i got selected to attend the preview event Nintendo put on for the Switch 2, so i spent a day in late April in Toronto (their only Canadian destination). of course, i didn’t need the console to be promoted to me given that i had literally preordered it the morning before, but attendance was free, so why not go anyway! here i’ll give thoughts on the event, the software i tried, and the console itself. and also share some nice pictures i took around Toronto’s lakeshore.
this post ended up pretty long, so here’s a table of contents to help you get around:
- The Experience
- Mario Kart World
- Donkey Kong Bananza
- Free‐Play: Experience vs. Preview Tour
- Metroid Prime 4
- Super Mario Party Jamboree + Jamboree TV: Bowser Live
- Kirby and the Forgotten Land + Star‐Crossed World
- Drag x Drive
- Split Fiction
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Exclusive Swag
- Nintendo Switch 2
- The Toronto Waterfront
The Experience
actually finding where in the Enercare Centre to enter was challenging; there didn’t seem to be any further guidance from Nintendo other than directing you to this huge building that takes several minutes to walk around, and i managed to approach it from the opposite side of where the event entrance actually was. i saw a couple other people just trying random doors with no success while i circled the exhibition complex in search of people wearing red. but eventually i found some signage.
apropos of nothing, i would also like to share this image of the lone Twitter logo our entrance was adorned with.
beyond security and ticket check‐in was a waiting area with assorted display cases showing all the new hardware. like, really, all of it — even the HDMI cable the console comes with was proudly showcased. there was also a staff member with a Switch 2 console for people to hold. it didn’t power on or anything, you could just cradle it in your hands for a spell, confirming for yourself that this new console is in fact a real physical thing that exists. the waiting area was necessary because admission was done in waves. attendees were given attendee badges and wave‐specific wristbands and “Gameplay Passports” (more on this later) before going through 2 separate Mario Kart World exhibitions and then a Donkey Kong Bananza exhibition, after which they’d be allowed to do what they want in the “free‐play” area. i will say it’s quite on‐the‐nose for Nintendo to force all attendees to spend an hour playing their own games before giving them any access to third‐party titles.
Mario Kart World
for some reason, all attendees got paired up for the first Mario Kart World exhibit, and every pair was sent to a setup with 1 TV and 2 individual consoles. this was actually the only time you got to hold the Switch 2 itself in handheld mode and play a game, as almost every other setup had the console stashed away inside the cabinet. since i went by myself, i was paired with a random quiet man, and after playing 1 race together on the TV we chose to try out the handheld consoles. i switched back to the TV after once race, but we didn’t play together again because my race had taken longer and he just kept playing on his console, and neither of us ever waited for the other to start a new race together on the TV. just an awkward situation.
i basically never use my Switch in handheld mode as it is, and the Switch 2 will be no different, not just because i prefer to play on a big screen but because the console is so damn thin that it’s painful to hold for very long. i would definitely be getting some kind of third‐party grip attachment if i had a need to be using the console in handheld mode for any significant periods of time. the screen looked nice though! but i don’t really have anything useful to say about it besides that anecdote. like, i’m not sure how it compares to an OLED display, but it seemed perfectly bright and colourful to me — certainly nicer than the screen on the regular Switch. i’m sure plenty of people are upset that it’s not an OLED display for how expensive the console is, but i don’t know that it’s worth fussing over when deeper blacks are probably the only real benefit you’d get.
i never ended up trying out attaching or detaching the magnetic Joy‐Con 2 controllers. oh god that’s so awkward to refer to as plural i just realized, like you could just say “Joy‐Cons” before but now if you want to specifically refer to the Switch 2’s controllers you can’t very well say “Joy‐Con twos” or something, that’s just weird. anyway i don’t think there was any reason you couldn’t try it out? i just never did. though they didn’t make a point of telling people to play around with it either i guess, which is in contrast to the Preview Tour for the Switch where we were shown how to switch from TV to handheld mode (i’ll make more comparisons to that event later). i’m sure the Joy‐Cons 2’s analogue sticks are actually larger, but they still felt small to me. they did feel better to use than the original Joy‐Con sticks, i guess? i dunno, compared to the original Switch event i didn’t spend as much time inspecting the hardware since there wasn’t much changed — except for the mouse controls, which i’ll get to later.
also Mario Kart World is good. i didn’t watch the Direct about the game so i don’t know much else about it, but you can play as Wario in a WarioWare‐like biker outfit with his hair pulled back into a little ponytail, which makes life worth living. i always wondered why Mario Kart Tour was the only game to have fun alternate outfits for the racers (besides a few exceptions like the princesses having different biker outfits). the track designs are also quite varied; i’m not sure how the distinction between courses works exactly, as i think i only did 1 race that was a standard 3 laps on a single course, and the rest all drove across the game world with no actual laps…? it’s fun to start off in one area and end up somewhere else completely though, with the track around you flowing from theme to theme. the load times seem much improved compared to Mario Kart 8, which was my biggest gripe with that game, so that’s good. still little‐to‐no antialiasing on rendered geometry despite how souped up the graphics are otherwise though (unless i couldn’t tell because the TVs at the event were just really poorly calibrated, but i really don’t think that was the case), so i guess the N64 really is the last time we’ll have ever consistently seen that from Nintendo. also the Baby Park remix goes crazy.
