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Last week my friend Grace finally managed to catch one of those super rare restocks of the switch. For those hoping to do the same at some point, you might follow both Cheap Ass Gamer and Wario 64 as they both pretty regularly announce restocks. However immediately after being excited about finally getting a switch, Grace mentioned that she would be bugging me for a list of games that I recommend. As such I en-devoured to attempt to compile such a list over the weekend, and said that I would be posting it on Monday.

I have to say… I didn’t expect my list to be quite so boring. Most of these games are pretty obvious picks, but as I said I would do this thing I am going to do this thing. Here is a list of some of my favorite Nintendo Switch games.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

This is the game that sold me a switch, full stop. I get that to some it is highly overrated, but it is a deep and immersive experience and if you have never played it I highly suggest doing so. Sure I personally have some issues with the fact that weapons break and some other things like that, however I deeply love this game.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

Sure this game is essentially the same game released on the WiiU. However it is Mario Kart in your hands and playable from bed, and there is never going to be a time when this is not worth purchasing. Mario Kart will always be one of the more enjoyable co-op experiences as well.

Diablo 3 Eternal Collection

If you have read this blog for any period of time you will know that I love Diablo 3. This is Diablo 3 that I can play from bed, and that is reason enough to want it. The only real complaints that I have are that this lives on a disconnected island from my PC account, and if I could somehow PLAY my PC characters on it… I would be so much more into this title. I don’t run a seasonal character up each season, but I absolutely have in the past and it was a joy to do so.

Lumines Remastered

The PSP handheld will always hold a special place in my heart, and not just because it was easily exploitable and you could run emulators on it. I remember spending hours upon hours playing Lumines and as a result was super pumped when I saw this game available on the Switch. I still spend a non-zero amount of time hanging out in bed and playing this to chill out after a long day.

Baba Is You

Another great chill out from bed game is Baba Is You. I own this on multiple platforms at this point, but I have to say the system that it is best suited for is the Switch because it allows you to tackle the puzzles on your own terms wherever you happen to be at. If I remember it is also extremely cheap.

Nintendo Switch Online

I spend an excessive amount of time playing Super Nintendo games on the Switch through the apps that become available one you have a Nintendo Switch Online account. This is roughly $20 a year and is money extremely well spent as it gives you a SNES and NES app with releases coming out pretty regularly as well as access to exclusives like Tetris 99. Additionally if you create a Japanese game shop account you can have access to any Japanese exclusive releases as you only need one account per switch with an online account.

Sonic Mania

This game is essentially… what if you could return to the greatest era for Sonic the Hedgehog and get more of it. This game essentially extends the original three games (plus Knuckles) and gives you more courses designed with the same concepts. Really good stuff and well worth playing, and the Switch is a device well suited for it.

Super Mario Odyssey

Did you like Super Mario 64 and Mario Sunshine? Gratz then you have a great new adventure ahead of you. I don’t love Cappy, because it seems like yet another goofy gimmick mechanic that Nintendo seems to love to put into games. However the gameplay is solid and at some point I might actually beat it!

Pokemon Sword and Shield

It’s a main line Pokemon game for the Nintendo Switch, and generally speaking I shouldn’t need to say more. However this is probably my favorite Pokemon game, because it actually grows the series. I wish the entire thing were open world rather than just one zone of it. It is an awful lot of fun, and the female character option is freaking adorable.

The Touryst

This is another great, hanging out in bed and playing game. The Touryst is a visual puzzle platformer for lack of a better term, and it is freaking gorgeous and runs insanely smoothly on the Switch hardware. The idea is that you are on a vacation to an archipelago, and each island has some puzzle to unlock which in turn gives you access to more islands.

Hollow Knight

It is Hollow Knight that you can play from bed. That should be all of the selling point that you need. You are going to see a running theme here for me. A lot of these are games that I enjoy, but also want to hang out and play them from bed. Switch is very much a console that I mostly play while doing that.

Trials of Mana

Seiken Densetsu 3 was one of those games that I knew about back in the 16 bit era but was never able to play because of the lack of localization. I tried playing a fan patch, but it was buggy and the game was too advanced for most emulators at the time. Once I entered the 2000s I mostly put away any thoughts about the game and moved on with my life until it released as part of a Secret of Mana collection on the console. However at the same time they announced we were getting this fully re-imagined version of the game and I decided to wait. This is exceptionally fun, and like so many titles on the list it has a Demo that you can download and play first.

