skywake

@Lizuka
To be fair that's true of a lot of less gaming focused hardware. There's a lot of edutainment style and similar software on PC that's easily accessible or free. What makes Mario Paint different is that it's Nintendo themed, right down to the music maker and minigame

Also you could argue that they already released a new version of Mario Paint, Game Builder Garage

Slightly related, I did catch some commercial TV yesterday (national Australian news) on the Switch 2 experience in Melbourne. I would describe the coverage was fairly negative. They only really talked about the cost

To be fair, kinda hard to expect much from a story on Switch 2 that starts with "Nintendo first released the Super Nintendo in Australia in the 90s, then the Gameboy".......

All I can say is as much as I enjoyed GTA5 I certainly poured far more time into Mario Kart 8. And Mario Kart World looks significantly deeper in scope while GTA6 is.... GTA again but now with some RT? I'm both will be great and I'll be there early for both. But World, for me, is doing a better job of selling itself at this stage

@Yosti
In a lot of ways for a game like Mario Kart it's not really that different to doing local co-op via split screen. The only real difference is that you'd have to consume some of the GPU resources encoding the video

But I would note that the media block on the Switch 2's SoC was one of the few things they specifically enhanced about Switch 2. They've made a point of enhancing that part of the Switch 2 internals specifically. I'm fairly confident it could do game share without much drag on general performance

So it's mostly just a question of how much slower 2 player full-res split screen would be. And also whether or not they want to offer that when people could instead buy the game twice

I think there's a non-zero chance we see Game Share in Mario Kart World. But probably limited to 2 player local wireless

@Sakhasm
All Switch Edition games have a fee but it seems that's mostly because "Switch Edition" appears to be the branding they're using for games with paid enhancements. Or at least games with an additional licence you get from the store, nothing stopping a publisher giving them a $0 price. And so far these games seem to be adding asset improvements, entirely new game modes etc

But separate to that there are games that are getting enhancements without a fee (Arms, Captain Toad, Odyssey, 3D World, Link's Awakening, Echoes of Wisdom, Scarlet/Violet etc). These are not branded as "enhanced editions", they're free updates. And from their site it appears that some of these add new gameplay modes, some of them have performance improvements... just probably not full asset reworks

Lastly there's just the general performance gains from backwards compatibility. The Switch 2 isn't emulating Switch, it's also not physically running Switch hardware. It's running through a translation layer. Assuming the translation layer doesn't break the game I think it's fair to say Switch games will perform better when running on Switch 2. Within the restrictions the developer has set. I'm talking faster loading, hitting framerate caps, maxing out dynamic resolution scaling etc

Honestly, it's pretty much identical to what Sony has done so I don't see where you're coming from

@Keman
Imagine being upset that a company releases a product that's more capable than you were expecting it to be. Very strange

@Porco
There's footage of it running Cyberpunk fairly comfortably. Digital Foundry has already done some commentary and analysis on it. It runs fine. Certainly better than the PS4/XBOne versions. 1080p with dynamic resolution scaling down to 720p and a 30fps cap and dips down to around 23fps but with higher settings than PS4. Remembering that PS4 frequently struggled to maintain 30fps and often dipped into the teens.......

But of the games they went through? Cyberpunk was one of the lowest resolution games of the lot. Most of these games were running at 1440p, some were 60fps at 1440p, a couple were full native 4K. It's actually pretty impressive performance wise, it certainly outclasses PS4. I would argue for a lot of people it's probably more than enough to be their main console

@KociolekDoSyta
I mean, you were the one you said that the Switch 2 was bad because of battery life and pointed to x86 portables as an alternative. All I've done is point out that generally they don't have better battery life than Switch 2, they're all far more power hungry. And the one you're specifically mentioned which happens to have a better battery life is over double the price of Switch 2

So yes, it is a pointless discussion. Your comparison is pointless. They're entirely different kinds of products and your comparison falls apart with any sort of scrutiny

FWIW I have a Steam Deck OLED and I love the thing. PC portables are amazing. But the suggestion that they are somehow better than Switch 2 because of battery life or value for money really is a joke. It's a cosmically stupid argument