there are multiple changes that some players won’t like for sure, but i acknowledge they’re better choices to help newer players. for one, they’ve apparently removed the kart customization feature where you could choose specific tires and gliders separately from the main vehicle. having fewer loadout combinations might seem to be a pure downside, but it will also make it much easier for newer players to find setups they like to use. i also wonder if there will be more racer classes with how many more characters this game has to choose from. like the cows from Moo Moo Meadows. the ones that were obstacles? you can play as those now. i have no idea why but it’s pretty funny. oh, single shells (and maybe some other items?) are also automatically held behind you when you have one now. i’ll miss the tactical ability to hide the fact that you have a shell from other racers, but it is better to make defensive item usage more accessible to less experienced players and to reduce finger fatigue from holding L to keep it out.
Knockout Tour
the second exhibition area had 2 sets of 24 consoles set up to do fully‐loaded Knockout Tours. this mode is insane; all the racers ended up staying in close proximity to each other at all times, in stark contrast to how far ahead i could pull in the regular races i just played or when playing Mario Kart 8 with friends. it’s a chaotic mess of items and racers and also enemies on the course like Goombas that just charge towards you?? it’s nutty. and it goes on for a really long time too, rivaling an entire grand prix but with no breaks at all. dealing with that much chaos for that long is exhausting. despite holding first place multiple times, i was ultimately knocked out at tenth. my unfamiliarity with the game’s new mechanics and items was a real handicap; there was definitely one point where another racer took first place from me by grinding past on a rail, which isn’t something i ever did myself. i also think choosing a bike here is a mistake since the Knockout Tour races go fairly straight across the game’s world, so you probably ought to prioritize speed over handling.
the staff member attending my setup and the adjacent one asked for both our names before we started. i later realized this was so she could cheer us on individually mid‐race by calling out our names. i get that they’re trained to encourage you to try and make your gaming experience feel more positive, but man, it was all so awkward. these interactions just felt so inhuman; her yelling “you got this!!” at me while clearly approaching what would be my final lap marker below the threshold placement was the clearest example of this. she also couldn’t tell me what that smiling bagged lunch item was when i asked (i genuinely didn’t know). look i’m the kind of person who imparts random shower thoughts on cashiers whenever i go grocery shopping because i can’t stand to do fully scripted exchanges with other real human beings, so this kind of grated on me. maybe most other attendees didn’t feel this way, i dunno. there were other staff members that i had much more human interactions with; this was just the worst of it. at least they didn’t do much “backseat gaming” though. there were a couple times where i wasn’t really sure what to do or where to go next while playing a game and expected the attendant to maybe jump in and point out something to me, but instead i’d get to take a few seconds to naturally figure things out myself.
oh, these setups were also the first to give you Switch 2 Pro Controllers. i guess the face buttons felt a little better to use? just a bit more clicky and less mushy. Nintendo talked up the “smooth‐glide sticks” but they did not feel different to me at all. i’m not planning to get one; my Switch Pro Controller still works just fine, and the new features aren’t compelling enough to justify the investment. the headset jack might be a nice‐to‐have for using headphones, but i still wouldn’t see myself using it much if ever. i don’t care about the C button because i’ll never use ~~Nintendo Discord~~ Game Chat (besides, the N64 had 4 times as many C buttons, so it’s clearly the better console here). the 2 grip buttons i’ll get on the charging grip i get for my Joy‐Con 2 controllers, and they’re of debatable usefulness anyway given they’re quite small and seem difficult to consistently keep your fingers in the right position to press them (i think i’d much prefer the paddles that the newer Xbox controllers have). the mouse controls mean i’ll probably end up using the Joy‐Con 2 controllers most of the time anyways.
Donkey Kong Bananza
we were all ushered to Donkey Kong Bananza setups next. this game is also good as expected. it’s a lot like Mario Odyssey in terms of having a dense world that’s fun to explore and traverse, except instead of having a Cappy you can punch everything. this winning formula is copied right down to the numerous sub‐levels you can find with tailored action challenges, and other elements like the occasional “get from A to B before the timer runs out” trials. i breezed straight through the demo areas in a fraction of the allotted time (moving much faster than my attendant had known was possible), but easily filled in the remainder of the time (i want to say 20 minutes total? idk it flew by) combing through the little intro area and finding all manner of extra collectibles in every nook and cranny.
