#oneaday Day 364: I should probably play Undertale

I've never played Undertale. More impressively, I have somehow not been spoiled on Undertale as yet, but I'm feeling increasingly like I should probably play it. I do own a copy, after all, and now its follow-up Deltarune is out on Switch 2, I feel like the risk of inadvertently stumbling across spoilers in the wild is about to take a sudden spike back up.

I don't really have a good reason for not having played Undertale. It's not that I don't want to play it, it's just never been a particularly high priority for me. Part of that is down to the "reverse hype" thing, where so many people are playing it and making memes about it that I just want it to go away in order to appreciate it on its own merits. In fact, I think that's probably most of the reason I haven't played it as yet. Which is arguably a bit silly, because as I have seen with a number of other games in the past — Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Mario Kart World being the most recent ones — it's sometimes fun to feel like you're part of the "current" conversation.

I'm still in the process of weaning myself off the habit of only playing one game at a time. While it definitely pays to devote yourself to something lengthy like Xenoblade Chronicles X (which I'm closing in on 90 hours of) it also certainly doesn't hurt to play some other things in the meantime, too.

The way I've found most helpful of thinking about it is in terms of TV shows: back in the prime of serialised TV shows in the late '90s, you'd watch maybe five or six ongoing shows all at the same time and still be able to keep them all straight in your head, even with a gap of a week in between each episode. While that's not how most people enjoy TV shows today, it absolutely is still possible to watch and enjoy multiple TV shows simultaneously (well, not simultaneously, but you know what I mean) without feeling like you've "abandoned" one in favour of another. And the same should be — is — true for games, too.

Very few games have such an intense structure that they demand your undivided attention for hundreds of hours; in the case of Xenoblade Chronicles X, for example, the main story is split into discrete chapters, and in between each chapter there are a bunch of "side" missions (which are actually also very important to fleshing out the overall setting and narrative) that can be tackled a bit at a time. With that structure, it's easy to find a natural stopping point — on the micro level, after completing a single mission; on a more macro level, after completing a story chapter, or clearing up all the accessible missions between story chapters — and then go do something else for a bit.

So y'know what? This weekend I might just start Undertale. I believe it's not particularly long, either, so it might be a nice palate-cleanser, and then I can play Deltarune and be part of the conversation over that. Maybe.

In fact, I will make that a commitment. Tomorrow I will start Undertale. I have no real commitments for the weekend, so I'll sit down with it, give it some time and see what I think. As I say, I know pretty much nothing about it at all, so I am very interested to finally give it some time.

For now, though, bed. Or maybe a Mario Kart race or two before that…

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#oneaday Day 363: It's Switch Twoursday

Come on, Nintendo, "Switch 2sday" was right there and you blew it. Sega had this shit sorted back in the '90s… although given the trajectory they took shortly afterwards, probably best not to take too many cues from them on the hardware front.

Anyway. Yes! It is the Nintendo Switch 2 launch day and I have been fortunate enough to get one on launch day. I ordered from Argos when pre-orders first went up, and I was half-expecting my order to be cancelled. But no! It arrived mid-afternoon today, so I went through the whole "transfer" process from my original Switch, and I've been happily enjoying Mario Kart World and Ridge Racer this evening.

I'm going to write something more substantial about both of those games over on MoeGamer at some point in the very near future, so I thought today I'd talk a little about my initial experiences with the Switch 2 in general.

Overall, my impressions have been very positive. Outside of the thing refusing to connect to my Wi-Fi on one side of my study (a problem that is by no means exclusive to the Switch 2), everything has gone pretty much as smoothly as you would ever want.

If you're upgrading from an original Switch, there's a straightforward transfer process you can run. This involves putting the two consoles physically close to one another, presumably so they can establish a direct wireless connection between one another, and then triggering the transfer process from both ends, perhaps with a login or two along the way depending on how you have your accounts set up. It even asked for the microSD card from the original Switch to transfer over captured screenshots and videos.

