A little bit underwhelming hardware-wise. Extra joycon L/R don’t seem like they’ll factor in much in most singleplayer docked or handheld settings. (I guess those aren’t new buttons… .) The mouse thing (if that’s what they’re showing) is somewhat interesting and helps to keep touch controls relevant when docked. Top USB port, sure. Backwards compatibility is great news. Screen is…?
As always with Nintendo I think it comes down to the games. Mario Kart 9 hasn’t blown me away just yet, but we’ve barely seen anything at all so…
It looked like they were mimicking cars to me, not mice. Not saying that it wouldn’t be a cool concept if it has an optical sensor. But they didn’t show any visual feedback to imply they were controlling any kind of cursor. If that was the implication, it’s obvious it was a rushed marketing piece.
Please excuse the screenshot of a video but this looks a lot like an optical sensor. I’ve seen a lot of internet “experts” covering this and the general consensus for now is optical sensor too.
A mouse mode could be extremely useful for things like Civilization or Fire Emblem. Of course, the touch screen is also great for that and Three Houses and Triangle Strategy didn’t support it.
Did I offend you or something? Does your dad work for Nintendo? 🙄
It’s a figure of speech. But let me really spell it out for you and any other fucking slowpokes in the back of the class…
I’m not impressed with the hardware or the software that they showed today. They should show more than 8 seconds of a game that looks marginally better than Mario Kart 8 (a game I bought and enjoyed 11 years ago on the Wii U) if they want to impress me and sell me on a piece of hardware that is incrementally better than the Switch they sold me 8 year ago. Hopefully they have something that will impress me when they do another presentation in April, but if not that’s cool who gives a fuck man.
Okay so they just made it slightly bigger. I don't know how to feel on the joycons, though. Like with them just being held by that connector alone on either side, doesn't make me think they'll be as secure.
I wouldn't really call this an ushering of a new generation, this just feels more like an suped up Switch model.
At least you'll be able to play nearly all Switch games on it so nothing is that drastic.
Slightly bigger? Look again, the old switch screen has massive boarders and this one lokks to go to the edges as well as being larger by a few inches. It looks steam deck sized. I would say its a significant increase.
And i got the impression that the joycons would be magnetic. That would make connecting and disconnecting them MUCH easier and intuitive. The amount of times ive seen people struggle the first time with the joycons having the button to release.
Seems like a good upgrade to me. And thats not to mention the extra shoulder buttons on the joycons, the larger joycons, and the fact that this likely doesnt reveal everythin nintendo has in store for us.
I am pretty sure those extra shoulder buttons on the back are the release levers for the joycons. I think the joycons attatch magnetically, but which also activate locking hooks. Otherwise people would be accidentally detaching joycons and the tablet portion would fall and break. Nintendo designs hardware to be kid friendly, so there is almost certainly a secondary attachment mechanism in addition to the magnets.
I was talking about these buttons. And in terms of locking in, thats a possibility but a strong set of magnets with a recessed area and a connector seems like it would be quite secure.
Now that I am looking at it again, I wonder if those buttons you circled are actually little plungers that push the joycon away from the body to help release it.
Edit: Whatever way they attach, I hope the new joycons don’t loosen and flex like some of the current joycons do. Some of my joycons have “wobble” when attached and it makes me sad.
this just feels more like an suped up Switch model.
To be fair, the last 2-3 generations of PlayStation and Xbox consoles have also been a little more than a bump in CPU/GPU specs. Anything else they added was just gimmicky fluff like Kinect that never really caught on.
Were we really expecting Nintendo to come out with something that wasn’t also just a souped up version of the last console?
I wouldn’t call the difference between PS3 and PS4 just a bump in CPU/GPU there is a huge difference. The PS3 cpu architecture is completely different from the PS4. The PS3 uses a custom PowerPC architecture. The PS3 can be used to make super computers.
At the same time, gaming consoles were simplifying, making them less useful to science. The PlayStation 4 outsold both the original PlayStation and the Wii nearing the best-selling status currently held by the PS2. But for researchers, it was nearly useless. Like the slimmer version of the PlayStation 3 released before it, the PS4 can’t easily be turned into a cog for a supercomputing machine. “There’s nothing novel about the PlayStation 4, it’s just a regular old PC,” Khanna says. “We weren’t really motivated to do anything with the PlayStation 4.”
Looks starkly… Non-Nintedo-y?
I dunno, changing from the full colored joycons to black with accents and more rounded corners caught me off guard. This looks like a handheld from GPD or ONEXPLAYER
I think they were the same, but the coloured ones were a little harder to get irrc? Preordered the grey version and it cost 330€ - coloured joy-cons should have been the same
I‘m assuming they debated about it until the very last second until they settled with the safest option. The leaks probably accelerated things a lot towards the end and it might’ve been called something different entirely if they had more time to agree on a name.
That‘s not how projects or marketing work most of the time, however. Nintendo is known to use project names throughout development. They have a schedule for each and every step and the recent leaks have turned things upside down for sure.
The reveal itself looks incredibly rushed. I suspect they hastily whipped up a quick animation in Blender by using some simple modifiers and clever editing. It has “Make a product animation in Blender” Youtube tutorial written all over it, if that makes sense. I kind of love it, but it’s not very Nintendo-like and neither is the name.
There’s a disclaimer that says not every Switch 1 game will work, but I think it will play on the new Switch with the same lousy performance it has now unless you buy the Switch 2 version.
That is how every previous Nintendo back-compat implementation has worked.