the terrain destruction mechanics generally seem to be set up such that you don’t need to meticulously punch away all the rock in an area to find any secrets hidden within. although (and a minor spoiler alert for the rest of this paragraph), near the very start of the game was an area where i noticed the ceiling was punchable, so i just repeatedly punched and wall‐jumped my way up out of curiosity, only to discover a lone monkey NPC who was like “oh hey, i didn’t expect anyone else to ever find my favourite lookout spot up here”. (my attendant had never seen anyone find this area.) the terrain was constructed such that you couldn’t just climb up here, so this was a case of actually just having to punch your way through a huge expanse of rock to find something. this was balanced out by the fact that there were no significant collectibles up there to my knowledge (maybe a bit of generic gold), just the NPC to acknowledge my skill verbally. this seems to me like the developers are saying they’re not gonna hide anything of real value behind destructible terrain without some kind of overt clue to lure you in. the only real reason i had to punch through that roof was my sense of 3D space telling me i hadn’t been up there before.
i like Donkey Kong’s redesign; he’s very expressive, and the mix of retro and modern styling, like with Mario and Luigi in Super Mario Wonder, is very well executed and feels both refreshing and familiar. i know not everyone is gonna like this shift away from the Rare design, but deliberately eschewing it for a new 3D platformer featuring DK was very encouraging to me, because the less similar this game is to Donkey Kong 64 the better. that game was truly awful. spoiler alert for the rest of this paragraph again: i also found Cranky Kong on a hard‐to‐reach floating island (which i think i was supposed to get to by making some platforms solid somehow, but i just abused the roll mechanics to make a really long jump from a distant ledge), and he used his Rare design verbatim (which was pretty out‐of‐place next to this redesigned DK honestly), so it’s not like they aren’t throwing any bones to the Rare fans. and the game’s trailer also showed off some 2D Donkey Kong Country‐like segments, of course, complete with barrel cannons.
the controls will be difficult to adjust to. most every other game uses B to jump, but this game uses A. i know this is so the top and bottom face buttons will punch up and down respectively, which does make some logical sense, but having the jump button in this odd spot was constantly messing me up. i almost always ended up punching down once or twice before pressing the actual jump button. i never got even slightly used to it while playing, so i’ll almost certainly end up changing the controls (using the system settings if i have to if the in‐game control options are too limited). i feel like having those extra grip buttons might be helpful for this game too. every setup at the event had a helpful little card on a shelf below the TV showing what buttons do what, and unlike the very simple card for the Mario Kart World setup (which only showed how to steer, accelerate, drift, and use items, although i found X still showed a rear view), this game had a different function on every single button on the controller. one of them just slaps the ground? i only used it to activate things that arbitrarily required slapping, so i don’t know what other purpose this action serves.
there’s still a big focus on collectibles, but like, nothing will ever be as bad as Donkey Kong 64’s coloured bananas, so it’s fine. i did find the gold pretty annoying though; if you broke a big cluster of it, smaller pieces would scatter every which way, forcing you to run around to pick them all up like you just took damage in a Sonic game. this collection process was pretty tedious, so i ended up tending to just ignore gold entirely. the worst case was when i broke a cluster on land that sent a bunch of pieces sinking to the bottom of a nearby body of water, and i just sighed and left them be down there.
Free‐Play: Experience vs. Preview Tour
after these 3 mandatory first‐party exhibitions, all the attendees in each wave were then unleashed into the “free‐play” area. depending on which wave you arrive for, your “Gameplay Passport” would be a different colour (evidently with no further differentiation for colourblind people), and a TV when entering the free‐play area showed what the exit times were for each colour. which, when we initially entered, was, uh, wrong, and said our purple colour was leaving at like 3:20 PM, which had already long passed. (this got corrected a few minutes later.) the reverse of the Gameplay Passport has 6 spaces, 1 of which gets filled in by staff at each station you went to, and you could redeem a fully filled‐out passport for “exclusive swag” at the exit. this means each attendee is only allowed to try out 6 additional games at most.
now, i also attended the original Nintendo Switch Preview Tour in January 2017 in Toronto, so i’d like to talk about how this event compares to that. they serve the same ultimate purpose of promoting a new console in the 2 months up to its launch, of course. (i’d also gone to a similar Wii U prerelease event which i still have a T‐shirt from, but my memories of that are much more vague, and i have no pictures of it; it definitely wasn’t held in a convention centre, just a pop‐up somewhere.) the Preview Tour stops had 2 days that were invite‐only for existing My Nintendo members but had a third day open first‐come first‐serve to the public, whereas all 3 dates of the Experience require an event ticket that any free Nintendo Account holders could try to get. for some reason, the Experience required you to only apply for 1 specific time slot, whereas i’m pretty sure the Preview Tour let you pick whichever time slot you wanted that still had open spots. i believe the Preview Tour was only in North America? whereas the Experience has fewer North American locations but several in Europe and Asia/Oceania as well. within Toronto, the Preview Tour was held in the Metro Toronto Convention Centre right in the heart of the city, where the Enercare Centre holding the Experience is much further west but has a better parking situation. only the Preview Tour gave me detailed information on where exactly to find the entrance though. the Experience also had a complimentary coat check while the Preview Tour did not.
