Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]

One of my favorite video essay's on this is "Nintendo - Putting Play First" by Game Makers Toolkit [1]. It goes into when making a game, Nintendo first determines the mechanic they want to focus on; jumping, throwing a hat, shooting paint, etc and finding out how to make it fun, then building and iterating on the idea.

It's how they can keep putting out essentially the same games but are completely different.

1. https://youtu.be/2u6HTG8LuXQ

I saw an interesting analysis years ago about whether or not the most powerful console 'won' in each generation (i.e. whether or not being the most powerful console of your generation leads to success).

Generally speaking, no, it doesn't actually affect things, and in several cases (e.g. the Game Boy, the Wii, and the Switch come to mind) the objectively 'worse' console (from a tech perspective) was more successful by a country mile.

Strongly agreed. When I think of the best Nintendo products the words “fun” and “play” spring to mind.

AAA gaming on the other hand, either resembles sports, shallow short-form media, or Oscar-bait melodrama. Very little fun to be had.

What ever happened to fun and play?

I can't remember where I read this, but I came across someone talking about the fact that these AAA photo realistic games are hugely expensive to make, but if you look at what young people are spending their time playing, they're games like Fornite, Minecraft and Roblox. As soon as I read this, it clicked for me.

I have two teenagers (15 & 17) and this is exactly right. My son plays games all the time and although he's played Elden Ring and GTA and other games of that sort, over the years I would say 80% of his time has been Minecraft and this other 2D game with a platformer vibe whose name I forget that has procedurally generated maps. He's frequently calling me over to his computer to check out his latest architectural creation in Minecraft. I know it's not just him, because he plays multiplayer with his buddies as well, and again, a lot of it is these games with quite frankly primitive graphics. But they're fun!

I'm a huge Nintendo/Mario fan but I've recently been playing through Astro Bot on my PS5 and I must say, when you combine super fun mechanics with amazing graphics and performance, it's quite an experience! But there isn't nearly enough content like this on the non-Nintendo consoles, so point is definitely not lost on me.

I play one game at a time for about a month and then move to the next. When I first played Mario Odyssey on my switch I was over the moon with how much pure fun it was compared to all the good looking and serious RPGs I played in the decade before. I had forgotten games can be this enjoyable. Nowadays I try to do these super fun games in between my souls-like sessions.

Focusing on tech or unoriginal production values (that's photo real! You don't need a great art director, you need a photo..) is appealing to companies because it's predictable vs the creative uncertainty and subjectivity of "fun".

Astro Bot won game of the year because it had amazing graphics and physics and had Mario-tier fun. The team actually made a cryptic shout out to Nintendo at the award ceremony.

Nintendo has great games, but the resolution on TVs, even cheap ones, is outstanding now and it goes to waste using a Switch.

Playing a great game that also uses what the TV has on offer is really the best experience. If we get 4k and ray tracing on Switch I’ll be stoked.

Not just Nintendo. The PlayStation 4 controller had that touchpad in the middle that also clicked in to act as a button. I played a lot of games that used it as a button (usually to open a map, or something) and don't remember a single game that used it as a touchpad.

I think someone at Nintendo has a brother-in-law that owns an IR sensor manufacturer. Only explanation for that feature being in every right joycon.

A lot of that was necessary for Nintendo get away from the "it's a video game console" comparison after the video game market crash. That's why the NES looks like a VCR too.

When you try weird shit you’re bound to have failures. Nintendo has a remarkable success rate with their weird shit, though.

Don't forget Stack-Up! :P

As a mouse mouse. It seems to have an optical sensor on the inside edge (the side that attaches to the console) and the video shows the joy cons zooming around on that edge.

or the upcoming civ 7, or any number of games!

First Wii was able to play Game Cube Games. WiiU was backwards compatible to Wii. All theses consoles used nearly the same chipset anyways.

for what it's worth Nintendo had planned to make the SNES backward compatible and that intention influenced design choices, particularly the very similar CPU.

