Bye, July!

And good riddance, you miserably molten month. Don't come back for another eleven months, or much much later than that if it's at all possible.

I cannot play this game to save my life.
(image from CDRomance)

Anyway. (Ahem.) Some pretty good news to report for the Dreamcast, which hasn't seen much in the way of excitement since the pandemic, when two hackers brought the bulk of the Atomiswave library to Sega's last game system. Not only is there an English translation of SNK's Cool Cool Toon, but Atomiswave titles like KenJu and Rumble Fish now have sensible button layouts, and... okay, here's the one that's really got me excited... King of Fighters Evolution finally offers support for VGA monitors. It probably should have had that support from the start (cough... cough... SNK), but better twenty-three years late than never!

Okay, onto the ever present rumors of a Switch successor, given credibility by reports from more trusted sources than the usual shady customers on the internet whose predictions are right 52 percent of the time and wrong 48 percent of the time. (It's still a better batting average than Michael Pachter. Yes, I'm going with a joke ten years past its expiration date.) Tom's Hardware, GameSpot, and Game Revolution all claim that the Switch 2 is arriving in the middle of next year, and that third party developers already have development kits in their hands. 

Not too much is known beyond that, which means that we don't know if the Switch 2 will be backward compatible with the original Switch, and if so, by what degree. Developers have already made it clear that they don't want backward compatibility because it would stifle "innovation*" (ie reselling us the games we already own as whoop-de-doo remasters, a tactic we first saw in 2013), but personally speaking, I don't WANT a second Switch if it's not compatible with the first. I've got umpteen million classic collections and Arcade Archives games on my Switch, and I'm quite insistent that they remain available to me. 

Much has made made of the report that 87% of mass market video games are not currently available for purchase, but look, the Switch went a long way toward filling out that remaining thirteen percent. There was no way to buy an authentic version of Donkey Kong or Mario Bros. prior to 2017... your only options were piracy or some weaksauce NES port with dull colors and gameplay that just didn't feel right. Compared to what had come before, the Switch is a wonderland of arcade goodness, an Aladdin's Castle you can fit in a backpack or a purse. Pac-Man? Crystal Castles? Double Dragon? Terra Cresta? Moon Patrol? Vs. Super Mario Bros., the arcade one with the harder stages? Street Fighter friggin' III? A decade's worth of King of Fighters games? They're all right there in your two hands, and they're yours to keep, legally, forever.

Or depending on the whims of the console manufacturer, perhaps just the life of the system itself. When you buy something in the Xbox ecosystem, it tends to stick around for a while. The digital copy of Crystal Quest I bought for my Xbox 360 in 2006 is still available to me, seventeen years and two console generations later. Sony's commitment to past purchases is a little spottier, but you can still play PSP games on your Vita, or PS4 games on your PS5. 

Unfortunately, Nintendo has not fared so well in this brave new world of digital downloads. Games purchased on the Wii eShop could be ported to the Wii U (sometimes at an additional cost to the user), but once those games were on the Wii U, they were stranded there. You couldn't take them back to the Wii, and you couldn't push them forward to the Switch. As a result, I have dozens of games that I love, trapped on a game system I've grown to hate. I'd like to play Metroid Zero Mission again. I would not like to dig out my Wii U and its senselessly oversized controller to do that, and I would very much not like to pay Nintendo a subscription fee for access to a game I've already purchased. Hello? This is already mine? You got your money, now where's my damn game?

For me personally, compatibility with the original Switch is an absolute must, a higher priority than anything else. I've tied too much money into the first Switch to abandon that collection and start anew. Just give me what you already made six years ago, boost the performance so old games run better on the new hardware, and ensure that the backward compatibility is as close to 100% as you can make it (without burdensome conditions and limitations) and I'll be happy. Hey, it worked for the Xbox Series.

* Tech companies to customers: "Bend over and drop your pants! Here comes five inches of innovation!"