all of that is sort of six of one, half dozen of the other though. the differences that really mattered to me became apparent once i stepped into the free‐play area. compared to the original Preview Tour, the show floor of the Experience was incredibly plain: lots of TVs and soundbars with some generic shag carpets, plus standing desks if mouse controls were used, and… that was pretty much it. the Preview Tour had a lot more going on despite being in a significantly smaller space. Nintendo heavily themed the different areas of the event after the different games on display. the many setups for Breath of the Wild (an unbelievably big deal to play at the time) were under green lighting with green “grassy” carpet and set up on fake brick ruins, next to a giant outpost chest model…
…the stations for Splatoon 2 had big pink and green splatters all over the floor and cabinets and benches, not to mention a giant Inkling statue under the pink overhead lights…
…the ARMS area had hanging posters for the different characters and scrolling LED signs…
…the Snipperclips stations had yellow and pink chairs in front of a “grid paper” table…
…the main stage was flanked by mock‐ups of airplane seats, a living room, a cable car, and a diner (with Waluigi working in the kitchen) to let you play the console in its different “modes”…
…there were fun photo ops for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Super Mario Odyssey…
…and there was a Mario mascot wandering around!
plus there was a lot more seating, with chairs, couches, or benches in front of most TV setups. at the Experience, i know for a fact there were a total of only 12 chairs available for attendees, being the little stools in front of each Drag x Drive setup. i can be on my feet for hours without any trouble, sure, but plenty of people do not have this ability and it sucks when they’re left for dead like this!
anyways, as you can see, i took way more interesting pictures at that event compared to this one, and also just way more pictures in general because there was a lot more interesting stuff to photograph. so the Experience was not nearly as extravagant as i was expecting based on my prior experience, which was a real letdown.
you also weren’t limited in what you could play at the Preview Tour, or forced to play anything specific. i mean sure, they had way more setups for Breath of the Wild and Splatoon 2 than anything else because they knew they’d get a ton of attention, but they certainly weren’t mandatory. given that this is what they did at the Experience though, it perplexes me as to why they also decided to forcefully limit how many games you can play. it can’t have been to free up stations, ’cuz filling out all 6 spots on my Gameplay Passport took up 60 of the 80 minutes i had to spend in the free‐play area anyway, and they had plenty of available setups across the floor at all times. without that restriction, i might have tried out a couple more games i otherwise wouldn’t have, like Hades II or Yakuza 0 (or, hell, Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour), and become more interested in buying them. attendees will naturally gravitate first to the games they’re already most interested in buying because they’re excited to try them out, but after that they’re going to try out as many different games as they can, and it’s this extra time which gives the most opportunity to actually sell people on new products! my best guess for why they implemented this system might’ve been to keep attendees from staying past their allotted time, but they already did that with the Gameplay Passport colours! i just don’t get it. (as mentioned before, playing enough games would net you “exclusive swag” on your way out, so this incentivized you to play a bunch of different things. but that doesn’t mean having a filled‐out Gameplay Passport needed to bar you from playing anything else!)
well, even if they didn’t restrict how many games you could try out, i would only have been able to fit 2 more into my allotted time at most. where the Preview Tour let everyone loose on the whole floor for a whole glorious 3 hours, the Experience only left you with ⁓80 minutes to wander around the free‐play area after the mandatory hour of Mario Kart and Donkey Kong. i suppose it was set up to push as many people through the exhibitions as possible, but the whole thing just felt too streamlined. the Preview Tour had a more chaotic atmosphere perhaps, but it was also far more magical. and it had some short lines in front of some stations, sure, but i’d attribute the lack of lines here to just having way more setups for attendees to use, rather than the limitations on how attendees could spend their time.
Metroid Prime 4
i still have more games to talk about though — 6 of them, as you may have guessed. i tried Metroid Prime 4 next since it was right in front of us as we went into the free‐play area and probably was the other game i was most excited to see. this was my first time using the Joy‐Con 2 mouse controls. they’re fine! you might think it’d feel unsteady to use such a thin surface as a mouse, but it wasn’t a real issue in my experience. i might have thought it wouldn’t stay steady and would keep tipping over, but i had no such problems in practice. i suppose it’s possible that the nice big mouse pads they had could’ve been helping with this a bit. the attendant told me i could use the right stick for the camera at any time if i wanted, but i didn’t do this even once because i liked the mouse controls so much. they were very responsive, although i do feel there was like, a frame of smoothing applied to them to make them feel a bit more palatable.