GC on Wii
Wii on Wii U
Game Boy on Game Boy Color
Game Boy/Color on Game Boy Advance
Game Boy Advance on (New) Nintendo (3)DS
Nintendo DS on Nintendo DSi
Nintendo DS/i on Nintendo 3DS
Nintendo 3DS on New Nintendo 3DS
In every case, the system drops back to the earlier console's hardware specifications. There are hybrid cross-gen games on some of the handhelds which offer improvements on the newer hardware, but up to this point, older games have never been updated to get the improvements of newer hardware. That doesn't necessarily mean the same will hold, but I'd suggest you assume it will and be pleasantly surprised if they buck the trend.
I’m those cases isn’t it because they had separate hardware built in for backwards compat? This is more of a PC style hardware upgrade rather than totally different hardware (compute wise) so it might be different for that reason?
Sort of, though Wii and Wii U are a bit more complicated than that so this somewhat of an oversimplification. The ELI5 answer is that some hardware components are directly upgraded and can run in a compatibility mode, other components are just the original hardware thrown in separately.
New3DS is the most recent and most notable exception. It's directly upgraded 3DS hardware, but the CPU downclocks to run at 3DS specs on all legacy titles (and there are almost no native New3DS games so this upgrade was pretty pointless). Softmodding can unlock the full clockspeed, and most games do work fine this way but there are a few rare bugs.
I expect Switch 2 will just be the same architecture upgraded, because that's a lot easier to do now, while the old style of true redundancy would inflate costs too much today. It's also worth noting that Switch titles already expect variable performance in order to support handheld and docked modes, so I doubt much would break if allowed to overclock. But I could also see Nintendo not even trying to support it if even one bug might exist somewhere.
Just adding on to this, I do think the "up-specced OG hardware" approach something Nintendo has done before. Upgrades like GC to Wii and Game Boy to Game Boy Color are really just boosts to the clock speeds and RAM, they don't have anything specifically included for BC reasons (unless you're counting GameCube memory card slots). They really are just iterations on the same hardware. Similar to the New 3DS, on modded consoles you can run GameCube games at Wii clock speeds and they almost all work without issue.
On that subject, the fact that Nintendo says the compatibility won't be 100% is potentially encouraging. If the Switch 2 was just going to downclock compatible parts to their Switch 1 performance and was otherwise identical, you'd expect all games to work. The reduction in compatibility could be because games are going to be running with Switch 2 clocks across the board, which most games should handle just fine and a small handful may not.
Sure, but the game sets the resolution, not the console. The game might get a performance boost or a more stable frame rate on better hardware, but unless it gets a patch to detect which system it’s running on and adjust the resolution accordingly, most games will still run in 720p.
Another commenter elsewhere mentioned that things like Labo or Ring Fit won’t (likely) work because of the different sized controllers. I would be surprised if other games that don’t use special extra hardware work just fine.
Normally I’d disagree (because games written for a single console don’t do well with hardware upgrades), but since the old console already runs at different speeds when handheld and docked, I’d expect most games to be able to handle faster processors safely. We’ll have to see how that shakes out. If it really does run them better, and it has drift-proof sticks, I’m quite interested. Otherwise, I’ll wait a year or 2 until there’s a good, cheap library of games for it.
Ah so upgrade cost identical to what Sony did? I can see them doing that … The problem with that is that the games already have the ability on the cartridge. Remember the datamine of Paper Mario TTYD remake and the higher resolution data on the cart?
I would not put it past Nintendo to charge you $70 for Tears of the Kingdom again so that you can run it at reasonable resolutions and frame rates this time.
The rumor is that the price is going to be $450 for just the console and $500 for the console with Mario Kart bundled. May or may not be true, but it’s certainly plausible given how expensive electronics have gotten since 2017. I was thinking of pre-ordering after the Apr. 2 Direct, but if that price is accurate I’ll look into getting a Steam Deck instead. A lower price was the biggest advantage the original Switch had.
If it’s anything like how the Wii was basically a GameCube it may not even be all that hard to rework existing switch emulators to work with switch 2 games. Given that it’s going to have full back compat I bet that’s why they went after switch emus so hard. They wanted to halt development as much as possible for as long as possible so it doesn’t eat away at their switch 2 sales.
I recall reading something about Nintendo wanting to include Denuvo in the Switch 2. Will be interesting to see whether or not this one’s games and consoles are cracked wide open as readily as before.
My digital copy of Super Mario 3D All-Stars has been in limbo ever since I tried to transfer it from one Switch to another. Here’s hoping I can get that fixed with Switch 2.
Yikes… so that list had 21 titles on it, not 22; and there’s a good chunk of them that are remakes. The ones that aren’t sound bad - not fun. “Not really” is accurate. 22 is not accurate at all.
You asked "has Nintendo even released a game?" and the answer to that question is "yes". They released 22 of them. I don't care where you wanna move the goalposts to, you can't say 22 games is "not really".
I guess I should have put the /s at the end of my post so that everyone wouldn’t be so offended. Fuck Nintendo and their lawsuits though, no sarcasm intended there.
I don’t think people are upset at you calling out Nintendo for their rampant lawsuits, but instead at your dismissive reply when someone provided a list of games to answer your question.
Judging by the 15 downvotes on my “Has Nintendo even released a game since that second Zelda game, or are they too busy suing people?” comment, I’m not so sure. I do find this a bit amusing though.
Back to that list though, there’s nothing on it that’s remotely appealing to me, so I guess I’m a bit biased and dismissive.
I also do not consider ports, and remakes new releases, even if there’s a new price tag on them.
there’s nothing on it that’s remotely appealing to me, so I guess I’m a bit biased and dismissive.
Precisely. Just because YOU don’t like them doesn’t mean they don’t exist. As far as non-remakes from that list go, I only liked Pikmin 4, Mario Wonder, and Echoes of Wisdom.
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