since the early days of video gaming we've been looking for more and more
ways to take our games with us from the Primitive handhelds of the 1970s that
could only play one game each to the 3DS
which brought portable stereo 3D to the
masses to the NVIDIA Shield that can stream full quality games wirelessly
from a PC so as it becomes increasingly
easy to cram high-end equipment into a
small package I mean just think what's possible these days with a smartphone or
a small form factor computer it might not be surprising that the next big
thing in console gaming might be Nintendo's new Switch a living room
console that's also being pitched as a
fully portable console wait
what okay so it's like this the switch
took one of the main selling points of its commercially unsuccessful
predecessor the Wii U and made it a lot
more robust the Wii U featured a screen
on the main controller that enabled the gamer to play without a TV uh maybe
while they were in the bathroom or something but the caveat was that you
had to stay within a certain range of the actual console which combined with a
distinct lack of killer apps meant that
this wasn't enough to lure people away from competition like Sony and
Microsoft but not to be dissuaded by
poor sales figures Nintendo making what
some consider to be its last stand in the living room console arena is
doubling down on this concept by making the switch's 720p screen part of the
console itself which has a tabletes form
factor and weighs slightly less than 400
G with the controllers attached to the side a little lighter than an iPad Air 2
when you're using the switch in standard living room mode or TV mode as Nintendo
calls it the console connects and charges over USB typc to an included
dock that features an HDMI port and
three spare USB type A ports although
the switch comes with a somewhat meager 32 GB of internal storage this is
expandable through a Micro SD card slot
good on you Nintendo so the switch will play games at either 1080P or 900 P at
up to 60 frames per second while connected to a TV and this is cool in
60fps titles it can even maintain this frame rate when you take it on the road
but if this wasn't enough of a paradigm shift for you where things get really
interesting is when we start to look at the controller setup the switch actually
comes with a pair of controllers so yes
you get local multiplayer out of the box they're called joycon on and they bear a
passing resemblance to Wii remotes but are quite a bit more versatile in
addition to being smaller the console comes with a joycon grip that holds the
joy-cons together to allow them to behave like a single controller with
more traditional ergonomics but if you want to remove the switch from the dock
and take it with you the joycons can also act as independent controllers for
portable local multiplayer or they can slide directly onto the console itself
making it look kind of like the Wii U controller except with the ability to
play on toilets everywhere instead of just the ones in your home and Nintendo
is pushing the multiplayer aspect very hard here not only emphasizing how folks
can play with separate controllers on the same screen wherever they go but
also that up to eight separate switch
consoles can be linked together on a local network some games will even run
on multiple switches in this manner with
just one cartridge similar to Diablo spawn or download play on the
3DS joycons also support motion sensing
but a bit differently than you might have experienced it on the Wii or the
Wii U one of your two joycons has an IR
sensor that can detect not only motion but distances and shapes and both
joy-cons support what Nintendo is calling HD Rumble which is an advanced
haptic engine that can simulate lots of
different Sensations Nintendo demoed
this by showing how it could simulate the feeling of an ice cube rattling
around a glass with the player being able to distinguish between one and
multiple cubes and between solid ice and liquid water pretty cool if big if game
devs actually Implement any of these features on the subject of the games
themselves this is an area Nintendo is definitely looking to improve on over 50
games are in development and there's going to be extra emphasis on
first-party titles like Mario and Zelda
to give players an optimally nintendoe
experience but even though the switch is obviously newer than the PS4 or Xbox One
don't expect it to push the limits of console performance the NVIDIA Tegra GPU
also isn't going to come close to competing with a high-end PC graphics
card but it wasn't designed to as Nintendo experiences tend to be less
about Cutting Edge graphics and more about delivering something unique that
isn't easy to replicate on a PC or other gaming box and of course tempering the
graphics horsepower means better battery life the console itself is expected to
work for 3 to 6 hours while the joy-cons can get up to 20 hours each one thing
that's decidedly not that cool is that
unlike in the past Nintendo is going to start charging an annual fee for on
online multiplayer though thankfully they are widely expected to undercut
Sony and Microsoft so you probably won't be paying nearly as much as you would
for a PSN or Xbox Live subscription so
will it be successful at $300 the launch
price puts it on par with the PS4 and expone right now except that they come
with an included game and both have massive back catalogs so whether you
make the switch will ultimately come down to Nintendo
being more successful selling this
hybrid Paradigm than NVIDIA
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