#319: Midnight caller

Hello and happy Switch 2 day+1. And a rare welcome to free readers, who are getting their occasional sample of the full Hit Points experience today; there’s lots to get through so let’s get cracking. Free folks, if you enjoy the below, you can get some equivalent of it in your inbox every Friday for the low-low price of £4/$5 a month. I realise just about every website, newsletter and podcast etc is asking for your money these days but I do think Hit Points is a) a little different from everything else out there and b) worth the money? And in my defence I’ve been doing this for four years now. Not exactly jumping on the bandwagon here, am I.

Anyway! On with the thing.

I was a bit twitchy about going along to my local Switch 2 midnight launch. In my head I’d be the only one there, rolling into a car park populated solely by the gang of masked youths waiting to stab me for my console the second I set foot outside the shop. But I was all amped up after Sony’s surprisingly excellent State Of Play — more on that later on — and figured I wouldn’t sleep anyway, so excited had I become at the prospect of new Nintendo hardware. At times like this we are all kids on Christmas Eve, really, despite all that stuff I said last week.

I parked up just before midnight, and was stunned to find at least 50 people already lined up outside. None of them wore balaclavas or sported zombie knives glinting in the foggy moonlight; they were just a bunch of kindred spirits who simply couldn’t wait until the morning to get their mitts on Switch 2. And I was very glad I went along in the end. I had some nice chats with like-minded people. I was able to do all the setup stuff, kick off some downloads and have a quick peek at Mario Kart World before turning in. And then at 7am I slid out of bed, staggered downstairs and, knowing the day’s hard work was already done, plonked myself in front of the TV and settled down for one of life’s rarest pleasures: a new Nintendo console. I had a lovely time.

And it is a lovely thing, on first inspection. This is, quite comfortably, the most premium-feeling Nintendo console ever made. There is something almost Apple-like about it, most obviously in its construction — the satisfying magnetic thunk of the Joy-Cons, the dramatically improved haptics, the Nvidia juice that flows in its veins — but also in the sense of thoughtful iteration that pervades the console. Like, yes, it's just the new version of the thing you already have, but gosh this one is just better. There's even a touch of Apple to the system transfer — you just put the two consoles next to each other and let them get on with it — though this was not as elegant a process as I'd have liked. Hit Points Towers is a three-Switch household, and at various points in the transfer I was instructed to get up and grab all three of them while it piffled around with licence transfers and pairing and all that. Late yesterday evening, when I was commanded to power on the eldest’s Switch Lite in order to play a game I owned on a console I had just bought, I wanted to find the person who came up with Virtual Game Cards and shake them roughly by the lapels. But I realise I’m something of an edge case — and after a friendly helper in the Hit Points Discord told me how to roll back to the old way of licence-sharing, all was well. (Thanks, PaulC. If anyone else wants to do the same, you want to click the ‘Use Online Licences’ toggle in User Settings.)

Anyway! Mario Kart World is a delight, though I am gently befuddled at how the most overtly family-friendly game on the most family-friendly line of consoles on the market does absolutely nothing in the way of onboarding. It doesn’t even tell you which button to press to accelerate, much less explain the intricacies of the new movement options. You'd think it might want to shout about its fancy new modes, but if I didn’t know it existed from the trailers I’d have missed Free Roam mode entirely yesterday, so tucked away is its main-menu prompt. It took me so long to find it that I briefly wondered if I had to unlock it by playing the other modes first. Very weird.

Obviously it’s great. It’s Mario Kart. While I gather Free Roam has been pitched as the headline attraction, for me the greater draw at the moment is Knockout Tour, which stitches together six tracks and eliminates a few players from the back of the pack between stages. It’s the sort of endlessly replayable, on-or-offline, single-or-multiplayer mode that I didn’t realise Mario Kart has been missing all this time. There’s always something at stake, whatever position you’re in, and with 24 players on the grid the carnage is almost constant, particularly online. I love it, and I’m not just saying that because I won my first online race, though that definitely helps. 

That Mario Kart World lacks the irresistible pull of the best Nintendo launch games — one does not want to inhale it in the manner of a Mario 64 or Breath Of The Wild; after an hour or so I’ve had my fill — is no bad thing, given how much else there is to sample. The two Zelda tart-ups are simply sublime (DLSS and its related technologies already feel like this console's secret sauce; it is not just an expression of the Nintendo Difference, but the Nvidia Difference as well) and I am delightfully smug at having fallen off Tears Of The Kingdom after about 30 hours. I've started a fresh save and it is as much ‘my’ Switch 2 launch game as Mario Kart is. The controversial Welcome Tour is, beneath its austere presentation, a playful little thing, and the maracas minigame is worth the price of entry by itself. There’s a button toggle to switch between a maraca filled with beads, and one filled with a single rubber ball, and the haptic portrayal of the latter is simply witchcraft.