@KociolekDoSyta
Ok, so I buy an ROG Ally X for $900AU more than Switch 2. Then I save on games because .... oh wait, no I don't because a game like Cyberpunk Ultimate Edition actually costs more on Steam than it does on Switch 2. Oh well. Ignore that then

Oh, but the battery life is half as much! I need a 20Wh battery for Switch 2 to get the same kind of battery life. I'd need a huge.... oh, you can get a 75Wh battery for around $50AU. A battery that's the size of a deck of cards. And that effectively charges the thing 3x at least, extending the effective battery life to 8-24hrs. Never mind then

That leaves me $850AU to spend on closing that storage gap between 256GB and 1TB.....

I think your maths doesn't maths

@KociolekDoSyta
Excuse Australian prices but the Switch 2 is $699AU, the Steam Deck OLED is $899AU and the ROG Ally X is $1599AU. And the battery life on all of them is more-or-less the same (admittedly the Ally X gets a bit under twice the battery life but for $900AU more it'd want to!)

So what are you talking about?

@KociolekDoSyta
If you're expecting better battery life out of one of the x86 portables you're in for a rude shock. Those things are significantly more power hungry, especially if you're pushing them harder. Which is why they are rated for similar battery life despite having batteries that are over double capacity the Switch 2. In other words, they can only match the Switch 2 by being significantly bulkier with significantly larger batteries

Honestly, throw a battery pack in your back and you'll be fine. Especially with how low the relative power consumption is, especially compared to all the PC portables. People doomed about the OG Switch battery life which was more-or-less the same as this. We managed. The walls didn't collapse. Mountain out of a molehill I think

@Jeronan
Don't get me wrong, it's great that it has it and it's certainly at the higher end of possible outcomes display wise. But I think people generally misunderstand Nintendo's approach to hardware design. They're not about being cheap or cutting costs or releasing low spec hardware. They're just more of an Nintendo internal game development first platform builder

Nintendo has certainly made some hardware design choices over the years that haven't aligned with what the competition was doing. But other than maybe the decision to not go with optical media, which was one born out of a corporate grudge, I can't think of an example where they've gone out of their way to be cheap to the detriment of the gaming experience possible on the class of hardware they were delivering at that point in time

120Hz, VRR, 4K output, HDR..... these are all fairly tangible benefits to the gaming experience. They're not bleeding edge, they've been around for years. And given how far display tech and display IO has advanced they're not at all particularly hard to achieve at a price appropriate for that class of SoC

I get that this is a good outcome, I get that it was possible they could've gone cheaper. It wouldn't have been that shocking to me if the screen had been lesser. But also.... people are acting like this is a revelation after only a few days ago thinking it was pie in the sky fanboy wishlist nonsense. And from my perspective that reaction is kinda bonkers

This is good.... but it shouldn't be a shock

You know what this sounds like? Sounds to me like Nintendo managed to get some units into the US before the tariffs hit. A limited run bundle seems like a reasonable way to adjust the price up after a limited number of units has sold without having to actually adjust the price up

@Dm9982
Steam Deck probably doesn't support it because HDMI and Linux don't really play nice. The Switch 2 being a mass market, high production device is a bit of a different beast. Also to say the docked experience for Steam Deck is secondary would be vastly overselling it. It doesn't even have a 16:9 aspect ratio, you can do it but that's not really the point of it

The Switch (and Switch 2) is a hybrid mass market console. It's both. It was going to support VRR. It just was. And I think the fact that people up until just a couple of days ago were dismissing entirely the possibility of 120Hz, VRR, HDR and 4K? I think that says more about their biases than it does about Nintendo

@HotGoomba
That's fair. Just making the point that calling this new tech is only really accurate in the same sense that you might've exclaimed that the Wii U was using new tech because it has a HDMI cable rather than a composite AV cable in the box. I mean yeah, sure, technically it is the most modern standard. But the alternative would've been going out of their way to ignore a very low cost, very big win by just supporting the current standard

Which was never happening and it's strange to me that some people seriously entertained the idea that it might

