Games

Everything has to look so serious these days.

The colourful Joy Cons were part of the Switch’s identity, sad to see it reduced to an accent they seem almost ashamed of.

I'm sure that they'll have a billion models with more color

They wanna make it very clear that this is their best-selling console ever but better, I would‘ve been surprised if they didn‘t just slap a 2 on it. There‘s so much riding on this for them.

Nintendo consoles tended to be radical, Nintendo handhelds were more iterative.

The Game Boy and DS lines all built gradually on each other, seems the Switch line is following suit. I assume Nintendo see the Switch as a handheld that can be docked, rather than a console that’s also portable, so I guess it makes sense that it’s following a similar trajectory of previous handheld lines.

Nintendo collapsed its console and handheld product lines for the Switch. We're also seeing large parts of the gaming industry adopt the Switch form factor for their products. I don't think there is anything that Nintendo could innovate on that would sell.

At the same time, the Switch is such a solid console that a hardware upgrade with full backwards compatibility* is really the best case scenario. People have wanted a bigger screen, better chip, and better joysticks since launch, and now we'll have them!

*the video says it's not 100% compatible, but I'm assuming that's for stuff like Labo and Ring Fit that need those exact joycon sizes/shapes.

I am hoping that the Joycon mouse mode turns out real and used in some interesting ways.

Nintendo lawsuit want to know your location

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.

2zu

The Pokemon games all being the same caused me to get bored of them years ago. And now with them suing Palworld for 'capturing monsters with an object and summoning them in 3d space', a patent made after Palworld released their trailer, I find the Nintendo brand actively harmful to the state of gaming.

Pokemon is literally the same game over and over, I hugely regretted my purchase of pokemon x cause it was literally a cloned game with barely any new features. It's probably Nintendo's most effective cash cow in terms of effort to capital reward.

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?

Much like the rest of the announcement, the specs actually got leaked a few days earlier: https://thegamepost.com/nintendo-switch-2-full-specs-appears-to-have-leaked/

TL;DR: 12GB of RAM, GPU that's roughly on par with the Steam Deck. It's not the most powerful handheld out there but surprisingly not bad for Nintendo standards.