cmwolfe.net

2020

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Switch - Part 5 2020-04-10

Sorry folks - even I am baffled at the fact that this series is on its fifth post. Please bear with me (or stop reading. I won’t be offended).

This post is basically about costs. For most consoles, the table stakes to play are the cost of the console and maybe the price of a game. The Switch complicates this math a bit, and it is worth discussing.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Switch - Part 4 2020-04-10

The User Interface/OS

What I thought then - The interface is too simple and limited. I hate the lack of customization and theming options
What I think now - Same as above, but it hasn’t impacted me much.

Before we get into this, we need to go back in time a bit. Here are some photos of the OS on the Nintendo 3DS, which launched almost ten years ago:

The default layout. A single row of icons for all your software

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Switch - Part 3 2020-04-10

We looked at the core features, and the controllers. In this post, I want to tackle some of the smaller, more miscellaneous features of the Switch.

Touchscreen

What I thought then - Cool, there’s a touchscreen!
What I think now - Now it works, now it doesn’t - what the heck?

Sometimes the touchscreen works. Sometimes it does not. The only way to tell is to open a piece of software and see what happens.

Generally speaking, I dislike the idea of forcing software to make use of hardware-based features, especially considering that hardware manufacturers are liable to stuff their devices full of gimmicks.

But touchscreens are not gimmicks. Ten-plus years of smartphones and Nintendo DS hardware is proof of that. And yet support for the feature is spotty. At the very least you would think most games would support touchscreen input on their menus. Imagine managing your Spirits in Smash Ultimate using your fingers to quickly sort or mass delete.

I JUST WANT TO SCROLL!! sobs

I almost wonder if it is in there by accident, as if Nintendo was so used to making touchscreen devices that it just kind of slipped into the schematics without anyone realizing it. Or maybe it was just cheaper to get touchscreens, even if they had no major plans for them.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Switch - Part 2 2020-04-09

In part 1 of this series, we looked at some of the Switch’s core physical characteristics. In this post I provide some commentary on its controllers.

Joycons

What I thought then - These are brilliant
What I think now - These are still brilliant … and I am afraid they are going to break

Sometimes the sign of a brilliant idea is that it just shows up on the scene one day, and makes so much sense that you cannot understand how nobody thought of it earlier. That is how I feel about the Joycons. A fully functional modern controller that can split up into two smaller controllers with the same number of inputs as the SNES? Sign me up.

The Joycons were one of the only things about the Switch I liked back in 2017, and my opinion remains unchanged, but man, these suckers are going to break eventually, aren’t they? Already my children have managed to chew some … let’s call them “Custom engravings” into the blue Joycon:

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Switch - Part 1 2020-04-09

In the introduction to this series, I talked a lot about how I got over my irrational hatred of the Nintendo Switch, and came to accept it for what it is. In these next few posts, I intend to break down the console and its ecosystem feature by feature, bit by bit, in extreme (arguably excessive) detail. In each case, I will explain how I used to think about each characteristic, then about how my opinion has shifted (assuming it HAS shifted).

I do not expect anyone to gain anything from reading these posts, but as I alluded to in the intro, writing it all down helped me get a lot of lingering thoughts out of my mind, which made it an extremely therapeutic process.

For this first entry of my analysis of the Switch, we take a look at what I consider the “core features”, the aspects of the console that are the most visible and important.

Side Note - I have one of the newer models with the better battery life, which is going to inform some of my opinions.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Switch - Intro 2020-04-09

From 2017 until, well, now, I spend a considerable amount of mental energy railing against the Nintendo Switch. I say “mental energy” because I never got into heated online debates, and only very rarely got into in-person debates about the console. Most of my thoughts and opinions lived entirely within my mind, expressed to only a handful of people.

And yet here I am, in April of 2020, to tell you that I have had a Switch in my home for almost two months now.

TWIST!!

And I love it

So what changed all of a sudden? How did I go from “railing” against it to falling in love with it? The quick and dirty explanation is that I am a human being, and like most human beings, I had some opinions that were hypocritical and poorly thought out. Once I identified this and reassessed, my mind was changed.

For those who want a lot more detail than that, read on.

Gunpla Chronicles - HGAC Maganac Final 2020-03-12

Now that the Maganac is assembled, let’s talk a bit about it.

I really like this design. It vaguely reminds me of a Zaku, what with the monoeye, the Heat Hawk, and its fairly bulky shape.

On a whole, however, it doesn’t really look like most mobile suit designs. For one, you don’t see many mecha which use so many earth tones. The closest I can think of is the Gundam Local Type North American version, but that’s a case where the brown parts look more black (or dark grey) under certain lighting conditions. Case in point:

It is almost as if the Local Type is ashamed of being brown, and tries to hide it. The Maganac, however, is brown and proud.