Can 1-2-Switch’s Mosaic Of Minigames Justify Its Price Tag?

Its name almost sounds like the first line in a nursery rhyme, and there’s the same kind of childlike nonsense and glee to some of the minigames within 1-2-Switch. From milking cows to guns at dawn, it’s an exercise in creative controls and getting the most out of the Joy-Con.

The elephant in the room – sadly, there’s no elephant themed minigames – is that this is £40 for a game that many would expect to be bundled in with the Switch. It’s a demo reel for the Joy-Con; a series of short bursts of nonsensical fun, and it doesn’t quite feel like it’s going to be worth the asking price.

Perhaps that’s a little too cynical and with enough games, that price could be justified. Yes, these minigames are brief curios, but there is a clever playfulness to their design and we don’t know how many minigames Nintendo are going to put together in the package. The twist throughout is that instead of looking at the screen, many of the minigames ask you to consider how the Joy-Con reacts in your hand, listen for audio cues, stare directly – and off-puttingly – into the eyes of your rival. It’s Nintendo’s exploration of their hardware, married to the screen-less capers of Johann Sebastian Joust.

The game was introduced during the Nintendo Switch Presentation with a stylised take on a cowboy showdown, and that’s pretty much exactly how Quick Draw plays out. With your Joy-Con held by your side, preferably while you pose like a Spaghetti Western cowboy, you wait for the audio cue to fire, whip the gun hand up and pull the trigger as fast as you can. The quicker gun wins, the slower dies a slow and painful death.

It’s a similar test of timing in Samurai Training, but this one is much more about eyeing up your opponent and second guessing them, like a good old game of slapsies or knuckles. One player holds the Joy-Con above their head, while the other stands waiting for them to swing down, and try to clap with the remote in hand to catch the falling blade. You take it in turns until one player fails to catch the sword and, again, dies a painful death.

There’s no deaths in Copy Dance, unless you’re bad at dancing and think you might die of shame. Here it’s all about one player pulling a pose and the other trying to mimic the motion and the timing as closely as possible. One player leads three times, and then the other leads, with the final score and winner based on your accuracy, timing, and so on.

Ball Count shifts gears to focus in the HD rumble and the sensitivity of the haptic feedback it offers. You have to simply tilt the controller back and forth, feeling the subtle vibrations and the bumps as the balls bounce into the corners. It’s a surprisingly convincing effect, though perhaps not quite as convincing as Nintendo make it sound. For the purposes of this game, though, it’s easy to learn that gentle motions let you get more distinct bumps to count.

Safe Cracking takes that HD rumble and has you turning the dial on a safe, feeling the mechanism inside it clicking in your hand as your search for the ever-so-slightly heavier spring. Agonisingly, you then have to try and hold your hand steady to lock it in before you can hunt for the second and third points in the combination. It’s actually quite a high pressure game, as you race against your opponent to try and find all three before them.

And then there’s the cow milking game. As with all the others, it’s incredibly simple, asking you to squeeze the cows udder by pressing in the two buttons in the Joy-Con’s top rail, and then smoothly move the controller downwards. Do it well enough, and you get more milk out to fill more glasses.

As with all the games, it’s endlessly tempting to turn and look at the screen to see how you’re doing, but it’s such a bizarre game that you can’t help but laugh when you look at your opponent. It was made all the more amusing by the Nintendo helper making borderline Carry On innuendo throughout.

It’s with Milk that any comparisons to WarioWare really come to the fore. Those bundles of minigames were a joy to play, blending the simplest of gameplay mechanics with inventive imagery to make you laugh and smile. 1-2-Switch could easily have been a WarioWare game, and it might get pretty close if there’s a lot more games thrown in than have currently announced – others not available to demo take the total up to eight, include Table Tennis and Eating Contest, which uses the IR sensor to read your lips.

There’s just a stigma, as there was with PlayStation VR Worlds, to having a bundle of short minigames sold as a separate launch title. It might well be that 1-2-Switch is broad enough to justify the asking price, but at the same time Nintendo need to be as aggressive as possible with the Switch. Wii Sports was just that for the Wii, a small collection of minigames ideal for demoing the hardware and making it desirable for people to then want to buy. After the ignominy of the last few years, 1-2-Switch could have been placed as a gateway game to impress and entice with its quirky gameplay and sense of humour.