I know, and you can basically restore full GameCube compatibility on the Wii U via Nintendont. Neither of them let you use the actual physical games from the old system, and needing to perform jailbreak hacks to use them and load ROMs on anyway doesn't count as much as out-of-the-box compatibility.

The New 3DS consoles did have double the RAM and an improved CPU and GPU, so there were quite a few games like Minecraft and the SNES Virtual Console that could only run on the New models.

There are a handful of more New 3DS exclusives than there were DSi exclusives. Both revisions failed to garner enough market for developers to try to target them.

Super Smash Brothers worked very well with the second pad.

IIRC Xenoblade Chronicles and Fire Emblem Warriors were the only ones I really cared about. Lots of people held onto their old hardware; probably wasn't worth excluding them.

The biggest advantage of owning a New 3DS turned out to be the huge performance uplift. A fair number of games ran at double the framerate or only supported 3D mode on the newer hardware. Code Name STEAM had substantially less downtime on the New models because the AI could process turns faster. Several reviews for Hyrule Warriors Legends flat out said not to buy the game unless you had a "New" model due to performance issues.

"Generations" is a fairly subjective term all things considered, and I basically acknowledged it by saying these things are fuzzy.

As the sibling post mentions, they all have exclusives, however, which is something Sony has refused to allow for PS4 Pro and PS5 Pro updates. And even though Nintendo considers the GBC to be the same console as the original GB when it comes to tallying sales figures, it's a rather significant upgrade. Slightly better than NES full color games, double the processor speed. It made a compelling upgrade and target for developers.

All of those have games exclusive to them.

3DS has like ~15, though some heavy hitters (Xenoblade and Fire Emblem), DSi has like 6 no-names (and, technically, a whole lot on DSiWare); but there are many GBC-exclusive games.

I was about to say that. Pretty much every unique Wii U game has been remastered for Switch.

The DS can't play GBC games at all, it doesn't have the Z80 CPU from that console to even provide backwards compatibility. Nintendo also removed it from the Game Boy Micro, making it a GBA-only console.

The world is noticeably empty due to hardware limitations.

The style is entirely informed by hardware limitations. They did their best with what they could.

Lack of ram meant it could only handle a couple trees at a time

I would say gameplay and art style instead of what the rest of the industry calls graphics (polygon count basically).

Nearly all Nintendo (game freak is not technically Nintendo) games look beautiful thanks to having a great art style instead of just focusing on higher polygon count.

I agree with you, but in some newer games it just doesn't make sense to me.

They want good graphics but the Switch can't handle them, but they still try to make them.

For example, Pokemon Scarlet & Violet.

Gameplay and the game design for me personally is really great, but I can't stand the graphics. I would rather play on worse graphics just to not have constant frame drops and in some parts of the game N64 graphics and in some 4K ones.

Agree completely. I loved Tears and didn’t once think it looked bad in any way. It was a very clever game and made me feel like a kid again. That’s what I’m looking for in a Nintendo game. I’ll jump on my PS5 if I want to be wowed graphically.

Exactly. If you want to be dazzled with AAA titles running at 120Hz/60fps/4k then there are plenty of ways to spend your money. Frankly that segment of the industry feels like a treadmill of never ending upgrades for the same basic game.

My whole family shares and island in animal crossing, firing up some arcade brawlers on the couch. We’ve been playing the hell out of our switch for years and never once have we complained that it’s not flashy enough.

TotK seems extremely washed out and low-contrast is a majority of the environments. I played a bit of BotW and thought it was much more vibrant.

It's a beautiful game, one of the first to use programmable shaders, and one of the earliest that doesn't look dated at all. The shaders make everything look smooth without looking blurry.

Loading screens are hidden, it's not like the contemporaneous PS2 game Mafia where you wait a few minutes to load, spend a few minutes driving across town on a mission to shoot up some people at a restaurant, get yourself shot up, then have to wait for it to load all over again.

Beautiful art direction to be sure.

But let's be real, it's Super Metroid. :)

I wouldn't blame Unity for this. It's perfectly capable of running games efficiently on mobile. Problem is people either don't know how to or don't care to optimize their games performance.

