cpmh1234

I know we say the Switch is underpowered, but given the first party games that run fantastically as well as third party miracle ports, I struggle to see how this is justified. When No Man's Sky runs pretty well on Switch, it feels like they rushed this one to get it out at the same time as other consoles rather than optimising it.

@BTB20 The New 3DS was discontinued in 2017, the XL in 2019 and the New 2DS XL was discontinued in 2020. It's the New 3DS whose parts have run dry, and as the article notes, the latter two will continue to be repaired whilst stocks last.

@PinderSchloss The 3DS has had a pretty good run.

I don't begrudge a company no longer providing first-party repairs to a system they stopped selling 7 years ago. If you're going by the same metric, and say the Switch 2 comes out in April 2025, you're looking at Joy Con repairs up until sometime around 2032.

I get that we want companies to provide great customer service and repairs, but I think to also accept that there's always going to be an end date. And seven years is after end of life and fourteen years after launch (or ten for New 3DS) is way beyond what most companies offer.

It's crazy how some games that outwardly look much better than this one (BoTW, Hogwarts Legacy, Doom for example) play so much better than this game, which can in theory get away with so many fewer polygons and lower-res textures.

Crazy how good Switch seems to be for third-party games. Traditionally, the inferior Wii ports didn't sell half as well even when it was outselling the 360 and PS3.
But this generation, the Switch seems to be the preferred home of a few third-party games even when they're hugely downgraded graphics-wise to fit on its hardware.

@Edu23XWiiU That would likely suffer with the same issues as the Wii U, or even the new 3ds. It needs to sound like a successor and not an add on.

@TheBigK Sony and Microsoft have been pretty exclusively iterative and it's doing them pretty well (Sony more so). I just think Nintendo has struggled to market iterations, especially with awkward naming conventions. The 3DS was pretty successful in the end, as were the GBC and GBA.

I don't think anyone can expect the Switch 2 to sell as much as the first, but if it sells half as many it'd still be Nintendo's third most successful home console and ahead of the NES.

I think if the console is iterative, I really just hope they stick with Switch 2 as the name. XBOX has floundered with its naming conventions, and the Wii U didn't set the world alight.

Switch 2 just makes sense and the normal numbering system hasn't done Sony any harm (ironically, the PS VITA bucked their simple naming trend and didn't do as well for itself). Super Switch, Switch U, new Switch...no thanks. Just plain ole Switch 2.

@HeadPirate That's so interesting, I had no idea there was a difference between Western and Japanese graphics back in the 80s. In that case, I can appreciate what they're doing, even if I don't necessarily love the result.

Every picture I’ve seen of this game just looks a little bit…rough around the edges, I guess. Like the early SNES games before they realised just how much more colour they could add. And that’s fine, if it’s going for the NES aesthetic, but this feels like an awkward middle ground.

@Axecon I'd love to see a return for Pokemon Ranger, or a brand new Mystery Dungeon. Or even to see what completely new idea someone can come up with, using the Pokemon IP.

Another Code has my vote more than anything else. I think it was my first DS game and I played it to death (though I was eight, so I made my parents do all the more complex puzzles). It was a game that really took advantage of the DS hardware so I hope this remake does the same for the switch.

Ruby and Sapphire were my first Pokémon games, and though I know I look back on them with rose-tinted glasses, I still think they were the best. Once you got Surf and could head out east of Lilycove, the games felt open-world and limitless.

Looking back, I know they aren’t. But it took a long time for a Pokémon game to feel so open again.

Pokemon seems to have dropped off the charts pretty quickly...despite selling so well in the beginning. I enjoyed the game but never played the post-game or competitively, so I wonder if people who did buy have been less likely to recommend and that's contributed to a lack of longevity?

The cost of game development is going up. The cost of living for the developers is going up (and Nintendo has announced a 10% pay increase for its staff). Inflation is pushing up material prices in ways that it didn't previously. Unfortunately, we're going to pay more now for a game than we did 20 years ago. And I'm happy to do so under the circumstances.

@ROBLOGNICK I honestly can't fathom how much financial mismanagement you'd need to squander 1 billion a year. My best guess is they're profitable, but laying off extra workers means more profit and more money for shareholders