Long weekend's over and my right forearm is genuinely sore from a video game. Not from a controller cramp, not from mashing buttons for six hours straight (though there was some of that too, if we're being honest about Saturday night). Sore from throwing actual punches in my living room at 11pm while my Switch's Joy-Cons tracked every wild swing.
Nintendo ran the second "Global Testpunch" weekend for ARMS from Friday night through Sunday, a free demo of the boxing-slash-fighting game that's coming out June 16th. I downloaded it Friday around 9, mostly out of curiosity, figuring I'd play a couple rounds and go back to whatever I was actually supposed to be doing (taxes, still, in May, don't ask). Four hours later I was still standing in front of the TV with a Joy-Con in each hand, arms out like I was directing air traffic, absolutely gassed.
The pitch is simple: you've got these characters with literal spring-loaded arms, you punch by thrusting the controllers forward, you curve your punches by twisting your wrists, you block by holding both controllers up. It sounds like a gimmick because it sort of is one, the same way Wii Sports Boxing was a gimmick back in 2006. But it took maybe half an hour before my brain stopped thinking "I am waving plastic rectangles around" and started thinking "I need to dodge left, RIGHT NOW." There's a real fighting game under the motion stuff, with dashes and grabs and character-specific arm types you can swap in and out.
Here's my actual complaint, and it's not a small one: after about ninety minutes my left Joy-Con started drifting during the throwing motion, registering punches I hadn't started yet. I recalibrated it twice through the system menu and it settled down for a while, then did it again Sunday afternoon. Maybe mine's a dud, I don't know, but I've seen a couple people mention the same thing in passing online, so I don't think it's just me. For a $79.99 pair of controllers that's the whole interface, that's not nothing.
I ended up preferring the Pro Controller mode over motion, which feels like admitting defeat but whatever, it's true. Button ARMS is faster and more precise and my shoulders don't hurt afterward. Motion ARMS is more fun to watch and more fun to do once, at a party, with people laughing at you. Both exist in the same game, which I think is actually the smart call on Nintendo's part rather than forcing everyone into gimmick mode. My partner, who has approximately zero interest in games most of the time, played four rounds as the mechanic-looking one (Ninjara, I think) purely with motion controls and got weirdly competitive about it, which tells you something about who this thing is actually built for.
Small tangent because I can't help it: I also spent part of Saturday finally patching the Windows machine I use for photo editing, because work had been sending increasingly stern emails about the ransomware thing going around this month and I'd been putting it off the way you put off flossing. Took eleven minutes. Should've done it two weeks ago. That's the whole tangent, I just think it's funny how a global cybersecurity event's lasting effect on me personally was "reminded to click the update button."
Back to the actual point. ARMS launches June 16th at $59.99, and if the demo weekend is any indication it's going to sell a lot of copies to people who own exactly one other Switch game (guilty). The Switch itself has been sold out at every store near me since basically launch day in March, which is its own ongoing annoyance if you're trying to buy one as a gift instead of just already having one like I got lucky and did. My eShop download of the demo disappears at some point this week, I assume, going by how the first Testpunch weekend worked. I'm going to squeeze in a few more rounds tonight before it's gone, ice pack for my wrist standing by.
Also, whoever wrote the announcer voice lines for this demo needs to be stopped. "SUPER ARMS!" I know. I heard you. You said it fourteen times in the last minute.