I’d think the dock would have a few antennas too. An additional GPU would be nice… do you know for certain there isn’t one in there?
Looks great but a console lives and dies on its developer support and ninty haven’t got a great track record of that despite early promise. I seem to remember there was a similar large list of developers promised for the wii u but that didn’t come to much either.
@tekk was suggesting that there is, indeed an additional GPU in the base. There are laptop set-ups that have that, but they’ve never seemed particularly effective from what I’ve read. In the absence of information, I assumed that they’d be putting their power into the tablet itself so players would get a distinctly better tablet gaming experience than they’d get elsewhere that could also play last-gen console games without problems, and it’s not like Nintendo care about making graphical powerhouses. But a lower-resolution tablet screen and portable power considerations do provide some reasons why they might have some graphical processing in the base even if they aren’t going for 4k gaming.
Still not sure what all is in the base. Another graphics card wouldn’t take up that much space, a wifi antenna hardly any at all (and they’re showing multiplayer gaming with the tablets, so presumably there’s some antenna in that portion); an internal power brick would take up more space, and I guess collectively they start to add up.
I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen a console partner list include game engines, physics engines or modelling software. And I’ve heard of…19 of the other studios/publishers. Wonder who the others are, or rather, what they’ve released.
Yeah, I’m not calling 4k or anything, but the fact that gameplay happens to be a lot smoother when docked, that everyone’s guessing the handheld display is only 720p, and the patent they filed (I’ll link the image in the bottom, the right portion is the relevant one) makes me think they’ve got some tech in there to beef up the processing power. Even the handheld itself could be quite powerful on its own though: NVidia has confirmed that it’s running a modified Tegra as its SoC (System on a Chip for those not familiar with the term; think of something like a raspberry pi where the cpu, the graphics card, the memory, and everything else is all in one piece manufactured at one time, not like modular “real” computer parts. The Raspberry Pi is a famous example here), and the current gen Tegra architecture isn’t all that far behind the consoles this generation for performance.
The docking, if they’re playing the long term, could be pretty cool as far as upgrade capabilities too. As long as they sufficiently overengineered whatever bus they’re using, they could get quite a bit of future proofing by giving you the ability to just buy a new, more powerful dock. If 4k hits the Switch, I’m going to bet it’s that way, not at launch.
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I miss my purple N64.
I really regret trading it away.
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Interesting. I did almost the opposite: I bought more games for that console than I did for any others combined (even the N64). (Why? Wavebird.)
There’s no such thing as a nonproprietary game console, and probably never will be. Even retro PC gaming obliges some sort of emulation these days, so the notion strikes me as mostly dubious anyway. I also find it interesting that the closer to the experience of PC gaming consoles becomes, the less interested I am in them. Plug and play with cartridges was probably peak console for me.
Interesting to see Nintendo reach back on this.
Will it bring me back? To be honest, I don’t know. I would never have walked out of a Fred Meyer with a Wavebird and a Game Cube back in the day had it not been for Rogue Leader, which subsequently led to Windwaker, the only game I’ve ever preordered (and the only Zelda game I’ve ever really enjoyed).
The first guy in that video - fancy apartment, jetsetting lifestyle, designer duds… is he supposed to be the “it all came true after all” actualisation of this famous kid?
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It looks good to me, I’ve narrowly avoided the temptation of the Gamecube, Wii U and 3DS because my sensible inner self keeps saying “you just want to play Ocarina of Time again like you used to, and Mario Kart” (I did eventually get a Wii just to play Donkey Kong Coutnry Returns, and nothing else). I’m keen on the hook-two-of-them-up-no-problem feature, hooking two old gameboys to play F1 racing and 2 player Tetris for the 1st time was awesome future balls at the time. Plus each of them having two controllers as standard on a portable device is the sort of thing that’ll bring local multiplayer back into my realm. This is an intriguing development, I may yet return to the land of the rising marios.
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That’s an interesting option. It might create some weird situations where there are games you can’t play unless it’s docked, but piecemeal upgrades (upgrade the dock, then later upgrade the tablet) seem more palatable than what Sony and Microsoft are doing, requiring people to replace their whole consoles every couple of years.
Though I am wondering how much we can infer from the video given that the on-device videos are likely both simulated and running on not-final hardware.
Kinda weird to see Skyrim there. I mean, had fun with the game and everything. But while it’s not retro-old, it dropped in 2011. While it’s new to Nintendo it’s kinda odd to use a last-gen game to promote a next gen system.
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Maybe Bethesda have got all the bugs out of it now.
Yeah, right.
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There’s a remastered version being (re-)released next week.
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My son, who’s in 6th grade, has a Wii U and a 3DS and evidently those aren’t enough. He wanted a GameBoy (which I gather was phased out around the time he was born) so that he could play Pokemon games. He managed to find a refurbished game, which he bought with his savings. (I don’t remember which game it was – the place that sold it had replaced the battery; evidently there’s a small amount of money to be made doing that if one has some soldering skills.) Then he just needed to hunt down an old GameBoy device. Fortunately, the kid up the street (who’s in middle school) said, “I have an old GameBoy Color, I haven’t used it in years. Take it!”
You can be sure the Switch is in his sights…
Speaking of handheld games, I got one of these in 1983:
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what it boils down to is since the tail end of the n64 the vast majority of games I, and seemingly most people, have interest in are available on every system but the Nintendo ones. That whole cross platform thing that took over in the 00’s. Nintendo deliberately avoided the whole subject in favor of 1st party development and system exclusives. Part of their insistence on still viewing themselves as a toy company, not a media company.
In terms of PC emulation. Its an entirely different world. Most retro-pc gaming requires nothing special. For DOS games you use DOS box a microscopic little program that always works. There’s no list of compatible games, no bugs, no requirement for hardware exponentially more powerful than the original system. No hacking together methods of getting a Wiimote to work sort of like it does for the system. Because you’re not emulating hardware, the hardware’s all the same infrastructure. You’re just trying to find a way to replicate the software environment. The worst complication you run into is that old Lucas Arts adventure games run better in SCUMMvm than DOS box. And most of the major games have been re-released such that they run natively in Windows. Anything since the 90’s runs natively to begin with, often with minimal tweaking. The problems you run into are the same problems you were running into at the time. Cause old school PC gaming required a screw driver. For me that’s half the fun though, as much as things working is nice. You felt pretty damn competent back in the day when you managed to work around some major, game killing, bug.
Compare that to emulating more recent console games. It was only very recently that Dolphin caught up with supporting every game cube game. And that program is still unreliable and difficult to use. Emulated games often run differently in important ways than they do on the original system. Anything that isn’t a decade old, its a crap shoot if the game in question is supported. You need massively more computing power than the actual console had. Bugs. Hand remapping of controllers. And that’s before you get into shit like the Wiimote. You want to re-play a Wii game without a Wii? Still need that Wiimote, and a separate set of programs and hardware to get it working And so forth. Retro console gaming happens this way. Retro PC gaming happens this way. Even trying to replay my old Game Cube games now that the hardware melted itself is a holy god damned terror.
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My experience has been that this other way is usually more reliable and has better support.
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Better selection on the old stuff too. But its less instantly recognizable when making the “you just download that shit and it works” point.
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Emulation-ahoy!
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