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Switch 2 Technical Review – Shocking frame rates exposed!

I haven’t been following the news for some time because what you don’t know can’t hurt you, like the origin of this blood I’ve been coughing up for three months. If ICE comes to send me back to Africa, where I have on good authority all humanity is from, I can let them know I haven’t been following their activity and they will let me go because clandestine police forces with vague accountability are anything but unreasonable. At least that was my experience during my brief internship for Pinochet.

But news of the Switch Deux did somehow make it past the spoons and forks guarding my cave, and like any caveman, I am wowed by shiny things. Yes, I immediately bought the console after deciding I wasn’t going to buy it and ignoring the preorder period while judging the marks who wanted to buy an expensive piece of hardware sight unseen. Then, as if to mock those who want but cannot have the thing (which is likely evidence of a moral failing), I got one. I opened my browser the morning after launch to my homepage of Costco.com (like any big game bargain hunter) and found the bundle with Mario Kart New World Order in stock for a mere $50 above MSRP because of a forced bundling of a subscription to NSO (New Sworld Order).

Thinking to myself, “this will generate content and I live to deliver content when I am not optimizing search engine visibility,” I ordered the thing. Mere days after the delivery date Costco promised it would arrive, it arrived and I was ready to parent and do some busy work and not look at the Sw2tch until a day later. The packaging was slick but that a business man now runs Nintendo is apparent in many ways – I guarantee that console boxes released under Iwata could take a nailgun on any face, let alone a measly staple. The penny grubbing Welcome Tour “interactive digital software entertainment service and/or product” should generate Melania coin as you play, but a company putting billions into developing Wii Hedge Fund Manager U is never going to go for that, but I digress.

Welcome Tour is full of little surprises.

Why order the console if I’m not paying attention to the world and decided I didn’t need it? I would imagine you would ask if you couldn’t see there were still a lot of words left in this post. Then you’d probably ask me how black was my media blackout. I’m not even sure who the president is (but take solace knowing whoever won is tired of spoiled Palestinian children strutting around with four limbs). Still, I have heard some things about tariffs because I need to keep my ear to the grapevine due to my counterfeit wig business, but I’ve said too much. These tariff talks did spur me into action with the assumption the console would cost $46,000 by the end of the following week. Assuming I would buy then flip the thing, I ordered 39 but Costco only charged me and sent one because only they are allowed to scalp things, apparently. (I believe this is called pay-to-play or death panels or something in business lingo.) Even selling one system could generate the profit I need to fulfill my dream of building AI to play games for me so I can focus on working and cleaning the bathroom.

But the deeper reason is darker than garden variety war crimes. I wanted a new thing because it gave me something to pour my attention into. It gave me something to live for besides the clause in my life insurance that prevents payout on account of suicide. And it’s fun to want things when all other meaning has been obliterated by personal and societal failings. And maybe Donkey Kong would be cool.

The new Donkey Kong uses voxel technology.

I’d like to do a deep dive on the software, but so far I’ve mostly played Monster Train 2 on it. Everyone is right about this game, it’s a perfect sequel if you love incremental, glacial progress, and are probably exactly who Martin Luther King was talking about when he said some people want freedom but on their timeline and not the oppressed’s. You god damned monsters (trains). I’ve also been poking around at the NSO offerings since this is my entry into the expensive tier that doubles the available retro ROMs from 6 to 9.

Here are some quick Gameboy game reviews between 20 and 21 words – 

Mario Land 2 is a mediocre version of a great series that impressed some people by being on a handheld. [20] Gargoyles Quest is fun but something of a trifle that deserves to languish in obscurity I really think so a lot. [21] Castlevania Legends sucks. [3]

Beyond all these 4kb games, I also downloaded patches for some Zelda games. Now I can not enjoy Hyrule at a higher frame rate. But if I were to ever want to play an open world game, the Zeldas would be on the list of 20 I consider putting a few hours into then dropping. And I randomly chose one of my many unplayed Sw1tch games to start on the new system – Foretales. It’s a cool game (and card based, as all entertainment should be) but I think the internet and nuclear scientists are right, games from the old system are a little blurrier on the new without a dedicated patch to deblur them.

It’s ugly, but at least the music is bad.

In some places on the internet, suggesting you want to see more games announced will immediately get the SWAT team sent to your house and once they’ve neutralized you with a bazooka they explain to your grieving widow that Nintendo didn’t send out development kits until recently and that the pieces of her late husband were a huge, impatient baby. I will take the risk and say I want to see more games announced. I wishlist a lot of cool indie games on Steam between browsing the AI-generated 3D model filled porn games (you should see the one with the woman with large breasts) and reading about white supremacy on the Steam boards, and it would be cool if I could spend three times as much on these games to have them on a handheld with a two hour battery life.

Overall the Switch II is an acceptable upgrade, but is it an Xbox? No, I just told you it’s a Switch 2nd. The benefit of text is you can go back and reread a sentence if you don’t understand it, unlike those self-destructing videos on the internet. Does that app where you send text messages that are deleted right after you read them still exist? That was my favorite way to share classified information with foreign nationals when I was working in Chile. In conclusion, Mario Kartography is fine. Sure it’s worth Nintendo’s new standard asking price of $135 but it’s still just Mario SCART.

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chris
Admin
4 days ago

I’ve been impressed so far at the improved load times for Switch games (generally takes 30%-40% of the original load times, in my experience). Although I haven’t played games that stress the Switch in other ways, it’s nice to have backwards compatibility with improvements (and get to use all the old controllers and such).

Finally, the largely disliked Pixeljunk Monsters 2 is bearable to play on Sw2tch.

Agreed Mario Kart World is fine, I’m not huge on MK but the character variety is good.