Switched Off

Woot posed this question during the Amazon Prime Days sale, and I figured I could squeeze a blog entry out of my answer.

Uh... no, not really? I'm not even the sort to rag on the Switch because of its dated hardware. I just made a ColecoVision game, after all. Specs aren't really all that important to me. No, the reason I won't miss the Switch is that it straddles the fence between console and handheld, and does neither particularly well. It's not a great console experience because of the default controls and hardware that lags well behind the Xbox Series and Playstation 4. It's not a great handheld experience either, because games aren't formatted for the handheld's resolution, making many difficult or even impossible to read. Unless you've memorized all the text from the console versions, there's just no way you're playing Rock of Ages 2 on a Switch. 

The D-pad on the Switch Lite is junk, too. So prone to reading diagonals when you don't want them! So prone to not reading diagonals when you do want them! Fighting games are abundant on the Switch, but it's a special kind of hell trying to play them. I'm honestly more comfortable playing Street Fighter Alpha 3 on the Playstation Vita. That's how bad the Switch Lite D-pad is. It's Nintendo's worst D-pad since the Game Boy Advance SP, but at least that had the mitigating circumstance of a clamshell design, forcing all the inputs on the front of the device to be nearly flush with the shell. 

The Switch Lite D-pad just sucks. There's no logical reason for it to be as bad as it is, and that makes the system especially hard for me to love in spite of a dream library of retro titles. It's filled to the brim with arcade favorites... Donkey Kong! Mario Bros! Terra Cresta! Exerion! Moon Patrol! About a zillion Neo-Geo games! And they all play rather shabbily on the Switch, thanks to that lousy D-pad. It didn't have to be that way, it shouldn't have been that way given Nintendo's extensive experience with making directional pads, and yet here I am, not enjoying games I've always loved because the control kind of sucks. It's a cryin' shame, it is, it is.

So no, I won't miss the Switch much if its successor is both backward compatible and can reliably read your inputs, rather than making vague educated guesses like the Switch Lite does. If Nintendo plays its cards right, the Switch 2 could be the preferred way to play original Switch games, just as the best Xbox One you can buy is an Xbox Series. 

 

Oh! By the way, I thought I'd share this image I found on DeviantArt. User TheColorfulKitsune created an arcade-quality version of the extra stage from Donkey Kong Jr. on the Coleco ADAM. Check out the dough presses and the gelatinous dough monsters and the giant mixer and that wood-fired hearth. I'd play that, even if it looks slightly like an advertisement for Keebler cookies. They make 'em in a hollow tree, you know! (Or a factory in the midwest, one of those.)