When it was finished (about 15-20 minutes later), all of my saves, settings and account details had been transferred over to the Switch 2, and the Switch 2 made a start on redownloading all the digital software I had on my original Switch. This was fine for my purposes, though those who have larger digital libraries may have run into issues, since the largest microSD Express card you can get for Switch 2 (and it will only take microSD Express, except for the aforementioned screenshot library transfer process) is 256GB. OG Switch, meanwhile, would happily take 512GB or more.

The auto-download thing was fine, but for some reason it did stop partway through and didn't resume. I assume this is because I started doing something that talked to online — that's what generally happened with downloads on the original Switch — but I would have expected it to start downloading again afterwards. This didn't happen. Not a huge issue, since I can easily manually redownload anything I want to put back on the system, because the icons for those pieces of software are there, but it would have been nice for that to be fully automated.

One of the biggest upgrades is to the eShop. No longer a slow, annoying mess to navigate, the Switch 2's eShop seems perfectly functional, and it already has some hentai shovelware games ready to go. So the curation issue isn't exactly solved, but the painful user experience side of things is, at least, fixed now.

I briefly fired up the new Gamecube app you get with a Nintendo Switch Online subscription, and boy, those games sure do look lovely all HD-ified. I'm looking forward to having a play with Soul Calibur II and F-Zero GX in particular; I'm in no hurry to replay Wind Waker, meanwhile, since I played the Wii U version a few years back and while I enjoyed it, I also don't have much desire to play it again just yet.

Handheld, the screen looks lovely. While not OLED, it's bright, large and smooth. Games look great on it. I haven't tried any original Switch titles on it as yet, but Switch 2 stuff looked pin-sharp and super-slick. It's also a bit bigger than the original Switch, meaning it'll probably be more comfortable to play more complex games in handheld mode than the original Switch was. I will likely still keep it connected to the TV for the vast majority of the time, but I feel more inclined to play handheld with that lovely screen than I do the original Switch. No shade on those who primarily played OG Switch handheld; I just preferred the TV experience by quite a considerable margin.

Thus far, then, I'm happy with my purchase. I still have plenty of concerns about things like Game Key Cards, software prices and suchlike, but we'll see how things pan out long-term. I do find myself wondering if Nintendo will be able to capture the same lightning in a bottle that the original Switch was — historically speaking, they've tended to follow an astronomical success (Game Boy, SNES, Wii) with anything from middling-to-solid commercial performance (N64, Gamecube) to catastrophic failure (Virtual Boy, Wii U), so it will be interesting to see where Switch 2 falls on that spectrum… or if it will continue a run of good luck for the company.

Anyway, it doesn't really matter. I have one, I like it and I'm looking forward to playing with it some more. So I'm going to do just that before I head to bed. Mario Kart World calls me!

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#oneaday Day 362: Switching to a new era

Switch 2 is officially out tomorrow. Some folks have been getting theirs today. Mine looks on track to arrive tomorrow, so I should be able to get some time in with Mario Kart World and Arcade Archives 2: Ridge Racer tomorrow evening. Doubtless I will have things to say about both of those.

Today I just wanted to offer a tip of the cap to the original Switch. It's not a "farewell", because the Switch 2 will (hopefully) allow me to continue to enjoy all the original Switch's games, and if not, well, I still have that original Switch.

I love the Switch. I actually don't use its main tentpole function of being a handheld all that much, but I do take advantage of its easily portable nature quite frequently. It's much easier to bundle a Switch case and dock into a suitcase than it is a PlayStation 5, after all, so when I travel, the Switch typically comes with me.

I've also amassed an enormous collection of Switch games — 405, to be exact, if my collection database is to be believed, plus a number of digital-only games. That's more than any other single system in my collection — PS2 comes close with 282, but Switch has definitely been the front-runner for a long time. I would often buy multiplatform games on Switch by preference, even if they weren't the "best" version in terms of graphics and performance; even though I didn't play the games handheld all that much, that aforementioned portability factor remains a great thing.

Plus there's the fact that the Switch plays host to a ton of games that I wanted to play! In particular, it took up the mantle from the PlayStation Vita in terms of anime-inspired RPGs and visual novels, and some clever publishers even found a means of getting full-on sexually explicit games onto a console for the first time. A Nintendo console, at that.