The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening

I never played the original on the gameboy, and when I heard about this I was extremely excited. The way that this game has been remastered is delightful, and if you were ever a fan of the classic era of Zelda then this is definitely worth checking out.

Streets of Rage 4

Streets of Rage as a franchise is really important to me, for weird reasons. I was the kid that had a Super Nintendo and my best friend had a Genesis, and SoR was the game that we spent most of our time playing together. When I also got a Genesis I ended up playing the hell out of the later two games as well. This game is a loving recreation of that era of Beat Em Ups, with a gorgeous hand drawn art style. Probably one of my favorite games out this year.

Animal Crossing New Horizons

You can’t make a Nintendo Switch list without including ACNH, because it is effectively a cultural phenomena. This was my first real AC game, and I played the shit out of it for the first few weeks. I have not logged in for a really long time, but if Grace were to pick it up it would be reason enough to do so. The only problem with the game is that it is extremely time consuming, especially playing it how I chose to do so… and not partaking of time skipping. I might back away from that so that I could feel less beholden to the 24 hour clock.

Spyro Reignited Trilogy

I’ve not spent anywhere near enough time with this, but I am extremely excited to have the entire Spyro Trilogy sitting in my hands. It plays more or less like I remember the original, which is both a good and a bad thing. The movement is a little kludgy, but so was the PlayStation era game. I would have rather they did with the thing that Ratchet and Clank did, and present the old story with updated gameplay.

Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition

I have never played a Xenoblade game prior to this, and for right this moment this is my main squeeze as far as Switch games go. This very much plays like a single player MMORPG, in that the way that the questing and such are set up feels like MMO style questing. I am enjoying myself so far, but i can’t say I have made it terribly far into the game itself. The world seems interesting and the game is extremely pretty. I had picked up Xenoblade 2 but never got around to playing it, and now I am sorta thankful given that I can play the games in sequence.

What Did I Miss?

So what games did I miss from the list that you would have suggested? I didn’t suggest Bloodstained because the Switch port is not good. I didn’t suggest Smash Bros, because I never got into that and I am not part of that broader fandom. Super Mario Maker 2 is another good choice because it is in theory an infinite number of Mario games, but I have not really spent anywhere near as much time as I would have liked to with it.

I have a lot of games on my switch that I didn’t talk about, but I am curious what games you think I should have included. Drop me a line below and let me know.

For the last few days I have been painstakingly attempting to back data up off of a drive that has been slowly going south. I have no clue how and when it started failing, but I was first made aware of this fact with a blue screen of death complaining about storage issues. The G Drive was a 3 TB mechanical drive where I stored all of those windows folders like My Documents, Downloads and Videos to try and keep them off of the very small SSD boot drive. However since it was filling up, I had started migrating a lot of my game installs to either the 1 TB m.2 drive or the other 4 TB mechanical I had in the system.

I have sitting here a brand new 5 TB mechanical that I was going to put in another system as well as 8 TB of network attached storage that I was just about to use for replacing my aging and filling 4 TB system. So I got the 8 TB online and started furiously trying to back everything up that I could off of my G Drive. I also attempted to relocated the various windows systems over to my F Drive, which still had ample space. However it appears that the G Drive was further gone than I realized, and now I am going to pay the price of my laziness.

I have a complicated method for storing my game screenshots. Namely I have capture software dump everything into a single directory, and then every so often I sort through that directory and file them away more permanently on the network storage. However with everything going on… I had not done this filing away step in a really long time. The above screenshot is what my captures directory now looks like. Every image that is showing up with that default icon… is unreadable and effectively lost forever. There doesn’t seem to be much of a rhyme or reason as to what is lost.

What concerns me more greatly than some screenshots that I had yet to file away however is that my G Drive as also the home of my emulation archives. If the images are any evidence… I am going to have a large number of corrupted files. All of my “favorites” are currently sitting on my RG350, however I had two different complete MAME sets for different versions and not that it cannot be acquired again, but it is always a pain in the ass to do so. In reality there is very little of what I store on my drives that cannot be reacquired again… but it is the time lost that I mourn.

Yesterday during the day and in the middle of trying to recover more files… I got another blue screen of death and this time when the system booted back up the drive was no longer available. So this weekend is going to be me swapping drives, finishing the process of swapping network storage… and then trying to use my SATA to USB drive recovery set up to pull more data from the dead drive. I got quite a bit of the things that mattered to me off, but whether or not they REALLY copied is suspect at this point.