Metroid Prime 4 is… Metroid Prime 4. i dunno, if you were expecting it to be anything more significant than a fourth Metroid Prime game, i think you’ll be underwhelmed. but it’ll be fun! the intro stage had real Metroid Prime 3 vibes to it, what with the GF officers everywhere up to their usual stupid antics and all sorts of cinematic set‐dressing going on around you to sell the dramatic conflict you’ve been thrust into. the incredible responsiveness of the mouse controls are in real stark contrast to how slow your movement is; combat just sorta felt like pointing and shooting at every thing until it dies. maybe Metroid Prime was just always kinda like this? not sure; i haven’t played those games in ages, and the last FPS i really played by release date was Doom (2016), part of a series where quick and constant movement has always been crucial to survival, so maybe this just felt slow in contrast.
i didn’t really expect to still need to use the lock‐on to shoot at enemies with the mouse controls, and indeed i found it easier to lead shots and track their movements if i didn’t use lock‐on. unfortunately, strafe dashes were my only quick movement option during combat, and they’re only accessible while locked on to something. the boss at the end was definitely easier to fight using lock‐on though, since it had multiple weak points that kept being covered and uncovered, and you had to constantly adjust where precisely you were aiming while also moving around it to avoid attacks. this was the only point where an attendant did any significant backseat gaming, by pointing out that full charge beams would do more damage to the boss than a missile; i hadn’t used charge beams at all up to that point ’cuz i just didn’t realize i had them, so that was fine.
Super Mario Party Jamboree + Jamboree TV: Bowser Live
then an attendant pulled me in while walking past his station to be the fourth player in a Super Mario Party Jamboree setup. i really regret letting myself get talked into this one; i didn’t realize until we were all being set up in front of a red backing wall that this was for the webcam‐controlled “minigames”. they’re bad! this mode is a really miserable simulacrum of being live game show contestants, which is only fun because of the novelty of being in front of an actual crowd of people at an actual live show and has no redeeming value when imitated without that aspect. there were a lot of awkward looks exchanged with the other adult players in this one, and middling reception to attempts to pump us up by the admittedly enthusiastic hype‐man attendant (cynically, i’d guess his bombasticness is why he was assigned to this station, which direly needed it).
the wide angle of the webcam does capture you even while standing pretty far off to the sides, but it also means that if you cut out 2D images of the players at the extremes, they’d be badly perspective warped compared to the inner ones. a good game might try to fix this problem; this game does not do this. it also was tremendously bad at recognizing me at all because i was wearing a respirator mask (and one of the only people there doing so…); i get the feeling that the attendant resolved not to pull in anyone else wearing a mask for this game after seeing how poorly it dealt with me. i could hit the ? Block in “Hitting it Rich!” okay (though my team still lost), but “Goombalancing Act” was abysmal and the game refused to recognize my head’s movements at all (though my team still won because the woman i was paired with managed to get 2 parallel stacks of Goombas on her head somehow). now, there are only 3 camera minigames in total, and we just played 2 of them, so you’d think we would proceed to play the third one to break the tie. this does not happen, because if you played every minigame in one go then there’d be no replay value! so at the end Bowser just tells you to yell and move around and once again this is just so damn awkward when it’s not part of an actual live show my god why would you do this (somehow my team won and this victory felt totally undeserved for me).
in summary, this mode exists only as a proof‐of‐concept for using the camera in a Switch 2 game, and it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s a tremendously bad idea. never play this mode. i did see other setups for this game that showed off the added mouse‐controlled minigames instead, which looked fine. one of them was just like those old no‐budget Flash games where you have to slowly maneuver your cursor through a maze without touching any edges which was so funny to me. it’s like Nintendo has newly discovered the concept of the computer mouse and is coming up with exactly the same kinds of basic game concepts for it that everyone else already did a quarter century ago. well, at least their versions of this concept probably won’t have any jumpscares.
Kirby and the Forgotten Land + Star‐Crossed World
the Kirby and the Forgotten Land + Star‐Crossed World demo let you play the first level of the “new campaign”. it’s, exactly how the game was before, but they added some blue stuff. i dunno, it was just a bunch of layouts from a couple stages in the first world but now there were blue platforms you could activate and a new type of coin to collect. and a different type of creature to save i guess. i never played the original, just watched a friend play a bunch of it a while ago now, but everything i played through was so familiar that i struggled to realize what was actually different. well, at least it’s a solid 60 FPS now! i’m still not very interested though.
Drag x Drive
i definitely wanted to try Drag x Drive. i'd been pleasantly surprised when this title was announced, as paraplegic sports are wildly underrepresented in most media. Nintendo putting resources towards developing this game is very cool to see, as with the other accessibility features they've added to Nintendo Switch 2 (like the little‐known speech‐to‐text feature of Game Chat). i mean, what a stellar way to broadcast that you're taking accessibility seriously!