The Switch was weak when it came out. Decent PCs from that same year can handle most of these games just fine. It's not really the developer's fault when the Switch is the only platform with issues, and they're usually not "pushing the envelope" in any way. The fault here is Nintendo's, they didn't prioritize support for ported games, though admittedly they couldn't really foresee the indie game boom, since it wasn't nearly as big of a deal at the time, especially in Japan.

First-party Nintendo titles are more or less the only games that actually manage to "push the envelope" on the Switch, and that's because they have the resources and experience to do it. Even then, some games end up constrained compared to the original vision, because the hardware can't handle it no matter how much insider knowledge you have about how it works and how to use it right.

Most indie devs don't have time and money to optimize. They will make the game primarily for the biggest audience, and then make it somewhat playable for everyone else.

The closer Switch is to the Steam Deck, the more likely both will be targeted.

What a bizarre thing to say. People buy indie games for all sorts of different reasons, and sometimes it's the beautiful art style.

That spec seems fishy given both Ampere and Ada both have 1 RT core in each SM. 12 RT cores would make much more sense. The 1534 Cuda cores is also weird since 128x12 would be 1536. ALSO the leak says "Nvidia T239 Ampere (RTX 20 Series)" but Ampere debuted in the RTX 30 Series.

The leaks are a little inconsistent on this one.

On one hand, the base architecture is Ampere, but it's been repeatedly rumored that there are various backports from Lovelace. It's a weird mixture of the two, alone with some unique parts never seen elsewhere (a file decompression engine that accelerates LZMA, according to kernel commits).

It's hard to say then how powerful these raytracing cores are, or how many are even necessary for simple but beautiful effects. It's also worth remembering that the Switch bakes the graphics drivers into the game itself, uses data structures and shaders more native to the GPU without compilation, and has a custom low level graphics API called NVN (and NVN2), so performance is not necessarily linear compared to a PC.

Series S is severely ram-starved at 10GB (~2GB used for OS, so 8GB functionally)

Switch 2 has 12GB according to leaks

The Series S may as well be an older gen, it is hobbled in ways that prevent it from actually running optimally. It has notably limited releases on xbox.

My read of "certain games may not be fully compatible" wrt Ring Fit and Labo would be that they'll still potentially work with older joycons.

Labo VR is the only one I can think of that definitely won't work.

That would be pretty great if that's the only limitation.

Would be cool if you could still pair old gen controllers to the new switch for things like ring fit.

The switch had the red and blue from launch. In the reveal trailer they only showed the grey, but then in the switch presentation they revealed the red and blue. I don't quite remember, but I think from then on they mainly used that in marketing. It could be the same situation here, but the fact that the joycons already have a hint of blue and red makes me think this will be the only version, as it's sort of a mix between the 2 versions of the original switch.

Personally I like it. I choose the grey version of the switch, and I think making the joycons the exact same colour as the system this time looks way better. Also I like the splash of colour rather than it being entirely grey/black.

I know for a fact they had the grey and colorful models on launch day, I bought the model with the red and blue joycons at mignight on launch day at my local BestBuy. The promo video in this article[1] shows some folks playing bomberman with those joycons about 2/3 in.

1: https://www.polygon.com/2017/1/13/14241960/nintendo-switch-l...

Not sure which version was more popular, but I bought a red/blue switch on launch day. And anecdotally I'd say I've seen more of those than the grey one over the years.

Your taste/view is as valid and correct as mine.

If these things could be standardized, we would have only one design for every category of item, possibly from different brands.

Since it can't, we have this thing called design and art, which is a good thing :)

Who even runs HTPCs these days?

People are speculating that you can use the controllers like a computer mouse. You can see an allusion to that towards the end of the video.

I disagree. I find it delightful. The sounds are awesome.

There's a very good reason for this: The whole OS is under 400MB. Every Nintendo Switch game cartridge comes with a full copy of the necessary OS on it.

Every game card is playable, no matter how out of date the Switch is, without any internet connection.