And then, of course, there’s everything else. I've not tried Game Chat yet, though hope to put that right with some chums over the weekend. I'm still eyeing up the rest of the launch line-up, and haven't touched the GameCube section. And then there's my Switch 1 library. As someone who pretty much stopped playing Switch 1, firstparty tentpoles aside, as it got steadily powercrept by new, far beefier technology — the beefy PC, the 4K OLED, the Steam Deck — I have an awful lot of catching up to do, and it sounds like it will be worth the endeavour. I hear whispers of previously creaky games simply singing on the new machine, and look forward to checking them out for myself over the next few weeks. Is it time I finally played Bayonetta 3? Fire Emblem: Three Houses? That Hyrule Warriors sequel that ran like an absolute dog’s dinner? Sounds like it. Lovely stuff.

Switch 2 might lack the wow factor of previous Nintendo launches: there is no dramatic new way to play on offer, no instant-classic firstparty game. Yet I'm not sure any previous Nintendo hardware has made quite such a strong impression — and in that sense it feels surprisingly un-Nintendo-like, though I do not mean that negatively. It is beautifully built, a welcome change for a company whose hardware teams have always tended towards the toylike. It is highly technically capable, in stark contrast to Gunpei Yokoi's 'withered technology' maxim, and highly familiar, rather than some bold departure from the norm. It was also bloody expensive, which hasn't traditionally been Nintendo's way of doing things. But nothing I've seen in the last couple of days has made me feel like this thing wasn't worth the money, and I'm not sure I can say that about many of the gaming devices I've picked up over the last five years. A strong start, then, with many years of delights to follow. Looking forward to it already.

MORE!

• So, having clearly not got the memo about Switch 2 launching before not-E3, Sony did State Of Play things the other night. Not sure I entirely understand the thinking here: yes, you get to briefly disrupt the hype around your competitor’s big launch, but no one’s going to be talking about you at all the following day. Still, it was pretty good, wasn’t it, though that is not without its caveats. A friend messaged me towards the end and called it “a Sony apology tour” which I think explains it very well. This was Sony rather performatively turning its back, if only for 45 minutes, on the live-service follies of the Jim Ryan era, by shutting up and playing the hits. If the whole nostalgia thing bores you, it might not have landed quite so well, but given how grim Sony’s vision of the future of games has looked over the last few years, as it has used occasions such as this to reel off one obviously doomed Fortnite contender after another, it made perfect sense for it to lean back into the past instead. 
  
  It was all very calculated, and I do not think it signals the end of Sony’s live-service obsession, merely a hiatus from it. The overwhelming majority of games on show were, after all, multiplatform affairs, funded and published by companies other than Sony. But it was delightful to just sit back and soak up a parade of lovely-looking revivals of so many beloved classics. A new Lumines? FF Tactics? Everybody’s Golf? A frickin’ Marvel tag fighter in the Dragon Ball FighterZ engine that’s probably going to be stuffed full of battle passes and whatnot but looks absolutely insane? Lovely, lovely stuff. Let’s hope that sets the tone for the rest of not-E3. If it does we’re in for a heck of a week.
• Call Of Duty veteran Mark Rubin says he’s leaving the game industry following the closure of Ubisoft’s F2P CODlike XDefiant. “It’s a sad day for fans and all the passionate devs that worked so hard on this game,” Rubin sobbed on not-Twitter, before putting the boot into his former employer for not giving him enough resources or marketing support. “Everyone’s heart was in the right place,” he said, “but we just didn’t have the gas to go the distance for a free-to-play game.” I can see his point, to be fair. Ubisoft never really seemed to truly believe in XDefiant, and gave up on it ever so quickly.
• For a while there it looked as if the days of Chinese megacorps funding western studios were over. Is Tencent’s fresh investment in Lighthouse Games, founded in 2022 by former Forza bod Gavin Raeburn, a sign of things changing? Or the exception that proves the rule? Dunno, but it’s still a nice change of pace to see a studio on the up, and actually looking to expand. Raeburn told GI.biz he wants to increase Lighthouse’s current staff of 130 by another 50 or so as it brings its Forza contender to the finish line (sorry). 
• Oh! Wait! Hot off the wires comes news of Tencent coughing up $80m for a 15% stake in Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead Games. Hmm.
• Layoff Watch returns, neither knowing nor caring that it’s Switchmas and not-E3 and people just aren’t in the mood for its misery, with a brief flurry of updates. Both Runescape titan Jagex and Yooka-Laylee maker Playtonic have made an unspecified number of redundancies; People Can Fly has warned layoffs are inevitable following the cancellation of two in-development projects; and Zynga has shut down Echtra Games, developer of Torchlight, with some 60-odd workers sent to the unemployment line as part of a “strategic realignment.” Gah. Thoughts with all affected, as always.
• I am sure it is just a coincidence that both the CFO and COO of Leslie Benzies’ Build A Rocket Boy have left the studio just days ahead of the release of its debut game, MindsEye. But it doesn’t look good, does it. 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“I want to say to the game industry: resource those on the margins, and seek difference. Take chances again and again. This artform is barely unearthed; it’s too early to define it. Fund the indescribable.”

Remi Siu, founder of 1000xResist developer Sunset Visitor, accepting a well-deserved Peabody award for one of Hit Points’ most favouritest games of last year. Fuckin’ preach.  

That’ll do, Mario Kart’s a-callin’, and I must rest my takes-brain ahead of Summer Game Fest later on. I imagine I’ll be back in yer inbox again on Monday or Tuesday to chew it all over. Free readers: here’s that subscribe button again. 

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