Microsoft had an event today for ID@Xbox. They showed off a bunch of games, some good looking and some not so good looking, some new and some previously announced, and at the end of it they provided a long list of the games that would be launching day 1 on Game Pass.

Earlier in the month Microsoft closed their acquisition of Bethesda and held a press briefing about it. No new games were announced, but what was announced was a large number of titles coming to Game Pass, many in an enhanced form for the Xbox Series systems.

During the Xbox One generation, Microsoft abandoned console exclusivity for all of its first party games and started launching them day and date on PC. It later announced that all those games would be coming day 1 to Game Pass, and it has stuck to its word. There have been a few Xbox only games, at least for a little while, during the last few years, but the vast majority of games available on the platform have been on PC, and sometimes even other or seemingly competing platforms.

Coincidences do happen in this world, but there's nothing coincidental about any of this.

Microsoft was founded as a software company. It has since pivoted into being a software and services company (including services that aren't really 'software' per se, like its Azure server hosting.) While it has made hardware from time to time, and still does, that's always been an ancillary business for them. If you want to buy a Surface laptop, Microsoft will sell you one, but Windows, Office, and Edge are the actual products. Under Steve Balmer Microsoft tried to go head to head with Apple in the hardware market. That's what got us the Zune. Microsoft isn't interested in reliving that era.

Xbox has always been the exception. Microsoft got into the console business as a software maker (the Dreamcast ran a version of Windows) but it stayed as a hardware maker. Unlike Microsoft's other forays into hardware the Xbox brand was somewhat successful, and emerged as a strong #3 in the console market, sometimes making it to #2 when Sony or Nintendo were having bad years.

The Xbox was intended in part as a way to get Microsoft software into what looked like a large growing market for living room PCs and home entertainment boxes. That, in part, explains the name, which could mean anything and doesn't actually reference games in any way. Xbox was the first console to really push a service alongside it, Xbox Live, and Xbox Live has continued to be a major part of Xbox's marketing pitch up until a few days ago when it changed the name to Xbox Network. Subsequent system names like 360 and One continued this theme, intended to give the impression of an all in one system for your entertainment needs. By the time the Xbox One actually launched it had realized Microsoft's ambitions. It was a system that could do video and other applications just as easily as it could games, and made for a heck of an all in one entertainment box. Unfortunately this turned out not to be much of a selling point, because the living room PC idea was hopelessly outdated in the age of the smartphone. Some generals are always fighting the last war, and Don Matrick and Steve Balmer are exactly those kinds of generals.

The Xbox One wasn't just pitched as an all in one living room box, though. It was also pitched as a box that focused on services. The original pitch for the Xbox One was a system where your games would live on the Internet and could be downloaded to the box, but ownership would be tied to an account and could be shared with friends electronically rather than physically. It was a daring pitch, and Don Matrick absolutely bungled it, angering gamers and causing a PR nightmare that, along with Kinect, tanked the system before it launched. Phil Harrison was involved, and he used the same reverse Midas touch that he's offered for Stadia, with similar results. Microsoft retreated, told gamers that they were canceling that whole vision, eventually canceled the Kinect itself, and spent that whole generation doing reputation repair and trying to salvage a disaster of a launch.

Don Matrick was replaced by Phil Spencer, a much better salesman and strategic. Spencer knew that unless you're a cable company style monopoly you can't tell customers how it's going to be. They'll just run to the competition. Instead you need to offer them something of value. You need to seduce them. So he set about creating Game Pass, a service that was pitched on a very appealing "all you can play for one monthly price" message. And he set about freeing Game Pass from the Xbox, first by making a PC version and then by expanding to other platforms. He did this all while continuing to offer the core Xbox audience exactly what they were comfortable with. Your favorite franchises? Still being made. Those familiar green DVD cases? Still available at your favorite retailer. All those Xbox games you purchased online? Heck we'll make them backwards compatible and portable. You can play your favorite Xbox games on your brand new system. Nothing has to change!

But Xbox is changing. It's becoming even more of a service. The Xbox Series X is a fine piece of hardware, but it's like the Microsoft Surface. It's just an option if you want to play Game Pass games. You can also play them on your PC. Or your phone. Or anything with a compatible Internet browser. The Xbox is not the product, it's just a way for you to get the product. Like the Surface is. Your Microsoft Surface is also another place you can play Game Pass games.

Of course Microsoft will stay in the traditional games business for a while. Maybe indefinitely. You don't want to play Gears of War on Game Pass? You'd rather buy a physical copy? Fine. Why should Microsoft care? There are Netflix shows you can buy on DVD. Phil Spencer isn't interested in telling you what to do with your money. He's interested in taking as much of it as he can from you, in whatever way he can, preferably in a way that leaves you feeling happy so you'll want to give him more in the future. You want to buy packaged games? Okay. Want to keep playing games on your Xbox One? Microsoft will keep supporting it as long as possible. You want a new, premium, console to stick next to the TV? Can do. You want to play games on your phone or your PC? Have fun, buddy!

The Xbox brand started competing for a set top box market that never came into being. Microsoft isn't fighting that battle anymore. The console business has long been about selling boxes to people and then making money off licensing software for those boxes, but Microsoft is not a company that makes its money selling boxes and it doesn't think that boxes are the future of the business. Instead it thinks the future is content. In 2021 you don't want to be the TV maker, you want to be the company making content for that TV, and Microsoft is positioning itself to get you content via subscription in whatever way you want. Consoles will eventually die, just like the VCR and the DVD player did, and Microsoft doesn't want to be a DVD player maker in a streaming world.

What does this mean for gamers? Nothing, as of yet. The Xbox will be supported as you'd expect this generation. If you subscribe to Game Pass you'll get a lot of very good games for very cheap as Microsoft continues building that brand and business model. If you don't then you'll still have a good console and all the third party releases, and packaged and digital games to buy etc... Phil Spencer wants you as a customer, not an angry ex-customer who doesn't like Game Pass but isn't being offered anything else. He hopes that over time you'll come around to want Game Pass and become a subscriber. And if you won't then he'll try to make money off of you the old fashioned way.

But in understanding why Microsoft does what it does you can't look at this as a console war anymore. Sony is still interested in selling boxes and games. Its subscription service is kind of an afterthought. Microsoft would put Game Pass on PlayStation tomorrow if it could and if the economics were right. It doesn't care how many Xboxes it sells if Game Pass is still growing. Buying Bethesda wasn't about using Elder Scrolls VI to push Xboxes. If it was then Microsoft would have announced something about upcoming games in the press conference. Instead it's about using Bethesda's games, past, present, and future, as content for Game Pass and to push people into that ecosystem. It will sell you copies of the games on Xbox and Windows because it doesn't want to alienate people, but what it really wants you to do is subscribe.

I grew up during the console wars of the 80s and 90s, when Nintendo and Sega both wanted to be the box under your TV. Now all three companies are doing something different. Sony still wants to be that box. Nintendo wants to sell you a handheld that you can plug into the TV if you want, and it is also in the software business, selling tens of millions of copies of its games at full price while Microsoft's are all on a subscription and Sony mostly uses them to get people to buy its hardware. Microsoft is moving to the subscription business. They're all different models.

But looking at Microsoft's moves through the lens of Xbox doesn't really work anymore. They're still tied to the model for now and they will leverage the brand and use the hardware as a way to attract players, but it's not where their future lies. They're a services company. Subscriptions are available for as low as $10 a month!

