Nintendo’s eagerly awaited iteration of the world’s favourite game console offers plenty of subtle refinements. All it needs now is a new masterpiece to play on it
The arrival of a new video game console – especially one with “Nintendo” stamped on the box – is a rare, sacred event. It has the power to transport us to childhood Christmases; a time, hopefully, of lighter responsibility and clearer innocence, perhaps when a parent sat with us cross-legged on the carpet, the full beam of their attention aligned, for that moment, with ours.
A console is an electrical device, much like a toaster or an alarm clock, except its utilitarian function is not to toast bread or rouse us for the commute, but something more ephemeral: to generate joy. A collection of wires and microprocessors that can conjure worlds, here we find playful challenge and the capacity to experience mastery and victory in ways the real world, with its kaleidoscopic injustices and inequalities, often denies.
This is the power of the video game console’s spell, and Nintendo, which started business as a maker of playing cards in Kyoto, Japan, in the 1800s, is a master builder. In 1983 its Famicom (a contraction of the words “family” and “computer”, released in the west as the NES) helped revive the nascent video game industry with a tight focus on quality assurance. Vitally, this early console also provided a canvas for the imagination of its star artist-designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, the generational talent who designed Super Mario Bros, The Legend of Zelda and dozens of other video games that helped define the creative possibilities of the emergent medium.
All this explains the excitement surrounding the release, earlier this month, of the Switch 2 – a follow-up to the original Switch console that launched eight years ago and has since sold more than 150m units. The name is apt; this is iteration not reinvention.
Like its predecessor, the Switch 2 can be used as both a handheld device – similar to an iPad, with a panoramic screen and detachable, magnetised controllers latched to the sides – and a conventional console, connected to a television via a charging dock. While the console has a larger, upgraded screen and dozens of tiny, tactile improvements, it uses an identical user interface to the Switch (and, parents will be relieved to know, plays almost all the old console’s games without issue, – in some cases with upgrades), which might leave a new owner a little underwhelmed with what, at £395.99, is an expensive and, for many, now difficult-to-find purchase.
Usefully, Nintendo has released Welcome Tour – part minigame collection, part educational quiz software – to illuminate the myriad upgrades its engineers have made to the system. Presented like a microscopic museum exhibition set atop the Switch 2 and its various peripherals, you guide a tiny character across meticulously rendered versions of the Joy-Con 2 controllers, the screen, the dock, the camera, descending tiny ladders to waddle around the internal circuitry of the device.
Charging players for what is, in part, a piece of interactive marketing is astonishing
Virtual helpdesks have been erected across the machine, where a tiny digital Nintendo employee will ask you if, for example, you would like to learn more about the AC adapter, used to charge the console. Accept this strange offer and you’re then presented with a series of info walls that explain how Nintendo managed to reduce the size of the AC adapter while increasing its power, or how the company made the charging cable thinner so that it’s easier to wind and store. You then take a quiz to assess your reading comprehension and retention of facts; score full marks and you earn medals that can then be used to play various minigames designed to further show off the Switch 2’s various features.
One, for example, works like Twister for your fingers, asking you to place all 10 digits on different coloured spots on the multi-touch screen. Another teaches you how each controller can now be turned on its side and used like a computer mouse on your leg. An uncharitable player might point out that, when Nintendo launched the N64 in 1996, players received Super Mario 64, a game that revealed what 3D could feel like for the first time, its analogue stick offering a tactile grammar for movement in space, its castle hub world a manifesto disguised as a playground. By contrast, with the Switch 2 we receive a game in which you can “guess the frame rate” of a bouncing basketball.
Still, the game is not without peculiar charm, although the fact Nintendo is charging players for what is, in part, a piece of interactive marketing is astonishing. Most will be drawn to Mario Kart World, the most traditional and traditionally exciting piece of launch software – fast, slick, dazzlingly pretty – but also, somehow, oddly thin.
Most console releases offer a screen-flash of a future not yet realised. The Switch 2, for all its architectural familiarity, carries this promise too. In its quiet refinements and cautious opening notes, there is a sense of Nintendo catching its breath – laying the groundwork rather than setting off fireworks. But for a company that has often produced era-defining work to accompany the launch of new hardware – the Game Boy’s Tetris, the Super Nintendo’s Super Mario World, the Switch’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, each one a title that defined its system –Switch 2’s arrival feels muted, even premature; the tuning of an instrument awaiting a masterpiece.
Photograph by Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images
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