When we play games, we are constantly aware of how well a game measures up to our standards. In other words, do we enjoy playing games? Of course! Our goal is to have fun. When we write a review, game guide, tips, tricks, or how to our team has spent hours playing the game in question.

Nintendo Switch Games

We use a standard Nintendo Switch to test games. It’s setup on a 42 inch TV. We have between 1 to 5 players. Our players use joycons in the horizontal (single) and vertical (dual) setup. We don’t use pro controllers with our Switch.

Since a Switch is also capable of being played in two modes, we always play games in both handheld mode and attached to a TV. We play the game with as many or little players as possible. Every games is played at least 2 hours, most are played to completion.

PC Games

Whether it’s online, such as Steam games, or locally installed, such as Nancy Drew games we use several PC’s to test games. Our primary gaming PC has a modest setup with a Ryzen 5 1400 core, 12 GB of Ram, AMD Radeon RX 570 4 GB Graphic card, and dual monitors. We have 5 other PC’s with similar specs but with a lesser graphics card.

All our PC’s run on Windows 11 or 10. While there are much more powerful gaming systems for thousands of dollars, for the games we play these PC’s serve us well. We don’t play any first person shooters (FPS) so we don’t need a RTX 3090 or 128GB of ram.

Nintendo DS Games

Lastly, we use a standard Nintendo 2DS to test games. The DS is a handheld gaming console for single players. Multiplayer games for DS require more than one DS.

Game Tests

Several standards are measured while testing games. We gauge how hard or easy the controls are, the learning curve, and the actual game play.

Controls shouldn’t be awkward, such as assigning a commonly used button to the top left. Keeping the jump button assigned consistently throughout minigames is a good thing.

Some games are harder to learn than others. Which is fine as long as a steeper learning curves are rewarded. Out of Space is a good example of a rewarding game once we learned how to play. Chalkdash Carnival in handheld mode, is a bad example. Even after learning how to play… it was still hard.

Giving a game a fair trial is also important to us. We’ve found some games require investing some time to judge the actual game play. Kirby Star Allies is a good example. It doesn’t take much time to learn how to play, but judging the game by the first level isn’t fair. We were blown away by later levels.

Other Factors

While testing games, the graphics, sounds, and navigation are also evaluated. These characteristics of a game are difficult to quantify, but we do our best to assess them.

We assess graphics based on whether they add or detract from the experience. Ditto for the sounds. Yoshi’s Crafted World is incredible use of graphics, and Overcooked sounds are top notch.

We rate navigation of a game based on the menu layout and intuitiveness. Whether a how to or training is included. This is separate from any in game navigation.

Summary

Finally, we appraise a game based on whether or not we’re having fun! That’s our overall assessment. While fun can’t be quantified, we use a rating system with between 1 and 10 stars. We combine all the factors together and average the score to get a final result.

Our rating system is meant to reflect whether a game is worth getting or not. Anything above 5 is worth getting, below it is not. The higher the rating, the more we recommend it.