I loved the original and Second, but I played the demo for II and it did not click with me at all. I really disliked the change to how turn order worked, the original system dovetailed so much better with the titular Brave/Default mechanic.

Even if/when Switch 2 emulation is possible, there’s not a chance in hell it could run on Deck hardware.

Both systems have pros and cons. This article isn’t bashing on the Steam Deck at all, just making the case for what the Switch 2 has going for it.

They say up front that this article is a response to the frankly obnoxious amount of “my gaming platform can beat up your gaming platform” circlejerking that has been going around - which you’re kinda perpetuating.

The Deck does not “obliterate” the Switch 2, and a headline like that makes you part of the problem.

Of course there’s going to be one eventually, but if they’re implying it’s coming very soon that actually raises questions. Donkey Kong Bananza looks to have been developed by the team that did Odyssey, so if a 3D Mario was being developed in parallel, I’m curious who was on that project.

The Wii U was stuck working against itself in a number of ways. On paper, the idea of bringing the DS’s successful format to a console sounded great… but couldn’t actually work the same way in practice.

The first problem was that human eyes can’t focus on two screens at different distances from the eye. You can’t actually look at both screens together, you have to switch your focus from one to the other.

Then there’s just the economic reality of console development requiring developers to prioritize multiplatform development. No one wants to design a game around the Wii U and have it be exclusive to the Wii U. That was viable for the DS because the DS was such a massive juggernaut, and because handheld titles could be developed on a much smaller budget, but Wii U exclusivity could never be justified. Games that are being developed for other single-screen platforms and then ported to Wii U can’t do much with the Gamepad.

But perhaps the most ironic nail in the coffin was that the best use case for the Gamepad, Off-TV Play, could only be supported by games designed around a single screen. Developers shouldn’t make the second screen important or else they lose this feature!

Every Nintendo DS game.

The Stanley Parable, and similar “walking simulator” type games.

I bought a Miyoo Mini Plus two years ago and liked it so much I wish I’d bought a more expensive model with analog sticks. I keep looking at all the shiny new stuff on the market and feeling the temptation to upgrade, but holding off because something better is always around the corner.

Well, guess I no longer have to worry about temptation now.

It really just seems to me like you want to argue, but I’m not sure why you chose me to argue with. All I said was that they can’t raise or drop the price of the console, and I dunno why that’s the comment that set you off.

I said that they can’t drop the price of the console and they can’t raise the price of the console either. What does this have to do with what I said?

I think that you’re doing that annoying internet argument thing, because you’re not actually replying to what I said here.

We’re talking about the console.

Given the outcry over the price, I think they have no choice but to eat the loss. They can’t drop the price, but they can’t raise it either. They’ll just have to hope that they can bring down manufacturing costs over time.

Very unlikely that they even could drop the price with the tariff situation.

I may be stretching the definition of cancelled a bit because we don’t know if it was ever in development to begin with, but I will forever have a chip on my shoulder about Puyo Puyo 30th Anniversary.

The three best games in the series were Puyo Puyo 15th Anniversary (2006), Puyo Puyo 20th Anniversary (2011), and Puyo Puyo Chronicle (2016, this game is 25th in all but name). None of these games were released outside of Japan, but after Puyo Puyo Tetris’s Switch port got localized in 2017 and sold really well, fans had high hopes that the pattern would continue and the next one of these would get localized too.

The pattern did not continue. Instead, Sega responded to PPT selling well by making Puyo Puyo Tetris 2. It’s literally the exact same as the first game, only much buggier. It’s a terrible game and I hate it.

To this day, we still have not gotten a proper mainline game. In fact, Sega just announced they’re rereleasing Puyo Puyo Tetris 2S as a Switch 2 launch title. This is all the series will ever be from now on.

I can’t tell if you were intentionally trying to mislead, but you know that this discourse was never about CAD, right? You know that the article is discussing USD, right?

It’s not nitpicking to say that you’ve been misleading, whether intentionally or not.

That’s CAD, the article in the OP was about USD.

Switch 1 games are not $80.

They do not sell SNES and N64 games for $80, no. You know those are on the NSO app already, right?

