Nintendo Games
One area where Nintendo has unquestionably delivered the goods is with its own first-party software. 1-2 Switch may be a throwaway minigame collection, but Snipperclips is a fun co-op puzzler. And then there’s Breath of the Wild, which is at worst one of the best games of this generation, and at best one of the greatest games of all time.
Breath of the Wild is the type of killer app launch title I’d argue the industry hasn’t seen in more than a decade. The GameCube launch window title Super Smash Brothers Melee and the original Xbox launch game Halo: Combat Evolved are probably the only launch and launch-ish games from this century that even belong in the same conversation. And you’d have to go back another half-decade to the Nintendo 64’s launching with Super Mario 64 to find another comparable title. There will never be full agreement on any ranking of launch games, of course, but Metacritic averages provide the closest thing to definitive evidence of this reality.
The only problem is that while Zelda is enormous and magical, all games eventually come to an end. When this one does, it’ll be a long wait for its story DLC coming this holiday and Super Mario Odyssey, also planned for a fall release. Arms feels like it will be fun in the meantime, but how long will that keep owners occupied? Mario Kart 8: Deluxe and Splatoon 2 should be entertaining. The former, however, is an outright port, albeit with a heavily requested and absolutely enjoyable new mode. And the latter feels it will be more akin to glorified DLC than a full-blown sequel.
Switch owners — myself included — had better hope Arms is even better than my limited demo time led me to believe; that Super Mario Odyssey makes it out this year as planned; and that I’m wrong about Mario Kart and Splatoon and they both offer more new thrills than they seem to on the surface. Failing all of that, the wait for that Breath of the Wild story DLC is going to be excruciating. But hey, at least Nintendo has already made playing Zelda more, uh, “pleasant.”
