Hey guys, I’ve had my Nintendo Switch for a few weeks now, so I feel qualified to rant about it for a little while. Since this console is often praised as one of the best things Nintendo has ever made, I felt I’d chip in a contrary opinion.
If you’re a protective Nintendo fan, look away now!
tl;dr: As a home console, the Nintendo Switch is just a WiiU with less features. The portability is not a feature that is useful to me.
Let me begin by saying that it’s still a fun console, and it’s worth the money, for most people. Anyone who didn’t own a WiiU, or wants a handheld, will love it.
But as the only person who bought a WiiU, I feel like I’ve just paid £350+ to keep playing WiiU games. Graphically it’s not even a noticeable improvement – you’d have to compare them side by side to notice a difference. I’m not expecting cutting edge-graphics, but 1080p has been the standard for around 10 years now – you could at least give me that. Half the games are ports or sequels of WiiU games, and the new games look like they could run on WiiU hardware anyway. Nothing is backwards compatible – not the games, and not even the controllers! (I purchased a Mayflash Magic adapter which lets me use my old WiiU Pro controller on the Switch. Very cool life-hack. That should totally be a built in feature of the console.)
Why did I say it has less features? The WiiU and previous Nintendo consoles had fun charts for showing you which games you’ve played every day and for how long. Those are gone. Now you have to play a game for 10 days to see a rough estimate of your playtime (rounded to the nearest 5 hours, wtf?). Very primitive and confusing.
As for online features, they are the same as what the WiiU had – but now you have to pay for them! Talk about cutting out existing features and putting them behind a paywall.
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Anyway, if you want a new handheld to replace your Nintendo 3DS, then it’s a huge improvement. But as a home console for the living room, it doesn’t offer anything new or exciting. I wish Nintendo would make consoles again.
When I was a kid, the Nintendo 64 revolutionized 3D video games. The GameCube took those games and made them look 5x better. The Wii was gimmicky, but offered some unique controls for the time. The WiiU… looked a little bit better than the Wii. And then the Switch… is a WiiU that you can carry around.
It would be nice to see some groundbreaking innovation from Nintendo again. They should be the company working on making VR more accessible. But instead, you’ve got Sony making better Mario games than Nintendo. (see Astro Bot: Rescue Mission) And yes, I’m aware that Nintendo is a company and needs to make money, and that my favourite gaming products seem to be those that don’t make much money. That sucks for me.
Oh well. I just wanted to get that out there.
If you just want a handheld and love your Switch, probably none of this applies to you.
Kupo Games
Web and mobile games by Matt Roszak.
As someone who has been a PlayStation guy since the first one and oftentimes a Nintendo guy since the Wii, I enjoy my switch and have found portability to be amazing like they took the Wii U and flipped it on its head. The right analog stick is an odd placement (though I don’t mind the switch pro controller), but I love how I can actually take the games with me wherever I go even if the frame rate/graphics of certain games are admittedly a down grade in order to cut corners especially for the sake of fair battery life that’s above average. I’m glad we have ports of games originally released on other consoles I can actually take with me as a Crash fan! Unlike any other consoles, the Joy-cons that work perfectly fine can’t easily allow me to do minor movement like I can barely do on certain games that can be flawlessly executed like on PS4, but at least they can split to become two player that is amazing.
Simply put that I as a PlayStation guy and still am overall would recommend!
I have never left a comment here, but now I wanted so say one thing. You mentioned that the graphics aren’t that much better. Who cares? People buy games nowadays just because it looks great. Like that’s the most imporant thing in games. I hate that. Same thing with movies. I still haven’t watched any movie in 3D. People that saw Avatar and Hobbit praised those movies and said that the 3D was amazing. They barely remembered anything about the movie except that it looked amazing. I’m a huge Pokemon fan. I have played Pokemon over 20 years and I will play them as long as Game Freak makes great Pokemon games. Still, I was little angry that they cut about half of the Pokemon in Sword and Shield. They said that they couldn’t fit them all in the game. Guess what? I would have preferred Sword and Shield if it had Fucking Gameboy Color graphics if that meant that they could fit every pokemon in the game. Of course I’m the minority here. I really don’t care about graphics. If the game looks good then that’s just a small plus to me. People care about graphics more that the gameplay, story, characters and other things like music.
About the online features. It’s not that expensive. I mean if you can afford the console and games you have enough money so that you can buy online functions. You just have to make small sacrifices if you don’t have too much money. Eat healthier, drink less alcohol, stop smoking, don’t buy expensive stuff all the time. I mean you can easily get enouh money for the online thing.
By they way. Is Final Fantasy 5 coming to Switch? That would be really cool. Hopefully i wasn’t too mean. I just wanted to give my honest opinion. Love you games!
So many typos. Also, I clearly meant Epic Battle Fantasy 5, not Final Fantasy 5 XD
I proud of you son
Thanks for this article. So if I want to play Zelda (new and old), the best is WII U. But is it still on sale? Or then I arrive too late? T-T
I play again at EBF5 for the pleasure of seasonal quests, hey hey 🙂
oof
horible take. it deserves all the praise it gets
Nintendo must die for hypnotizing people with THEIR consoles and titular mascot. YOU ROCK, MATT, MARIO SUCKS DIC SOUPCAN!
They celebrated Mario’s 35th birthday with 5 remakes(Mario 35 is a remake of the original Mario) and changed the look of the e-shop and we were repetitively reminded and was celebrated for way too long, and the Legend of Zelda(much better franchise) got no mention of it’s birthday.
FOR
Unique hybrid design
HD Rumble
Two controllers included
Bright, crisp, colorful screen
AGAINST
Joy-Cons charge only on console without accessory
Split D-pad
Oddly placed right analogue stick
Limited online service at launch
Nintendo is the past. I’m just kidding 🙂
*Nintendo Makes great games
*Nintendo can afford to produce consoles
*Nintendo Needs money
So…
Produce consoles solely to sell games, players buy consoles just for games, and Nintendo makes boatloads of money.
Arguably so long as they never stop producing good games, this scheme could keep going until hardware becomes ridiculously expensive from lack of resources.
Test
testing*