At the beginning of the month I set myself a simple goal. Play PSVR for at least a little bit every day and blog about it. I got off to a good start and I not only found myself able to carve out the time to play the games but I was enjoying PSVR a lot more than I thought I would. I loved Moss, had a blast with a hotel smashing game, and even enjoyed a simple puzzle game partially because it was in VR.

Then, about a week in, I stopped playing VR games and I haven't touched the headset since.

So what happened? Did my PSVR break under the strain of actually being played for the first time in years? Did I just get lazy and quit? Did I develop some kind of allergy to the rubber used in the device?

No. What happened was that my step father had surgery. This had been planned for a long time, and I was actually looking forward to it because he'd been in pain for months and the doctor was hopeful that the procedure would help him. What I was not expecting were the complications. He seems to be fine now and is recovering and mostly pain free, but for about a week after the surgery he was in and out of the emergency room while they figured out what had happened and developed a treatment plan. Because of this I had to be available at all times of day and night, in case I needed to rush to the hospital or even just provide logistical or emotional support. I could not use a VR headset because it could cause me to miss an important phone call or text message. Given the choice between a dumb blogging experiment and helping my family there was, of course, no choice.

Then, after the complications had been dealt with and he was feeling better, I developed some headaches, probably from the stress of everything that had been going on. Periods of stress have often been migraine triggers for me after the stress has passed, so this wasn't surprising, but the last thing I wanted to do during one of these headaches was strap some goggles and headphones on and blast myself with light and sound. I can usually play low key games even during a migraine (JRPGs work pretty well, as do games like Loop Hero or deck builders) but only if I take frequent breaks and close my eyes when I need to. Modern consoles have been a godsend for this because of how easy it is to suspend games, even during the middle of a cut scene or whatever. While you can do this with a VR game, the intensity of the experience and the fact that you need to actually put something on your face and take it off to take a break means that I can't really use it when I'm not feeling well.

All this doesn't mean that VR is bad or doesn't have its place, but it does mean that place is limited. I'm a single guy and I can usually carve out time to play games in the morning or evening if I want to, but VR is so demanding that it wasn't possible even for me. If I had kids or other things that were likely to demand my time without warning (like my stepfather when he was experiencing surgery complications) it would make VR even more impractical. In addition, the fact that it's hard to do when you're not feeling 100% means that it can't easily fit into your life as a way to wind down before bed or just deal with an illness.

Part of the popularity of the Switch is that it fits easily into people's lives. You can play it on a commute (when those are a thing again) or while someone else is using the TV, or in bed before going to sleep. VR goes the other direction. Even as headsets get better and more convenient the fact that it demands your full attention and it bombards you with light and sound, and build in alerts and interruptions for when you get phone calls (as some headsets already have) it will always be more demanding than conventional gaming. It's fine and even good as a supplement. I'm not done with VR, and I will definitely get back to it and blogging about it soon, but it's always going to be a supplemental thing for more hardcore enthusiasts. There's a reason that many of the games being given away by Sony during the current promotion are VR games, and that's not because VR games are super popular.

VR is not a fad and it is here to stay, but I think it will be more like motion controls than we expect. They're a part of a lot of games (and I think many games will offer VR support and flat screen options) and there are some games that really use them well, but they're kind of a niche thing at this point. VR will be a bigger niche than that because it has more to offer (and incorporates motion controls very well) but it will never be the dominant way to play games.

I was excited when I saw that Ys: Memories of Celceta was getting a port from Vita to the PS4. I played Ys VIII last year and absolutely loved it, so I’ve been jonesing for another game in the series ever since then. I’ve been aware of Ys as long as it has existed but I never played any of them before VIII, mostly because the early games’ bump combat concept did not seem appealing. That bump combat stuff is long gone and modern Ys is much more of a traditional action RPG, though with a loose and arcadey style that sacrifices precise gameplay for speed and ease of play. I knew Ys IX was coming over eventually but I also wanted to go back and play some of the earlier games I’d missed in the long running series. The release of Memories of Celceta on PS4 in the US seemed like a perfect opportunity, but since I already owned but had not played the Vita version (them PSN sales) I decided to wait for a price drop to double dip.

Cut to nine months later and PSN finally decides to chop $10 off the admittedly already budget price of the port, and even though I would have preferred a larger discount I gave up and bought it for $20. Having played through the game to the credits, at a little less than $1 per hour I got my money’s worth. Memories of Celceta is not as good a game as Ys VIII in almost any way, but it’s still a fun and addictive experience that actually gets better as it goes. I was mildly disappointed by the first few hours of the game but ended up really liking it by the time it wrapped up.

Ys: Memories of Celceta is a remix of two games that were released a long time ago as Ys IV. The history of the Ys series is complex and one that I don’t fully understand, but basically Falcom released two versions of Ys IV on different platforms, both outsourced to different developers, and Celceta, which was originally a Vita game, represents them making an “official” version that draws on both games but also features new plot and characters and, of course, modernized gameplay and graphics. The Ys games aren’t quite as disconnected from one another as the Final Fantasy series, since they re-use characters, world building aspects, and other elements, but they’re pretty much standalone affairs so knowledge of prior games definitely isn’t necessary to understand them. This is especially true for Celceta, given the set up.

So what is the set up? Adol, the intrepid adventurer and protagonist of the series, has lost his memories and even identity while exploring a massive forest. He has returned to the town on the edge of that forest exhausted but alive and after meeting up with Duren, an information dealer who he was apparently friendly with prior to his memory loss, helps save the town mine from encroaching monsters and is subsequently tasked by the governor with mapping the very forest where he developed amnesia. Duren and he set out into the forest to make the map and to recover Adol’s memories, which are floating around in the environments as glowing blue orbs, as memories are wont to do.

The game’s first couple hours are mediocre, bordering on actually bad. It’s not a great looking game, even for the Vita, and the animation level of the opening cut scenes is terrible, below even the standards of the PS2. You’re stuck in town for way too long, learning some of the mechanics and dealing with story set up, and while the game gets better as you start to actually explore the forest, I could definitely see why Ys VIII was the breakout game for the series, rather than this one. Celceta is mechanically quite similar to Ys VIII, with you controlling a character and running around smallish environments while you do standard action RPG stuff like slashing enemies, picking up loot, opening chests, swapping equipment, completing basic quests, and all the rest of that jazz. Just like in Ys VIII you have an active party of up to three characters who you can swap between at the press of a button, a set of up to 4 active skills that you can use with skill points that you build up by using your standard attacks, and a super meter that lets you fire off a mega attack that will destroy most standard enemies immediately and do massive damage to most bosses. You can dodge and guard, including flash dodging and guarding if you hit the button right before an enemy attack lands, many enemies have specific vulnerability to one of the three types of attacks (smash, slash, and pierce) and resistance to the others, and there are tons of crafting components spraying out at all times, which your AI controlled companions helpfully pick up for you.

Despite these similarities, Celceta suffers in comparison to VIII in almost every aspect. For one, Ys VIII is a much better looking game, especially on PS4. While it was also originally released on Vita there were numerous enhancements for PS4 that simply weren’t done with the Celceta port. Beyond that, Celceta was clearly low budget even at the time, looking more like a PSP title than a Vita game in some ways. VIII has total camera control, allowing you to take in its much more detailed environments, while Celceta allows some very basic zooming in and out but is otherwise played from a static offset top down perspective. The better camera perspective also allowed Ys VIII to have a lot of verticality to its environments and a dedicated jump button, while Celceta’s environments are mostly flat, though there is the occasional ramp or overlapping walkway. Ys VIII was not a fantastic looking game even for the Vita, let alone the PS4, but it’s gorgeous in comparison to Celceta, and while its environments are still carved up into small areas that you load between those areas are multiple times the size of the relatively tiny areas that Celceta has.