I'll take that kind of functionality before "surprise and delight." We might get "surprise and delight" this generation though, if in part because the change to a modified Samsung NAND over Macronix might be cheaper at larger capacities if rumors are correct.

I hated the 3DS UI. It was not exciting, it was bad and inconsistent. At least with the Switch it is unobstrusive.

the gamecube controller was so good, I really don't understand why they walked away from it

YMMV, but I'm not finding any of those to be problems with my Deck.

Reboots take a noticeable length of time and could certainly be faster but they're almost entirely "oh there's a new version of the OS" for me.

I haven't had any problem with games crashing either.

Its native controllers largely Just Work, and it's easy to turn on turbofire or rearrange buttons to work better with Steam Input. When I connect it to the projector and pick up the PS4 controller I have attached to the dock that works fine too, someday I should really try to properly pair it so I can use it wirelessly, but I mostly just play it handheld.

I basically spend zero time futzing around with Proton unless I am trying to get some old PC game to run.

I spent a while fooling around with installing emulators when I first got it, but I never actually touch them in practice, that's the only time I've ever been outside of the Steam UI.

I like my Steam Deck and would generally personally prefer it over a Switch if I had to choose one. I even use it in the "docked" way where it is both driving the family TV but can also be taken out and used directly.

And they've clearly put so, so much quality work into the Steam Deck. It's absolutely amazing considering the source material.

But it's also hobbled by so much of its library assuming it was built for a desktop PC or a notebook that could pretend to be a desktop. Some of my games react to being docked properly, some do not. Some can handle switching from the integrated controls to an external controller live, some do not. Some can handle switching resolutions, some do not. Some respond well to using the integrated controls to manipulate how much computing power you allocate to the games in real time, some do not. Some games work perfectly with multiple controllers, a couple freak out unless the stars align.

The Switch just works.

But I will say that even as someone who is generally not a graphics snob, the Switch is definitely not just aging, but aged. If all the Switch 2 is is basically "Switch 1 but with 2021-level power instead of 2013-level power" I'd be pretty happy.

Did you turn on beta OS updates? Because in my experience I have to restart it about every three months when Valve releases an OS update -- but when I had betas turned on, that was every few days instead. (Might also explain some stability issues for you.)

Also: I've seen one crash in the whole time I've owned one, the controllers work perfectly, and I don't think I've ever had to meddle with Proton in any way.

Dock cable going in on the top is a bit fiddly, though, I'll grant you.

From a usability perspective, I can play Halo on my Steam Deck.

From a usability perspective, I can play Doom on my Steam Deck.

From a usability perspective, I can offline Spotify music on my Steam Deck.

From a usability perspective, I can SSH into my server from a Steam Deck.

The Nintendo Switch is cool but it is infinitely less useful than a Steam Deck. From a usability perspective, it's quite poor. The Steam Deck is the best console I've ever owned :)

Interesting I have had close to zero issues with my deck. Occassionally the audio is crackly when waking from sleep. But it's rare and goes away after a sleep/wake cycle. But then I never really fiddle with settings, at most I cap the FPS for more intensive games. I never dock it either

It's very usable for me. And wakes from sleep almost as quick as switch. That immediacy made switch my favourite console of all time until I got the deck.

Was just saying the same thing on another comment!

Feels like the Steam Deck is like a Hot Rod / Muscle car and the Switch is a Toyota Corolla.

Might not be as cool or have as much HP and you aren't going to tinker without it but you can always turn it on and get to your destination.

the switch software feels so freaking good too. it feels rock-solid and fast. what really blew me away is how quick system updates are, from start to finish.

That's not a restriction, nobody's preventing Nintendo from bringing those games to the platform. I don't currently have pasta at my place, but that's because neither me nor my partner have bought any, not because it's banned from the house.

Of course you can.

I found the (non-lite) Switch to be rougher on my hands due to less ergonomic design. Deck is larger and heavier, but it sits nicer in hands.

I found it quite bulky at first, especially after owning a switch. But I adjusted quickly. I don't have large hands either

Personally I find it fine. It's a lot bigger than the Switch, but the grips make it more comfortable to hold overall.