i filled in the last spot on one of the 2 sets of 6 setups; most of the other 5 players were messing around in a court together it seemed, waiting there until an actual competitive 3v3 game started. an attendant had to come over and hold a secret button combination on the Joy‐Con 2 controllers at my station to reset the game to the tutorial. all the setups had a stool to sit at, to get you in the paraplegic spirit i guess. (again, i think every station should’ve had seating, but whatever.) the lowered desks also featured nice gigantic mouse pads adhered to their surfaces, and i get the feeling i’ll want my own big mouse pad for playing Switch 2 games. (honestly i’m surprised there are no Nintendo‐licensed Switch 2 mouse pad accessories yet; seems like a big product opportunity for ones branded after various Nintendo IPs.) an attendant had told me that i could use my pant legs instead of the mouse pad, but i honestly didn’t even try it. i’m sure it works fine, but given how often i’m moving my legs around while sitting for long periods, that’s not a control method i could ever come to rely on. plus it just felt needlessly awkward compared to using the purpose‐built desk right in front of me.
the game controls better than i expected! i had been skeptical of the value of using both mouse sensors for this instead of using the joysticks, but this method has the clear advantage of being much more intuitive. the fairly long tutorial went through everything in detail anyway, but most of it was easy to just figure out based on how you might use a real wheelchair, even not having used one myself. the one thing that felt restrictive was that moving one Joy‐Con 2 controller faster than the other didn’t result in a slight turn while moving, which i constantly tried to do only to end up going straight. i imagine this is necessary to let most players have an easier time going straight, but it still felt limiting to me. instead, you have to push with one hand briefly before also pushing with the other, doing a small turn before going straight ahead at full speed. i was not as good at figuring out how to time this as i felt i would be just moving my hands at different speeds, nor as consistent. how responsive the controls felt was aided tremendously by the upgraded haptic feedback in the Joy‐Con 2 controllers (i believe Nintendo’s calling it “HD Rumble 2”, in keeping with the whole “2” theme). this game is the best showcase for how much better the stronger rumble feels, as the feedback was significantly more pronounced than the older Joy‐Cons are capable of.
what takes more getting used to is how the inertia of the wheelchair works, which is critically important to understand because that big difference in character control is what makes this totally different to approach compared to a conventional basketball game. whenever i felt like i wasn’t in control of my character, it was usually because of the wheelchair unexpectedly spinning wildly before i could get a handle on my speed and orientation. at other times, i was in control but simply didn’t plan my trajectory well enough. Rocket League is unsurprisingly a common comparison, and while i haven’t played that game myself (the closest i’ve gotten is playing The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe), i’d say it’s a much greater extreme with the incredibly daunting amount of inertia your car has. Drag x Drive feels like a much more palatable middle ground between that and bipedal basketball, but it’s still tricky to get a good handle on. sometimes i was cruising across the court confidently and other times i was fumbling with my chair, but i was still having a lot of fun playing and ended up scoring all 7 points for my team (tying the game up at the last minute).
i was worried about the controls feeling tiring, but the Joy‐Con 2 controllers are so light that this didn’t trouble me at least during my short time with the game. still, i do have to wonder about the feasibility of joystick controls for people who can’t manage the motion controls. the joysticks could probably work just fine for simulating wheel movements, but the other motion controls are more tricky. i’m sure shooting could just be a button (i don’t think how you swing your arm to shoot really impacts whether the ball goes in), but other hand motions aren’t so simple. most gestures seem to be technically superfluous (though they were still fun to play with of course, not to mention fairly novel as a means of expression within a competitive game), but the trailer also shows the arms being used to block, and while i don’t think any of us did this in our play session, it’s obviously an important mechanic that’d need to be accessible in an alternative control scheme. (the trailer also shows jumps being performed, which the tutorial i played didn’t cover at all!)
the game’s mechanics are also similar to the controls in that they’re straightforward to get a broad understanding of but leave plenty of room for nuance in interactions. i really hope Nintendo puts out a demo for this game or has an “open‐access” period like they’ve done with Splatoon and ARMS, because i think the appeal of this game isn’t really understood until you actually physically play it and understand how nice it is to control. while it’s easy to draw parallels between this game and ARMS, i would say ARMS was not nearly so fun to play as Drag x Drive, as someone who owns it. the slow‐moving projectile fists always felt awkward, even if the concept was novel. i see Drag x Drive more as an opposite to ARMS: it has much tighter and more satisfying controls, but lacks the vibrant colours and characters (not to mention a memorable name) you might expect from a Nintendo property. (i don’t think either is much fun to spectate, though!)
the lack of innate personality to the player characters seems to be a very deliberate choice here though. from what i can tell, this game is really leaning into the online aspects, not just for playing 3v3 matches but also hanging out on the court. you can see in the above screenshot from the trailer that there are other players hanging out in the other court and the track going around them while the 3v3 is still going on. given that, it makes a lot of sense to let players express through their characters rather than controlling colourful personalities. this approach makes a lot of sense when you consider the context of Game Chat, and i believe this is also why Mario Kart World similarly lets you race and also just drive around the game world leisurely with friends. i don’t game online very much outside of modded Minecraft and Among Us with friends, so i’m not a good judge as to whether or not Nintendo is finally doing online “right” (even though i don’t think aping Discord’s crappy UI is it personally), but to me this strategy at least seems to demonstrate a better understanding of the market than they’ve had before.
on that note though, Drag x Drive might be something of a non‐starter for me given that i simply don’t have enough friends to play this game with. i have very few friends planning to get a Nintendo Switch 2 given its premium price, and there are even fewer within that subset who would be interested in playing this game. but! i think there will absolutely be groups of people who end up loving this game and playing it all the time, and they will be right to do so. i think this YouTube comment on the trailer puts it well:
heed my warnings, traveler: do not make fun of Drag x Drive, for it deserves no scorn; do not sleep on Drag x Drive, or you’ll find yourself the fool.