Ys VIII also had a lot more to do than Celceta does. It was full of side content, ranging from fishing and town building to a town defense system and complex relationship system between Adol and the other castaways. Celceta is just an action RPG. It has some crafting you can engage with, and optional side quests, but no side activities outside basic combat or fetch quests, which isn’t always a bad thing but makes it feel much less immersive than VIII was. Especially missed is Ys VIII’s use of the character of Dana, which I won’t go into to avoid spoilers, but really added some variety to the game, especially in the ways it was fleshed out for the PS4 version.

Ys VIII’s strongest aspect was arguably its soundtrack, which is top tier even in a series known for good music, and while Celceta’s music is still above average it isn’t anywhere near as good. Other sound is just okay for Celceta. There’s a little bit of voice acting but most lines are text only, or feature a short voice clip of part of the line and then mostly text. It’s a common JRPG trope to save money on voice acting (even the modern Yakuza games do it) but here there’s so little voice acting that it’s very noticeable, though what’s there is…fine. In general Ys VIII seems to have had a much higher budget for presentation, while Celceta feels more like a mid-tier PS2 game than something released in 2012. Even the game’s anime intro feels a little cheap, and the in engine cut scenes all look straight out of the early 2000s.

The only area where Celceta really outshines its successor is in its plot. VIII has better characters and dialog, but Celceta is one of the few JRPGs I can remember that has a somewhat cohesive and logical plot where the twists and turns all mostly make sense and the character motivations are consistent and reasonable. This is a small element of the game, and VIII’s stronger cast and better dialog mean that it has the better story overall, but I found myself wrapped up in Celceta’s plot in a way that I wasn’t expecting.

Putting aside comparisons to Ys VIII, there are elements of Celceta that felt archaic even for a 2012 game. For example you collect artifacts during the course of the game, which give your characters additional abilities like swimming underwater or shrinking down to a tiny size to get through small holes. Only one of these items can be equipped at a time and you end up spending an annoying amount of time in menus equipping and unequipping them, especially since one is a special cloak that lets you heal your party just by standing still, which is very necessary in a game where healing items are expensive and none of the characters has healing magic you can rely on. The fast travel system is also annoying since for the first half of the game you can only warp between points of the same color, meaning that traveling back to the starting village (which you need to do to collect the rewards you get for discovering more of the forest) can only be accomplished by chaining together a bunch of fast travels in an annoying manner. The way “artifacts,” which are special items that enhance your party’s abilities, are used is especially annoying. You can only equip once at a time, and since they grant pretty basic abilities, like swimming underwater or recovering health by standing still in a dungeon, you find yourself swapping them frequently. There are even separate artifacts for running and for dashing, which…is a decision that someone apparently made. Since most of the artifacts are situational this doesn’t serve to force you to make strategic decisions, it just makes you spend a lot of time in menus swapping them in and out, and is the kind of design choice you expect from a game from the 90s, not the 2010s.

So far I’ve done nothing but complain about Celceta, and when I started playing it I did find it somewhat disappointing, but as I delved deeper into it I found a lot of the issues fading into the background as the strengths of the core gameplay and storyline drew me in. Even a worse version of Ys VIII’s gameplay is still pretty fun, and Celceta’s plot is clear and logical, which is very rare for JRPGs. Characters actually have motivations for the things they do and there’s no giant left field twist where someone you haven’t even heard of turns out to have been the real villain all along.

In addition, the dungeon design gets better further into the game. The first few dungeons are pretty boring, and sort of linear, though I did get stuck on one for an embarrassing amount of time because of a visually unclear puzzle (that was actually very simple once you understand the rules.) In the back half of the game the dungeons get much more involved, with more challenging battles, cleverer puzzles, and just more to do in them. None of them are spectacular, but they’re solid action RPG dungeons that are worth your time if you’re a Ys fan, or just a fan of action JRPGs.

And that’s what I came away from Celceta feeling. Despite the slow start, and despite the fact that it is surpassed by VIII in virtually every area, Celceta was still worth my time. It’s a good, solid, game with some significant deficits. At a little over 20 hours it’s a very manageable length for a JRPG and doesn’t overstay its welcome. So many JRPGs, including Ys VIII, just drag on forever before wrapping up, so I appreciated Celceta’s brisk pacing and willingness to wrap up after saying the things it has to say.

It is a measure of Celceta’s quality that after I finished it I didn’t immediately move on to Ys IX, because I wanted to draw out my time with the series a little more before moving on to the latest one. In fact, Celceta sent me down something of a series hole. One of the marks of a good game is that it leaves you wanting more, and Celceta definitely did that for me.

I recently had a multi-day Internet outage due to...I'm not sure. During that time I had a couple windows where I did have Internet but it was out for the vast majority of the time and while the company eventually sent a technician nobody could really explain what the problem was. It seems to be working now.

Obviously in 2021 during the pandemic that is extremely frustrating (though nowhere near as bad as what some people are going through of course) because I couldn't just go to the movies or drop in on a friend. What I thought I could do was play some single player games. So I did. But the experience also showed how deeply ingrained the Internet is to our modern game boxes.

I will go through the systems I used and the problems with them.

Switch:

Obviously the Nintendo Switch does not require the Internet to work because it's a portable and that would be too crazy even for Nintendo. However, what it does do is record what games need updating from the Internet but not actually install the update until you try to play the game. I thought I might try a nice long RPG as an escape but both Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and Octopath Traveler were flagged as needing updates but had not updated. There's no easy way to see the list of games that need updates and while the system is supposed to update automatically it clearly does not work. I could launch the games without updates but I didn't have any idea what they were or why they needed to be done. This is, admittedly, a minor quibble, but it goes back to my irritation with Nintendo's lack of modern features in general.

Xbox:

On my main Xbox I was able to play games fine but you can't get achievements when offline. They are supposed to pop up when you come back online but a bunch of mine didn't. So I'm missing achievements I earned. Alright, whatever, it's dumb but not a huge deal, achievements are stupid.

The real issue with Xbox is with secondary systems. I have 2 Xboxes because I bought a Series X but kept my One X to use on my treadmill. This One X gets more play than my Series X because I treadmill for 1-2 hours most days, but there's no point in using the Series X there because it's hooked up to a 720p TV. Without Internet that One X can only play physical games. It can't launch digital games whatsoever. Not even if I was logged in recently, and not even games that I own (rather than Games With Gold games or Game Pass games.) I understand the need to keep people from downloading games to a system and taking it offline full of games while they then play the same games on another system, but this sucks. Secondary systems are more likely to be used places without Internet (like being taken to a cabin in the woods or on vacation or whatever) so having such limited features really sucks. It also shows how Internet dependent all of Xbox's "play anywhere" stuff is. Not just the cross system sync or whatever but even the ability to play a game on multiple systems unless you have a disc, and a lot of games don't have physical versions on Xbox so...

PlayStation 4:

This was by far the worst. My PS4 was barely functional while offline. It wouldn't load a lot of games at all while connected to my router but without Internet, and even when I disconnected it from the router it struggled. I just got a "please wait" sign and then was told that my Internet wasn't working but not given an opportunity to launch the game anyway, or told why I couldn't. Maybe it has something to do with PlayStation's notoriously buggy license stuff, since games I'd played recently or downloaded recently seemed to work, I don't know, but it was supremely frustrating. I suspect it might relate to the game's landing page and news feed stuff, which...I hate that stuff. I just wanted to play the games I don't care if the leaderboards aren't working. It was extremely frustrating and not at all clear what the issue was.