Unfortunately the situation with needing to download huge updates is also occasionally present on the Switch. Several third party AAA games (EA sports titles come to mind) ship small cartridges and a require big downloads to the SD card to be playable. Switch game downloads (usually) aren't as large as Xbox/PlayStation downloads, but the wifi chip in the OG model was so slow, they might as well be.

The new one is rumored to feature hall-effect sticks on the Joycons which would hopefully solve that issue.

I kind of like the joy con issue, as it means I can send the controllers back to Nintendo and get them fixed for free, even when the problem isn't the joycon - it's the kids destroying the controller.

https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/region/d/joycon...

(Nintendo has always had excellent support - I remember getting a Gamecube refurbished long after the Wii was everywhere).

You can get free replacements btw. My original switch from release finally got drift in the latter part of last year. Nintendo had replacements to me within a few days at no cost. Rare to have such a pleasant experience with customer support, it was a flawless process

New Switch user, believe it or not. I just purchased my second 8BitDo controller with Hall effect joysticks this week. Hoping I can avoid the drift problem by avoiding Joy-Cons! (We usually play on the TV.)

Honestly I swapped them myself both in the Joycons and in the Pro controller a couple times each over the years. The modules cost like $15 through Amazon or Ebay, and unlike the XBox controller, they're separate modules with a ribbon connector instead of soldered in, which makes replacing them a breeze.

I have no desire to do that though. It's uncomfortable to sit up in bed, and uncomfortable to play games lying down.

7ms latency, 4k120fps with geforce now. 10ms on wifi. I'm not kidding.

It's ALMOST perfect. I play BF1 through it. Try it once (I believe they still have the "free for 1hr per session, infinite sessions"? That's what sold it to me).

I can play very intensive games (graphically) on my macbook on the couch. It's amazing, and I couldn't believe the 10ms on wifi. It's mind-blowing.

BUT I live near Amsterdam, where a server cluster is.

Also, about the graphics: I'm borrowing a 4080 every time. Everything is on max. If you're in a very (very) hard scene for compression, then yeah, you'll see (very little) artifacts. But I run it on 75mbit, and that's a LOT.

I have gigabit, but no servers that are close, it's... rough

Yeah my experience has been thats its basically unplayable. I'm the kind of person who refunds when a game is <60fps though.

And let's not forget the size and weight difference. It's a lot easier to slip into a bag, and it doesn't run super hot under load.

That's true, but Nintendo's counter to that is exclusive games, and they have big series like Mario, Zelda, Smash Bros. There's also newer ones that are more niche, but at least for me it's just the game where some new Smash Bros character comes from.

With exclusives games, emulation can be a problem, but many Nintendo games also rely on the novel things on their platform. For instance the Mario Party series has always tried to use something (rumble, mic, touchscreen, controller's shape).

This makes it necessary to get the console, and once you get market share it'll be worth porting and optimising games for an under-powered console (Celeste, Hollow Knight and probably every game runs worse on the switch, but it's playable). I'm not a gamedev, but it seems that nowadays it's easier than ever to port games since in practice there's fewer architectures around.

Steam has a refund policy because consumer law requires them to have a refund policy.

Which is also a gray area. I personally am fine with it for older, depreciated consoles. But I won't emulate current gen games unless I'm also buying the game.. especially on the Nintendo platform where the games still have some "magic" to them, compared to the more generic games on other platforms that prioritize graphics over seemingly all other attributes.

Obviously there isn't a switch 2 emulator yet, and probably will be a while until one is released.

The challenge will not be hardware emulation (if it's a nvidia tegra 2 based SOC that will be easy) but hack the OS/security to make it usable.

So don't expect to play mario kart 9 on your steam deck anytime soon.

Edit: with easy i don't mean that it will not demand a really top of the line computer to run it. But that isn't completely undocumented or custom hardware, like i don't know, ps3 or sega saturn.

Sure, but you cannot play online, though. You can't trade Pokemon for example. Tetris 99 got a lot of play in our house. It heavily depends on what you're chasing.

