Part console, part handheld: can Nintendo Switch put the house of Mario back on top?
The first real moment of magic comes, inevitably, in Breath Of The Wild. Disappointed as we are by Nintendo’s decision to set Link’s Switch coming-out party in the same area of the game as E3 2016’s Wii U demo – this is our fourth playthrough of the new Zelda game’s opening section – that’s not really what we’re here for. After pottering around as Link, using the new Pro controller, for a few minutes, it is time: we slide the Switch from its dock and, instantly, the biggest Zelda game to date is running on a 6.2-inch screen in our palms. We have played bigscreen games on handheld displays before, of course, but the transition has never been so elegant, the results never so natural in the hands. A few minutes later the process is reversed, the tablet returned to its base station, the action returning seamlessly to the TV, resuming as quickly as we can pick up the Pro controller.
This, we had thought prior to Switch’s unveiling, was its central hook, its USP. Yet Breath Of The Wild is the only game we see at Nintendo’s London event that even shows off the feature. Indeed, around half of the Breath Of The Wild demo units are locked away behind Perspex casing, preventing plenty of showgoers from even experiencing what we had assumed to be the console’s headline feature. Instead, this event has been designed to show everything else Switch can do.
It can do an awful lot. The Mario Kart 8 Deluxe area, for instance, has wireless multiplayer on eight networked consoles in handheld mode, a twoplayer Battle Mode throwdown using the new, endearingly dinky steeringwheel peripheral, and another two-person setup played with the detachable Joy-Con controllers and the handheld screen propped up on its kickstand, which Nintendo calls tabletop mode. Elsewhere are games playable only in tabletop, or with players using a Joy-Con each, or pairs of them. There’s nothing at the event to show it off, but Switch has a capacitive touchscreen in handheld mode, too. The overall impression is of a console, and a company, that is in a bit of a muddle about what it wants its new system to be, and has decided that it should be everything. And this unveiling suggests, whether by accident or design, that in fact Switch’s greatest trick isn’t its much-hyped hybrid blend of portable and big-screen consoles after all.
Instead, it’s the Joy-Cons that are brought to the fore. In hindsight, we were foolish to think that Nintendo would focus solely on a new console’s output method, without also seeking to innovate when it came to designing its input device. While we knew the Joy-Cons could be detached from the tablet screen and held side-on for on-the-move multiplayer, we had no idea about what Nintendo calls ‘HD Rumble’. Showcased best in launch title 1-2-Switch, it offers a depth and variety of feedback that makes Xbox One’s buzzing triggers and even the Steam Controller’s excellent haptic fizz feel positively old hat. It says much about Nintendo’s justified confidence in the feature that all of 1-2-Switch’s minigames are played without looking at the TV screen, the developer secure in the knowledge that the controller itself will communicate everything you need to know.
1 ZL button. 2 L button. 3 The Minus button, which lets the user pause the game in twoplayer mode. 4 Left stick. 5 SL button. 6 Player LED. 7 Directional buttons, which mimic a D-pad in singleplayer mode and face buttons in multiplayer. 8 Sync button. 9 Capture button, for taking screenshots. 10 SR button.
It means Switch can offer that rarest of multiplayer videogame experiences: eye contact. The inescapably masturbatory Milk is all the better for it – though we don’t necessarily recommend it for family get-togethers – and Wild West quickdraws and bank-heist safe-cracking are similarly elevated by being able to look your opponent squarely in the eye. The readiest comparison to what 1-2-Switch offers is Johann Sebastian Joust; the fact that so many attendees felt compelled to reference a fouryear-old Danish indie game whose impact was largely felt on the conference circuit speaks volumes about the way Nintendo has contravened expectations by once again making a console that offers a way to play that, while perhaps not entirely new, is at least new enough.
