Nintendo

Nintendo Switch Carrying Cases 2020-04-12

The answer to the question “What’s the situation with carrying cases for the Switch?” is the same as the answer to the question of “Is the Switch really portable?”:

It’s complicated folks. And it depends on a couple of factors.

This answer comes from the fact that there are two different sizes of case, at least when it comes to officially licensed ones. For the sake of simplicity let’s just call them “Small” and “Large”. Which one to use depends on what kind of experience you want to take with you.

The Small Case

The small case is, well, small. Not much bigger than the Switch itself:

Review - Nintendo Switch Official Charging Stand 2020-04-12

I recently purchased the first Switch accessory that I previously classified as a “nice to have” - a charging stand.

The use case for a charging stand is simple - imagine a scenario in which you might want (or need) to prop the Switch up on its kickstand and use it in Tablet mode. Now imagine that you would also like to charge it at the same time. This is what the charging stand is for; it lets you prop it upright and plug it in.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Switch - Finale 2020-04-11

This post is the last one in this series of (over)analysis of the Nintendo Switch.

If you read through this entire thing (and that’s a big if), you may have come to the same conclusion as me, which is that taken as a whole, all the posts leading up to this one have had a negative bent. This was not at all my intention. When I wrote these posts, I tried to clear my head of all the opinions and stances and agendas I had against the Switch. I reassessed it as a now-owner and fan. And yet somehow, I came up with almost the exact same observations I had as a hater.

And yet there was one crucial difference - my observations on the console are the same, but my reactions to those observations are not.

My previous, angry stance was based on little to no actual experience with the things I was railing against. I got angry and nasty because I let the internet condition me into being that way. I let it train me to be angry and self-righteous, and to get emotionally invested in the fate of faceless, emotionless corporations.

When I finally got past that, and allowed myself to react to things naturally, I made the same observations, but realized in most cases that I didn’t really care about them one way or another.

I don’t expect everyone to agree with me. I understand that some folks will still get angry. But I’m done with letting my emotions be manipulated. I’m done letting myself be swayed by the allure of being righteous and angry for the sake of it. All I can do is call things like I see them, and let others come to their own conclusions.

Now I would like to finish this series on a positive note, by going over all the things that make me love using the Switch. This section is going to take up far fewer words than the rest of this series, but consider the words below to be far more potent. As far as I am concerned, this is the only part that matters.

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

This is the penultimate post in my series on the Nintendo Switch, and the only one that is not directly about the Switch itself. Rather, I wanted to mark down my thoughts about Nintendo itself.

I have been a customer of Nintendo for most of my life, far longer than any other video game company, electronics company, or software company. There are times where I love what they do, and there are times - especially recently - where I don’t. No matter what, however, I have always felt as if I understood the company and their business decisions, even when they did things that looked bizarre to the gaming community at large (the DS and the Wii, for example).

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.