The deadline for initial activation is fast approaching: Reminder: You Have Just One Week To Claim Your Nintendo Switch Online Sub With Twitch Prime
The 24th September cut off is for the initial free subscription of three months - after that date, you won’t be able to claim anything from the offer at all. As long as you claim your initial three months by then, though, you’ll still be able to claim your remaining nine months up until 22nd January.
Purchased! 
I evidently don’t know how the Nintendo e-shop is organized, or if their store is personalized. I looked under “New Releases” and it was not there, despite some games released way back in April were. 
I used the search tool to find it.
In related news, I’m usually easily distracted by tech info, so despite being more of a reader than a video watcher, I ended up watching Digital Foundry’s youtube video on tomorrow’s release of “The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening Switch Remake”. I have no idea when I would find time to play it, but now I want it, “quality of life improvements galore”, too. 
What a gorgeous game, I do like what they’ve done.
Think of “new releases” as more “featured games that are mostly newish”
Ars Technica nailed it! This is what The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening reminded me of, but I couldn’t put my finger on!
The visual design speaks for itself in this article’s attached galleries, but it’s also, for the most part, tremendous in motion. Every character, enemy, and piece of terrain shines with an unmistakable mix of plasticky and bouncy rendering effects. As a fully animated world, the results don’t look like frozen, plastic figurines, stop-motion puppets, or even like obnoxiously animated CGI Saturday morning cartoons. At their best, these elements look like a game console rendering a top-to-bottom homage to the Rankin/Bass legacy of Christmas specials, only with the kinds of blended, natural animations that a '60s TV production crew surely dreamed of.
Zelda: Link’s Awakening review: This beach adventure looks 2019, feels 1993
No Nintendo remake has ever combined the beautiful and the familiar like this.
Kudos to the graphics team, who didn’t grow up, and doesn’t love, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, with Burl Ives?!?! 
It has been completely overshadowed by the Link’s Awakening release, but Ni No Kuni just came out for Switch. It’s such a great JRPG from 6 years ago.
I am definitely enjoying Link’s Awakening, but it also makes me appreciate how masterful BotW was. Awakening definitely feels old-school. I adore the dungeon design and how nearly every room is a puzzle. The overworld is sometimes tedious to traverse, the enemies are easy, and the music is hit or miss.
I never played the original; were all these Mario references in it? It is weird to run into Gombas and Pirhana Plants.
I definitely remember Goombas showing up in at least one dungeon.
Oh, I know everyone knows this, but Into the Breach is The. Best.
Both Civ 6 expansions releasing for Switch on November 22… no word about Gathering Storm for iOS though.
Link’s Awakening has a death counter! Boooooooo.
Downloaded the demo for Ori and the Blind Forest, hope to get to it this weekend to give it a look (“If you complete the trial, your save progress will carry across to the full game”). I understand it has an “Easy” difficulty setting that I may be the target audience for 
, that allows for:
During the escape sequences (the equivalent to boss fights in other Metroidvanias), you get checkpoints on easy mode but not on normal or hard. You have to successfully perform the whole escape sequence in one go in higher difficulties.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/387290/discussions/0/1648791520846742405/#c1648791520855652711
Anyone have any thoughts on the difficulty of this one?
Shaun Musgrave is reporting “… what do you even do with a list of sales like that? It’s massive, and there are so many great games in there that you’d have to be rich to buy them all.” Looking at the list, I see that all of the SteamWorld games on Switch are on sale, to include the most recent one, SteamWorld Quest.
One of my personal goals is to finish all the SteamWorld games on Switch …
I’m not often one to complain about pricing, and please note that this complaint comes after I’ve already purchased and played the game rather than merely whining beforehand, but:
I don’t know that Link’s Awakening should be a $60 (US) game. Everything about it is great; it’s a classic Zelda design with a good map and fun dungeons. But it is very quick and very easy. I’ve beaten it at 100% already. Now there is a dungeon maker, which I suppose gives the game legs, but I haven’t been very interested in that aspect of the game.
I don’t know, the game is solid but it probably should have sold at about 2/3 it’s price.
Ori was tough for me, but charming enough that I stuck it out despite being as coordinated as polka dots with plaid. That said, Apple Arcade has me feeling like the bar just jumped really high for a game to earn my attention, and I don’t know that I’d feel bad about having missed Ori, either. Seems like a sensible addition to the canon of superb Metroidvanias, but I haven’t really cared about a Metroidvania since, I guess, Symphony of the Night.