@HotGoomba
Two things. Firstly, the Wii U was in many respects the most powerful console when it launched. It was somewhat CPU limited which resulted in odd scenarios where some Wii U ports could be visually well ahead of PS3/360 but have framerate issues. And a year after launch the PS4/XBOne released. But still, it was alright at the time. Arguably similar in relative performance to what Switch 2 is delivering here

Secondly, VRR isn't new technology. VRR has been around for over 10 years and became part of the HDMI standard in 2017. Too late for the Switch obviously but it's far from new tech. To be blunt, the idea that VRR wasn't going to happen for Switch 2 is and always was kinda nonsense. It's a gaming focused advancement that has become a standard part of modern displays. A tech that is mostly useful for lower end hardware that can't achieve a locked max framerate. Of course Nintendo, a game making company developing a hybrid console, was going to embrace it

I guess the hacks gotta get their last bit of doom in before the full reveal. And the no 4K output heard from some developer they talked to is just the icing on the doom cake. Doom clearance sale, everything must go!

If you go through the history of consoles the N64DD intended to support the GameBoy as a controller, the GBA could be used as a controller for the GC, the DS could be a controller for the Wii, the 3DS could be a controller for Wii U. Also IIRC there were some games that could do this between PSP and PS3 and also now there's the PS Portal being a thing that exists. And lets not forget streaming games being a thing that's built-in to Steam

I don't think this is at all a stretch or particularly odd. Whether or not it's a central part of a new platform enough to make a dedicated button for it I'm less convinced of. But as a side feature used occasionally? Sure. Why not?

@SillyG
The fun thing about the gambling bit is that technically it would mean the original Pokemon games would be R18+

Making a pedantic point here but the Switch already kinda has a Vitality Sensor built in. The IR camera and light on the right JoyCon can effectively be used in the same way. Ring Fit Adventures uses it to check your pulse at the end of a round

The screens on the DS were 3" 4:3 screens. Which means that two DS screens stacked ontop of each other is 9.2cm. So in order to replicate the DS on a 16:9 screen without rotating you only need a screen that has a 7.4" diagonal

The Switch 2 is rumoured to be around 8". That means it can support the DS screen setup natively without rotating the screen. I don't think this is an issue

All they need to do is support a handful of different layout options and they're good. Side by side, top/bottom, single screen and TATE. Done

Next thing you'll be telling me that their developers use a PC with a Keyboard and Mouse to develop Switch games rather than writing their code on a Switch with an on-screen keyboard! Oh, the horror!

I very much doubt this rumour. Especially in the way that they described it. I would think if you were to implement it you'd go for a mechanically simpler design like an actual wheel or use some kind of touch pad like setup. A "conveyor belt" design seems far too complex

But if they were to implement some kind of scrolling mechanism? I'd be all for it. It's an input that modern controllers are worse for not having and it's the main thing that PC gaming has that a modern controller doesn't have anything close to an analogue of

Something people here haven't considered. The current rumours suggest, and the probability is fairly high, that all Switch controllers will be compatible with the Switch 2 but only wirelessly. The current JoyCon won't fit in the Switch 2 "rails" or whatever its equivalent is

So the Switch 2 is out and you pick one up. You then pick up a NES themed JoyCon via NSO but.... how do you charge them? On the JoyCon rai.... oh, you have a Switch 2. You can't. And that's probably why this product exists

@SillyG
Shipping details of components for Switch 2 included a microphone. I'd say the chances of built-in voice chat on Switch 2 is fairly high. Or they could just use it like they did on the DS and have variations on games where you blow into it instead of pressing a button

@Not_Soos
A point of technical pedantry. It's a bit meaningless to talk about consoles in terms of how many "bits" they had beyond the SNES era. In the sense that it mattered the N64 technically had hardware support for 64bit calculations but using those features was generally not worth the effort

And yes, Sony and others marketed their consoles as "128bit" during the PS2 era but that was, well, marketing. For the most part once we hit 32bits that was more-or-less plenty for most things. So what they did is instead of chasing "bits" we instead started to see processors start to do more instructions at once. With the exception of memory because 32bits only allows you to address 4GB. 64bit allows you to address.... 16..... million... TB....