The Joy-Cons solve plenty of problems for Nintendo. When docked to the handheld screen, they offer traditional, dual-analogue controls, ensuring that even the most complex 3D games are playable without compromise when on the move. When detached and shared between two players, they mean Switch supports multiplayer out of the box, without the need for additional controllers, both within and without the home. In-built gyroscopes mean Nintendo can return its gaze to motion controls, something that always felt like a fudge on Wii U, where motion could only ever be an optional extra, rather than the de facto standard, relying on users to dig out their old Wii Remotes. HD Rumble, meanwhile, offers the platform holder the new-way-to-play hook that feels so essential to each new piece of Nintendo hardware.
11 ZR button. 12 R button. 13 Plus button. 14 SR button. 15 A, B, X and Y face buttons. 16 Right stick. 17 SL button. 18 The Home button doubles up as an NFC reader for Amiibo support. 19 An infrared motion camera, which can detect simple hand motions (Nintendo showed it being used for a game of rock, paper, scissors) and will be able to record full video in future
However, that’s an awful lot for one controller to do – even if it is, in fact, two controllers in one. The left Joy-Con on its own offers up an abundance of buttons: two on the inside edge that slots into the tablet unit, serving as shoulder buttons when the controller is held sideways; two triggers on the top; an analogue stick; pause and screenshot buttons; and a set of face buttons that doubles up as a D-pad, a necessary, but oddly inelegant, solution from a company whose controllers have always seemed to have been designed to simply melt into the hand. Throughout our lengthy hands-on Switch sessions we’re unable to escape the feeling that, by reaching for a D-pad direction and instead finding a button, we are somehow doing it wrong.
They’re a touch too small, too, an unavoidable consequence of their needing to sit flush with the handheld display. We see the commendably patient staff on hand to demonstrate Arms continually having to stop play to remind players of how the Joy-Cons should be held – side-on, with the inner edge pointing towards the screen – and playing 1-2-Switch’s Milk right-handed using the left half of the Joy-Con is just baffling, despite our repeat visits to the booth after urging fellow attendees to indulge in its uniquely onanistic style. Are we supposed to hold it upside down? Back to front? Maybe both. Either way, it never feels intuitive, and for perhaps the first time ever, we find ourselves grateful for the assistance of a demo bod’s trained pair of hands.
The resulting impression is of a console that, by offering so much, has been forced into a series of compromises. Its controllers are detachable from the tablet screen, so are a little too small; they can be shared by two players, so the D-pad must instead be a set of face buttons; they can be held in multiple orientations, so none ever feels quite right in the hands. Across its history, Nintendo’s hardware has tended to be defined by a single goal: N64’s analogue stick, Wii’s motion controls, 3DS’s stereoscopic display, or Wii U’s offscreen play. We thought Switch was going to be a smart convergence of its maker’s previously separate console and handheld businesses. Instead, we leave Switch’s first public showing thinking about the old gag about the real definition of a camel: that it is a horse designed by committee. Switch is, as pledged, a hybrid handheld and TV console. But it is also a Trojan camel for motion controls, for touch, for flighty, fun but forgettable games such as 1-2-Switch, rather than the lustrous, indulgent, full-fat games we thought, based on the reveal trailer – with its Mario, its Zelda, its Skyrim and Splatoon – were going to be the rule, rather than the exception, in Nintendo’s Switch-era software strategy.
Perhaps Switch will fulfil the undeniable promise of its core premise in time, but it seems unlikely to do so at launch. Given the contents of the announcement video, and the timing – Switch’s public debut was timed just seven weeks ahead of its release – many expected that Nintendo was going to make us all an offer we couldn’t refuse. In the absence of concrete information from the platform holder, the rumour mill span into overdrive, predicting a launch lineup for the ages, and it seemed plausible enough.