Split Fiction
uhh then i played some Split Fiction, out of mild curiosity and also mild guilt for having only played first‐party stuff this whole time. pic unrelated. it was fine and i truly have nothing interesting to say about it. next!
Cyberpunk 2077
after i’d finished Metroid Prime 4, the attendant there told me there were some mature games hidden on the backside of one of the rows of setups, facing away from the rest of the room. (i’m not sure if he told me this just figuring my age or because i was adept at mouse‐controlling a first person shooter.) indeed, there are signs and staff to each side to make sure kids don’t wander over. Yakuza 0 and Cyberpunk 2077 were back there, with a few attendees taking interest. out of a truly morbid curiosity, i decided to try Cyberpunk 2077; this is the exact kind of AAA gaming experience i have practically no practical experience with, so i was mostly wondering if i was missing anything at all worthwhile. just about the only thing i knew about this game going into it was that it was so busted at release Sony delisted it from their online store shortly after launch and offered no‐questions‐asked refunds for all purchases. (i have to assume it was re‐listed later after some updates.) well, bad news: it’s still busted.
the attendant here talked me through this game far more than any of the others had. perhaps this was because i’d told her i knew basically nothing about this game, but i think the demo dropping you into the open game world with no tutorial meant you could very easily end up wandering off somewhere with nothing to do and have a very underwhelming demo experience. i looked around a bit, but she pointed out to me as i climbed up a tower that there would be a hostile encounter at the top. (i have no idea how you were supposed to tell which NPCs would want to kill you and which were just hanging out; i think she just knew from experience.) and while confusedly mashing some buttons trying to figure out how to pull out and switch weapons for combat, i quickly rendered the game unplayable. i thought i was misunderstanding her instructions, but eventually i came to realize that the game was just broken: my character’s hands had disappeared outside of brief single‐frame flashes of them unarmed or holding a hammer weapon, and the weapon wheel either didn’t come up or couldn’t be dismissed, so i was unable to fight the single foe awkwardly shuffling around this little tower and occasionally taking shots at me. the second time she took the controller from me, she similarly was perplexed at the game’s unresponsiveness before also concluding that it was, in fact, totally busticated. she had to reset the station to let me take another crack at it, after which point i deliberately played like i was doing a stilted longplay to try and avoid agitating the game’s touchy code. which of course made it way more boring to play. so, really bad first impression.
i had pressed Y to talk to an NPC before, so i walked up to another NPC who it looked like i could interact with him, only for my character to grab him in a chokehold and give me no options besides a lethal or non‐lethal takedown. needless to say this is not at all what i wanted. i opted for the non‐lethal option since i do not enjoy killing people, and the girl he was with i guess didn’t want to fight me but instead awkwardly trotted away from me with some very stilted pathfinding and otherwise had no sort of emotional reaction to the situation. then i went in a building where i had to shoot a bunch of people and got a bit lost, during which the demo uneventfully suddenly terminated itself after its invisible timer was up.
somehow this game felt like it had both way too much going on with its interfaces for quests and skill points and stuff, and also very little going on in terms of the actual combat and exploration? clearly there was a lot of work put into this game’s assets and world, but the actual functionality seems to have suffered severely. so yeah, this wasn’t interesting to me. i’m not wowed by graphical fidelity (and even if i was, i’m not being wowed by that frame rate of ≤30 FPS), and the gritty world and gratuitous use of the F‐word don’t appeal to me even as a “mature” adult. i dunno, i still feel validated at my only really AAA experience in the past decade being Doom (2016) — it was a lot less distressing to shoot fantastical demons in that game than realistic people in this one, i’ll say, and Doom didn’t throw in curse words for the heckie of it either.
most attendants would ask what you thought about the game when done playing at a station. the second most interesting conversation i had was with the Drag x Drive attendant, since i had a lot of thoughts on how the game felt to control. but after playing Cyberpunk 2077 was the most interesting interaction; with a knowing glint in her eye, she followed up her scripted question by saying in a very human way, “you can be honest.” i proceeded to be honest with her and she expressed no faults in my assessment.