Then there were games that should have worked but didn't. Race the Sun just wouldn't load at all, and I played that mostly on Vita so I know it works offline fine. But nope, nothing. Crimsonland would let me play the quests but not any of the survival modes for some reason. It just told me I was offline and refused to launch them even though they are single player modes. Possibly this relates to the leaderboards. I only tried about 6-8 games, so having two of them (both single player experiences) not work properly and others refuse to launch just made it all a huge pain.

I genuinely question how useful any digital games would be on PlayStation if the servers ever go down permanently. And while people might smugly talk about how this shows that physical games are the answer, more and more physical games require patches and to be online to work properly. I don't think my Crimsonlands or Race the Sun issues would have been better if I'd had physical versions (if those even exist.)

This outage was a rude awakening for me regarding how dependent modern consoles are on an Internet connection. We might scoff at something like Stadia and its requirements for streaming, but a lot of the games we "own" and have locally are subject to some of the same issues, and even the systems they're on can have issues if not plugged into the Net.

All you needed for an NES to work was an electric outlet and a 13" Zenith color television with an RF port.

This series: Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4.

Along Together is the game that made me stop and ask “wait, do I actually like PSVR as a platform?” I bought one at launch, messed around with it a bit, and mostly wrote it off, but other than Dexed and to some extent Tetris Effect, every game I’ve played on it this month has been…fun? I suspect that what may have happened was that PSVR launched without enough good software and I just bailed too soon. I’ve kept buying games when I saw them cheap, and I’ve kept meaning to mess around with the thing again, but never did because it’s kind of a pain to set up and strap on. Now that I am actually giving it another chance…it’s been good. If you told me when I was hunting for a PS5 for two months that I would get one and it would sit unplayed while I messed around with $15 PSVR games on my PS4 I would have thought that either you were insane or I was on my way there. But here we are, and I don’t feel crazier than usual.

Along Together is a simple 3D puzzle game. It looks like a platformer but you can’t jump (or fall of platforms, or die) so I don’t think it’s fair to call it that. The basic set up reminds me of Moss, where you control your character through the analog stick and your disembodied hand in the world through motion controls, but unlike Moss you don’t have to physically grab items to manipulate them, just point at them and press a button while you actually move them with the analog stick, so in actuality this is more like a Wiimote and Nunchuck set up than anything else. It almost looks like a high-res Wii game too, with bright and simple environments and cute little animations. The game has a fixed camera placement but it moves along a track as your character advances through the level, unlike Moss’s diorama set ups, and while the automatic movement made me very slightly queasy at first I did adjust to it.

The ‘plot’ of the game is as simple as can be, and has been done in a billion games over the years. You’re a child, your dog is missing, you have to go out on an adventure to find it. There are 3 worlds in this game, forest, mines, and junkyard, of progressing difficulty. They are all abstracted out into puzzle levels where your child character walks towards a goal and you and she manipulate things in the environment to clear a path. Everything you can push or pull has a little six sided symbol on it, and they range from gears to mine carts to logs, all of which either directly act as platforms for your character or move platforms elsewhere in the environment. Your character can also flip switches or trigger pressure plates, some of which require constant pressure and some of which are permanent triggers. There’s also a slingshot that you can use at certain predetermined points to trigger other switches, because of course there is. I will give the developers credit for the cute visual of your character holding up their fingers to make an imaginary slingshot while you control the real one. It’s a nice nod to the game’s conceit that you are the child’s imaginary friend as they are on this adventure. Like Moss the kid does recognize your existence, but she only speaks a made up language and only really talks to the dog, Riku, who you encounter in various levels. When you see Riku he is always on an alternate path where you must move something into place for the so he can trigger a switch that opens up your path forward and rinse and repeat.

Along Together is not a great game. It gave me a terrible first impression, both with a weird technical issue where the camera was way further from the action than it should have been so that I was clipping through objects in the back of the level and from the boy character (you can choose gender) whose voice was so annoying I immediately quit out of the game, deleted my save, and switched to the girl, who I found much more tolerable. The first world’s puzzles are so easy that it seems like a game aimed at kids the age of the main characters, so about 6, but thankfully the later worlds are challenging enough to be engaging, even if the game never offers up any true brain busters. The music is simple and pleasant, the graphics are clean but unremarkable, and there’s nothing about the game that makes it anything more than an average puzzler. It even has some semi-serious technical issues, including a collision detection error that allowed me to move a platform when I should not have been able to and ended up with my character stuck in space vibrating while another UI element inexplicably grew to the size of the entire environment like a black hole opening to swallow everything and some very unpleasant audio played. I almost thought that this cheery children’s game was hiding some dark underbelly but it was just poor QA. There were a couple other unpleasant audio bugs as well that played sounds way too loud, which really sucks when you’re using headphones. I got stuck on a late puzzle because the game can be inconsistent about how you can interact with certain things, and it took me about an hour to finally figure out what it wanted me to do (I tried to look it up but this is too obscure a title to have easy solutions available.) I don’t think that would have happened if it were more technically sound and less finnicky in its collision detection.

But despite all these complaints…I really liked Along With You. Something about being in such a cheery and happy place in VR is very nice, and the ability of VR to situate you within the level physically just makes everything more immersive. The main menu is a model of the child’s room and every level has a collectable, which fills in a toy shelf next to you as you find them, including what is clearly a Game Boy with a playable game on it. It’s kind of a mix between Flappy Bird and VVVVVV, a simple diversion but kind of neat nonetheless.

The VR stuff isn’t essential here; you could absolutely make this game with a normal screen and not lose anything of real value, but it makes it feel fresh. It’s only a few hours long, but I got it on sale for $10 so it’s hard to complain about that. I finished it in one day, went back and cleaned up the trophies to grab the platinum, and immediately deleted it from my hard drive. It’s not something I’ll ever need to play again but my time with it was mostly enjoyable.

I’ve played a lot of games like Along Together over the years, and you likely have too. Something about doing it in VR is different. Whether it’s the immersion, the ability to fine tune the camera by moving your head, or just the novelty of it I can’t say. It might be a combination of all three. But even with the game’s issues, and its overall average quality and been there done that design, I had fun guiding the little girl through the relatively simple levels. It was a pleasant diversion. The ability of PSVR to elevate an average game to an above average experience makes me rethink my relationship with the platform. Maybe I like it more than I thought I did when I began this a week ago.

This series: Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.

I came into Hotel R’n’R without a lot of expectations. I actually bought it specifically for this blog project, since it was $12 on sale and seemed like it would offer up some dumb fun. It also reviewed reasonably well. What I found was a much more polished and complete game than I expected. After the boredom of Dexed I put this on expecting to play a couple rounds and bounce off of it, and actually found myself pretty invested in the game. Hotel R’n’R is the kind of ‘arcade’ experience that I actually want in VR.

So what is Hotel R ‘n’ R? It’s a hotel room smashing simulator. You play a rock star who is apparently a terrible musician and decides to sell his or her soul to the devil in order to achieve the success that you’re not talented enough to get through, you know, music. The devil agrees to the deal but he wants you to smash up hotel rooms because he has a grudge against the hospitality industry or something. You start out in a tiny motel in the middle of nowhere and are tasked with causing damage and raising your infamy through completing challenges (such as “do X dollars of damage and escape before anyone comes to check on you”), which unlocks additional hotels, for a total of 6. You also earn cash as you play (though you lose some of it if you get caught or hurt or, of course, killed) and you can use that to buy equipment, which you can take to the hotel with you in order to help you accomplish your nefarious goals. The game helpfully starts you with a foam finger but you can advance to things like firearms and explosives, though the better items are pretty expensive and won’t be obtainable until you start increasing your multiplier by unlocking more hotels and completing some of the many, many, challenges the game has. You select a load out before you go and can mix and match various items so you can have a lighter for starting blazes, a firearm to shoot those hard to reach items, and a clubbing item to go ham on the tv and decorative vases, as well as other items like drugs that make everything float or a glue gun that lets you stick items together.