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| Nintendo Switch Pro game controller |
Yet this is the most slender day-one offering Nintendo has ever served up, if not in terms of volume then certainly in terms of quality. Thirdparty support is even worse than at Wii U’s launch, when the big names were at least prepared to give it a go. The remake of Mario Kart 8, and the deceptively named Splatoon 2, had seemed like bankers for launch day, designed to lure in those who never bought a Wii U. Instead they are being used to pad out a miserably barren release schedule leading up to the holiday-season launch of Super Mario Odyssey, which some had suggested would launch alongside the console in March. It’s especially frustrating given that, knowing Nintendo, Odyssey is already all but finished, but will sit in a drawer until winter, when its maker has decided it will be most useful. We were led to believe that, as a consequence of joining up its console and handheld businesses, Nintendo’s development teams would be able to work at a faster lick. On this evidence, little has changed.
Odyssey will be here for Christmas and will no doubt be brilliant. But by then it may be too late. A UK launch price of £280, without even a bundled game to sweeten the pill, is a good deal higher than we’d hoped – and a €330 pricetag on the continent means we can’t even blame Brexit. The £60 levy for a Pro controller and eye-watering £75 for an extra Joy-Con set is even more painful. Yet it is the software pricing that truly takes the biscuit. The Switch version of Breath Of The Wild will run you £60 on launch day, a £20 markup over the Wii U release. Ultra Street Fighter II, a gently updated port of an eight-year-old remaster of a 23-year-old SNES game, is priced in Japan at the equivalent of £35. 1-2-Switch, novel and enjoyable as it is, contains minutes of actual gameplay, and will cost £40. Mario Kart Deluxe, with its handful of extra characters and complete absence of new tracks? £50 to you. On top of that there will be a new, paid-for online service, which finally offers voice chat – but only through an app on smart devices, not via the console itself. You’ll also get one free game per month, including NES and SNES titles featuring all-new online play. Inevitably, however, there’s a catch. The game is only free for that month, meaning you lose access at the end of the period unless you cough up.
These are bad decisions in isolation that only look worse in a wider context. At launch, a Switch with Breath Of The Wild will set you back £340, and that buys the fan of videogames an awful lot in 2017. Add an extra tenner and it will get you PS4 Pro or PSVR hardware. You could buy a Slim PS4 with Uncharted 4 and keep £140 in your pocket. You could get an Xbox One S with similar cash to spare, or leave it all in the bank and put it towards Microsoft’s Scorpio – which, as its maker is so keen to remind us, will be the most powerful console in the entire known universe.
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| Nintendo Switch Joy-Con controller |
Or, most worryingly for Nintendo, you could carry on playing free games on the smartphone or tablet you already own, and forget about the new console from the company that got you into games in the first place. Nintendo has said that its belated move into mobile would be a handy way of introducing the planet’s largest videogame market to the unique appeal of Mario et al; that giving people games for free would be a small price to pay if it meant being able to sell them full-price software, playable only on hardware of its own design, later on. Judging by the state of the Edge inbox in the days following the event, Nintendo has failed even to persuade many of its long-serving fans that Switch justifies its required investment at launch. What chance of it convincing an audience that has been trained to expect everything for free? Suffice it to say that Nintendo stock ended the day of Switch’s full unveiling down by almost six per cent. Worse may be to come.
Still, we depart choosing to focus on the positives, even if there are caveats to almost all of them. Switch is a fascinating piece of hardware with tremendous potential for play, whether indoors or out, alone or with others. There is magic in this console: the witchcraft of changing displays, the playful, flexible functionality of the Joy-Cons, the intriguing new twist of HD Rumble. Breath Of The Wild still astounds, and while it’s a big investment, it runs better than the Wii U version in TV mode, and offers parity with it on the handheld. This, it seems, is the most flattering way to look at Switch: while it may disappoint as a home console, it’s a brilliant handheld, powerful, generously well-featured, and a true generational leap over 3DS that can be connected to the family TV for a hefty bump in resolution and performance. Viewed from the other direction, it’s a fully portable Wii U that supports multiplayer and motion controls out of the box. It is too expensive, certainly, its first year of software looks patchy, and it lacks the singular clarity of purpose that we associate with Nintendo’s most successful past hardware. Perhaps there are better ways to spend your money in 2017, but nothing else on shelves may offer quite so much potential to surprise.