Well, hello there! Today I'll ramble about games which have been ported over to the Nintendo Switch and why I think this is a pretty awesome thing to be happening.
There are three big categories when talking about these ports, namely: ports from the ill-fated Wii U, ports of older games and ports of new games (at least the same year they have actually been released)
I. The Wii U Ports
I'll start with the least impressive category of ports. Those games ran on very inferior hardware, but they had a gimmick: dual screen interaction, well, at least some of them. That has been reworked into having the game and the touchscreen elements merged into a single screen in the handheld version and having the touch interaction mapped to the controller in the TV mode. The main example of this practice I can give is Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, which, in classic Nintendo style, has that cheerful attitude about it. Other great ports are the Bayonetta series (I know Bayonetta 1 also came on Xbox 360 and PS3, but I'll give it a pass because the second game was a Wii U exclusive) and also Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze which consumed more of my time than I'd like to admit.
One good reason to love these ports is the fact that they were stuck on something that is considered a failed system until they got a Switch release, but there is a glaring issue: they are pretty expensive.
II. Older games ports
In here we will nominate stuff like Bioshock: The Collection, The Witcher 3, Assassin's Creed 4 and Rogue, Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen and Rocket League. Those are amazing achievements on the hardware they originally came on, but to squeeze them into a handheld format is very impressive. I have two points to make about these: The Assassin's Creed games are the PS3/Xbox 360 versions of the games and Black Flag comes without the multiplayer component and The Witcher 3 suffered a notable downgrade in textures and resolution but comes with all the DLC and has a cross save functionality. This kind of ports is delightful to me, as I can play some of my favourite games on the go (laptop doesn't count, if I put it into performance mode it's dead in a maximum of two hours if not plugged into a wall socket). Just imagine going through Toussaint , exploring, doing side quests, while you are sitting in a train. Or exploring the bowels of Rapture, scrounging for supplies while in the backseat of a car. Starts sounding pretty good, right? The apex of this: playing a match of Rocket League while using the bathroom (actually please don't do that).
III. New games
These are the cream of the crop. I'd like to nominate a porting studio for an award, and that is Panic Button. These guys managed to get the aforementioned Rocket League to work pretty nicely on Switch, but their magnum opuses are Doom(2016), Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus and Wolfenstein: Youngblood. Yes, they run at a lower resolution and are capped at 30 fps, but they are incredible feats of engineering and they are more than playable. They are also working on porting Doom Eternal over, so we might have a new king in the ring. There is also Assassin's Creed 3: Remastered, which was released a month after it's console and PC counterparts and it is closer to the last gen version from a technical standpoint, lacking most of the graphical improvements from the remaster. Another great port was Outlast 2. Although it isn't a really good game, from a technical standpoint the Switch version is quite good, offering some impressive visuals, which of course are not on par with its bigger brother on PC and other consoles.
All in all, the Switch is basically the little box that could and although it isn't a graphical powerhouse, it makes up for it in the portability segment. Now, if only the games weren't as expensive, maybe I'd have a bigger collection.
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