Why pay for the Steam Deck, though? Buy it online and claim it never arrived to get a refund.

I’m yet to hear a moral argument for emulating current games you don’t own unless you’re poor and need to choose between buying Zelda and starving.

Switch emulation works surprisingly well, but it has its quirks and some titles are barely playable. I love emulation primarily because it's necessary for long-term archival of game libraries, but emulating modern systems is not a super user-friendly process (not to mention the qualms around piracy).

The audience of people that would get a Steam Deck and then emulate Switch games is so small that this is a no-issue for Nintendo. If you can do that you're probably not the target audience to begin with.

you can see why they are so aggressively pursuing emulators

Steam has a verification process to determine which games work properly on the Steam Deck. If you follow that then you should have no issues playing your games on a Steam Deck.

I can't buy steam games second hand, and I can't let my kids trade steam games with their friends, and I can't sell a steam game and get some $$ back if I decide I am not likely to play it again.

Would have not surprised me if it's actually Mario Kart 8 2. (Technically that's already what Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is, so, actually, it would be Mario Kart 8 3).

I mean, at this point it makes little sense for them to start from scratch, releasing a newer game but with much less than the enormous amount of content provided by MK8D + DLC would seem like a very noticeable downgrade, so just revamping the old one would be a practical move, though I don't think fans would be happy with that.

MK8 was mostly flawless gameplay wise, how can it be improved? But at this point one has no choice but to trust Nintendo's ability to come up with surprises.

There are certainly some ways they can, I'd love to see a 100 man race or something crazy like that.

Everyone has a new design, maybe I'm more familiar with my Marios than most but I could tell immediately it has a more cartoonish design, and characters have a rubbery kind of stretch and bounce to their animations. You can see it notably on the closeup of Mario where he hops into a drift.

The art style is somewhere between the 2010s bog-standard Mario and Super Mario Bros Wonder.

To be fair, if we’re going by track alone, there’s nothing to say it’s not just a new track for the Switch 2 release (or even just released at the same time, but available on both).

Calling anything “cringe” is pretty self-referential. This slang just makes me imagine a bunch of genZ folk wincing nonstop with the heads in their phones. Must be exhausting.

As long as the internet has existed, we have been lampooning corporate keynotes. The gaming industry does this every cycle, trying to hype up incremental updates as if it’s the best thing to ever get released. See you again in a few years!

The Wiimotes were a clear influence on the Joy-Cons.

Nintendo still uses motion controls; they just made them portable and more resilient with gyros instead of IR.

> almost everyone I knew had a Wii at some point, but they didn't use it outside of a family toy with a few games when they first got it.

At various points in my family's owning one, we obviously used it for the Wii Sports-type games, as well as non-motion games like NES titles from the Virtual Console (the Wiimote in its rubber case felt surprisingly decent in the hands while turned sideways). But we also used it for Netflix and YouTube with the official apps, and surprisingly, various other websites with the Internet Channel. We sometimes used the SD card reader to look at photos from digital cameras, which seems like it doesn't make a lot of sense today, but was easier than connecting up a camera or camcorder to a TV with a cable to look at things, which was also a thing back then.

It was certainly a "go long periods without touching it" part of the home, but it was also surprisingly versatile with the uses that did pop up for it. And I think we got more usage out of it, both in terms of hours and in terms of distinct use cases, than we got out of the Xbox 360 we had later (if not, it was basically due to Minecraft, not because we played a larger number of games on the Xbox).

I believe the Wii had the best or second best attach rate for a Nintendo console (how many games sold per console sold). It lived a long time and had a ton of good releases.

Yes, great source. filter that by Home vs the mobile category to see it is only beat by PlayStation.

You could argue the Switch is a home console as well.

TBH other then a few neat local multiplayer stuff in NintendoLand, there really wasn't much that actually utilized the dual screen in a way that actually enhanced the game. You couldn't quickly swap between the screens like you could on the DS, because the screens were different distances away and required re-focusing your eyes. This meant that most gamepad usages played the same as if you just pressed a button to bring up your inventory or switch views or whatever.