I'm not just talking about lewd games, though. Tons of great Japanese games came — are still coming — to the original Switch, and there are loads on my shelves that I haven't gotten to just yet. The thriving limited-print scene, which I know is divisive, has been particularly strong on Switch for those who want packaged versions of indie games — and best of all for collectors, most of those releases are truly complete on cart in terms of DLC and patches.

Sure, Switch has had its annoyances, most notably Joy-Con drift. I also had a drifting stick on my Pro Controller for a bit, but taking it apart and putting it back together again fixed that and it's been absolutely fine since. The eShop has long been a bit cack, though, both in terms of speed and the amount of AI-generated slop it's been subject to. Early reports would seem to indicate that Switch 2's eShop has taken care of the former issue, and the latter is something more endemic to the entire digital distribution scene, not a Nintendo-exclusive thing by any means.

I think Switch 2 is going to be a lot of fun. I also think it's going to see a few teething troubles, with the most notable being the Game Key Card situation. There are a lot of games that people want to play that are being released on these stupid things, and that concerns me. I do not want the Switch 2 to be a platform that forces me to go all-digital because I like collecting games. My quiet hope is that the early Game Key Card releases are such a flop that the publishers cheaping out by using them rather than proper cartridges will abandon them, Nintendo will quietly retire the practice before long and these games will get reissues on a proper cartridge. But I guess we'll have to wait and see on that. It feels like it might be unlikely, but stranger things have happened.

Anyway, I am looking forward to playing Mario Kart World and Ridge Racer tomorrow, and I, of course, still have to finish off Xenoblade Chronicles X — pity that one doesn't appear to have a "Switch 2 version" upgrade, as it could really benefit from the additional oomph! — so the future, for now, looks bright and enjoyable. And, tomorrow, there will be much racing!

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#oneaday Day 326: It's officially my birthday

It is, as promised, Actually My Birthday now, since I have been to bed since last night's post and woken up since then. I have had today (and the days surrounding it) off work for reasons I've already outlined, so today has been mostly about playing more Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and then going out for a nice pub dinner with Andie this evening. I have simple tastes.

One thing many of you will have doubtless discovered as you get older is that people inevitably find it harder and harder to buy presents for you. Gone are the days when you could circle things in the Argos catalogue and hope that one of them would be your "main" or "big" present on the big day. Nope, much more common as a grown-up to get a few little bits and pieces from your Amazon wishlist — which I'm very grateful for, by the way, those who sent such things! — and "I'll just give you some money" from the parents.

I would like to reiterate: this is fine, and not in the "room is burning around me" sense. This is good, even! Much better that one is able to get something they actually want to celebrate their birthday rather than running the risk of getting gifts they already have, gifts they don't really want but are obliged to look like they like or any of the other situations in which people in 2025 are, in my experience, brazenly ungrateful.

I got some very generous monetary gifts from both my parents and my mother-in-law, both of whom are very clearly trying to spend some of their accumulated cash to minimise the impact of inheritance tax in the future. My parents' gift paid for my Nintendo Switch 2, which is nice, and my mother-in-law has bought (well, pre-ordered) me a MiSTer Multisystem 2 from Heber Electronics.

If you are unfamiliar with the latter, it's an all-in-one FPGA console designed for playing retro games from a wide variety of home computer, arcade and console systems. FPGA means something inordinately technical that I don't understand at all, but it basically means that it's the hardware pretending to be a classic system rather than a piece of software doing its best to imitate it. That means that the recreation of the experience is pretty much 1:1 of What It Was Actually Like without any sort of emulation quirks, but with modern benefits such as HDMI out, USB storage and suchlike. There are even addon thingies you can get to use original controllers and other peripherals.

