My Nintendo Switch Review (2022) Can’t Make Me Sad This Time
Posted on December 14, 2022 by Aywren
So the past few years, my Nintendo Switch Review in 2020 and 2021 made me a little sad. This was because when I saw the statistics and numbers around how little I actually played those years, or how few games in my library I played, I knew I needed to start the following year playing my Switch more.
But this year, there are no graphs or statistics like – total hours played or how many games played. Well, actually, I can see that I played 29 games last year (I’ll talk about that more later). But I have no clue exactly how many hours I sunk into those that I played “a little while”. It’s about as helpful as the statistics on the Switch friend list – which is not very.
I mean, I can see which three games I put the most time into.
I can see what genres of games I played the most.
I can also see that I’ve played Animal Crossing consistently for 3 years.
But that’s really all the helpful stats I got from it. Don’t get me wrong. That’s pretty neat. Still, I know that I really should be playing the system and my backlog for that system more.
A few years back, I decided to use Deku Deals as my tool for keeping up with my Switch backlog. I’m still using that today as a way to track sales and what games I own. I can see on the screenshot from February 2020 that I owned 44 games then. As of today, I own 111 games. So that’s quite a backlog inflation, sadly.
Keep Away from Give Away
I will say that part of this backlog inflation was due to a giveaway that No Gravity Games had back in last December - you could snag 18 games for free over several days last year. They’re doing a similar giveaway this year, too, it seems.
I sat down with each and every one of the games, and I’m sad to say, all of them were shovelware. Either the quality of the game was just downright bad, the controls were difficult or impossible (a Switch game should NOT have a mouse pointer that you control with joysticks – seriously!), or the ones that were somewhat decent had poor gameplay or were frustratingly difficult.
Please do yourself a favor and stay away from these free “games.”
I couldn’t find a redeeming game in the lot. So, after trying out each and every one of them, I put them on my abandoned list. Hence, why I know I played many more games this year than last. Even discounting those 18 games, I still played 11 legit Switch games last year, which is more than the previous years by far.
Backlog Speculation
To get my actual backlog number, you do have to subtract the DLC – which is mixed in. So once that’s all done, I only own about 88 games of note on the Switch. That puts me at about 53% of my Switch backlog played, which could be better, and I want it to be. I’ve picked up a lot of fantastic games for the system this year – and even picked up a bigger SD card as well.
I say this every year, I know. Not to mention there’s just so many great games that have dropped this year and will be coming next year that I’m really interested in. I’m trying to find a way to approach this so that I’m having fun with my games while still making progress, but not allowing statistics to overwhelm me.
This Switch year in review must have realized that showing us all the exact numbers was maybe not a good thing. So while this report can’t make me sad this year, my lack of gaming performance is still on my mind. Nice try, Nintendo!