The game is structured somewhat like Hitman (which I know has its own VR mode that I may try out) in that you enter one of a few locations each time, with different items, and then proceed to play with the toys. It’s not anywhere near as good as complex or well made Hitman, of course, but it scratches some of the same itches of planning out and then executing mayhem. “If I carefully stack all this stuff here, then set this on fire before shooting that other thing I can really cause a lot of damage before alerting the hotel.” That sort of strategic play.

Fortunately there’s a little more game here than just doing as much damage as you can unimpeded. Once you make enough noise you alert the hotel and that starts a countdown as various staff members come to investigate the hullabaloo. That means you’re free to move items around the room without breaking them in your ‘set up’ phase, but once you shatter or smash a few things the maid (and it’s always the same maid) comes to check on you. You can escape the room before she arrives, keep her locked out by playing a short minigame where she flips the locks and you switch them back before she enters, or you can punch her in the face (or shoot her) once she pokes her head through the door. If you keep her locked out or use the Do Not Disturb Sign then the manager will come next and you have the same options with him, but if you hit her (or if you hit the manager or lock him out) security will come next, and they’ll kick in the door and shoot you. This means that once you trigger the hotel to check on you you’re on a pretty quick clock even if you win both locking minigames. Escaping before anyone enters the room means you get to keep more of your money rather than paying it off in legal fees or hospital/resurrection costs. You also have to monitor your health because getting hit by debris or messing up your hands by punching stuff can kill you, as can smoke inhalation if you get into too much pyromania It’s a neat system that creates a sense of tension as you go from carefully planning your hotel attack to just smashing everything in sight while the clock runs. The team that made the game is tiny so it’s impressive how they managed to balance all these gameplay elements so well when so many bigger VR teams don’t seem to understand how to actually make their games into games with mechanics and goals rather than mere tech toys.

In addition to the main game there’s a party mode with overpowered weapons, some not very interesting minigames (such as one where you try and throw body parts at a dancing manikin to create Satan’s ultimate boy/girl/unholy nightmare toy) and some spaces to walk around and check things out. By VR standards it’s a lot of game for the $20 it asks for, especially because the hotel rooms are reasonably elaborate (several of them are actually suites with a number of rooms) and feature complex interactions like water and fire.

My biggest complaint about Hotel R’ N’ R’ on the PSVR is that it’s janky as heck. It was clearly made for better hardware and downported, and it shows. The move controllers just aren’t up to the fidelity it wants for you to do certain things, so actions like trying to throw items can be extremely frustrating. It has a crouch button to help you pick stuff up off the floor, but even so I found it almost impossible. Even gripping larger items was really difficult with the moves, and I think it would have been much more fun if I was using something with better tech that felt more one to one. There are also some basic UI issues. Some of the challenges didn’t seem to trigger even when I was sure I met the requirements, and the UI can be a bit gimmicky, forcing you to constantly be using motion controls to navigate the world just to do basic things like check your status in certain challenges. These are relatively minor complaints but did dampen my enjoyment a bit. I should say that while the game is janky on PSVR, the visuals and presentation are pretty polished. This was made by a tiny team but it definitely punches above its budget in terms of visual design and even voice acting. It has some real style.

I should also note that this a game where you really need a clear space to play. While you are supposed to move by using buttons to turn and a button and hand motion to walk, that feels unnatural and if you’re like me you’re going to turn your head and body and move or reach to grab things when action gets frantic. Because some of the movement is done through motion controls and some physical I was constantly disoriented and unaware of where I was in physical space. My space is relatively safe but I bumped into my couch a few times and hit a table with a move controller. I’d almost recommend playing the game seated just so you’d be forced to use in game motion, but it feels much more natural standing. It’s also a little bit tiring because you’re flailing your arms and twisting around and such, but that’s not a bad thing per se. It won’t give you a real workout but if you’re standing it’s much more active than traditional video game playing or even using something like the Wii. By the time I was done I definitely felt the effects of standing and flailing my arms for a few hours, but despite the discomfort I wanted to keep playing, and there were a number of times when I planned to bail but kept going because I got enough cash for an unlock I wanted or I was achingly close to completing a challenge to move towards the next level. That’s how good games get you and pull you in.

Is Hotel R’ N’ R’ one of my favorite games on PS4 like Moss was? No. It’s just a fun arcade time smashing stuff up. But it is very engaging and definitely has that “one more try” appeal. I thought I’d mess around with it for an hour and move on to something more substantial, but I played for a couple hours my first time and after writing this up I went back for a few more hours of mayhem, unlocking 5 of the 6 hotels and blowing up a lot of bathrooms with C4. I’m not sure how much more I’ll play during this blogging series because I want to get a good sampling of games done this month and I don’t have unlimited time, but I enjoyed my time with it quite a bit. It got its hooks in me quickly and thoroughly in a way I was not expecting. There have been games about smashing up objects or spaces before, of course, so this is nothing new, but it works incredibly well in VR. When you’re setting fire to something with a lighter in one hand and clicking locks as fast as you can to keep the manager out with the other it’s very immersive and a whole lot of fun. When I started this project I thought it would be a chore. I wasn’t shocked when Moss, which is regarded as one of the PSVR’s best games and is very much in my wheelhouse, was enjoyable, but I never expected a simple $12 game to draw me in and make me play for hours longer than I intended, and even run down the juice on my move controllers, just from the simple fun of setting off fireworks in a hotel room or detonating some C4 inside a fancy Japanese talking toilet.

This series: Part 1. Part 2.

On day 6 of Ma[PSV]Rch I encountered my scariest enemy yet. Screen smudging. Putting the PSVR on isn’t hard but it’s very easy to rub the lenses against your forehead or cheeks or whatever while adjusting it. Skin oil can create unpleasant smudges that make everything look cloudy. I cleaned it with a microfiber cloth and that helped but apparently a lens pen is the way to go, so I’ve ordered one of those. This is a reminder of how much more annoying the PSVR is to use than just a traditional TV and console set up. You need to clear space for it (I’m currently keeping a clear playfield so I don’t do that daily, but it is a concern) and you need to deal with all the wires and adjusting it on your head, and then there’s keeping the lenses clean and the various controllers charged (at least Dual Shock and 2 Moves) and it’s a whole thing. Traditional consoles have moved to make everything easier, with being able to turn them on via the controller and accessing games digitally so you don’t even need to swap discs, but PSVR makes you work for it a little bit. Considering that I can’t play VR games for hours like I can traditional games, it’s definitely a higher bar to entry.

I also experienced some drifting during play for the first time. One of my Move controllers went completely haywire and was pointing the opposite direction. I had to turn them both off and back on to fix it. I also found myself out of the play area and totally disoriented at one point. I thought I was facing the TV and camera but I was actually perpendicular to them. It was fine, I just re-oriented myself, but it’s a reminder of how not ready for prime time this tech can be.

I’ve broken this blog into two parts because I played two games on day 6 and had very different reactions to them, and as a single unit it was a bit too long and lacked flow. A link to part 2 is at the bottom.

Let’s start with Dexed.

