to do so. I would describe it as a sort of blend of the old Zelda games and something a bit more large and less linear like an elder scrolls game for example.

It is really hard to tell how things will go with the Switch, will it be another Wii or another Wii U or something in the middle? It has started off a lot better than the Wii U did but I guess the true answer to this will depend on how Nintendo handle things from here, I wait with baited breath holding my new baby Switch.

My Personal Thoughts on the Nintendo Switch 2017 Presentation and if I will or wont get a Switch at release.

So I kind of rocked backwards and forwards unable to decide if I was going to write a post about this or not so that kind of explains why this is a little late compared to other peoples but as the Nintendo Switch Presentation has come and gone and I have now watched it (not live it was at like 4 in the morning and I couldnt be botherd to get up that early). I guess this is a quick what did we learn and how do I feel about it piece. It is proberbly important to note that I have had a little time to chew things over, I have read other peoples oppinions and will have took a few of these on board some proberbly mellowing my oppinion and some getting me even more grouchy about certain issues. One of the reasons I didnt know if I should do this or not is because whenever I give an oppinion that is not 100% Nintendo positive to the point of propoganda I seem to get a lot of hate directed at me, and well I am always going to tell the truth as I see it.

The launch date was announced as March the 3rd 2017 this was done nice and early during the presentation, which is good because its one of the things people are obviously the most keen to know, I would say the second most important thing people wanted to know was its price and Nintendo supplied this as well. There had alwready been a lot of speculation about the price with various websites offering place holder prices and one particular sight GameSeek offering preorders for £199.99. Well it turns out that its UK price is going to be the much higher £279.99 although for anyone lucky enough to have preorderd one from GameSeek they have agreed to honour the preorders at the price they originally stated. So what do I think of this price? Well considering its £279.99 without a game and it looks like the RRP of a lot of games is currently around the £60 mark with some being available to preorder from certain sights for about £40 I think its kind of expensive, lets make this clear if you pay RRP for the machine and then manage to get a game for £40 thats still basically £320 for the machine as well a console is useless without at least one game to play on it, I would have been much happier if they had even made some limited game as a pack in title just so you could see the machine run and mess around with it a little and then pay for an actual title a week or two latter. Some of this is just the typical technology tends to cost more in the UK crap as the Switch is going to be $300 in America which if you do the maths is actually a heap tonne more reasonable.

I will admit that I dont think I am going to buy a Switch on release and this is coming from a guy who had a GameCube days after release, a Wii the night it came out (I cued for it) and a Wii U reasonably quickly too, in honesty the price is just a bit more than I wanted to pay. I had saved up enough to get one (I saved about £350 in total) and I had kind of flip flopped from a strong Yes to a no, to a maybe and backwardss and forwards but I seem to have finally rested on not now. I have a Xbox One, a PS4 and a Wii U and I have titles for all of them that I have either not played or just barely dipped into ,I am not in need of a new machine really and the price point simply is not good enough to tempt me to be stupid and buy something I dont need just because it would be darn cool, a price point of £200 for a stand alone machine or £240 with a game proberbly would have been enough to do this in fact if it was £200 and the games were £40 I would proberbly have grabbed a machine and two games on launch. I guess most people will have a price in there head that they were ready for and if it meets yours great but it didnt meet mine, and bluntly if you didnt have a price in mind and would have paid anything for it then wow your crazy.

A lot of people have been arguing that the Switch looks under powered whilst others have been defending it by saying that we havent seen the specs yet, but lets face it we have seen the graphics and as nice as they are from the way they look and the type of titles we are being shown I have to say we are proberbly looking at specs that are either around the level of or even a little lower than the PS4 and Xbox One, now specs are not everything admitidly but when you could grab a second hand Xbox One and some of its greatest hits that have been released in the last few years for less than a Switch with nothing well it kind of makes you stop and consider what your best course of action is.

Lets look at this at the most basic level and I wont cheat by picking a second hand console or an old inferior model or even second hand games but lets look at what £279.99 can get you, it can get you a Switch with nothing to play on it or you could get a Xbox One S brand new from amazon with Minecraft for £214, a copy of Rare Replay for £13.45 (a collection of some of the best work of a brilliant developer) Forza Horizon 3 for 24.99 (One of the most highly rated driving games released in recent years) and Skyrim Special Edition for £27, I added this one both because it is a fantastic game but also because people seem to be pretty darn excited that despite being quite old now that it is heading to the Switch, oh and you have 55pence left over for some sweets. I am not saying this trying to stop anyone from getting a Switch as it is up to all of us as indivudals to decide if we are excited enough for it and can afford it and if it is the thing we really want to spend our money on, in fact I am confident I will own it one day just not at release or in the imediate future.

So why dont I comment a little bit on the games now and my thoughts on them. Well lets start with 1 2 Switch. Well it looks like 1 2 is bacsically to the Switch what Wii Sports and Nintendo Land were to the Wii and Wii U respective. 1 2 Switch is basically one of those games which kind of demonstrates tha hardware and the abilities of your principle control method in this case the Joy-Con controller(s). In honesty it didn't really make me stand up and pay attention when I watched the presentation and I really dont see it as being worth the amount that it looks like they will be selling it for, it feels much more like it should have just be something thrown in with the console as a sort of demonstration piece. Wii Sports I spent ages on and really did seem to see as a game in its own right where as Nintendo land I soon grew bored of and just saw as a minor distraction and 1 2 Switch lookss like it would fall in to the latter category obviously this is just a speculative oppinion based on a quick bit of footage of it pre-release so it could end up suprising me when I finally play it, I dont want to pretend I am capable of reviewing things that have yet to be released so it needs to be noted this is all just pure speculation.

As for Splatoon 2, yeah it looks like more of the same but that is in no way a bad thing, it was great to see Nintendo unleash a new IP on us with Splatoon and its great to see it continue with new weapons and added moves, I think at its very worst this is just going to be more of the same great game and I dont think thats a bad thing at all, I am glad to see that it is an actual sequel and that there not just re-releasing the Wii U one on the Switch going well no one had a Wii U hardly so its proberbly new to lots of people anyways right? Which is pretty much exactly what they are doing with Mario Kart basically releasing the Wii U one again but with all its DLC included, yeah this is not something I really appreciate but I suppose I can see why they are doing it. With the way they seemed to have half heartidly given up on the Wii U in the middle of its life one of the things us Wii U owners kind of consolidated ourselves with was that we had enjoyed some great games along the way and everyone else was mising out and that one day everyone would want to play these games and so would have to track down Wii U's and well now it just sort of leaves some of us asking the question why did I bother with the Wii U it wasnt that well supported and everyone is going to get its best bits on the new machine anyways.

I could go on to discuss other games but I have hit the nail on the head in one way, we have all seen how quick Nintendo will shrug and let a console fail some of us have seen this with the Cube and the Wii U and it cant help but make you look at this console with a sense of trepedation. Sure Nintendo are blowing there own horn about how strong Third party support will be but they have done this in the past for it to then just dry up quickly, it seems this had been one of Nintendo's biggest problems since the N64 days and it hasnt really gotten any better. If you are going to get a Switch it has to be on the strength of the first party Nintendo games which are often some of the very best games made, but unfortunatly there are seldom enough of them to sustain a serious gamer leaving Nintendo machines in a state were they are best purchased as extra consoles and not primay ones.

Yes I havent mentioned Zelda but lets face it that is coming to the Wii U as well and if history has taught us anything with Zelda games released on 2 machines they are always more or less the same and the one for the older machine is the one that becomes a collectors item.