To put it simply, the Multisystem 2 is a console that plays almost any retro game you can throw at it, making it a nice all-in-one, self-contained system for authentic-feeling retro game fun, on either a classic CRT or a modern HDMI display. (Or both at the same time, even!) With old gaming hardware and media becoming increasingly expensive and impractical to collect for a variety of reasons, this is a great option for just… enjoying retro games. Which, ultimately, is what I really want to do with all this stuff. And having the opportunity to easily hook it up to capture hardware via HDMI is even better, 'cause then I can share what I'm doing and what I'm interested in and the things I've discovered.

So yeah. My "big presents" this year are a Nintendo Switch 2 and a MiSTer Multisystem. Pretty great, I'd say. I know my child self would be thrilled, even if I have to wait until June for one and August for the other.

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#oneaday Day 321: My Switch 2 concerns

I still have my preorder in for a Nintendo Switch 2 and I'm looking forward to having a play with it. But I am quite concerned about some things that seem to be cropping up in these initial pre-launch months.

Chief among these is the "Game Key Card" thing. For the unfamiliar, this is effectively a replacement for the "code-in-a-box" nonsense some publishers pulled with Switch games, where you'd buy a "physical release" and get nothing more than a box with a voucher for the digital version of the game in it. The box was then completely useless because there was nothing to put in it. The sole justification for this, one might argue, is that it allows "digital" games to be given as gifts. But only the ones that have actually had this treatment, of course.

Game Key Cards is… possibly a step forwards from this, but still not in any way desirable. Effectively how they work is that they're a cartridge you put in your Switch 2, and this then automatically causes the digital version of the game to download from the eShop. There are a few justifications for this: it keeps costs down while still allowing for a boxed release of sorts, which in turn can be given as a gift just like code-in-a-box.

Unlike code-in-a-box, however, Game Key Cards are transferable. They need to be in the Switch 2 to play the game even once it's downloaded, and they can be loaned, traded or sold to others. This is arguably an improvement in that they make digital purchases more portable — you can take a game over to a friend's house, for example, although one might argue the inherently portable nature of the Switch 2 makes this a moot point anyway — but one suspects it is going to be used by a lot of companies as an excuse for cost-cutting.

We're already starting to see a number of games that have announced their "physical" release will be on one of these Game Key Cards, with no other option than the digital-only version. As a collector of physical media, neither of these options are desirable.

Some have conjectured that this situation has arisen because Switch 2 carts are, supposedly, expensive — like, $16 a unit expensive. That means once companies have paid their cut to Nintendo, paid manufacturing costs, paid marketing expenses and everything else that goes into making a game, there potentially won't be much left for games sold around the £30-40 mark. This is, apparently — and remember this is mostly hearsay at the moment — the reason that physical releases like Mario Kart World are £70 or more.

Thing is, I'm not sure I understand why they're so expensive. They're essentially flash carts. Admittedly, in the case of Switch 2, they're high-speed flash carts, which are slightly newer (and thus more pricey) tech. But $16 a unit for something that supposedly only goes up to 64GB seems… high. (Oh yes, that's seemingly the other reason some are going for the Game Key Card approach — games such as Street Fighter 6 flat-out won't fit on one.)

I've long said that if a console generation arose that was digital-only, I would probably bow out and stick to my existing library of games — which, as most of you probably know, is pretty enormous. Nintendo, whose consoles have long been a champion of physical media — Switch 1 carts are the only releases of the current(ish) generation that don't require lengthy installs before you can play — seem to be pushing towards that all-digital future that I'm not sure anyone really wants, particularly those involved in a hobby that has always been, to some degree, about collecting.

I'm willing to give Switch 2 a chance. I'm even getting the bundle with the digital version of Mario Kart World included — I figure as a game with an online component, it's probably going to have regular updates and/or DLC, making the physical edition useless after a while anyway — but I'm still a bit concerned.

I guess one thing worth waiting to see is what the limited-press physical houses do — if anything — with Nintendo Switch 2. A significant portion of my Switch 1 library consists of limited-print physical releases of games that would have otherwise been digital-only. If that situation continues, then I think I'll be all right. I know some folks hate the limited-print stuff, but I suspect it's going to become an increasing reality of video game collecting in the coming years. We'll have to see, I guess.

