Four Years Of Nintendo Switch

The end of this month will mark the fourth year since I bought a Nintendo Switch.

I’ve mentioned before that I didn’t play any console games from 1998 to about 2019. There were several good reasons for this. First, I was really busy. Second, consoles are expensive, and I definitely didn’t have the money to drop on many games for the 2000s and most of the 2010s. Third, when I did play games, I played on the PC. I remember in 2007 not going out to eat for a while to save up to buy a better video card so I could play ELDER SCROLLS IV: OBLIVION on something other than the very lowest video settings.

But summer 2019 marked a major personal milestone – my 100th book, DRAGONTIARNA: KNIGHTS was about to come out. A few people asked what I wanted to do to mark this milestone – maybe take a trip, go on vacation, that kind of thing.

I decided instead that I wanted a Switch.

Why a Switch? At Easter 2018, my younger brother had unexpectedly given me a Super Nintendo Classic as a present. For a while at the end of the 2010s, Nintendo intermittently sold two mini-consoles, the Nintendo Classic and the Super Nintendo Classic, each one accompanied with recreations of the old-style controllers and some of the greatest hits for the console. Playing around with the Super Nintendo Classic got me interested in the Switch, since the Switch Online subscription service also came with emulators for the NES and the SNES. I had played a lot of NES and SNES games back in the 1990s, but I only rarely had the chance to finish them. Partly it was because I was busy, and partly because the technology to save games back then didn’t really exist.

So after DRAGONTIARNA: KNIGHTS was published, I made up my mind, and got a Switch.

As it turns out, getting a Switch eight months before the Great Covid Freakout turned out to be a really good idea. 🙂

It gave me the opportunity to beat several games, actually numerous games, that I had run out of time to play. The first one was THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM, which I had gotten for PC back in 2011 and had played intermittently since, but never found the time to finish. I beat it for the first time on Switch. Then I finished BLOODSTAINED: RITUAL OF THE NIGHT, which was a sort of spiritual successor to the various Castlevania games of the 90s.

With Switch Online, save states, and some of the anthology collections, I managed to finish some of the classic games from the 80s and early 90s I never had the chance to finish earlier.

-The Super Mario games: SUPER MARIO BROTHERS, SUPER MARIO 3, and SUPER MARIO WORLD for SNES. (I never really got into SUPER MARIO 2 for the NES.)

-The Castlevania series: the three CASTLEVANIA games for NES, CASTLEVANIA II for the Game Boy (the first CASTLEVANIA for Game Boy really isn’t worth playing), and CASTLEVANIA IV and CASTLEVANIA DRACULA X for the SNES.

-The Zelda series: the original LEGEND OF ZELDA for NES, which I never finished, and LINK TO THE PAST for SNES, which is one of the few SNES games I actually finished back when it originally came out.

-SUPER METROID, which I never got a chance to play at all in the 90s, and is deservedly a classic. You can see its mechanics turn up in many other modern games.

Lest you think I spent all my time replaying the classics, I did finish some newer games as well. The remake of LINK’S AWAKENING was excellent, a good updating of the Game Boy classic. METROID DREAD was absolutely superb, even though it took me a while to finish some of the boss fights. I also finished ELDER SCROLLS BLADES, which I’m not going to say was a great game, but I still enjoyed it, and am proud to say I beat the final boss without paying for a single micro-transaction (though I did buy the soundtrack, which makes for good background listening while writing epic fantasy). I keep meaning to play the remake of METROID PRIME, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

The multiplayer games also turned out to be great fun. I started bringing MARIO KART 8 and some controllers to family gatherings. Turns out nearly everyone likes MARIO KART! They say alcohol is a social lubricant, but MARIO KART is almost as effective, and results in a lot fewer hangovers! Though I do lose at MARIO KART a lot. Replaying the old multiplayer classics like SUPER MARIO with someone who appreciates them is always fun.

So I think it is safe to say I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment out of that Switch.

What’s interesting is that the Switch is seven years old now – an eternity in technology terms – yet it’s still going strong. Microsoft, Sony, and the PC game market have been locked in an arms race for ever more powerful hardware and more detailed graphics. By contrast, the Switch was fairly underpowered even for 2017 when it came out, and while it’s been updated a few times in the seven years since, it’s still essentially the same device. Pretty much every phone manufactured in the 2020s is more powerful than the Switch, but Nintendo doesn’t seem super interested into rushing into their next console, though the rumor mill has been talking about the “Switch 2” or the “Switch Pro” for years.

This makes sense once you know Nintendo’s philosophy of “withered technology.” This was a strategy articulated by Nintendo game designer Gunpei Yokoi, who called it “Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology.” It described using mature technology that was well-understood and cheaply obtained, rather than cutting edge stuff, to create unique game experiences different than anything else available. I suspect this is a variant of a philosophy you see among successful people in every field – they rely on the “boring, but practical” methods and combine them in ways to create something unique. Or if you dig into many successes, you will find that the people behind them stuck to the well-established fundamentals, but did them really well.

And that’s what the Switch does, isn’t it? It’s a unique experience. You can plug it into the dock and play it on your TV, or unplug it and use it as a handheld console like a super-powered Game Boy. So I could play it on my couch, or take it with me to family gatherings and plug it into the TV for MARIO KART. It’s an idea that seems incredibly obvious in hindsight, but it really wasn’t at the time.

DRAGONTIARNA: KNIGHTS was my 100th book, and DRAGONSKULL: CROWN OF THE GODS will be #143. Maybe when I hit #150 I should get a Switch OLED. Or the “Switch 2”, if it comes out by then. 🙂

-JM