Finally going to the bathroom pays off!
I cancelled it, actually, because my local Target has them in stock. Sarah is going to buy one right now.
Going to the bathroom: still useless.
This may be one of my favorite exchanges on Qt3.
Vesper
1593
I drove past Target at 7:15. There were five dudes out front. Went and got my DD coffee and drove past again. It looked like a couple red sweatshirts were out there, maybe handing out tickets? I dunno? I decided that I didn’t want to wait outside so I went home and thought I’d come back after they’re open. If they have any, I’ll probably buy it, but if not, I’ll wait. I really shouldn’t spend the money was what I thought to myself…
Went back about 8:45 on my way to work. Walked to electronics and found six gray units and more importantly, two Collector’s Edition Legend of Zeldas. My son is a massive fan of the series so that sold me. If the CE hadn’t been there, I think I would have waited for a red/blue one to appear for me. Looking forward to trying it tonight!
Kyrios
1595
Yeah, I ordered one online this morning when it popped up in stock, but it looks like the better play would have just been “take a morning break and hit the local Target of my choice”. Oh well, it’s not like one weekend is going to kill me… and it looks like I should still have it in time for PAX next week.
Sarah went over to Target at 9. She was third in line and got the gray one, regular zelda and a pro controller. Pretty easy. I did all that searching and worrying over nothing. BAH
I wasn’t going to get to worried. I have Zelda coming from Amazon for Wii U and that ultimately is what mattered today for my sons (and for me…) as they love the games and the reviews are so glowing. That said, I’m pretty happy that it was easy to get one this morning. Target got more than I expected. I wonder what the Wal-Marts were like last night? I know Best Buy locally had a line for the midnight opening. One dude at Target this morning was saying he had ordered online and had to wait til next week for the order and was kinda bummed he hadn’t just waited to see what was in stock.
Certainly you can’t blame Nintendo for undershipping the console!
[quote=“DaveLong, post:1597, topic:126573, full:true”]Certainly you can’t blame Nintendo for undershipping the console!
[/quote]
That’s true. I had to pick Sarah up from work around 4:30 yesterday and there was a girl sitting out in front of the GameStop we drive by. I can’t imagine waking up after that and seeing I could walk into the Target across the street and buy it at 8 AM. I think the Wii launch has forever burned into people’s minds that Nintendo products are hard to find.
Of course, some of their Amiibos and stuff don’t help that myth.
In that PC thread, @wumpus was saying how he’ll eat all his clothes if the Switch outsells the Wii. It won’t, but I suspect there are going to be a lot of people who buy more than one of these systems for a single household because of the portability. That certainly wasn’t true of Wii U.
The Switch is rather small (not in a bad way) and seems very portable.
Man, I’m wicked curious about it. I have to wait til I get off work at 4:30 to check it out, but I haven’t seen one in person. Since I only have the PS4 now, I have plenty of space open on the TV/sound system. I don’t suppose there’s optical…
CraigM
1601
Guys I don’t have enough gaming time as is, just bought a house so buying a console is out of the picture, but Zelda is one of my 5 favorite series.
QUIT MAKING ME WANT ONE ;)
I hope it’s awesome. Maybe in a year or so. I was counting on supply shortages making it easy to ignore. Does this mean that Nintendo ramped production properly, or they are not as in demand, I wonder…
I run the optical to my soundbar/surround from my TV so every HDMI device outputs through that, but there is no optical out on the dock.
HDMI cable is very short. You may need one of those…
I don’t think people really ever think about Target
I have a cat who eats HDMI cables so I usually order in bulk from monoprice, so thankfully I should be set.
I just got bummed realizing the Switch with dock is probably too tall for my TV stand. Which isn’t going to stop me from swinging by Target at lunch, of course.
I think they’ll all be gone by the end of today. They did say they had ramped up production based on the pre-orders. It’s the end of Nintendo’s fiscal quarter. They wanted to sell through as much as they could I’m sure.
…and consider also that Target didn’t open at midnight most places so it was a be there at 8AM thing. Most gamers were out picking them up at midnight last night at the electronics/game stores and Wal-Mart.
In terms of performance, it’s immediately clear to the naked eye that the docked Zelda stutters in places where the mobile experience does not - and to confirm this, we manually counted frames by eye based on our camera shots to ensure accuracy in producing the performance test below. It’s really easy to isolate this issue as it occurs frequently in the open world, right from the beginning of the game. In some places, we see the smooth 30fps update while docked drop down to a momentary 20fps - confirming a basic double-buffer v-sync implementation.
What’s curious is that the stutter is fleeting, effectively ruling out GPU rendering as the cause - as the on-screen content doesn’t change.
(Comparison on performance about 7’20" in)
DF is also promising a comparison between Wii U and Switch as soon as they possibly can, whatever that means in practice.
Wendelius