I wish we could just be excited for New Thing. It feels like a long time since we've been able to be unreservedly excited for New Thing. The last few New Things we've had — particularly in gaming — seem to have had particularly big caveats involved, and Switch 2 is no exception.

Think back to the run-up to the PlayStation 2's launch. Nothing but excitement. A new system that could produce incredible visuals, could take full advantage of the new DVD format for storage, and which was fully (almost) backwards-compatible with the previous PlayStation? Sure, the price was a sticking point for some, but that came down. And the PS2 went on to be one of the most beloved systems of all time, with good reason.

I wonder if the last couple of generations of console hardware are even going to have a legacy to leave behind once their digital services are turned off.

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#oneaday Day 316: Mario Kart World looks like fun!

You will doubtless be aware of the impending release of the Nintendo Switch 2, and its launch title Mario Kart World. You may also be aware of the fact that people are complaining about the price (not unjustifiably). And you may even have sat down and watched the Mario Kart World-centric presentation the other day.

Some people seem to be a bit down on Mario Kart World. I had to banish a video from my YouTube recommendations earlier for it claiming to offer "the unfortunate truth" about the new game, when said "truth" was just that the video maker, who hadn't played the game, didn't think it going open world was a good idea.

I'm not going to get into whether he's right or wrong (he's definitely wrong, though), but instead I want to talk about my own personal response to what I've seen of Mario Kart World so far, with the caveats that I haven't played it, I haven't been to any of the "Nintendo Switch 2 Experience" events, and that have preordered the Switch 2 bundle that comes with a digital copy of Mario Kart World, so I am perhaps predisposed to like the thing I've spent money on.

Basically, I'm well up for what Mario Kart World has to offer. I like common-or-garden Mario Kart to a decent degree, and it usually comes off the shelf any time friends are over. But despite the improving tech, visuals and course design with each new installment, the overall structure of the game hasn't really changed all that much since the SNES original. Mario Kart has always had a bit of a problem with its single-player modes being a bit bare-bones, and this is something that has never really been fixed over the course of 8 mainline installments. It was particularly apparent in the Nintendo 64 era, where Rare's Diddy Kong Racing offered an impressively substantial single-player "Adventure" mode that really made Mario Kart 64's paltry grand prix offerings look a tad weedy.

Granted, today the enduring appeal of modern Mario Kart games is in playing online, where you get the performance and visuals of single-player but the thrill of competing against real opponents. But that's not something that everyone enjoys — particularly since, as a popular game, it's filled with people who have no-lifed their way into mastering the most important "skills" (and/or exploits) in order to win every time. Playing Mario Kart online as a casual player is a great way of testing whether or not you really believe that "it's not the winning that counts, it's the taking part". Because after myriad sessions of seeing the frontrunners scream off over the horizon, never to be seen again, and not really knowing why or how they did that, it gets a bit old.

Mario Kart World, now, though, that's different. Online is still going to be an important part of the experience, and with the Nintendo Switch 2's GameChat feature, it looks like a potential return to the early days of Xbox Live, when it's easy to get folks together to shoot the shit while you're playing games — and not necessarily the same games. The key difference, this being Nintendo, is that GameChat is restricted to your friends, so no jumping into public lobbies and immediately being screamed at or called a racial epithet, unless that's what your friends are like. In which case you should find new friends.

But perhaps more importantly, judging by what we've seen so far, is that Mario Kart World offers a substantial single-player experience, and it's all down to that open world. Driving games are one type of game where it makes perfect sense to have an open-world map, and theming the game around rough-and-ready vehicles such as go-karts and motorcycles makes it feel less weird to go off-road exploring. One of my favourite games in this regard is Codemasters and Asobo Studio's Fuel, which has an absolutely vast open world filled with events to participate in and things to find. Plus it's just plain fun to drive around and see how a variety of different vehicles handle the various terrains.