But yeah, in the sense that it was used in the early 90s? You would say that Nintendo's console progression in terms of "bits" would be:
NES: 8bit
SNES: 16bit
N64: 64bit
GC: 32bit
Wii: 32bit
Wii U: 32bit
Switch: 64bit

the TL;DR, "bits" are largely meaningless for gaming hardware and have been for a long while

@Mew
Honestly, I don't mind your "anything that can't output 1080p" definition. Maybe I wouldn't pick that specific point to divide it but I think picking something that defines "modern gaming" and saying retro are all the consoles that lack that thing? Not a bad shout

e.g. if you said retro is any console that lacked digital video output. That'd draw the line at Wii with the 360 being just barely over the line. And that sounds about right. Or you could draw the line at a digital store which would drag in the Wii and original XB but would skip DS. Which also fits somewhat

@Not_Soos
If it's implemented anything like Mario Kart it's not a huge advantage. I don't think anyone leaning heavily on the assist functions in Mario Kart is winning races. Short of their opponents being truly terrible or the RNG gods giving them the W. There's a huge difference between generally being on the track and having good lines

With that said, in F-Zero its much harder to avoid the edges. So if this mode removes that entirely then..... it'll automatically be better than a lot of lower level players. But again depends on how they do it. What speed? When does it kick in? It could easily be a disadvantage to the vast majority of players

This is the same guy who was convinced that the Wii U's successor would be a "full home console" with an AMD APU. To the point where they were railing against people who actually had what turned out to be accurate leaks. Notably Eurogamer/Digital Foundry. IIRC they even put out a video immediately after the Switch reveal trailer where they argued the "real NX" was still coming....

I'm sure Metroid Prime 4 is nearing the end of its development cycle. I'm sure it comes out soon and there's probably a trailer being worked on. But I wouldn't use SMD as a source.....

You know what.... I'd actually be pretty happy with remakes of Phantom Hourglass/Spirit Tracks and a Metroid Prime Pinball. Those DS Zelda games, although hard to translate outside of DS, were great titles and I say the more 2D Zelda on Switch the better.

Metroid Prime Pinball? I mean damn, bring back the days of full effort Nintendo Pinball releases. I mean seriously, go back and play the original Pokemon Pinball and tell me you don't want more of that? Give me Metroid Prime Pinball over an announcement of 4 this year I say, I'm not even joking

I still have every console I've ever owned and I'm not about to do any different this time around. Although this time, if it's BC and especially if they maintain dock compatibility, it'll find itself on a second screen somewhere

I mean, I've been considering getting a Lite or a second Dock anyways. This would be no different

@spottedleaf
Yeah, nah. This doesn't really change the story for a new piece of hardware. The title of this article is somewhat misleading, it's talking about revenue in Yen for Nintendo overall. During a period where the Yen was down AND they released the second highest grossing movie of the year

If you look at the raw sales for hardware and software for the Switch? It's like +2% vs last year, so fairly samey. And that was with TotK releasing at the top half of the year. And in comparison to 2022 which was was, although still not bad, the weakest year for Switch sales

I suspect 2023 will still end up being the weakest year for Switch sales. In terms of raw volume of consoles sold

@FishyS
There do appear to be some significant changes. At a quick glance across the names, seems to be a lot of auth/browser changes
https://switchbrew.org/wiki/17.0.0

@SpeedRunRocks
"Computer workspaces in the 80s weren't very well lit, it seems."

I know it's a cliché that developers work in dark rooms but it's also kinda accurate. I personally prefer a well lit office with the blinds fully open. When at work I generally lose that fight. Less light => less glare. Also development is a pretty concentration heavy task, the sun might go down and you wouldn't notice for a couple of hours

As for the movie? The drama was a bit much but the movie is a drama so it makes sense. I enjoyed it, probably not movie of the year or something I'll go back to but it certainly wasn't bad. The actual true story was doing a LOT of the heavy lifting here. Which, frankly, is not unexpected considering how great the story they had was

@Samalik
It's not that hard at all to rip Wii and GC games. A couple of years ago I did it, was like an afternoon to rip ~30 games. Also yes people, emulating games you own is most definitely a thing