Look, if you wanna be mad that Mario Kart World is $80, that’s fair to be mad at. But you don’t gotta make up misinformation.

I thought we were talking about Switch 2 games?

But then you still have to buy the game.

If I have to pay $80 for Kirby Air Ride 2, I will pay $80 for Kirby Air Ride 2. I have waited 22 years for this game, there’s never been anything else like it.

There are so many multiplayer games competiting for players’ attention today. The biggest risk associated with a multiplayer game is the lack of a playerbase. F2P is the obvious way to mitigate that risk. Of course it’s not impossible for premium titles to succeed, but it will be very difficult to overcome players who might look at it and think “I’m not sure if anyone else is going to spend $30 on this, and if they don’t then I won’t either.”

By the looks of this game, I’m skeptical that it has enough of a hook to succeed. The market for sports games is dominated by licensed titles, can they really hope to compete with FIFA?

I absolutely love the 8BitDo Pro 2. Supports both wired/wireless, I just never unplug it.

It is less bad than code-in-a-box. That’s not a high bar, but it is less bad.

There are two main reasons to buy physical:

Ability to share, trade, and resell your games. These key cards still support this, whereas code-in-a-box did not. So, slightly better.

Then there’s the peace of mind that your games will still work in the distant future. I think if you ask most people who primarily buy physical, myself included, we’ll say this is the main appeal of physical games, and the big reason why key cards don’t feel acceptable.

Some day when the servers eventually go offline, these key cards will become bricks. It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when. We have no idea how long Nintendo will support them for, and they’re not going to hard commit a timetable out loud for us. But we know it can’t be forever.

But even for standard physical games, there is some uncertainty regarding their long-term future that I’m not sure people realize. When those servers eventually go online, your cartridge only has 1.0 on it, you won’t be able to get patches. That’s better than a brick, but for a lot of games that’s probably not the version you want to play.

And then the even darker concern is bit rot. No form of physical media is permanent. Every disc and every cartridge will eventually degrade. Worse yet is that for many forms of media, we don’t even know how long they’re set to last for, we only find out once some of them start to fail. Cartridges are generally better than discs, but beyond that we truly have no idea how long Switch cartridges should be expected to last.

Curious if these carts remain compatible with Switch 1, booting back into the base game.

I know that I’m one guy, and my purchasing decisions ain’t gonna change nothin’. But I still try to vote with my wallet as much as I can in order to feel like I’m doing the right thing. I’m the guy old-fashioned enough to still only buy native Linux games because I don’t like the idea of replacing official support with just hoping Proton happens to work, knowing full well that this replacement happened long ago and I am too late to turn back the clock. And I’ve got a whole list of publishers I will never buy from under any circumstances.

I will never ever ever spend money on gacha, because if I don’t know what I’m buying then I’m not buying it. Even putting aside the ethical concerns, that’s just a stupid purchase.

But I have a lot of nostalgia for TF2, and I don’t know how to reconcile that. They kinda got away with sneaking in gacha before we realized how evil this is. I haven’t touched the game in a long time anyway, but if the Heavy Update ever saw the light of day (it won’t) or even if they just brought back rd_asteroid (even more not happening), I’d be very tempted and I dunno what I’d do.

There are two gacha games I still play, without spending any money on, while knowing what a hypocrite I am for playing them. Mahjong Soul and Riichi City. They’re the two most populated Riichi Mahjong clients - it’s either these or Tenhou, but Tenhou isn’t in English, hasn’t been updated in a long time, paywalls a number of features behind a subscription model, and is steadily losing players to its competitors. If a new client with an ethical business model took off I’d switch in heartbeat, but I can’t imagine one would ever take off to a point where I could queue at any time of day and get high-ranking opponents at my level. So I’m kinda stuck with these.

It is less bad than code-in-a-box. That’s not a high bar, but it is less bad.

There are two main reasons to buy physical:

Ability to share, trade, and resell your games. These key cards still support this, whereas code-in-a-box did not. So, slightly better.

Then there’s the peace of mind that your games will still work in the distant future. I think if you ask most people who primarily buy physical, myself included, we’ll say this is the main appeal of physical games, and the big reason why key cards don’t feel acceptable.

