Nintendo won't let me jerk it

We were doing a bit of cleaning around the house a few weeks ago and as I was going through our mountains of trash and old, unwanted crap, I tripped over this black slab of plastic, which was covered in a thick layer of dust. Turns out it was a Nintendo Switch. I couldn't believe we were dumb enough to buy two of the damn things!

Look, Breath of the Wild is probably my personal game of the year. Yes, breaking weapons are stupid and Link looks so weird, I still remember when early pre-release footage caused lots of people to assume there'd be a playable female protagonist this time around. The game was still so fun, I played the absolute shit out of it. And then - nothing. Okay, and then Splatoon, Arms and Mario, none of which I particularly care about. The new Mario still feels like a loose collection of jump puzzles and minigames to me and Claire, the resident 3d platformer fanatic, has put about 2-3 hours into it and never touched the damn thing again. Great! Another purchase to feel completely stupid about!

I had more fun with Sonic Forces than I did with Mario Odyssey. It's a good thing I quit my job as a games critic.

You can only play so much Mario Kart. Disgaea 5 is so full of fluff, filler and annoying bullshit, you can play for days without actually ever reaching the goddamn game underneath all the extra garbage. The rest of Nintendo's online store looked a bit like Steam did half a decade ago and at twice the cost. That's not a terrible thing if you want to play some Steam classics on the go, but I have my GPD Win for that, which also doesn't force me to buy all of these old titles again, just so I can play them on the go.

Our Switch(es) saw so little use, I genuinely considered giving one away to Claire's mother or something, because we sure as fuck weren't using them at all. My appreciation came back in one of those 'more money than sense' moments, where I decided that caring about neither Pokémon nor Tekken was the perfect reason to buy Pokkén Tournament DX months after release in a sale. I've completed every last tournament, optional boss battle and hidden bonus content over the course of a day and I'm still causing little kids to ragequit in the online mode. I love a game, which is a combination of stuff I absolutely do not care about!

Though I feel a bit girly for playing this.

I had another look at the online store the other day and suddenly - Resident Evil Revelations 1+2! For peanuts! I have never played a Resident Evil game before. I watched my brother when he played the first one on his PlayStation and it looked absolutely awful. 1st gen 3d graphics weren't much to look at even back in the day, camera and controls were shit, the voice acting was notoriously terrible. Hey, I can totally understand there's a certain B-movie appeal to it, but it just wasn't for me. Some of the later games in the series look pretty great, but I've got a genuine case of zombie phobia, which may or may not be related to my dad showing me hardcore horror films when I was five years old. I still don't fully close the shower curtain. So... Resident Evil on the Switch? PERFECT!

I've been playing the campaign in coop mode with Claire and it's some of the most intense shit I've ever experienced. The way cooperative gameplay is handled on there is really cool. Claire points out hidden treasure and blinds zombies with a flashlight while I'm panic-spraying bullets in their general direction. The game switches characters halfway through an episode, which is where she gets to spot zombies through doors and walls, warning me before I blindly run into them. I'm still shitting myself. If you're constipated, why not solve it the natural way with Resident Evil Revelations 2?

*poop noises*

I'm having even more fun with the Raid Mode, which combines some of my favourite stuff from Mass Effect multiplayer, Warframe and amazingly awful games like House of the Dead. You level up characters and unlock new skills much like in ME3 multiplayer, you get to mod weapons with elemental ammo, reduced recoil, faster rate of fire etc. like in Warframe and there's this insane cheesiness to it with god-awful techno music and poorly-animated zombies flopping through windows like in those old arcade style coop zombie shooters. I fucking love this shit!

My only problem lies with the game's motion controls. One the one hand, they're super immersive and I might actually like them even better than mouse + keyboard. There's just something about aiming a joy con and pulling the trigger to shoot. And with a bit of practice you'll be lining up headshots like crazy. Problem is, I tend to spaz out a lot and jerk the joy con around like an idiot, causing the gyroscope to lose its center, resulting in an annoying drift effect. Claire is perfectly still, because she hates wasting calories, so she is stupidly deadly with motion controls, but I'm just too twitchy to really make them work. I wish there was a sensor bar to help me aim when I panic. I still can't force myself to get that proper trigger discipline, but it's an insanely fun gameplay experience in the moments where I can force myself to stay still enough. And then...

I didn't play the first Xenoblade Chronicles. Apparently it was the greatest JRPG of its time and everyone loved it, but it just didn't appeal to me all that much. The 3DS version looked tempting, but eeeeh... I'm good, thank you. Then I saw the trailer to this one when browsing the shop and... whoa! o_O

The visuals! The landscapes! The battles! The music! A guy with an eyepatch! The download finished a few moments ago and I can't wait to give this a go. While I was at it, I've also gone and grabbed Gear Club Unlimited. Yeeeees, it's a glorified mobile game, it's no Gran Tourismo or Forza, but I just want to race some real cars on the go. Mario Karts are great and all, but you can't eat spaghetti every day.

It looks okay. I'll give it a chance and not expect too much.

I haven't been much of a console gamer since the death of the Dreamcast. And I was so bored with the Switch, I was already starting to wrap it for somebody else for Christmas. Now I can't put it down. Weirdly enough, I'm spending most of my time playing games full of Pokémon and zombies and other shit I never liked and I'm having stupid amounts of fun. And now that I no longer have to spend my weekends reviewing shit, I get to play as much as I want. Whee!