Well, I must admit I do have one game in my Wii iso collection I didn't rip. Metroid Prime Trilogy which I did buy on the Wii U but I didn't get on disc. Although did own 3 on disc and have brought the remaster on Switch. Also I have Wind Waker and Super Mario Sunshine isos despite never owning a GC.... although I did get Wind Waker HD and Mario 3D AllStars

Why would I bother doing this when I have the original discs and hardware? Well, for one, why not? Secondly, because generally these games look better than they did on Wii this way. We're not going to get Metroid Prime tier remasters for Zack & Wiki. Also, flexibility. Having Twilight Princess on a portable machine? I mean you can't do that on the Switch. I'd love to be able and I'd buy it day 1 if they did but... in the mean time I don't have to wait because I ripped the ISO myself and I can run it on my laptop

So yeah, the world of emulation isn't quite as black and white as some here are portraying. There's certainly space for ethical emulation

@Magician
"Digital only" only makes sense when your media is a disc because the optical drive is a relatively significant cost. A cartridge slot isn't. If they can get backwards compatibility going for digital purchases there will be no reason to skip on the cartridge slot

I'm pretty confident there will be BC. I'm VERY confident that if there is BC your existing Switch cartridges will work

@Magician
I get that backwards compatibility is no guarantee, although I'm far more optimistic about it than you are. What I don't get is the idea that somehow it would matter whether or not those purchases were on cartridge or not. It'll either have backwards compatibility or it won't, I don't see BC being digital only

@TioRogerio
I actually used it fairly regularly up until a few weeks ago. It was on my phone and also my home tab in my browser. It was literally the only social media platform left that was still built an in sequence feed. Everything on the same level. If you followed someone and they posted something? You'd see it when they posted it in the order they posted it. Haven't really posted to it in ages but it was useful as a kind of news feed

But they decided recently to try and direct you to a curated feed. Which shows you tweets entirely out of sequence, hides some posts and promotes stuff from people you aren't following. Between that and them nuking verified accounts? I uninstalled it and changed my home page to a news site

People shouldn't be defending Nintendo objecting to refunds generally but especially not here. It's a product that clearly has issues, there should be no questions on a refund if people ask for it

@blindsquarel
If emulation offers a better experience why not? There are (relatively) legal means to acquire these game images. I mean, new releases are a bit more sketchy than previous generations where the means to rip the roms are a bit more mature. But even so

I for one use the service mentioned in the article. For SNES ROMs of games I physically have on the SNES. I'd also do it for my Wii RIPs but I can't really be bothered configuring the controllers for it to be that plug and play. Tempted to attempt it for my Wii U/3DS/DS games

@metalgario
People do stupid things all the time. I've certainly seen people convince themselves they were in the right and plow through with some BS story only to get mud on their face. I obviously don't know this person.... but I do know people who would pull this kind of thing

Also the thing that always got me about this was the timing. If it was a dispute in pay, take it up with your union or at the very least renegotiate. I don't think anyone has ever come out clean after effectively quitting and then publicly calling for a boycott

@Fizza
It's super game dependent. Some games will have no issues, others will have the in-game time speed up, others will have minor niggles and others will just do odd things. Eg recently I learnt that GTA5 on PC stutters for a good fraction of a second when you go over 180fps

Probably Pilotwings just happens to be one of the games where there are no significant downsides to just unlocking the framerate. Which makes sense because it was an early N64 title and wasn't really pushing the hardware that much so didn't really need any fancy programming tricks. Especially compared to other games on the N64 where 15fps wasn't unheard of

@Fizza
It's potentially a bit tricky for some games because the in game clock is often tied to the frame rate. and sometimes not directly but in odd ways which can cause weird behaviour. Sometimes even a thing for suprisingly recent games at higher frame rates

Remember, these games are basically just ROMs with small patches. Some of them to "fix" would involve a LOT of tinkering. Probably a bit beyond the scope of NSO

@westman98
Interesting, I hadn't heard that level of detail from the leak in terms of core config/codename. My comment above was going off my memory some earlier speculation from bits and pieces of "leaks" from last year. Probably says something that all of these leaks have been on largely the same page for well over a year now

