Anachronism

Probably for the best. One of the biggest reasons for slowdown in computers is the OS and other software running in the background taking up more processing power than they need to. Meanwhile, a dedicated game console with a bare bones interface like the Switch doesn't have any of that miscellaneous nonsense hogging processing power that should be going to the games. Thanks to that, even if the hardware is fairly weak, you can get a bit more out of it than you usually would from a comparable computer or phone.

It seems like a product exclusively for people who don't plan to keep their games. For anyone else, the key card is just another thing to carry around and another point of failure over a digital purchase.

I'm curious how games on both will work in terms of the actual software. Will you be able to transfer digital games directly from one to the other, or will you just have to redownload them from the eshop? Will they all try to take advantage of the Switch emulation, or will some have builds more specifically suited for the Switch 2? Should be interesting to see how developers handle it.

I was pretty sure it was from the Odyssey team before I even knew it was a Donkey Kong game. That particular glossy look to everything is very similar between both of them.

I don't think Switch cartridges taste nearly bad enough. I've eaten plenty of food that tasted much worse.

I prefer not to have achievements, but the continued sterilization of their UI is a shame. Their new app has unique animations for every theme and seemingly every day of the month. I hope we get something similar on the Switch 2.

Are you allowed to have these instead of a bunch of posters and figurines in a man cave? Because that's definitely the look I'm going for if I ever have the option.

That sounds like either nothing could change or things could get worse. Things getting better would be nice, but I guess that's not an option. On the bright side, Vietnam at least seems willing to come to the table, so hopefully they'll be back in a more favorable situation soon. And I'm all for making any kind of outsourcing to China unprofitable, even if it means higher prices while companies are shifting their manufacturing elsewhere.

That is a really nice feature. There were a few games where I used the Switch's system-level button mapping to move things around, but going back and forth between those games and anything else was always a pain.

I already said this on another article, but I really just don't want games big enough to justify an $80 price tag. No matter how much content gets put into a game, there will always be something you end up seeing or doing more often than you'd like, and what might end up as a minor nitpick in a 20 hour game can become a constant, infuriating frustration in a 200 hour one. That was certainly my biggest gripe with Breath of the Wild. Within the the first tenth of the game, I had all the major abilities, I'd seen all the environments and most if not all of the enemies, I'd probably used most of the base weapons, and then I had to keep walking around those same environments hitting reskinned versions of those enemies with more health using reskinned versions of those weapons with more damage for over a hundred more hours to reach an acceptable level of completion. Tears of the Kingdom did a lot to improve on the level of variety, but since it was reusing so much from its predecessor, the content still wore thin long before I reached the finish line.

That's the biggest weakness of big games in my opinion. The developer will build up a massive amount of whatever they want to make more of, but will end up reusing a massive amount of whatever fills in the cracks between the sections they're focused on. It's theoretically possible to make a 100+ hour game where the gameplay, visuals, story, and everything else keep evolving enough to never get old, but no one has actually managed to achieve that as far as I'm concerned. I'd much rather get a $60 game that ends before it wears out its welcome, maybe with a $20 DLC that has to justify itself with interesting new content, than buy into an $80 pile of gameplay that might get old long before the credits roll.

There's also just the fact that bringing in $80 as an option leads to the possibility of it becoming the new standard, and plenty of companies will happily jump up to that price tag without doing anything to earn it if they can just brush it off as the new normal. I feel like these prices could hit especially hard for the main audience Nintendo's always tried to cater to - kids. A kid generally doesn't have a ton of disposable income. If they get an allowance or earn money through chores and odd jobs, they can maybe pick up a few full price games a year. When I was a kid, I mainly relied on getting games as gifts. $40-50 for a game is a low enough price that a financially stable adult can buy one or two for their adorable child/grandchild/etc's birthday without batting an eye. $60 starts to push the upper limits of what feels comfortable for a gift, and any higher means you start pricing people out. So instead of a kid getting five or six $40-60 games per gift-giving occasion, they might only end up with one or two $70-80 games instead. If my math is right, that's a situation where everybody loses.

I can honestly let everything slide besides the $80 price tag on Mario Kart. $450 for a new console is reasonable. $70 for new games is tolerable since the rest of the industry was already heading that way. And $80 for enhanced editions makes more sense to me since I don't see a reason for old games to go down in value, and these now have added content for an added cost. Treating the upgrades like DLC is a better solution than making me pay a full $70 for games I already own. But $80 for a brand new game sets a precedent that I don't want anyone else to follow. I won't care if a game has been in active development for a decade or is getting five years of free post-launch expansions. I want to play a lot of different games, so I'd rather developers just make whatever game they can for $60/70 and then move on and start the next one.

I have a tiny sliver of hope that the prices Nintendo already announced were set high in anticipation of the new tariffs, but if they really bet big on setting a new standard for premium portable gaming and now have to either further alienate their user base with higher prices or swallow a bunch of extra cost they didn't plan for, they're about to have a very bad time.

