With Finals and graduation and all of that terrible real life stuff on the horizon, I’m staving off imminent insanity in the only way I know how:
Video games.
Specifically, finally trying out that brand new Nintendo Switch Pro Controller I got for my birthday. Two months ago.
To be fair, I mostly haven’t used it up until now for two reasons.
First being the obvious fact that I just haven’t had a whole lot of time to play as the semester has progressed. But also I’m just a stubborn baby that tried to convince himself his janky left Joy Con was still usable, despite a significant drift.
In retrospect I don’t know why I was such a stubborn baby. The Pro Controller is actually a solid accessory!
Not only does it fit comfortably in my hands, but I appreciate the grips not being made of the same material as the semi-transparent body, meaning they don’t get covered in fingerprints.
However, I did immediately come across some trouble with the concept of using a more traditional controller for the Switch…
It doesn’t work with every game.
I notably found this out while trying to play some Pokémon Let’s Go Eevee with Aly.
She was complaining about the drifting Joy Con, so we tried to use the Pro Controller.
Turns out you can’t use it to do things like throw Pokéballs without the same gyroscopic technology, so they just didn’t add any functionality for the external apparatus.
Cool.
On the bright side, I’ve been able to properly try out the device with a pair of Indie titles I picked up again:
Both Wizard of Legend and Enter the Gungeon received recent updates, and I’ve been playing them to avoid slamming my head against a wall from all this work.
They both add a bunch of new content.
Wizard has a new locale called the Sky Palace (similar aesthetically to The Minish Cap‘s Palace of Winds, much to my nostalgic pleasure), new enemy types and a bunch of additional spells.
Meanwhile Gungeon got… Basically tons more of everything.
It’s amazing to me that such an already stuffed game has been filled with an almost imperceptibly large amount of extra content again. That’s good service if I’ve ever seen it.
The funniest thing about playing both of these titles in quick succession is how different the control schemes are, which makes it difficult to swap between the two.
For instance: In Gungeon, item pick-ups and general interactions are done with the “B” button, while shooting and dodge rolling are done with the triggers. But in Wizard, “B” cancels out all interactions and every action/magic command is done with the A/B/X/Y buttons.
But this difficulty context switching is only going to get worse tomorrow. Because we just found out that Nintendo is dropping the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate 3.0 Update:
Joker is finally here with all of his funky Persona 5 music (and a ton of really well-done fan service by the looks of things).
Sakurai is appeasing his hordes of complaining fans by adding the Stage Builder we all thought was gone. Now with moving platforms!
Clips can be edited together and posted online via the Nintendo Switch.
Move over Adobe Premiere Pro, turns out I could have been learning how to edit video in Smash Bros. all along! That’s the future of journalism.
Frankly the only “bad” part of this whole update video is the fact that no teaser was dropped for the next DLC character. Nintendo could have kept us strung along for years if they doled out teasers for new fighters one at a time.
Yet that’s not even a reasonable “bad.” The fact that all this content is coming deep into the game’s life-cycle shows it has a god damn ton of longevity.
It’ll be rough switching between all those control schemes, but it’ll be worth it.
Especially on account of all these memes:
You’d be mistaken if you thought I wasn’t going to whittle my study time away building stages in Ultimate.
Even though the mode is based on drawing and I’ll probably be terrible at it.
At the very least I’ll try bringing back some Brawl classics for my friends and I to enjoy.
Who knows, maybe I’ll even introduce you all to the pit of death in the near future. We’ll just have to wait and see!
Jason's Blog - Work in Progress 