Nintendo Switch

[Astonished]

Those Professor Layton games' novelty really wore off pretty quickly. I mean, I'd need at least two of those full games on one cartridge for it to be remotely worthwhile to me. But if the Switch lets you download the games onto it rather than having to buy the cartridges, or if they're not doing that yet but plan to later on down the line (fucking geniuses, these people...) then you might be able to take advantage of some of the sales they hold on occasion or the ones they offer via My Nintendo. I got a pretty sweet discount on Mario Kart 8 on the Wii U and got both DLC packs for free using my virtual coins built up from other purchases. I think if you get a 30% discount on any of those games to download, that would be a good thing to take advantage of. Might be a hell of a long time before the ideal sale/discount situation becomes available, though.

Not for me they didn't... absolutely loved them... it was great for puzzle games, the DS. Are you saying then that the Switch is backwardly compatible with older systems? Apologies but all your talk of virtual coins etc is completely foreign to me since I've been so long out of the console/gaming scene... but what you're talking about sounds interesting. I watched a few YouTube videos to look at the games on it, and I gathered from them that you can download games rather than buy the cartridges, but there's some sort regioning system for that... so to get around that, people would buy the cartridges from other countries etc. The one I was looking at with interest, and would probably be my first game if I got one, was called I am Setsuma (or something like that) and the guy reviewing it had to import it from Japan. I don't whether you were asking about downloads as a general question because you don't have one (a switch) yet, or whether you were just talking hypothetically about Layton... so sorry if I answered a question you didn't ask. But thanks for the advice... I now know more than I did before... that there are accounts, coins, and sales etc which would make it much more interesting to have one.

I do love the puzzles, just the replay value is very low because the story is no longer a mystery in the end and you reach the end of the games fairly quickly. I do like the later games' additional content (the one with the pet hamster was particularly charming) but still lacking in enough content to make it worthwhile for one game per cartridge.

So, Nintendo used to do this thing called Club Nintendo, where you'd get points for entering the serial numbers on any game consoles or games you bought, and you could exchange the coins for either downloadable games or merchandise. They suspended that service after a while (which totally pissed me off because I think I had enough points to get at least one more free game and they all went 'poof'.) They didn't even have a replacement 'rewards' system at the ready when they did that. But then they came back with My Nintendo. Here's how it works:

You get a few different categories of coins to use to get virtual rewards. You have coins for Mario Run, or the Mii-based App Miitomo, and then you have more important Silver and Gold coins. Silver coins are easier to obtain and you get less special rewards for them, but you can earn them easily by just logging into the various programs (eShop and the My Nintendo website itself) and you can occasionally get a discount on a cheap game with Silver coins, but more often than not it'll just be for a new background on your 3DS. Now, the Gold coins are only earned by buying downloadable games on the eShop, and those coins are able to be used to get much larger discounts on a wider variety of games, or get discounts or even FREE Downloadable Content for some games. For example, at this time, I could get a 15% discount on Pikmin for the Wii U using my Silver Coins, or a 30% discount on it using my Gold Coins; obviously the better discount is afforded by the Gold coins even though it's for the same game. That's about the best direct comparison of the two, otherwise their different rewards are pretty inconsistent with each other.

But Nintendo does just do random sales every month or so. For instance, right now almost every Kirby game is being discounted and I'm planning on snagging two of them before it's over, so I'll be earning a few gold points (don't have anything worth it to spend on yet, but I do try to check the eShop every week just to see what's on sale or My Nintendo to see if any new games are offering a discount). I don't know whether the Switch has any kind of game downloading capability up and running yet but I know the same Virtual Console that the Wii U has is not currently available and that's the biggest hangup for me. But if it ever does get put up, I'll be perfectly happy if it's run exactly the same way as the current Wii U eShop.