I don't know why, but reading the title, I thought of Baby Park first. Guess I just crave the chaos of 24 racers on that tiny loop.

I wouldn't really trust information from a random customer support rep, but I also wouldn't be surprised at all if this was true. As soon as I saw how these enhancements were going to work and how the enhanced editions were priced, I basically just started thinking of them as Switch 2 exclusive DLC.

Welp, I can barely see any difference. This performing so well and Cyberpunk/Elden Ring running at all is really impressive. Now I just want to see if something that pushes the other current gen consoles like Senua's Saga or Black Myth Wukong can get a worthwhile port working with the right cutbacks.

Ideally, I'd like to give most of the games on this list a go. Realistically, I'll probably end up owning less than half of them.

This comparison brings two thoughts to mind. The first is that it really is hard to improve much on Mario Kart 8's visuals. The second is that I don't actually know if Mario with or without the super mushroom is the normal one. He usually seems closer to the former in 3D games, but World's version is definitely leaning more towards the little gremlin look.

I've already made my peace with tariffs taking a bite out of my biggest hobby, though I'm not really sure how Nintendo's going to handle it if they need to bump prices even higher with everyone already screaming at them. The base Switch 2 going for $500 and more games jumping to $80/90 could genuinely kill the console's momentum.

I'm really not big on competitive games. If I can still have fun while actively avoiding other players or if they just let me jump into the arena by myself and beat up the npcs, then I might consider it. Some of those things still look like really fun fights.

"Surprisingly Small", huh? The title had me expecting a 10-50% increase over Switch games, not Mario Kart World and DK Bananza being around double the size of 8 Deluxe + Booster Course and Odyssey. Guess those high quality assets really eat up space.

They can add whoever else they want, but I'll probably be playing 50% with Sunshine characters/outfits and 50% as the cow.

@Jemae I'm not saying any of the games look bad; quite the opposite, I'm shocked they can all look as good as they do on a portable system if they're not using DLSS. As for dev kits, Nintendo's apparently pretty strict about Direct gameplay clips having to be from their actual hardware, so I think at least all the studios in there have had access to them for a while. But yeah, the point about youtube compression is fair. Hopefully there are some higher quality versions of the trailers out there for people to pick apart.

Back on Wii U, my internet would just cut out whenever someone opened my front door. I still don't understand exactly how that worked, but I do know the Switch has resolved the issue completely. I wouldn't mind having better download speeds, but beyond that, I really don't have any connectivity-related complaints.

I'll be interested to see how those more advanced techniques are used. Even though the Switch 2 is hitting way higher numbers than I was expecting, I'm still not sure how much we'll be seeing ray tracing in multiplatform games. Digital Foundry also seemed to think several of the games from the Direct might not be using DLSS, so I'm curious if there are difficulties with implementing it or some other reason why those devs are going with native resolutions over upscaling.

I'm still expecting them to announce you get it free with NSO or the expansion pack. I just can't imagine enough people buying this to justify selling it.

Shinen's games are beautiful, but I'm somehow equally impressed by how good F-Zero GX looks after 20 years.

My original left joy-con, two pro controllers, Wii U gamepad, and a couple GameCube controllers all have stick problems. I'm not going to believe anything's changed unless the new ones last through the end of the next generation.

A digital game that doesn't require any materials or factories to produce, and that you have to download and store on your hardware rather than being self-contained, should be cheaper. Even as a retailer rather than a buyer, I'd be a lot more concerned about the price difference between Switch and Switch 2 physical games than the one between physical and digital ones.

I don't worry too much about console prices because I can just pass them off as an extra couple bucks on each of the dozens of games I'll eventually buy for them. Though now the boosted game prices might end up doing a lot more damage to my wallet than the console itself.

Bravely Default is a great game, but I am never buying one of those game keys. It feels like something that was invented purely as a worse option to make digital games more palatable.

I do like that the virtual game card system they just announced should let me load up the games that will benefit from the Switch 2 on there and leave the rest of my 1TB library on the old Switch without any internet requirements or other headaches. The requirement to meet in person to share with anyone else still rubs me the wrong way, though.

$70 was already rough, but 80 is really too much for me. At that price, I'll have to wait on sales even for my favorite games. Though with the Switch 2 Editions like Mario Party and Kirby, I actually think the $80 price tag makes more sense than the new Switch 2 games. At least there you're getting a pile of bonus content on top of an already solid base game.

@Dee123 Eh, if they do make a big deal out of Switch to Switch 2 upgrades, Prime 4 would be an easy pick just for being a pretty game that's still actively being worked on. We definitely haven't seen a Switch 2 version, but given we know almost nothing about the Switch 2's library, I think we'd all be better off just waiting until tomorrow rather than declaring our random predictions as absolute truth.

Oh, of course! It's the clown horn button! Perfect background noise for any future Nintendo predictions.

@MrGawain Look, if it's between this and the internet's usual sense of humor, I'll take the dumb gags any day. Plus, it's worth it just for the couple companies that go the extra mile and actually release their ridiculous products/features.

