Promptly at 10 am last Thursday October 20th, the great toy-makers and video game legends announced their next console to the world with a bonafide internet bomb.
Dubbed the “Nintendo Switch,” it is everything that their last console, the WiiU, should have been. The three-minute video showed people of the world that they have learned from their mistakes and are ready to rumble with the likes of Sony and Microsoft once more.
And oh boy, is Nintendo going to rumble.
Everything about the Switch is an improvement and a sign that Nintendo has indeed licked their wounds from the dismally selling WiiU. Right from the get go, the name tells the public that this is an entirely new system ready to be plugged into players televisions, as opposed to sounding like an upgrade.
It just would not be Nintendo if they did not have some form of “gimmick.” The Wii ushered in the era of motion controls and the WiiU brought the screen to your hands, and now the Switch has two small detachable controllers, named “Joy-Cons.”
The Switch works a system that is plugged into your television and plays like your Playstation or Xbox at home. However, the controller you use has the detachable Joy-Cons on it, which then can be re-attached to the removable and portable screen in the systems main console.
Once attached you can take the console anywhere you please. It comes fitted with a headphone jack as well for those long road trips and airline flights. What is better yet is that Nintendo still has yet to abandon their affinity for local multiplayer; each of the Joy-Cons can be used as an individual controller in games like MarioKart, NBA 2K, and the upcoming Super Mario game yet to be announced.
What is perhaps most exciting is the game library. Nintendo has already announced that the switch will have over twice the amount of games ready to play at launch that the WiiU, and many of those games will come from third party support, something that previous Nintendo consoles have frustratingly lacked.
Nintendo will always want to push their own games on their systems first, seeing as how it is their system (who would blame them though, Super Mario and MarioKart are amazing). However, Nintendo is not stupid; they understand that times are changing, that there are more third party developers than ever, and that their console needs to support these developers to succeed.
Nintendo has also smartly paired with tech giant Nvidia to develop their console; purportedly, Nvidia created a Tegra processor specifically for the console, and it looks very promising according to the video.
Nintendo has revealed a list of over 45 developers that are partnered with Nintendo ahead of the release of the Switch. Developer Bethesda has already been revealed to be releasing their incredible adventure game, The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, for the console. Other companies on the list include Activision, EA, TellTale, and Ubisoft, among many others.
The Nintendo Shift has the gaming world in a frenzy, and people simply cannot stop talking about it. There are longtime Nintendo fans that are going to buy the console no matter what (including yours truly), however, no one can deny that the first video has painted a picture of something truly special. Obviously, only time will tell how successful this console is, but one thing is for certain. Nintendo is back, and they are swinging for the fences with the Shift.
The Nintendo Switch is slated to release in March 2017