Dexed is the kind of game that made me stop playing VR games in the first place. That’s a harsh thing to say about a game that isn’t terrible to play or broken, but in a way I find Dexed worse because everything works and it accomplishes the things it’s trying to do. The problem is that what it’s trying to do is boring. A lot of early PSVR games were boring. There are dozens upon dozens of tech demos in the platform’s library that show that a certain concept can work in VR or serve to demonstrate that a developer knows how to make a VR game, but fail to provide a reason why anyone would want to play THIS particular game, in VR nor not. Dexed is one of those games.

So what is Dexed? It’s a rail/target shooter. In this case it’s a rail shooter with a bit of a gimmick, in that you have two Move controllers that represent fire and ice and you shoot ‘enemies’ of the opposite element, Ikaruga style, with a Panzer Dragoon style lock on system. I put “enemies” in quotes because outside of the arcade mode, where you just get a big half dome full of holes that enemies pop out of sort of like whack-a-mole and doesn’t even have the interesting backgrounds, there aren’t really any threats in the game. Enemies generally don’t shoot at you, and while they shoot back if you hit them with the wrong element, getting hit just impacts your score. In the normal levels you don’t even have a health bar. Things can get a bit more complex with a shield mechanic and a combo system, but the main game is really just a score attack of shooting a bunch of targets that don’t react to you at all and it’s dishwater dull. I am not averse to arcade experiences, and in theory a railshooter in VR could be very cool, but Dexed ain’t it.

Part of Dexed problems also stem from its production values, which are low. This is a cheap game ($10) and there’s not much of it (4 short levels, a ‘boss fight’ against a squid, and an arcade mode). Even considering the low cost and the “VR tax” that comes from developers working with unfamiliar tools and for a limited audience, it’s paper thin. The levels themselves are visually quite boring, with themes like “underwater” and “forest” but just not much going on. The underwater level has a whale but is lacking in other sea life. The winter level has a giant snowman. His head falls off. It’s mildly amusing the first time, but if you’re going to play Dexed for more than the 30 minutes it takes to see everything it has to offer it’s not going to hold your attention through the visuals. The music is barely there and a little annoying. It’s meant to synchronize with the sounds of the target shooting, and it does that, but the effect is uninteresting and we’ve all seen games do this in the past, and better. Based on trophy completion rates it seems like a lot of other people thought Dexed was boring too, because even the easy trophies have low completion rates.

I remember when I first got my PSVR. I downloaded the full version of Sony’s VR Worlds and I did the non-interactive sea dive animation. It was awesome. There was great animation, some fun mini-story telling, and a real sense of place and adventure. I even showed it to my elderly mother and step father and they enjoyed seeing it and thought it was cool, then never mentioned or asked about it again. It was like going to a consumer electronics show and checking out a demo of some neat tech that would eventually become something. A taste of what’s to come.

The problem with PSVR is that too many of its games never crossed beyond that tech demo status. The promise of things to come. Eventually you stop caring about the promise and you want the thing, especially if you’re paying for the software and trying to justify the $400 hardware expense. That costs as much as a PS5 digital, and it required already owning a PS4 to work. Games like Dexed just weren’t going to cut it. And they didn’t for me, which is why I stopped using mine.

I don’t mean to sound like Dexed is the worst game ever because it’s not. It works, and there is some fun to finding your rhythm in hitting the targets with the different PS Move controllers. When you’re in the zone a little bit and you intuitively know which you have to hit with the fire and which the ice, and the controllers feel like part of your hand, it’s kind of neat. The visuals are basic but not terrible. There’s nothing offensive about it. If you are really into score attack target shooters then there’s some depth with the combo system and whatnot. If the PSVR was as easy to set up and use as just turning on a console and a TV I could even see myself coming back to it from time to time to run through a stage just as a way to kill five minutes. But there’s not enough here to justify even the meager price, let alone pulling out the VR set and clearing room in front of the Tv to play it. It’s a 5 out of 10 boring game, and VR alone can’t change that.

The other thing of note about Dexed is that it was made by Ninja Theory. The same studio that made Hellblade, which is a game I really enjoyed. So this is not an untalented studio. This game was something they put together at the same time as Hellblade, presumably as practice for making a VR version of Hellblade, which they never released on PSVR (presumably because the system couldn’t handle it) but did put out on PC. So it literally was a tech demo and a practice project for their real game. Which was just a VR port of a game they already released on conventional platforms. And that’s what a lot of the early PSVR games were like. Even Moss, a game with some real heft that I actually loved, was clearly something of a tech demo; just providing the first chapter of what was conceived of as a longer story. More than 4 years after PSVR’s launch there are still too many projects that show what VR could someday be rather than demonstrating how good it currently is.

Ma[PSV]Rch Part 1

Ma[PSV]Rch is already a success.

I chose Moss for my second game because it is one of the highest rated PSVR games and a game that I got excited about as soon as it was announced. I bought it soon after release and I don’t really know why I never got around to playing it. I could blame it on the inconveniences of the VR headset, but it’s far from the first game I’ve bought for full price and not touched for years. I’m trying to get better about that.

Getting into VR was better on days 2 through 5 than it was the first night. I was right that you do get better at adjusting the headset and I was able to get it situated pretty easily, with headphones in place, in about 30 to 60 seconds. I am getting a sense for the location of the camera and getting used to the grainy look of the screens and the whole experience is just better as I adjust to it.

Moss itself was a revelation. It came out a year after the headset, when I wasn’t really using it anymore, and the level of polish and production is much higher than most of the games I messed with. The game starts you in what looks like a cathedral set up as a medieval reading room. The game’s cut scenes are presented as illustrations in a book that you use motion controls (on the Dualshock 4) to turn the pages of, and you return to this room to view them listening to narration while you view slightly animated pictures on the book’s pages. The opening chapter tells a pretty cliché story about a kingdom of mice overrun by an evil snake and a sprite champion who gives his life to help the mice survive after they abandon their castle and flee the kingdom.

The game proper starts when Quill, the adorable mouse protagonist, finds the relic left by the vanquished hero and awakens you, the “reader”, to act as her guardian. You control Quill through the left thumbstick and the controller face buttons but you have a separate floating blue orb that is controlled through motion control and you use a shoulder button to interact with objects in the world. Quill can run around, jump, dodge, and slash stuff with her sword (as well as pull levers when necessary) while your orb can do things like hold enemies in place, heal Quill, move blocks around, break certain items in the world, and pull or rotate some items. These controls work in tandem so you might run Quill up a staircase that you then rotate with the motion controls so that a ledge on the staircase lines up with an area you want her to jump to. It’s intuitive and it mostly works well, and being able to grab enemies or heal Quill during combat adds a combat wrinkle that I don’t remember from any other game.

The game is a Zelda-like. Visually it is set up as a series of static diorama type scenes, sort of like what you would see in a natural history museum displaying an animal’s natural habitat, but showing little fantasy mouse houses and ruins instead. You look down on the action from a roughly three quarters perspective and, of course, have full free head movement. This means that you can poke your head into the level and then look up at hidden bits of ceiling, or around a corner to find a hidden passage. Elements of the room often obscure your vision and it feels like you’re meant to interact by moving your head around to get a better view, which is incredibly immersive and makes everything feel real. The graphics are fantastic; not the highest poly count or texture quality but with a sense of solidness, for lack of a better word, that makes the game’s world feel like an actual place. Using motion controls adds a tactile sense to the proceedings and there were times when I reached out with my actual hand to touch stuff, which, of course, was not actually there, just because of how real it all felt. The game also intentionally puts objects in the foreground or hides things to try and force you to treat the virtual space as if it were real, and it works! It is by far the most convincing VR space I’ve seen on PSVR, and I really loved being in its enchanting world, like stepping in to a young adult fantasy novel.

