30th October 2016, 10:34 PM
Decent video, sure. Personally, I'm not sold on the Switch's "combine handheld and console into one" concept, or as the Switch as any kind of portable; I think there is a good likelihood that it won't be a very good handheld in a lot of the ways that make handhelds so good -- battery life, games designed for portable play, large size, etc. I also like the Wii's motion controls and the DS/3DS touchscreens and will really miss that stuff as Nintendo de-emphasizes it. I know motion controls live on in VR headsets, but NIntendo-style touch is pretty much dead now, isn't it? That's sad because I still find finger-based capacitive touch screens pretty bad for gaming purposes compared to the great precision of a single-touch plastic stylus-based design like the DS and 3DS use! Those are big issues.
However, I am sold on that I'll need to get a Switch. I never have gotten a Wii U, because they seemed too expensive for the limited library and STILL haven't come down much in price, because the new Zelda game (which would have been the system seller for me) kept getting delayed and now is cross-gen and still isn't out, and because I really disliked the move away from Wii-style motion controls. I definitely will get a Wii U eventually, no question, but I might well get a Switch first... depending on pricing and such of course. The 3DS (which, remember, I only got for the first time last year) is great but I also want to have a current Nintendo home console again, and this will be that, with ports of some of the best Wii U games and new games like the 3D Mario title as well. I think it'll be great as a home console and I want to have one.
But still, I still wonder about how smart merging handhelds and consoles together are. Yes, it saves a lot on development costs as you don't need to make all of those handheld spinoffs of console games and can instead have all your teams making games for one system, but will the kinds of games that have made me love all of Nintendo's handhelds (even the VB! Great little system that is) still be made, when the Nintendo system is far less portable than any previous Nintendo handheld due to size, potential damage (no closing system to protect the screen!) and battery life concerns? Will handheld gaming beyond the mobile sphere continue to be a thing, as it should be? And how much are you holding back the console by making it a portable too? You can make just as good arguments against this concept as you can towards it. I understand why they're merging them and it might work out, but right now I'd rather still see multiple platforms. (Of course, the 3DS isn't dead yet, but if the Switch succeeds it will be phased out at some point in the next year or so I'm sure...)
However, I am sold on that I'll need to get a Switch. I never have gotten a Wii U, because they seemed too expensive for the limited library and STILL haven't come down much in price, because the new Zelda game (which would have been the system seller for me) kept getting delayed and now is cross-gen and still isn't out, and because I really disliked the move away from Wii-style motion controls. I definitely will get a Wii U eventually, no question, but I might well get a Switch first... depending on pricing and such of course. The 3DS (which, remember, I only got for the first time last year) is great but I also want to have a current Nintendo home console again, and this will be that, with ports of some of the best Wii U games and new games like the 3D Mario title as well. I think it'll be great as a home console and I want to have one.
But still, I still wonder about how smart merging handhelds and consoles together are. Yes, it saves a lot on development costs as you don't need to make all of those handheld spinoffs of console games and can instead have all your teams making games for one system, but will the kinds of games that have made me love all of Nintendo's handhelds (even the VB! Great little system that is) still be made, when the Nintendo system is far less portable than any previous Nintendo handheld due to size, potential damage (no closing system to protect the screen!) and battery life concerns? Will handheld gaming beyond the mobile sphere continue to be a thing, as it should be? And how much are you holding back the console by making it a portable too? You can make just as good arguments against this concept as you can towards it. I understand why they're merging them and it might work out, but right now I'd rather still see multiple platforms. (Of course, the 3DS isn't dead yet, but if the Switch succeeds it will be phased out at some point in the next year or so I'm sure...)
Dark Jaguar Wrote:Nintendo usually isn't shy about advertising backwards compatibility. Even with the DS, their last "third pillar" system, they were pretty up front about the GBA slot on the bottom of the system.In your next post you mentioned some other good reasons for the Switch not having DS/3DS BC, but beyond that, if the BC is Virtual Console only, they wouldn't be talking about it now.
Quote:As for NVidia's main processor chipset, yeah, it's ARM based. Pretty much every portable device that isn't a laptop (which would therefor need to run x86 programs) uses ARM now. That goes from the Gameboy Advance to the iPad to my Android Phone to the "non-Pro" Microsoft Surface systems. Their design isn't the only way to design a RISC processor (the N64 uses a RISC based design, for example), but it's the standard that took hold, much like x86 did in the PC world. RISC's advantages over x86 stem chiefly from how power efficient they are and how well the power use scales with actual processor use (an idle RISC processor uses far less power than an idle x86 processor). I won't get into the details here, but it's this reason that NVidia, when designing a mobile chipset, decided to go with ARM instead of an x86 design. x86 still has some power related advantages, but ARM is catching up. x86 isn't resting when it comes to power usage either, but the two designs are so fundamentally different that there's no way to design a "two in one" architecture that can switch between them without flat out just making a dual-processor board, which doesn't really solve anything.Right, since NVidia is a graphics company first, it makes sense that they wouldn't use as original a CPU design as they do GPU...
NVidia's graphics chipset is another story entirely, as it's their own proprietary design (like most GPUs). That one's going to more closely resemble NVidia's desktop graphics card, but optimized to reduce power drain. In any case, that wouldn't affect backwards compatibility, which as far as the 3DS is concerned only the ARM chips matters.