Yeah, SotN being a bit more to the RPG side of things allowed it to stick for me where similar games like Outland eventually faded out. I think I had the full 201% or whatever it was back in the day.
SOtN was a masterpiece that has yet to be even close to matched. There are some good Metroidvanias and there are plenty of bad, but SotN is without peer.
This sounds like my skill level! I’m hoping to enjoy the artistic experience of Ori that is getting such high marks. 
I’m a big believer in difficulty settings, I’ve learned that I won’t have the interest, or time, to invest in a frustrating challenge that exceeds my limited skills.
Games, on the other hand, are the only major artistic medium that routinely requires the audience to prove they’re “good enough” before they can experience the entirety of the work. Plenty of game-makers seem perfectly content completely stopping players from even trying levels 5 through 25 until they’ve finished level 4.
Every game should copy Death Stranding’s “Very Easy Mode”
Not every player wants to suffer through gatekeeping challenges just to see a game.
Well, Ori and the Blind Forest is absolutely gorgeous! The “Prologue” segment was emotionally impacting as well. 
What makes Ori and the Blind Forest so special is its presentation. Unveiling a world which is dark in colour scheme yet much lighter in tone, this game is a candidate for the prettiest 2D platformer of all time. When us grumpy old folk complain that the mainstream of 2D gaming ended a generation or two too early, this game is exactly what we are talking about. Not only is there a dense, borderline obsessive amount of detail to the world, but all this is backed up by extremely fluid animation.
Unfortunately, I fear it is too difficult for me. I got to a stage that I just couldn’t get past. I set the difficulty down to “Easy”, but I believe it was my platforming skills that were lacking, something the difficulty settings couldn’t really help me with. I had played for over an hour, so created a save point and took a break. Unfortunately, when I returned to the demo I didn’t see an option to return to my save point, I suspect that perhaps that’s a function that is available once the full game is unlocked?
I’m left wondering if perhaps I missed a “Metroidvania” ability that I needed to acquire in order to progress, or if it is indeed my lack of skill that defeated my progress? It’s an enchanting game, and I’m tempted to buy the full game, but if I’m honest with myself it’s likely that the demo showed me that it’s a fantastic game that is slightly outside my level of skill, alas. 
From start to finish, Ori and the Blind Forest is a real joy to play. Challenging yet never feeling unfair or discouraging, and almost relaxing to control. The mesmerising art style and musical score are the icing on the cake that makes the player actually care about the protagonist and want to keep playing to the game’s conclusion.
Ori And The Blind Forest: Definitive Edition Review
I do recommend others give the Switch demo a try! I’ve got so many games in my backlog that I think I’ll let this one simmer a bit before I decide whether to buy it and try to persevere past the sections that exceed my skill level.
I was glad to see that the Switch port is excellent, in fact the game director stated that:
Keep in mind that we’ve been working with our engine for a good 10 years now and went through multiple releases and a sequel now. A lot of the optimizations we did for Will of the Wisps ended up in the Blind Forest version for Switch, so that was a nice side-effect.
Another thing people maybe don’t notice immediately is that Ori’s sprites were animated at 30fps on Xbox/PC, but for Switch we were actually able to update the animations to 60fps due to all the optimizations, so technically Ori actually even animates a bit smoother on Switch than on the other platforms
Ori And The Blind Forest “Animates A Bit Smoother” On Nintendo Switch
Cuphead is another beautiful game that I’m the target audience for, artistically, however I can readily see it is outside of my skill level. I was glad to see the indie brought to the Nintendo Switch, where it looks like it has had remarkable success:
Last we checked the game was at 4 million copies, meaning Cuphead managed to move 1 million units in two months’ time, a feat accomplished thanks to the Nintendo Switch port.
Cuphead sells 5 million copies, devs celebrate with 20% discount
In just two years, Cuphead has sold over 5 million copies on all platforms
Anyone still on Fire Emblem?
I am still on first play through, and somehow I have managed to join the “bad guys”. Or so my brother tells me.
30 hours in and I still haven’t got bored. Just want more!
Oh, man…it’s at the top of my backlog. I played an hour or so and lived it but I need to clear other stuff out before I start a new game.