Moss is not, of course, perfect. Taken purely as a game it is good but not special. The puzzles are kind of obvious, combat is simple with low variety of enemies and none of the complexity of Zelda’s gear, and you’re often asked to kill a stream of the same 3 boring enemies in endurance arenas that aren’t even that hard to endure because you have unlimited healing (if you can get Quill into an area where she’s safe to stay still for a few seconds.) It can be tough to judge jumps and the game can be finnicky about collision detection and other similar things. This is especially true in the ending sequence, where I died far more than in any other part of the game. In general it feels like the best parts of this game are the aesthetics and the world and while the gameplay is not bad a little less emphasis on challenge would have made it even better. It’s not that it’s a difficult game, it’s that the time spent fighting the same enemies over and over, or retrying a jump until you get it right, is not nearly as enjoyable as the time spent taking in the sights and sounds of the beautiful world the developers created.

Speaking of sounds, the music is decent, though nothing special, and the voice acting is mostly fine, all done by a single narrator who does voices for the characters like an audio book reader when there’s dialog. There are a fair number of speaking characters, including Quill, and I wish that she had been a silent protagonist, not because the voice actress is bad or annoying (she’s perfectly fine) but because her animation is so good and makes her so adorable and believable as this little mouse heroine that hearing a human woman’s voice speak for her kind of spoils the illusion. When she grins up at you (again, you have presence in the world and characters acknowledge you) or does a little dance after completing some challenge, she is just heart melting. One of my favorite game protagonists ever. When she’s chatting with her uncle or the queen of the sprites she’s just another game character. Not a bad one, but not nearly as special as her character model and animation.

My main complaint about Tetris Effect was that the gameplay didn’t really mesh with the VR experience. Moss marries the two perfectly. You use your head to look around corners and find hidden little scrolls. The game relies on a motion control and controller simultaneous scheme that’s much more intuitive in VR. The diorama set up is incredibly immersive in VR and creates a real sense of place and scale (there are obvious human sized objects mixed in with the little mouse weapons and such.) Even the cut scenes play out in a way that only really works in VR, making you feel like you’re reading a book in an actual library. It’s astonishingly immersive.

Moss isn’t just my favorite VR game I’ve ever played, it’s one of my favorite PS4 games. Marrying the exploration and puzzle solving of a top-down Zelda with the immersion of VR is perfect for me, and recalls those days of childhood wonder looking at recreated habitats through panes of museum glass, except that now the dioramas move and live and play out an adventure. This would have been mind blowing to me at 10 years old, but even close to 40 it pulls me in and makes me happy. This is the VR experience I wanted to have when I bought the headset, and while I know that not many more like it exist on PS4 (or in the PC world at this point) it makes me excited for VR and its future in a way that I definitely wasn’t before I played it.

It’s a short game, clocking in at around 3-4 hours, and there’s not much to it (it ends on a massive and explicit cliffhanger), but it feels like a game that was built around the limitations and strengths of current VR tech. It’s probably better on a more advanced headset than the PSVR, especially since at times it asks you to reach pretty far with your motion controls and my camera kept losing track of my DS4, but even with the technical limits I really loved the experience.

The Nintendo Switch is 4 years old. I got mine on day 1 so that means I’ve had it for four years, or over 10% of my life. It definitely doesn’t feel new to me, but it doesn’t feel like it’s been with me that long. Time flies.

For me the Switch has been both a good console and something of a disappointment. Breath of the Wild is my favorite game, so it’s hard to argue with that as a major point in its favor, and I’ve played a lot of other really good games on it, from Mario Odyssey and 3D World+ Bowser’s Fury to Xenoblade Chronicles to Animal Crossing New Horizons. It has had enough highlights to justify the money I spent on it, and to have provided a bunch of fun and meaningful experiences.

On the other hand there are months that go by where I don’t touch it. The Switch has a huge number of games available for it, but many of them are ports that I’d rather play elsewhere with better graphics, loading times, and achievements/trophies (not that I really care about those, but they’re a nice extra.) It’s generally the last place I’ll go to play games if I can avoid it, and I almost never use its headline portability feature. I had hoped that the Switch would be a new kind of Nintendo system; one that married the heavy hitters of their home consoles to the constant stream of software and experimentation of their handhelds. It hasn’t. Instead for me it’s been like the N64 and the Gamecube and the Wii. A place to play the big Nintendo games, which I’ve loved, and a few other things you can’t get elsewhere, but more of a complimentary console than one of my main places to play games. I have a friend who took up gaming during the pandemic and bought a Switch to play Zelda and Mario…and then he bought a PS4 and hasn’t really looked back. If I didn’t already have a PS4 I might have done the same, even though there’s definitely enough available on the Switch to make it a solid primary platform for people who value portability more than fidelity of graphics and UI quality. I’m just not one of those people.

The following are some pros and cons for my own personal experiences with the system. I realize they are not universal.

PROS:

• The Switch’s best games are among the best I’ve ever played. Zelda Breath of the Wild felt like being a kid again. Bowser’s Fury and Mario Odyssey are the best 3D platformers I’ve ever played. Mario Kart 8 is clearly the best kart racer ever. The Switch’s highlights are unassailable.
• The Switch does have a strong library of smaller complimentary games. Hades was probably objectively the best game from 2020 that I played. I had a ton of fun with Picross and Crypt of the Necrodancer. I’m sure Cadence of Hyrule is awesome. If you want to play Switch there’s always something new and fun on it. It just might be on something else as well.
• The Switch Pro Controller is great. Nintendo basically just said “What if we just make an Xbox controller with motion controls built in but no analog triggers” and then they did it, and it’s fantastic. Comfortable, lots of battery, durable, nice looking, by far my favorite Nintendo controller of all time.
• Nintendo has made efforts to modernize some practices, such as having an actual account instead of all software tied to hardware, decent and somewhat readable digital game sales, and a nascent retro game subscription service. Switch Online is very reasonably priced.
• It’s a portable and a console. So…yeah. That’s neat. You only have to buy one machine to get access to all of Nintendo’s output, and you can take your console games with you on a bus or play your bus games on the big screen. This was a more valuable feature about a year ago, and hopefully will be more valuable again in the future.

CONS:

• The Switch has not been the hotbed of Nintendo innovation I was hoping for. My favorite games have all been from franchises that existed for decades, and while they’ve taken shots with new IP like Arms it hasn’t really landed. They haven’t even put out much of the indie-type stuff they did on the 3DS like Boxboy and Pushmo, which are two of my favorite 3DS games. There’s a Boxboy game for Switch, but no Pushmo, and not a lot of innovative small stuff. If you look past the Wii U ports then Nintendo’s development record on Switch is kind of spotty, and definitely lower in volume than I’d hoped.
• Nintendo has modernized a little…but not nearly enough. You can use Micro SD cards but there’s no external storage even though the Switch proper (as opposed to the Lite) has lots of ports and could easily support an external hard drive if they wanted. Basic UI features are missing like the ability to organize games in folders or stay logged in to the store if you want to make multiple purchases.
• Switch online sucks. It sucks as a service. It sucks how it’s implemented. The voice chat makes no sense. The friend codes are dumb.
• Switch retro offerings are very limited compared to the Virtual Console of the past. NES and SNES game selections include a lot of heavy hitters but also some serious junk, and are not extensive. Everything else is a la carte and kind of random.
• The Switch has not been the system that made me enjoy portable gaming. I don’t like the Joycons as controllers at all and they feel flimsily attached to the machine in a way that feels cheap. Obviously Joycon quality has been bad for a lot of people. Some people obviously love the Switch in portable mode so this is very much a YMMV situation, and my personal history with portables is not a positive one.
• The Switch is seriously underpowered at this point. That doesn’t matter so much for first party games, which are generally designed to work within the hardware’s constraints and still look great (though Bowser’s Fury can get framey at times, as can BOTW) but a lot of third party games struggle. For someone who plays primarily in docked mode this, plus Nintendo’s bad digital rights policies and other issues, makes the Switch a less appealing place to play games that are available on other platforms.

