So, the Switch seems to be doing well at getting Japanese publisher support and I’ll probably wind up owning one in the next few months – especially with Tecmo slipping Fatal Frame references into Nights of Azure 2. 

But. I still have a bit over a dozen Wii games that are making me keep the WiiU hooked up, so I should probably play them if I want to get that HDMI port on the TV freed up. 

So far:

Nights: Journey of Dreams, the sequel to one of my favorite Saturn games and possibly one of the biggest disappointments. When I bought it in 2009, I put it in, played until I got to the first boss, got really frustrated and took it out again. 

This time round, I put in the disc, played for about 45 minutes until I got to the first boss, got really frustrated… wait, there’s a pattern here. It’s a pattern that says that this one is being retired from the backlog in disappointment. 

Madworld didn’t even last 15 minutes before suffering the same fate. It’s (a) a little too violent for me (you would think the guy on the cover with the chainsaw hand would have been a clue) and (b) the music was, err, painful is a good word for it. 

Also (c) annoying motion controls, but I knew I’d be hitting some of those so they don’t really apply solely to Madworld. 

One game that IS staying on the backlog, despite the motion controls, is Cursed Mountain. I love me a good bleak horror game, and CM hits all the high notes for my tastes. I started it up to see if it was going to continue the disappointing pattern I was seeing with Wii games, and then played it until I was forced to stop because the Wiimote audio was keeping my wife up and couldn’t be piped to headphones. I’m only about a third through but for now it is getting very high marks from me. 

After that, I put another three hours into Metroid: Other M, which I am happy to report seems to have a much more traditional control scheme. This is the first Metroid game I’ve played for more than about 10 minutes, so really all I know about the series going in was that the hot chick in the skin-tight blue suit was not, in fact, named “Metroid”. 

Other M seems tailor-made for me, because it opens with a huge info dump on Samus’s personal history and it seems like it is going to have a bunch more flashbacks coming to catch me up on the character.  I put about three hours into it, and my only real complaint is that it doesn’t really make it clear where I should be going next at any given time and the map is hard to follow.  

Also I had a hell of a time until I realized that your beam cannon could be charged while you were running. That’s not a game design issue, though, that’s just my not getting it. 

No idea what’s next after those. For now I just need to keep fighting off hungry ghosts and alien bugs, respectively.