Silver Falcon posted:

TotK is indeed Very Good and the perfect game to spend a voucher on. For your other voucher, nab Mario Odyssey, unless for some reason you have a burning hatred of Mario games. If you ever liked Mario games at all, you will love Odyssey.

Popoto posted:

I wanted to ask: are there any best practices when it comes to battery usage for the console and the controllers? Keep them charging all the time when not using?

quote:

Tl;dr: DO charge your Switch early and often. DO NOT drain the battery to 0% every time. DO NOT leave your Switch in a hot car for hours.

I have seen a lot of discussion and some misinformation about how to take care of the batteries in your Nintendo Switch. Let's have a brief discussion. I'll be around in the comments for some Q&A, too.

First, if you don't remember anything else from this long block of text, remember just this: charge your Switch early and often. Here's why.

The Switch (and all of its various controllers) has a Lithium Ion battery (LIB). Think of the LIB as a box with a spring inside of it. The spring wants to push up--that's the stored charge. When you charge the battery, the energy from the wall squishes the spring down, and when it's at 100% charge, the sprinig is compressed all the way down to the bottom of its box. Then, when you undock the Switch and start playing on the go, the spring starts pushing up, slowly uncoiling. When the battery reaches 50% charged, the spring is stretched out, halfway to the top. And, of course, at 0%, the spring is completely stretched out, and it's at the very top of the box. It has no more energy to give. Plugging it back in pushes the spring back down toward the bottom of its box.

Over time, as the LIB is pushed down and stretched out again and again, it will lose some of its springy-ness. On day 1 with your Switch, you'll get about 2-6 hours of play time from your 100% charged battery. But after six months, you can expect that your battery will have a bit less range, maybe 2-5.5 hours or so. How much range you lose depends on how you've taken care of the "springs" inside the LIB. More stretching, and expecially more extreme stretching, will wear it out faster.

Here's the thing about Lithium-Ion Batteries. When they fall below 50%, and get charged up, that causes a bit more wear than charging from, say, 75% back up to 100% again. And leaving the spring stretched out before charging it up again does more damage, too. Try to stop the spring from stretching way out whenever you can--that will help keep the LIB happy for longer. Ideally, you'll keep the battery above 60% at all times, and if it falls below that, you should charge it as soon as you can. There is NO "memory effect" or other reason to intentionally drop the battery down to 0% before charging. Obviously, there will be times that you want to get the full range out of the battery--and that's of course all good. When you're on a long trip and don’t have access to any charger for the whole day, then you'll stretch the battery as far as it can go.

But think about the times that you'll be at home, playing Switch in handheld mode on the couch or in bed. It'll be tempting to just stretch the battery down to 10% or even 0%, and then put the Switch down without charging. That's not good for your battery. You should plug it in ASAP after taking the battery down.

One more piece of advice: keep your battery healthy by avoiding extremely hot or extremely cold temperatures. Leaving your Switch for hours in a car parked in direct sunlight is bad news for the battery. Some third-party cases will trap heat inside the Switch while it charges--definitely not a good idea--so consider taking off any hot (e.g. leather) cases while charging. Cold temps can happen if you head out on a camping adventure, or if you go ice fishing. Just be careful not to let your Switch get too cold at times like that.

Finally, some mythbusting. There's no need to "train" your battery by charging it to 100% before first use. (There's nothing wrong with charging it up before playing, except your hype levels may be impossible to contain.) Again, there's no reason to routinely run your battery down to 0% before charging it to 100%. (This is a very common myth that is extremely damaging to LIB!) And your battery won't last forever; it will eventually need to be replaced. Nintendo will offer a service for this, but you want to keep your battery happy to keep your Switch running great for years to come.

EDIT2: Mythbusting on "overcharging" and keeping the Switch docked at 100%: The Switch will not overcharge the battery. It is designed for long play sessions while docked, in TV Mode, with the battery at 100%. This is OK for the battery, even though it is technically true that you can maximize lifespan by keeping the battery charged lower than 100%. But because the Switch is designed for Dock use, you should plan to just leave your Switch plugged in overnight, or for days, while at 100%. The risk of parasitic load causing extra wear is real, but for most players, that is an unavoidable and acceptable risk to enable uninterrupted TV Mode play. Source: http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/charging_lithium_ion_batteries

EDIT: More info and source for this advice: http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries

hatty posted:

They’re pretty easy to swap unlike most phones

WaltherFeng posted:

Thunder Bear posted:

A similar conversation happened a few pages back and the general consensus for "most optimal two games" was TOTK and Mario Kart, which I back 100%. You can't go wrong.

History Comes Inside! posted:

I also hate the depths, running around in the dark is not my idea of fun and I go through seeds like a motherfucker.

Even dropping into them sucks sometimes because the walls of the chasm are lined with angry glowy poo poo and sometimes that’s also under you and so you’re completely disoriented with no idea how high up you might be and which direction you need to glide in to avoid landing in the angry glowy poo poo.

ImpAtom posted:

Attach your seeds to something you can ride around.

Read After Burning posted:

Hello friends, has anyone played A Space for the Unbound (on Switch or otherwise)? I'm a couple of hours away from pulling the trigger on it, but was curious to hear thoughts!

Morpheus posted:

This took me an embarrassingly long time to do. Every time I booted up the game, I would think "I really should just go get that stuff" and then make my way...about halfway there before getting sidetracked by something new.

Mega64 posted:

You go to the top-right corner in the e-shop in most menus to reach your profile, which will show your wishlist. Nintendo will send e-mails about sales, but dunno how reliable it is for showing you every sale that happens on your wishlist.

You may want to opt with dekudeals.com instead.

Twerk from Home posted:

Already does, leaks have all been pointing towards 2020-era Nvidia Ampere GPU tech on cheap, outdated Samsung 8nm.

DEEP STATE PLOT posted:

i got dkr with my n64 and with how new 3d gaming still was, exploring the hub world in that game felt fuckin magical

Large Testicles posted:

FFXI is the loving worst about that. open a random chest in the first 3 hours of the game? NO YOU DIPSHIT, now you'll miss out on one of the endgame items

Non Compos Mentis posted:

it'd be nice if nintendo could do something about the amount of weird, cheaply made games on the eshop but i suppose that is just something you have to deal with on any game shopfront now

Mister Facetious posted:

Mario Kart Tour dlc tracks aside, I think it's a contender for the best looking game Nintendo's ever made.

Mister Facetious posted:

Back when this thread started (or was there one before it? I can't remember anymore), the was some article where indie devs were saying that their games would sell twice as often on the Switch as the PSN store.

Pinterest Mom posted:

Are you aware of numbers that have been released for Switch vs PS split for more recently-released indie games?

Pinterest Mom posted:

Ty! It's really hard to find any kind of numbers like this, I appreciate you sharing what you can.

Given the 3:1 ratio from Switch/Steam, I'm not sure you're saying something different from the other poster? "Publishing an indie game on Switch" is less of a golden ticket than it was in 2018, sure, but it sounds like the Switch might still be the best relative platform compared to the others.