So I kind of rocked backwards and forwards unable to decide if I was going to write a post about this or not so that kind of explains why this is a little late compared to other peoples but as the Nintendo Switch Presentation has come and gone and I have now watched it (not live it was at like 4 in the morning and I couldnt be botherd to get up that early). I guess this is a quick what did we learn and how do I feel about it piece. It is proberbly important to note that I have had a little time to chew things over, I have read other peoples oppinions and will have took a few of these on board some proberbly mellowing my oppinion and some getting me even more grouchy about certain issues. One of the reasons I didnt know if I should do this or not is because whenever I give an oppinion that is not 100% Nintendo positive to the point of propoganda I seem to get a lot of hate directed at me, and well I am always going to tell the truth as I see it.
The launch date was announced as March the 3rd 2017 this was done nice and early during the presentation, which is good because its one of the things people are obviously the most keen to know, I would say the second most important thing people wanted to know was its price and Nintendo supplied this as well. There had alwready been a lot of speculation about the price with various websites offering place holder prices and one particular sight GameSeek offering preorders for £199.99. Well it turns out that its UK price is going to be the much higher £279.99 although for anyone lucky enough to have preorderd one from GameSeek they have agreed to honour the preorders at the price they originally stated. So what do I think of this price? Well considering its £279.99 without a game and it looks like the RRP of a lot of games is currently around the £60 mark with some being available to preorder from certain sights for about £40 I think its kind of expensive, lets make this clear if you pay RRP for the machine and then manage to get a game for £40 thats still basically £320 for the machine as well a console is useless without at least one game to play on it, I would have been much happier if they had even made some limited game as a pack in title just so you could see the machine run and mess around with it a little and then pay for an actual title a week or two latter. Some of this is just the typical technology tends to cost more in the UK crap as the Switch is going to be $300 in America which if you do the maths is actually a heap tonne more reasonable.
I will admit that I dont think I am going to buy a Switch on release and this is coming from a guy who had a GameCube days after release, a Wii the night it came out (I cued for it) and a Wii U reasonably quickly too, in honesty the price is just a bit more than I wanted to pay. I had saved up enough to get one (I saved about £350 in total) and I had kind of flip flopped from a strong Yes to a no, to a maybe and backwardss and forwards but I seem to have finally rested on not now. I have a Xbox One, a PS4 and a Wii U and I have titles for all of them that I have either not played or just barely dipped into ,I am not in need of a new machine really and the price point simply is not good enough to tempt me to be stupid and buy something I dont need just because it would be darn cool, a price point of £200 for a stand alone machine or £240 with a game proberbly would have been enough to do this in fact if it was £200 and the games were £40 I would proberbly have grabbed a machine and two games on launch. I guess most people will have a price in there head that they were ready for and if it meets yours great but it didnt meet mine, and bluntly if you didnt have a price in mind and would have paid anything for it then wow your crazy.
A lot of people have been arguing that the Switch looks under powered whilst others have been defending it by saying that we havent seen the specs yet, but lets face it we have seen the graphics and as nice as they are from the way they look and the type of titles we are being shown I have to say we are proberbly looking at specs that are either around the level of or even a little lower than the PS4 and Xbox One, now specs are not everything admitidly but when you could grab a second hand Xbox One and some of its greatest hits that have been released in the last few years for less than a Switch with nothing well it kind of makes you stop and consider what your best course of action is.
Lets look at this at the most basic level and I wont cheat by picking a second hand console or an old inferior model or even second hand games but lets look at what £279.99 can get you, it can get you a Switch with nothing to play on it or you could get a Xbox One S brand new from amazon with Minecraft for £214, a copy of Rare Replay for £13.45 (a collection of some of the best work of a brilliant developer) Forza Horizon 3 for 24.99 (One of the most highly rated driving games released in recent years) and Skyrim Special Edition for £27, I added this one both because it is a fantastic game but also because people seem to be pretty darn excited that despite being quite old now that it is heading to the Switch, oh and you have 55pence left over for some sweets. I am not saying this trying to stop anyone from getting a Switch as it is up to all of us as indivudals to decide if we are excited enough for it and can afford it and if it is the thing we really want to spend our money on, in fact I am confident I will own it one day just not at release or in the imediate future.
So why dont I comment a little bit on the games now and my thoughts on them. Well lets start with 1 2 Switch. Well it looks like 1 2 is bacsically to the Switch what Wii Sports and Nintendo Land were to the Wii and Wii U respective. 1 2 Switch is basically one of those games which kind of demonstrates tha hardware and the abilities of your principle control method in this case the Joy-Con controller(s). In honesty it didn't really make me stand up and pay attention when I watched the presentation and I really dont see it as being worth the amount that it looks like they will be selling it for, it feels much more like it should have just be something thrown in with the console as a sort of demonstration piece. Wii Sports I spent ages on and really did seem to see as a game in its own right where as Nintendo land I soon grew bored of and just saw as a minor distraction and 1 2 Switch lookss like it would fall in to the latter category obviously this is just a speculative oppinion based on a quick bit of footage of it pre-release so it could end up suprising me when I finally play it, I dont want to pretend I am capable of reviewing things that have yet to be released so it needs to be noted this is all just pure speculation.
As for Splatoon 2, yeah it looks like more of the same but that is in no way a bad thing, it was great to see Nintendo unleash a new IP on us with Splatoon and its great to see it continue with new weapons and added moves, I think at its very worst this is just going to be more of the same great game and I dont think thats a bad thing at all, I am glad to see that it is an actual sequel and that there not just re-releasing the Wii U one on the Switch going well no one had a Wii U hardly so its proberbly new to lots of people anyways right? Which is pretty much exactly what they are doing with Mario Kart basically releasing the Wii U one again but with all its DLC included, yeah this is not something I really appreciate but I suppose I can see why they are doing it. With the way they seemed to have half heartidly given up on the Wii U in the middle of its life one of the things us Wii U owners kind of consolidated ourselves with was that we had enjoyed some great games along the way and everyone else was mising out and that one day everyone would want to play these games and so would have to track down Wii U's and well now it just sort of leaves some of us asking the question why did I bother with the Wii U it wasnt that well supported and everyone is going to get its best bits on the new machine anyways.
I could go on to discuss other games but I have hit the nail on the head in one way, we have all seen how quick Nintendo will shrug and let a console fail some of us have seen this with the Cube and the Wii U and it cant help but make you look at this console with a sense of trepedation. Sure Nintendo are blowing there own horn about how strong Third party support will be but they have done this in the past for it to then just dry up quickly, it seems this had been one of Nintendo's biggest problems since the N64 days and it hasnt really gotten any better. If you are going to get a Switch it has to be on the strength of the first party Nintendo games which are often some of the very best games made, but unfortunatly there are seldom enough of them to sustain a serious gamer leaving Nintendo machines in a state were they are best purchased as extra consoles and not primay ones.
Yes I havent mentioned Zelda but lets face it that is coming to the Wii U as well and if history has taught us anything with Zelda games released on 2 machines they are always more or less the same and the one for the older machine is the one that becomes a collectors item.
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