And that's before you take into account the fact that the biggest titles on the Wii U (Mario Kart and Smash Bros) didn't use the second screen at all. The second screen was a gimmick, and a gimmick that was exhausted pretty quickly.

I’m fairly certain I remember them suggesting that the original switch was capable of doing this but then they either never granted access to it in the dev kit or they just never had it end up getting used in any noteworthy games.

Nintendoland for the Wii U was _very_ fun in my memory. It was the only title that I remember leveraging the asymmetry of information that different players can have for local multiplayer.

A feature they could still possibly have snuck in would be the ability to cast a feed from the handheld to a TV.

That would be an interesting use of the USB connector at the top --- plug into the Dock and use the Switch as a gamepad à la the Wii U while playing on the TV.

I really loved some of the multiplayer games on Wii U that took advantage of the gamepad. Completely brilliant to have one "special" player with the gamepad + second screen vs. the rest of the plebs with Wiimotes.

The portability was amusing but then turned out to be absolutely phenomenal (and likely resulted in multiple sales to individual households).

It both saved them from having to work out what to do with the handhelds, and introduced parents to "the kids can just bring it with them".

I have an Xbox Series X and I'm still not sure I got "the right one" but since I got it as a glorified blurry player that can also play games maybe, it's fine as is.

Yes, because our chiseled bellies don’t get in the way.

Commando gaming is a time-honored tradition!

You clearly have not seen the wrinkles on my body.

well, first, the Switch does have a touch screen.... =)

but I think parent poster is referring to the somewhat common situation with portable devices where you're watching/playing in bed and the device is propped up on a pillow or blanket or something

There are many people who do though, and there are many games that heavily utilize the touchscreen.

It's a portable device, at some point or another I'm going to handle it without the side controllers. Having some place to grab the thing is basic ergonomics, much less something designed with kids in mind.

"Super Switch" would've been pretty bad-ass.

They were screwed from the start...

The Xbox came out when the PS2 did. When it came time for the next generation, Sony went with the obvious PS3. Microsoft of course couldn't compete with an "Xbox 2" vs a "PS3", and they couldn't skip right to "Xbox 3", so they called it the "Xbox 360", which was frankly genius because it had the 3 there anyway and put it on the same level in consumers' eyes.

But after that it all fell apart -- they had no good options. They still couldn't jump to "Xbox 4". Maybe "720" would have worked. Someone decided to have a clean break and restart at "One" but of course that fell apart immediately at "Two". So another clean break to "Series..". And by that point it's so screwy they've lost any chance of fixing it...

This is from the people who brought you "Microsoft Windows 10 Home Single Language 32-bit" though.

(I am still trying to work out if the 360 was named after the 360º ring of red on the power light that it so often would produce...)

I actually thought that would be cool for Switch 2 - call it the Switch 25. They could release the Switch 30 in 5 years and so on without too much confusion, assuming compatibility all the way through (by 2035 we'll probably all be on thin clients anyway).

Not bad yes, better xbox 2021, xbox 2025, etc?

Nintendo Switch Bigger OLED

Switch⁶⁴ :)

Ultra

That's their actual standard and hopefully it has returned to the "default" controller(s). I think they just flew too close to the sun in terms of trade-offs with the Switch 1 joy cons. Not possible to make them good enough at that price at that size at the time of release

The version of the grip that you buy as an accessory (HAC-012) can charge the joycons. However the pack in one (HAC-011) can't.

Looking around, it appears that Nintendo have also released an official "Joy-con charging stand (2-way)", suspiciously it seems they only launched it in October 2024, when various 3rd party chargers have been around for years.

There's also the official AA battery packs. Yes, really.

https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/joy-con-charging-...

You can get standalone charging docks for them, but I agree it kinda sucks.

I wouldn't be surprised to see new functionality that would pin games to the switch 2 controllers though, gotta sell new accessories.

I have multiple charging "controller docks" that you can plug the joycons into and then use them like a two-stick-controller and charge via usb-c.

You can buy chargers for joycons