Also you say everything else is a mystery but if you know the SoC and the core config that's pretty much everything short of a date. I mean obviously you can underclock/overclock and there are thermal/power considerations. And it doesn't really tell us about stuff like the screentype or other IO. But for the "how does the game run" bit, pretty much gives you a fairly accurate blueprint of what this is

@DTheSleepless
I mean in terms of "custom silicon" it may well be the case that the X1 spec was in part directed by discussions Nintendo had with Nvidia. Remembering that the first public discussion about new hardware from Nintendo was in March 2015 which was before any products with X1 were out. Presumably Nintendo was talking with Nvidia in 2013/14. The equivalent for this cycle would've been around 2018/19

The general speculation around this has been that some paired back Tegra Orin SoC would be the best fit. Which would be an 8nm SoC. And given it's a revision that's 7 years newer than X1 the gap in performance between it and the current Switch is... significant...

I think mostly though I just get a bit annoyed with the mentality around this topic. For some reason there's a very, very vocal group of Nintendo fans who are somehow offended by Moore's Law. And they always exist.

I bet if you went on archive.org you could find some Nintendo fanboy ranting on these pages during the DS era about how we don't need a DS successor because the DS fine as it is. Take any post in this comment section, replace Switch with DS. That's how stupid these comments will sound in a shockingly short amount of time

I wish there could be a discussion about the technical possibilities of a revision without the usual whine from the usual suspects. Also let it be known that gamers and gaming journalists almost universally know jack about tech and most shouldn't give an opinion on the topic

@twztid13
I've never sold any game I've bought so, meh

@Smug43
I'll put it this way. At launch 128GB cost about ~$100AU so a 15GB game effectively had an additional $12AU cost attached. Now because the cards are cheaper that cost is closer to an additional $3AU

Which you may say "that's an additional cost" which is true. But there are other discounts at play. Eg the regular retail price for games here is ~$70AU but if I go digital I can get a game voucher which drops the price to $67AU. Also digital games give you stronger gold coin rewards which adds to that. And additionally you can get discounted eShop cards (often ~15%). You can very easily end up paying ~$10-15AU less digitally, which more than makes up for the ~$3 you paid for that SD card storage. A card you need anyways for digital only games

And your last point about guarantees of being able to play the game in the future. I don't have any games that have become unplayable because I brought them digitally. None. Sure it has happened for some games but usually what happens is the servers for that game goes offline, which also impacts physical purchases. And in any case, other than preservation, why would I care? 15-20 years from now if I want to play Bayonetta 3 and Nintendo has made my game unplayable somehow? I'd personally feel justified playing it by other means

At this stage 15GB isn't a lot of storage so I don't get why people are going on like that's some sort of reason to go physical.

Sure when the Switch launched and a 128GB microSD card was $100AU. At that point it definitely mattered and was the reason I got a lot of games physically early on, especially >10GB games. But now you can get 512GB for a similar price

I think the Wii U more than any other console launched in a real limbo-era in terms of technologies. WiFi, hardware accelerated video decoding and LCD screens were good & cheap enough to make streaming low-latency 480p to a controller screen feasible in a way that wouldn't have been possible a couple of years prior. But on the other side flash and mobile hardware was well short of making a reasonable spec portable machine

Go back in time and put yourselves in that position of what to launch to follow the Wii. Do you launch a straight up "Wii HD", literally what the Wii U was minus the GamePad and hitting the Wii's $250US launch price. Or do you go Switch early and instead of the 3DS and Wii U release a portable Wii+, i.e. basically the Vita but with Skyward Sword on day 1. Or do you try to do both and make the Wii U

..... in hindsight? Wii HD would probably have been the best bet. But it was also the safest bet and the least interesting. Personally I'm glad they gambled on Wii U, I had fun with it. I would've liked it if they had made the controller a bit more sleek but

From what I've heard these leaks are very much real but also obtained via not particularly legit means. The leak also contains the name of the leaker. Some sites are not publishing this story because of that.....

100% some dude is losing their job over this one