The long story short… if you care about it store it in multiple places. Which is making me realize that I might need to research some proper cloud storage options for the huge volume of raw recorded audio that I have from the various podcast projects.

I was not in the best head space yesterday and to be honest I still am not. I don’t think anyone really is right now, but that is okay. Right now I have all sorts of minor issues going on, including the hard drive that I keep a lot of stuff on attempting to die on me. However I decided to make a post this morning because I saw something that actually helped me out a bit.

Y'all. I am FLUMMOXED. ABSOLUTELY FLUMMOXED. I had a goal of $500 this morning, thinking folks would be worn out after a hard month of fundraising. Y'all proved me so wrong today and I am humbled, grateful, thankful for everyone. $142,781 raised in 10.5 hours #BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/RWMi1lLNGf

— Selise, the Deathbane (@cypheroftyr) June 3, 2020

I am not even sure at what point I tuned in to the stream of @CypherofTyr but I do know that the original intent of the stream was to raise $500 for The Bail Project. When I joined the stream was somewhere between $10k raised and $20k raised, and throughout the afternoon I kept returning from meetings to watch the numbers just keep jumping. This became my afternoon activity of tuning in periodically to see where the stream was at. As afternoon turned into evening, things just started snowballing and over the course of a marathon 10.5 hour long stream she raised $142,781 dollars for The Bail Project.

Y'all, in 6 hours we raised $15,000 for @bailproject. I can't believe it. I kept raising the goal, folks kept coming through. I maybe cried a little, or that was just sweat from the celebratory champagne. We sent love over to @Sushiemonster. 💖 https://t.co/46XHgEBHT0

— Brian Gray (@urbanbohemian) June 3, 2020

It didn’t stop there however, as the fuse on Urban Bohemian’s stream was lit with the flamethrower that was everyone piling in after Cypher’s stream concluded. I had popped over ahead of the official end of the stream and was entertained as we watched the numbers start ticking upwards again. I admit that I didn’t stick around until the very end, but I stayed for a few hours and watched the numbers climb past $10k which triggered the inclusion of an amazing Unicorn Kigurumi. All total this stream raised an additional $15,305 for The Bail Project.

Today I’m streaming for @bailproject I’m doing a big angler/mermaid costume that we’ve been working on for a week or so together. Let’s try to make some art.
📹LIVE on https://t.co/HZJYyuMPUn

— SushieMonster (@Sushiemonster) June 2, 2020

It kept going from there with SushieMonster, but by that point I had long been claimed by sleep. I didn’t get to sleep on Monday night until somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 am, and was back up at 5:30 am so I was running on fumes at this point. This third stream however continued again to raise another $6000.69 for The Bail Project. I think the coolest part about all of it, is that it introduced me to Tiltify, which I apparently was completely in the dark about. It seems to make it very easy for you to rally a team of streaming fundraisers around a specific cause, which is something that I will file away in my brain for possible future usage.

The best part however was to watch this one stream team raise a total of $184,654.59 for The Bail Project. This is still going however as there are a number of additional streamers signed up at part of the team and throughout the course of this article I have been linking to the Tiltify Team page which you can still donate on. You might find yourself asking “What is The Bail Project”, because to be honest it is not an organization I had heard of prior to yesterday. I think it is summed up succinctly with their mission statement.

We believe that paying bail for someone in need is an act of resistance against a system that criminalizes race and poverty and an act of solidarity with local communities and movements for decarceration. Over the next five years, The Bail Project will open dozens of sites in high-need jurisdictions with the goal of paying bail for tens of thousands of low-income Americans, all while collecting stories and data that prove money bail is not necessary to ensure people return to court. We won’t stop until meaningful change is achieved and the presumption of innocence is no longer for sale.

I’ve been around the criminal justice system enough to know that those individuals who are incapable of bonding out, don’t have great outcomes. They are robbed of the critical time needed to prepare their case, and god forbid if things don’t go well, get their affairs in order. If someone cannot bond out, they are greatly limited in the amount of time and types of interactions that they can have with not only legal counsel but their own family. It is a broad cause, but one that helps individuals from getting stuck in a system that is so insurmountably stacked against them.

As I said before I have been dropping links to Cypher’s Nat 20s stream team on Tiltify throughout this post. I highly suggest that not only do you tune in to some of the streamers participating, but that if you are in a place where you can do it you donate some money to this excellent cause.