Fuel is a semi-realistic game, though; Mario Kart World, meanwhile, is not beholden to the laws of reality, being a game set in a cartoonish fantasy world. That means we can have a map with incredible geographic diversity, weird and wonderful things to discover and a real sense that you might find anything around the corner. For all I love Fuel, its overriding colours are dull green, grey and brown, and any changes in the map you encounter as you pass from region to region are gradual rather than drastic. Not so in Mario Kart World, and I think that's going to be a lot of fun.

One of the things I really like the sound of is how the races link together, with circuit races leading to point-to-point races that take you to the next course in the sequence. I absolutely love point-to-point races — a side-effect of growing up with games like OutRun and Lotus Turbo Challenge — and Mario Kart World sounds like it's going to implement them not only as interstitial races in the main Grand Prix events, but also as non-stop "knockout" rally competitions that unfold as one long race taking you between multiple areas, with the bottom [x] participants being knocked out at every checkpoint.

But then the open world is filled with collectibles to find — the exact function of which we don't know just yet — and "P-switch challenges", which task you with completing various missions that test your driving skills. It's this exploration aspect that I think I find most exciting, particularly as you can not only play it solo, but you can bring friends along, too. Burnout Paradise was excellent fun in its multiplayer free-roam mode — sadly, I only ever really got to play it with friends once — and I can see this being very enjoyable; a great way to virtually hang out with friends over GameChat while having a meaningful, but relaxing and not-too-demanding, gaming experience.

Whether or not all this is really "worth" £75 for its physical RRP remains to be seen, and "game worth" is a completely subjective thing anyway. But I know that after seeing the announcement and the subsequent Direct, I'm very much on board with Mario Kart World, and I'm looking forward to getting stuck into it when June finally rolls around.

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#oneaday Day 300: Paying the tax

I make no apologies for admitting that I preordered a Switch 2 today, even after everything I said yesterday. I thought about it a bit, and I basically came to the conclusion that I was almost certainly going to get one regardless of how much I complained about certain elements of it — and that in doing so I may well be Part of the Problem — and so I might as well just get it out of the way and do it.

So I did. Someone I know happened to spot that Argos had preorders go live today, so I snagged one. I went for the one with Mario Kart World pre-installed, so I basically get that game for £30 instead of £75. Not having a physical copy sucks a bit, but at the same time, Mario Kart World is one of those games that is going to get lots of updates and DLC, making a physical version arguably useless in the long term. That's a thing that happens these days, and that's not going away, so I may as well just enjoy the things while they are current, and I may well be dead by the time it's no longer possible to access the online elements. (Not that I'm planning on being dead any time soon, but you know what I mean.)

There's enough about Switch 2 that I like to make it worthwhile. The "Switch 2 Versions" of original Switch games are compelling, for one; I haven't yet played The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and now it will be nice to be able to do so at higher resolutions and frame rates. I'm by no means a frame rate and resolution snob — I was eminently satisfied with how Breath of the Wild looked and performed — but if the option is there to make it better officially without getting into hacking, modding and piracy territory, I'm all for it.

There's also some of the multi-format "big" games that are quite appealing. I might finally play Cyberpunk 2077 on Switch 2, for example, or Hitman: World of Assassination. The nice thing about Switch 2 versions of these coming so late is that they should be "complete" versions with all their additional DLC, updates and what have you baked into the Switch 2 version from day one. And hopefully with a physical release.

One thing I'm not super enamoured with is this "game key card" business. If you haven't seen it yet, it's the replacement for the "code in a box" system, whereby you could buy a Switch case that contained nothing more than a download code. This new version actually has a Switch cart in it, but the cart doesn't have the game on it; instead, it lets you download the game and play it while the cart is in. I initially thought this was utterly stupid, but if you read the fine print on the Japanese website (which a pal graciously translated for me earlier) it became clear that this is not the same as redeeming a game on your account from a code; it is transferable, so you can lend it to others, take it round to a friend's house, all that sort of thing. It's still a bit of a weird way of doing things, but I don't hate it as much as code-in-a-box.

(And look, I get why code-in-a-box is a thing; it lets people buy digital games as gifts and give the person something physical to open on their special occasion. But it's still a pisser to find what you think is a physical release of a game only to discover it's… not that.)

