I almost feel like Nintendo has developed some sort of complex about the industry it fostered, like it’s trying to make amends or be more of a force ‘for good’.
There was Brain Training for improving your bonce, the inclusive and family-centric design of the Wii and Wii Sports, the Wii U so gaming didn’t have to take up the TV, Miitomo for trying to get people to know their friends and family better, Pokemon Go to get people out the house. Now you’ve got the Switch which is purpose-built for getting people playing together, wherever. Their next crazy game or bit of tech will no doubt involve players not looking at a screen at all, or just ditching gaming entirely.
They may be pitching it that way, but I really can’t think of a worse multiplayer experience than two people playing split screen on single Switch with a tiny joycon each, as they showed in that video.
Pretty much. I am interested, and Zelda goes a long push towards wanting one, but still not fully on board.
But a new Metroid Prime game? Day One. I would buy it if it had no other game but a new Metroid Prime, and that is a literal statement. It’s why I bought the GameCube in the day.
See, this was what I thought may have happened, and have speculated the naming was bad before. but it is nice to see some evidence I was correct.
I can’t remember why I picked up a GC specifically, but I remember Metroid Prime being just… wow. Echoes had the same effect on me (that’s my favourite in the trilogy looking back). Corruption was patchy but still brilliant, despite that horrendous Halo-esque intro. Bleurgh.
If I tried to rank how much the Switches features and specifications matter, the size of the dock would be dead last. Not saying it won’t get smaller or more streamlined with revisions, but that will happen with everything. Is it important to you, or are you just making the same observation?
It depends. Even in that video you can see a performance difference between TV output and handheld output (at the very least you can see a lower framerate, and I’m sure the TV will be 1080p while the handheld will be 720p). So if the dock is doing something to help performance out at all we may not see it get that much smaller imo.
I’ve only played each one once so my recollection is fuzzy. I remember Echoes having the best bosses (a feat in itself) and I loved the whole light/dark thing and how that affected your passage through the world. The environments were a puzzle.
Yes! The subterranean theme was a version of Red Soil from Brinstar in Super Metroid. Amazing.
It’s a presence thing as well. Any tech vendor wants their brand on display. They want to balance the size of the dock between not being so large as to be a pain in the ass to put somewhere, vs big enough to be a noticed advertisement for Nintendo being in the house. If it were just a tiny dongle hidden out of sight behind your TV or in your cabinet, none of your visitors would see it and ask what it was.
I hope the handheld screen is 1080p, though I’ll live with it if it’s not. But if the overall performance is different between the docked and portable modes, that really undermines the appeal of the whole thing for me.
If Nintendo wants this thing to sell like crazy, they need to sell cartridges that bundle their classic games. Sort of like the NesRemix, but more like that new mini NES coming next month.
Imagine a cart with all the Casltevanias. Or all the Zeldas. You can play that on the plane with your Switch, which currently you can only do with emulators on a laptop or jail broken tablet with sketchy emulators.
My students were all agog about the release video, and were generally wildly enthusiastic. Then again, collectively they are a bunch that worships at the altar of couch co-op/competitive stuff like Super Smash Brothers and Mario Cart. They’re also Nintendo fans through and through.
The only Nintendo hardware I’ve every owned has been various forms of the GameBoy, from the Advance to the 3DS XL. I haven’t played my 3DS in ages, after I sort of let the latest Fire Emblem slide half way through Birthright. Or was it Conquest? Can’t recall. But that sort of game was the only type I ever played on the DS; tactical turn-based RPG stuff, or Advance Wars type TBS. I liked the form factor and the feel of the DS stuff, and while my phone has a bigger higher res screen, the physical buttons on the DS make gaming on it better by a mile. But I have no interest in the vast majority of titles that Nintendo hardware runs.
So the Switch is of zero interest to me, as cool as it is. And it is, I guess, the death song of the DS, as it’s way too big and complex and expensive to fill that “toss in your briefcase or purse and play it in the waiting room” role it filled before phones took over. I don’t travel much and the types of games I do play are generally not on mobile anyhow, so the portability doesn’t move me, and I loathe couch co-op stuff and don’t even own a console.
But I am intrigued by the idea, and the flexibility, of the Switch. I still think Stusser has it right, though. Android+Google+Nintendo sounds like a winner to me.
We used to do couch coop and LAN parties, then the Internet happened and we no longer needed to lug all that crap around to play a video game. These days when I get together with fellow nerds I’d much rather play a boardgame.
Pretty sure it’s 720p. I doubt they’re going to have a 1080p screen on there. Also, the dock is confirmed to be for the HDMI connection and charging. It’s not enhancing the games.
“The dock is not the main console unit of Nintendo Switch,” a representative tells IGN. “The main unit of Nintendo Switch is the unit that has the LCD screen, which the two Joy-Con controllers can be attached to and detached from. The main function of the Nintendo Switch Dock is to provide an output to the TV, as well as charging and providing power to the system.”
As I noted up above, it’s a home console system you can take with you anywhere you like, not the other way around.
