#SwitchGameADay

For a while now, I’ve been playing a different Nintendo Switch game every day, sharing a video clip on Twitter.

In this post I’ll collect together all of the clips, and the answers to the questions I’ve been asked along the way.


Why are you doing this?

Honestly no idea. Because it’s different? I just thought it might be fun.

Is this a lockdown thing?

Maybe? Not intentionally, but I think it’s true that I wouldn’t have kept it up more than a week or two if we weren’t stuck in the house!

What’s it been like? / Did you learn anything from it? / Have you enjoyed it? etc.

Surprisingly, I’ve enjoyed doing it.

I normally get really into a single game, and play only that for weeks until I’m tired of it, and then move onto another. And there were some games in my library that I hadn’t picked up in years.

Doing this broke me out of that cycle. Playing something different every day is a different experience. Like eating at a buffet instead of a regular meal. I enjoyed picking the next day’s game, trying to mix up the genres.

And it’s made me want to go back and revisit a bunch of games I never finished the first time around.

I’ve struggled to describe each game in 140 characters (no-one told the Twitter client on the Switch that tweets can be longer nowadays) but even that was a fun challenge!

Are you going to keep this up forever? / How long are you going to do this for? / Will you ever stop?

I don’t have an unlimited games library!

In theory, I’ve got enough games to keep it up for another few weeks, but I’m running out of steam with the whole thing now.

How do you have so many games? / You must spend a fortune on games! etc.

I got asked this a lot!

I realise I am lucky to be able to have disposable income I can afford to spend on games. But it’s not as expensive as you might think.

For one thing, I’ve been building up my games library over a few years.

And many games I play a lot are free-to-play.
Warface, Fortnite, Warframe, Tetris, Asphalt 9 – there are loads of games you can get without spending a penny.

I’m often given games as gifts at birthdays and Christmas. And one benefit of physical games is you can loan them to friends, so I’ve borrowed several games from friends for a play through.

Even after all of that, it’s true I buy a lot of games. I rely on price-tracking sites like Deku Deals for this. Any time I hear of a game that I like the look of, I add it to my lists on those sites. Then I try and forget about them. And when they go on sale I get an email.

It means that it can be a year or more from when I decide I’d like a game to when I actually get it, but I get a lot of games for just a few quid or less.

My most recent buy was Flat Heroes, (which we’re loving at the moment!), which cost £1.79.
Rive – a twin-stick shooter that I absolutely love, was £1.34.
Astro Bears is a family game we’ve spent ages playing, and was only £0.85

My point is, if you can be patient to not get games at launch, it’s more affordable than you think to build up a big games library. I probably spend more on coffee than I do on games!

And I’m tracking a large enough list of games that there is normally something I want with a deep discount every couple of weeks or so.

All of that is a long way of saying – yes, I have a lot of games, but probably haven’t spent as much as you might think.

Why do you sometimes post screenshots and not videos?

Okay, no-one has actually asked me this, but it annoyed me so I’m going to mention it anyway!

I hadn’t used the share button on the Switch much before, so didn’t realise that not all games let you share video clips. Some games disable it.

From what I’ve read since, some developers do this to save memory. The share button captures the last 30 seconds of whatever you were playing, so the Switch has to reserve however much memory 30 seconds of video takes. Disabling that frees up that memory for use by the game.

Logically, I guess improving game performance is worth it. But for someone trying to capture a video clip every day, the days where I’d get the “video capture disabled” message would make me sad!

Here are the shares…

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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 23rd, 2020 at 12:56 pm and is filed under misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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