Exclusive Swag
and that was the sixth game i’d played, so now i was done. i still had 20 minutes left to wander the free‐play area, and there were empty stations for games i hadn’t played, but i was now restricted from actually using any of them and being marketed to any further. i wished that i’d gotten to feel how the new GameCube controllers were instead of wasting my time on a port of a broken AAA game, and that i’d actually played the fun mouse‐controlled new Mario Party minigames instead of rotting away in front of a mediocre webcam, but my fate had now been sealed. and because there were no other features like displays or photo ops to appreciate, there was nothing else left for me to do unless i wanted to just watch other people play some games from a distance. although it made me sad to realize that i didn’t even want to be in there anymore, i decided at this point that i’d rather go peruse the Toronto waterfront with what overcast daylight remained. plus i noticed the bit on my Gameplay Passport which said it could only be redeemed for exclusive swag “while supplies last” and figured actually getting something tangible out of this was the least i deserved.
so, in a somewhat awkward exchange, the 5 or 6 staff members at the exit booth took my wristband and gave me a free bag. it’s a pretty nice bag, all things considered! it’ll work great as a laptop bag, which is not actually a thing i already have, so that’s nice. i already came to the event with a bag, but fortunately i’d brought something very lightweight that i could just easily shove inside of this new bag. this was the big upside to this event compared to the Preview Tour, where i’d just gotten a pin:
Nintendo Switch 2
i’ll close this out with some other assorted thoughts on the console — mostly stuff i hope to see in the future.
finally getting 4K HDR and 120 FPS VRR support on a Nintendo console is great, but i’m still seriously let down by the lack of HDMI 2.1 support, meaning you can’t have 4K and 120 FPS at the same time. (if i have to switch between display modes manually in the system settings for different games, i’ll be even more annoyed by this.) the third‐party games i’d tried like Split Fiction and Cyberpunk 2077 also didn’t look nearly as nice as any first‐party stuff, but they’re also launch‐day ports. still, i hope those and all other games will include alternate performance modes that prioritize frame rate over graphical fidelity, like how Metroid Prime 4 will have an alternate 120 FPS mode.
i had been confused by the inclusion of optical sensors instead of a scroll wheel (which Masahiro Sakurai has repeatedly suggested to Nintendo, as we all know). like, of the features to include from a computer mouse, why the sensor? and lots of games already use motion‐controlled pointers, so why bother with a mouse pointer instead? well, Drag x Drive is a game that can’t really exist without this setup, and it controls really well, so that could’ve single‐handedly sold me on the whole concept. but Metroid Prime 4’s mouse controls also felt way better to me than Metroid Prime 3’s pointer controls, so there are definitely good use cases for it. i do wonder what sort of third‐party Switch 2 controllers we might see in the future that implement mouse support. i’d be quite interested in trying anything mouse‐shaped — i’d love to see more funky stuff on the market like the Azeron Cyro. it’d also be cool if Nintendo just supported standard USB mice somehow. the closer i can get to my preferred PC setup of an Azeron analogue keypad and a gaming mouse while playing on console, the better.
i also really hope to see mouse controls in more games than the obvious fits like Metroid Prime 4 and Civilization VII. even something like Donkey Kong Bananza could benefit from allowing mouse controls for the freeform camera IMO; i’ve grown very accustomed to using mouse controls in 3D platformers after playing games like Spark the Electric Jester 3 and A Hat in Time on my PC and consider it a marked improvement over a right stick. i also saw on the Nintendo Today app that there are mouse controls on the HOME Menu, and i hope to see lots of software similarly support mouse controls for menus. i mean, imagine the Nintendo Switch 2 edition of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom letting you use the mouse controls for the camera and Ultrahand, and for navigating equipment menus and Fuse options. what an incredible improvement that would be!
GameShare being able to stream video to other Switch consoles for asymmetric gaming experiences seems to have gone under most people’s radars, but not mine. look, i love my Wii U, and being able to use other Switch consoles as essentially Wii U GamePads with the Switch 2 makes me salivate. i really hope this is explored by far more games than just Clubhouse 51. i mean, Game & Wario’s Sketch game (think Pictionary) is just begging to make a comeback on a new console as the best party game ever made (i still play it with people to this day). the real pipe dream for me would be the return of Affordable Space Adventures, which made far better use of the Wii U’s features than even most Nintendo games did. it’d be hard to sell if you had to have another Switch console to mimic the GamePad setup, but i bet you could figure out a good single‐screen solution using the mouse controls! and i bet the more powerful hardware would greatly improve load times too (the game’s OST even has a track called “This Game Has Too Long Loading Times”).
The Toronto Waterfront
anyway, as i mentioned, i took some time after the event to leisurely wander down the Toronto waterfront. i’m only ever in this city a couple times a year at most, and yet i still rarely take the time to appreciate any of its sights, so i thought it’d be nice to actually take some time to do so for once. it still surprises me how much beauty there is to be found in this otherwise overbearing metropolis; i’ll share a bit of it with you here.
for scrolling all the way down to the bottom, you get a rare selfie for your troubles. thanks for reading!
