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20 days agoY’know, I was gonna rant about how bad Nintendo’s gotten, but I figured keeping it short and sweet is better. I absolutely do insult people buying and praising Nintendo games. These are the same type of people who will turn around and say that PC gaming is too expensive, when they’ve probably spent triple that in games on the Wii, Switch, and Switch 2 now. Nintendo has become the lowest entry into the gaming ecosphere, which is sad for a number of reasons, but it has absolutely become the home for the lowest common denominator of people, where ideas from the industry at large are regurgitated with brand labels and people praise them because they haven’t seen the original form of those ideas.
I mean sure, I guess that comparison holds up, if you completely ignore the reality of modern walled gardens, and disassociate any difference between a console, which is just hardware, the exact same shit that’s in every PC, and actual vehicles, which have different chassis, engines, suspension, tires, and controls, because they do fundamentally different things.
A Switch, Switch 2, or Wii are about as different to PCs and any machine that plays games, for that matter as a convection oven is to an air fryer. They’re the same goddamned thing, one just does it on a larger scale, has more capacity, and typically isn’t governed by the brand maker on what you can do with the damned thing.
Comparing Nintendo vs PCs to ATVs to cars is about as mentally braindead as you can possibly get. What, exactly, can a Wii or Switch do that a PC cannot? I’m presuming you’re referring to it’s gimmicks like the motion controls for the Wii, or the detachable controllers for the Switch. At least, I hope it’s the joycons, notable for their designed stickdrift failure, and Nintendo’s refusal to resolve the issue with customers.
Otherwise, I would struggle to think of anything different from the Switch when comparing it to even a Steam Deck. It certainly struggles with performance when compared to the Steam Deck. Comparing on a price point, the Switch does technically win out, but again, lowest common denominator and lowest barrier to entry in the gaming industry. What else does the switch even have, outside of people buying games because of brand appeal? Seriously, I’m genuinely struggling to think of a single point Nintendo innovates on, and it’s certainly not their games.
I could go off into a whole segment of their games, but most have, like I have said previously, been regurgitating innovations other companies and games have made.
Separately, the gimmicks the Wii and Switch have are arguably the worst parts of the console’s designs. Motion controls that are so bad they had to make an extension that slightly improves the tracking performance. Switch’s most notable feature was the two controllers that detached and could act like a single controller, or act as two half-assed controllers, so you could get stick drift on your controllers twice as fast!
Now, to address emulation; that’s the whole fucking point of emulation. You can literally do the same thing a switch can do if you emulate the software shell that the walled garden requires all games to be built within. On older consoles you could argue that games were optimized for their hardware, and ran better as a result of optimizing for the hardware, but many ports, to or from consoles have effectively proven that optimization only goes so far and hardware is a hard limitation on what can be done.
If you can emulate a console’s game, you know, the whole fucking point of a video game console, which is to play games… Kinda answers the question.
Now, as far as your anecdotal evidence of you and everyone you know owning a Switch; that honestly says more about you than it does about the Switch. I can’t imagine the mental gymnastics needed to justify paying close to half the price of a new PC at the time just for the pleasure of playing the 3d platformer, or the dungeon crawler, or the relaxing life sim game. Nope, never seen a type of game like that outside of Nintendo. Nope, only Nintendo can come up with such interesting concepts as 2D, mostly linear Metroidvania! (/s, in case your IQ is lower than the price of a secondhand DS game.)
TlDr; Either you’re a corporate plant, a braindead shill on the same level as Harman Smith, or so genuinely casual you consider FIFA to be your most niche game you play. Think for yourself, and I encourage you to actually compare a Nintendo game, and find one gameplay mechanic invented in the past 3-4 years that was actually new. And no, “throwing spheres to capture creatures” is not a new gameplay innovation.