Some day when the servers eventually go offline, these key cards will become bricks. It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when. We have no idea how long Nintendo will support them for, and they’re not going to hard commit a timetable out loud for us. But we know it can’t be forever.

But even for standard physical games, there is some uncertainty regarding their long-term future that I’m not sure people realize. When those servers eventually go online, your cartridge only has 1.0 on it, you won’t be able to get patches. That’s better than a brick, but for a lot of games that’s probably not the version you want to play.

And then the even darker concern is bit rot. No form of physical media is permanent. Every disc and every cartridge will eventually degrade. Worse yet is that for many forms of media, we don’t even know how long they’re set to last for, we only find out once some of them start to fail. Cartridges are generally better than discs, but beyond that we truly have no idea how long Switch cartridges should be expected to last.

It is still possible to redownloaded previously purchased 3DS and Wii U games, they haven’t taken that down yet. You just can’t buy anything anymore. They haven’t said how long they’ll keep that up for, their FAQ simply says “for the foreseeable future”, but we know it can’t be forever and ever and ever.

Wii downloads went fully offline in 2019, 13 years after the console’s launch, or 7 years after the console’s successor. I wouldn’t try to extrapolate off a single data point though, Switch servers may potentially last longer based on both a longer console life-cycle and a desire to keep backwards compatibility going.

FWIW, Hall Effect isn’t the only way to prevent drift, they could be using some other tech.

But they really gotta clarify what they are doing about it then.

Switch 1 emulation on the Steam Deck already has much worse performance than a Switch, given the overhead of emulation. There is no possible way it can run Switch 2 games.

For Ring Fit and Labo, they’ve clarified that those games aren’t compatible with new JoyCons but can still be played with old JoyCons.

Nintendo published a list of games with compatibility issues. Says they are “continuing to improve compatibility, including by working with publishing and developing partners”, which implies they’re hoping to patch in fixes for affected games.

A surprising number of people in this very comment section seem to.

Eventually, perhaps. I do not claim to have a crystal ball powerful enough to peer decades into the future. But right now, for this generation, I can say we’re a long way from that point just yet.

This is very true. It’s not just that Nintendo makes good games, it’s that a lot of their games are wildly unlike anything else on the market. The reason I’m losing my mind over a Kirby Air Ride sequel is because there hasn’t been any other game like the original from 2003. I’ve waited 22 years for another game that could scratch that itch.

It didn’t have the form factor of the Switch

So it’s not a similar device. Comparing to phones is rather misleading, given that phones do not have active cooling and wouldn’t actually be able to run the kinds of games the Switch hardware could without catching on fire in the process. They aren’t gaming hardware.

Exactly what hardware at a similarly competitive price point and form factor are you comparing it to when you say it’s behind?

The Switch 1 didn’t use the very best top of the line parts that money could buy, but if that’s what you’re fixating on then you’re missing the fact that neither did the Steam Deck. The Switch made compromises to hit a $300 price point in 2017, and the Deck made compromises to hit a $400 price point in 2022.

The Deck is targeted squarely at enthusiasts. While it’s a fantastic product for that niche, anyone who thinks it’s going to capture a market the size of Nintendo’s any time soon is living in a fanboy bubble.

Hell, right now Valve isn’t even capable of manufacturing half as many Decks as Nintendo will manufacture Switch 2s. They literally can’t sell that number because they can’t produce that number.

What “standards” are you comparing it to? The Switch 1 was behind home consoles, but that’s not really a fair comparison. There was nothing similar on the market to appropriately compare it to, no “standard”.

Five years later the Steam Deck outperformed the Switch, because of course hardware from five years later would. But the gap between the 2017 Switch and 2022 Deck is not so vast that you can definitively claim in advance to know that the 2025 Switch 2 definitely has to be worse. You don’t know that and can’t go claiming it as fact.

All we know so far is that the Switch 2 does beat the Deck in at least one major attribute: it has a 1080p120 screen, in contrast to the Deck’s 800p60. And it is not unlikely to expect the rest of the hardware to reflect that.