I can sort of understand why the game key card thing is being used for stuff like Street Fighter 6, which is a game that gets updated regularly with balance patches, DLC and suchlike, and which has a massive filesize. I'm a bit pissed the Bravely Default remaster is using this system, though; there's no way that game wouldn't fit on a low-capacity cartridge. But oh well.

Like I say, though, there's enough about Switch 2 that I do like to make it, I think, worthwhile. It will be interesting and fun to use the social features if (and that's a big if right now, particularly with the chaos ensuing from Trump's dumbshit tariffs in the States) my friends happen to pick a Switch 2 up; it would be nice to get some sort of regular "game night" going, and the built-in chat features could even be a decent means of recording a podcast or streaming something in collaboration with another person.

Plus Mario Kart World does look good. I'm still not convinced it's £75 good, but I'm sure I can get £30 value out of it.

It's certainly going to be interesting to spend some time with Switch 2 when it arrives in a couple of months. I'm looking forward to it. Yes, I'd love it to be cheaper. Yes, I'd love it if we had a 100% guarantee that original Switch games will work on it (which we don't, yet, but they are supposedly working on it.) Yes, I wish I didn't have to buy a new format of memory card for it.

But I also understand why all these things are the case, and moaning and complaining about them almost certainly isn't going to change anything about them this close to release. So I may as well suck it up, pay the money and enjoy the thing I knew I was always going to enjoy anyway. And so that's exactly what I'm doing!

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#oneaday Day 299: Switch 2 Tax

It was the Nintendo Switch 2 reveal today. And while there's a lot to like about the system — 1080p and up to 120fps handheld, 4K docked, HDR, nifty online socialisation functions, upgrades to certain Switch games that include both a performance boost and new stuff for the games — one thing is giving me a lot of pause that I wasn't feeling before the announcement.

And that one thing is the price of games. As someone who collects physical video games, I naturally will want to continue doing that for any new console hardware I pick up. But the new Mario Kart is seventy-five fucking pounds for a physical version, and the new Donkey Kong game is sixty-six quid.

Donkey Kong is just on the borderline of what I'll consider paying if the game is legitimately good (and it's a real borderline case here as I don't really like Donkey Kong as a character), but more than £70 for a game that will almost certainly also have paid DLC is well over that line for me. I'm sure Mario Kart World, as the new game is called, will be very good, and I'm quite curious to play it — but £75 to have a copy on my shelf (and not much less than that for a digital-only version) feels… excessive. And I'm someone who voluntarily pays £35 to limited-print companies for £10 indie games just so I can have them on my shelf.

This feels like a mistake for Nintendo. It feels like it might put all the goodwill they built up with the Switch at serious risk of unravelling. I'm sure they will justify it by saying the new cartridges are higher capacity, the tech is more advanced or whatever, but it still feels like… a lot.

Couple that with the fact that while the launch lineup looked neat, there wasn't a singular game that made me go "yes, give it to me, I need this right now". We had a bunch of very welcome ports of stuff like Hitman: World of Assassination, Cyberpunk 2077, Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade (though no mention of Rebirth, interestingly) and numerous others, a Bravely Default remaster that I've been hoping we'd see for quite some time, the aforementioned new Mario Kart and Donkey Kong games, and a few other bits and pieces that were perfectly nice enough, but not really "system sellers" for me.

Not yet, anyway. I have no doubt I'll probably end up with a Switch 2 eventually. But today's announcement makes me feel like I probably don't need one at launch. Probably. Probably.

There's a few days until preorders open. I will have to mull it over quite seriously. Quite seriously indeed. In the meantime, though, it's not as if I'm short of regular-ass Switch games to play, including a selection of pretty chunky RPGs I still haven't gotten to.

So we'll wait and see, I guess. It was a good presentation, and there's a lot to like about Switch 2. But I feel like a lot of people who were all set to preorder day one are now having very serious thoughts about the situation, just like I am. I feel like this should have been an easy win for Nintendo, but as it stands, they could potentially have a problem here.

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