I still think live action is a bad choice, but if they're doing it anyway and making a series out of it, I think they'd be better off going for more of a Harry Potter story arc than a Lord of the Rings one. Start with a young Link to help onboard people into the world's wackier aspects, then get more serious as the story goes on and the characters grow up.

Xenoblade X is a beautiful game, but in a lot of ways, I'm not sure I'd call these visuals an improvement. I definitely prefer the more irregular features of the old character models to the plastic figurine look they've stuck with through the whole Switch generation. A couple of them might be a little wonky, but they just feel more detailed and emotive, less rigid, and overall more interesting to look at. And this is something I haven't noticed before, but a lot of the scenery in this video has way too much black compared to the original. A lot of things almost look like they have some kind of netting thrown over them.

@Koda1000 Last I checked, Nintendo was at about a 50/50 split for physical/digital sales and other platforms were mostly digital. Still, looking at the launch week for Wilds gives you an idea of the ceiling for these sales numbers, at least in Japan. I think Scarlet/Violet beat even that several times over, though.

@johnedwin It's a jrpg. Aside from Pokemon and a couple Square Enix games, they're all niche. If anything, that makes topping the charts even more impressive.

Huh, I'm surprised Japan is that severely uninterested in AC Shadows. Anyway, glad Xenoblade X continues to be received fairly well. It's not matching 3's launch numbers or even the second week sales of Monster Hunter Wilds, but with it being squeezed between that behemoth of a game and the Switch 2 Direct along with being a remaster and sharing its launch week with another popular jrpg, I guess it's performing pretty admirably.

There are a few games I'm waiting to play on the off chance they run better on Switch 2. Most of them are third party, but Bayonetta 3, Xenoblade X, and Scarlet's DLC are all on that list.

Nintendo's pretty good at working within the limits of their hardware, so I can't think of any Switch exclusives that really need enough changes to require an entirely separate edition. The problem is I'm also not confident Nintendo will want to let any plain old Switch 1 games take advantage of the Switch 2's hardware. Based on the way they've done things before, it's possible they'll intentionally constrain the Switch 2 so that things run exactly the same as they did on its predecessor just for the sake of consistency.

I really don't know why this isn't animated. I'll try to reserve judgement until we've actually seen something from it, but the series just seems too wacky and cartoonish to be portrayed well in live action. I don't want to see any version of Zelda where Link doesn't have a green tunic and windsock hat, but also can't think of any way for an actual human to pull that look off.

Man, themes, what a great idea. It's a shame it's impossible to do those on a console besides white and black. Anyway, I do like this app's overall design, but the main reason I'm keeping it right now is because they had a neat piece of Xenoblade art in there and I want to see more stuff like that.

Still really hoping there's some kind of free/cheap upgrade for anything that has a better Switch 2 version. If not, then it would be great if games that struggle on Switch could at least take advantage of the new hardware to hit their frame rate targets and cut back on dynamic resolution drops.

So is the platform holder strategy going forward just keeping exclusivity/timed exclusivity on their flagship games and tossing everything else wherever it can make money? I can't see Nintendo wanting to join the party, but with everyone else pushing in that direction, there must be a good reason for it.

This Direct felt like a parade of cult classics to me. I know a lot of the things in there have their avid fans, but in most cases I am not one of them. I also thought the Prime 4 segment was pretty poorly done. Scanning and puzzle mechanics are not the best showcase materials, and generic things like "psychic abilities" and "chosen one" plotlines don't give a good impression either.

But hey, at least we'll have trainers chasing us down again in Pokemon. I wasn't a fan of the fully opt-in trainer battles in Scarlet/Violet.

I'll be very surprised if this Direct is much more than Nintendo clearing out their last few delayed games and promotional obligations to third parties before moving on to the Switch 2. Then again, I'm still surprised they're even doing another Switch Direct, so what do I know?

I'll admit I didn't think it would happen. Though the timing feels almost like they couldn't make up their minds between doing one or two Directs. Hope we see a couple cross-gen games at both events so we can get an early start on the inevitable wave of comparison videos.

I definitely like having the option. I never allow subscriptions to auto renew, so I do tend to let Nintendo Online run out and sometimes go a few months before I have a reason to pay for it again. Being able to organize/bookmark/etc. any new soundtracks I can't currently listen to will help me avoid forgetting about them completely.

@HammerGalladeBro Not an expert but at a guess, I'd say it's because they can store what was pretty recently a mindblowing amount of data in something the size of your fingernail. SSDs with equivalent storage are in a similar price range, so you're pretty much just trading out faster loading times for a smaller form factor.

Think I'm currently using that 1TB one after upgrading from a 500 GB a few years ago. I wouldn't mind another 500 to give my Switch library some breathing room, but this close to the Switch 2's release, I think I'll hold on to what I have, use the old 500 GB for the first couple years of the next generation, then look into what's available when that runs out of space again.