A shot of a city come evening; a closed shop; a quiet house on the edge of town. A man sits alone on his sofa, the controller he’s clutching hidden by his hand, contentedly playing a brand new Zelda game – the latest from Nintendo. His dog, a Great Dane, barks for attention.
The Nintendo Switch logo clicks into place.
What follows is a series of places this regular, anonymous man goes. He slides out the Switch joycons from their controller and puts them into the dock to take the Switch with him to the dog park, demonstrating its unique, detachable design and portability.
Click! He’s in the airport, making use of the kickstand to rest the Switch on the pull-down table. When he arrives at the hotel on the other side, he can slide it back into the port, keep the joycons in, and play on a pro-controller.
Click! A group of men share a car ride, and share the screen to play Mario Kart on multiple switch joycons.
Click! A group of basketball players set down two switch screens on a bench opposite each other, and work in their teams to play a basketball game on their switches.
Click! Click! Click! The advertisement is wordless, set to upbeat music, and yet by the end of it everyone knows what the Switch can do. The world had never seen anything quite like it.
That was the trailer for the first Nintendo Switch.
THE SWITCH 2
The Switch 2 was announced on the 16th January, the first-look trailer released to YouTube. In comparison with its elder, it is bizarrely minimalistic. Buttons appear and disappear; new lines are carved in; new milky plastic flows in and sets to show off new features. There is hardly any music, but strange ASMR sounds link to the animation as the Switch 1 warps and transforms itself.
The video is calm and sleek and, like its predecessor, wordless – but ultimately ambiguous. It’s unclear what the Switch 2 actually does have, and feels very much like an underbaked concept that Nintendo dropped just to say, “this is what you want, isn’t it? Now leave us alone.”
So what did the trailer actually show?
FEATURES:
The big thing about the Switch 2 is, well – the bigness. Its screen has gotten bigger, as well as the joycons. An advantageous design, since the split screen function halved the already small monitor into even tinier pieces, and the joycons were too small for adults who purchased a Switch. The console was also given another USB-C port for better charging ergonomics and multiple accessories, as well as a new dock with rounded edges instead of square, and a much better kickstand that looks less prone to breakage.
The joycons have also been given a magnetic mounting mechanism, instead of the previous edition’s sliding one. While the trailer shows off how they snap into place with satisfying clicks and clacks, some are worried about how secure this mechanism really is. The magnetic pieces look fragile, especially for their target demographic of children. Another big concern is how Nintendo will fix the issue of joycon drift, and while it does show the joycons being padded with colourful, spongy, plastic material, the wordless trailer doesn’t offer many answers.
There are also a couple of mystery features that were not given clarification. On the inside of the joycons a strange metal hole appeared, which some suppose as lasers for mouse functionality – given that moments later, the joycons are positioned on their side, to slide about on the ground. A “C” button curiously appeared at the bottom of the right joycon. This could mean “chat” or “connect”, or could even be hearkening back to older Nintendo controllers where a “C” button meant “camera”. However, these ideas are speculation; we have no confirmation until Nintendo releases another trailer.
SPECS:
Despite rocking the world, the first Switch isn’t a very powerful machine – it’s a handheld, as well as a home console, which doesn’t leave room for much power. Switch 1’s memory only has 4GB, and it’s prone to overheating, particularly if you want to play a powerful game like Animal Crossing: New Horizons. And while specs of the Switch 2 are unconfirmed, the December leaks can lead to a few educated guesses.
Firstly, the RAM seems to have gotten a boost, going from 4GB/s to a shocking 102GB/s. It will also have a shockingly large flash storage system 256GBs. Compared with Switch 1’s 32GBs of internal storage, fans will be able to store a lot more games without an SD Card. It will also have support for HDMI 2.1, so its audio and visuals can be easily transferred to the big screen.
All of this runs on the new processor. A SoC (System on Chip), that’s rumoured to have a five-nanometre variant of the previous Switch’s eight – which would be an enormous upgrade – with hopefully 8 functioning ARM cores (a family of Central Processing Units used for portable, battery-powered devices). The previous Switch also had 8 ARM cores, but of those, 4 had to be disabled, and 1 was reserved for the OS, leaving only 3 functioning. In addition, the GPU processor uses Nvidia’s Ampere architecture, with 1,536 CUDA cores and 256 shaders (processing units found inside a GPU, designed to speed up calculations). What this means is that the processing should run faster at a higher resolution, and the graphics will look a lot better.
However, again, all of this is speculation. It is important to remember nothing is confirmed, and Nintendo still has time to change aspects of their new console – so take this with a big handful of salt.
GAMES:
Nintendo never launches a new console without games to back them up. Switch 1’s launch window came with exciting new titles like Mario Odyssey, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and Splatoon 2. So what exciting new games does the Switch 2 tempt its fans with?
At the end of the trailer there’s a short segment of a brand new Mario Kart game. This is enormously long overdue, as the last game in the Mario Kart franchise was in 2014, and very exciting for Nintendo fans. But, as of now, that is the only new game that’s launching with the Switch 2. Which frankly is a bit disappointing, given that the last console game launched with four blockbuster games that are still incredibly popular eight years later.
The Nintendo Switch 2 will be backwards-compatible with all of its predecessor’s Nintendo games, which is an enormous relief, however fans were expecting something a little more out of Nintendo. Perhaps more games will be revealed later down the line.
INFLUENCE:
When the trailer to the first Switch dropped, the world of gaming had never seen anything quite like it. Advertised as a one-of-a-kind hybrid between handheld and home console, its trailer was wordless but nonetheless vibrant and exciting – showing what the Switch could do, instead of telling. And it fit perfectly into Nintendo’s brand, as a company that always prided itself on taking risks and strides to leave its competitors in the dust.
So the Switch 2 is a strange department of this. This could be because when the first Switch came out, it was truly the first of its kind – dropping into a gaming niche that hadn’t been filled with zero competitors made it one of the most successful consoles ever sold, like an invasive species claiming a new habitat. Now there are a whole slew of competitors, like the Steam Deck and Sony Playstation Portal. Perhaps the Switch 2 lacks any of the usual, experimental, grandiose ideas that Nintendo usually likes to boast, because Nintendo are taking a leaf out of their rivals’ books, playing it safe by offering a better, more powerful version of a console they already know to be popular.
However we must remember that this is just the first-look trailer, which might have dropped with less fanfare to get ahead of Switch 2’s leaks. As far as we know there will be plenty of new features and games to get us excited that simply haven’t been shown to us yet. Only the internals at Nintendo really know what’s in store.