Four years in the Switch is what it is. It’s a console I’ve enjoyed and played intensely when it had some new game out that I wanted to play, but one that I rarely turn on to peruse the library like I do with my PlayStation and Xbox. There’s plenty of stuff to enjoy on it, again I think that this could easily be someone’s only gaming platform without them feeling deprived in the least, but most of it can be found elsewhere.

The thing that I find disappointing is how little Nintendo has evolved over the last 4 years. Its game output is still relatively low compared to prior eras, and lacking in smaller and more original titles. The UI and account management system still lack incredibly basic features. The retro selection is anemic and packed with plenty of filler. Most of these are issues that could be fixed relatively easily (game output is obviously more difficult than something like adding folders or picking up the pace of NES and SNES releases) but the system is selling well and Nintendo doesn’t want to change. That’s just part of the price of admission.

I like the Switch. I think it was worth the money. If you accept it for what it is then what it is is pretty great. I was just hoping for some things that it looks like we’ll never get.

If you clicked on this blog you may have some questions.

What the heckin’ heck is Ma[PSVR]ch?

After finding out that Sony was making a new PSVR headset I instantly wanted one, but I also remembered that I barely played with the headset I bought over 4 years ago (wait is that possible…oh no. 4 years?!?!?) I came up with the idea of playing PSVR every day in March and blogging about it to see how I really felt about VR when giving it a chance. The fact that I’m staying away from using my PS5 controller for now just seals the deal, since my PSVR is still hooked up to my PS4, and that controller doesn’t hurt my hand. I initially wanted to commit to at least an hour a day but that seems too hard given how schedules work so I’m just going to try to play some each day. I may not blog every day because if I only play 20 minutes I might not have anything to say.

Why now?

Did you read my answer to the first question? Because of the announcement of the new headset and…just look above.

Do you have enough VR games you haven’t played to fill 30 days?

No comment. But yes. Sadly yes. I have picked up so many VR games over the years in sales or such. Playing on PSVR is something I always want to do in theory but never actually get around to.

But why blog about it?

Because it’s fun. And it’s a way to remember how I felt about VR when it comes time for the release of the new one.

But why now?

Oh for Pete’s sake!

It’s a catchy title though. Ma[PSV]Rch. Rolls off the tongue.

Thank you.

I was being sarcastic.

Rude!

With all the questions out of the way, let’s start with:

DAY 1:

The headset:

It has been an embarrassingly long time since I touched my PSVR headset, even though I have it sitting near my TV on a stand on a small side table. The first order of business was to untangle the very long cord that goes from the breakout box to the headset itself. This was a bit of a pain but the fact that you can detach the headset itself from the line in box made it at least possible. I then checked to make sure the lenses themselves weren’t too dusty (they could maybe do with a wipe but not too bad) and hit the power button to see if it would work. It did! Unfortunately the earbuds that came with it are dead, but they are nothing special and I just grabbed a random pair of 3.5mm headphones and I was good to go.

Adjusting the headset itself was…a pain. Brad recently said that it’s still the most comfortable VR headset he’s ever tried, and maybe that’s true, but it’s still fiddly as heck and when I get it the proper distance from my eyes so that the image looks clear it loves to slide down my nose. I finally found a good balance where it was clear, but the rubber eye sockets seem to have dried out a bit so they didn’t seal my eyes in and I could see light underneath the bottom. So I had to take the headset off and turn off all the lights in my apartment. That worked and I was finally able to get it comfortable and clear, but that’s the thing about VR. Even the most comfortable headsets are a pain. From memory back when I played this thing a bit more you get better at putting it on and such, but it’s still a pain.

There’s also the fact that I wanted to start playing this morning, but I’m having a minor family issue (nothing to worry about but I need to keep my phone on me and attend to it if it rings.) VR is incredibly impractical, and PSVR was the most practical headset at the time. Finding a block of time, getting the headset on and comfortable, and getting my headphones adjusted while blind from the VR while not jarring the headset out of focus was quite the ordeal. No wonder I never play this thing! It’s a whole operation.

Once I got the headset comfortable I was struck again by the low resolution displays, which have aged really poorly. I’ve been using 4K consoles for a long time now, and this looked rough, far worse than I remember. I’m glad they’re going with a full refresh.

TETRIS EFFECT:

I only really considered one game for the first day of Ma[PSVR]ch, and that was Tetris Effect. It was Giant Bomb’s Game of the Year in 2018, and I’d played some of it but hadn’t even finished the main journey mode. I enjoyed my experience with it and considering it was sort of PSVR’s killer app it just made sense to finish that off.

The thing about Tetris Effect, and probably the reason I never finished it, is that it’s a lovely VR experience that doesn’t really feel like it has to be a game. I love the environments, the music, the particle effects that at times immersed me so much I could swear that I could smell the little specs of pollen or whatever wafting into my nose, but the actual playing of the Tetris feels very disconnected to me. I feel like I’m in a beautiful VR art installation, loving the sights and sounds, but someone is making me play Tetris to advance between the exhibits for some reason. I like Tetris, I certainly respect Tetris, I would even say that Tetris is probably the greatest game ever made, but I don’t need to play Tetris just to view a bunch of backgrounds. The VR experience itself really comes from the explosions of light and color and the shapes and images flying by your head and underneath you. At times you’re suspended above a beautiful island…playing Tetris. Sometimes you’re orbiting twin stars…playing Tetris. At other points a pod of celestial dolphins is swimming beside you…while you play Tetris. I understand the synesthesia effect of your actions influencing the sounds and sights and how moving and dropping the pieces creates a feedback loop with the environment, but it feels like you could be doing anything to achieve that. The gameplay never fully meshes with the backgrounds for me. The images are creative and gorgeous and immersive…and then there’s the Tetris.

It reminds me of CD-I Tetris in that it takes a cool tech demo, slaps Tetris on it, and calls it a game. Tetris Effect is more than that; the backgrounds do change as you move through each level and the game increases and decreases the speed level in tandem with music and background changes so it’s a whole experience, but it just feels arbitrary to me. I also like Tetris as a laid back chill experience, and the journey mode ramps up the speed as high as 13 at some points, which to me is borderline unplayable. I managed to get through it but the last level (which requires 90 lines to clear, 30 of which are extremely fast) took me several tries, and by the time I finished I didn’t care about the backgrounds or music anymore. My mind was wandering and I just wanted it to be done. Nothing takes me out of immersion more than having to play a bunch of high speed Tetris over and over until I get it right.

So did I enjoy getting back into Tetris Effect?

Yeah. It’s a gorgeous game. It’s like an interactive art exhibit. That makes you play Tetris.

I know there are more modes to Tetris Effect (and even more with the Connected variation) and I will get back to it at some point during the month but for now I’m glad I finished Tetris Effect’s Journey mode, and that I didn’t miss the start of Ma[PSVR]ch. It did feel good to turn on the old headset and finally tick the end of that mode off my “get back to it someday” list. Next I’m going to dive into a game that’s a little more uniquely VR (since Tetris Effect doesn’t even require VR) and see how that suits me.

Shoulda been Lumines. Don’t @ me.