Comment by nerdjon

One of my favorite video essay's on this is "Nintendo - Putting Play First" by Game Makers Toolkit [1]. It goes into when making a game, Nintendo first determines the mechanic they want to focus on; jumping, throwing a hat, shooting paint, etc and finding out how to make it fun, then building and iterating on the idea.

It's how they can keep putting out essentially the same games but are completely different.

1. https://youtu.be/2u6HTG8LuXQ

I saw an interesting analysis years ago about whether or not the most powerful console 'won' in each generation (i.e. whether or not being the most powerful console of your generation leads to success).

Generally speaking, no, it doesn't actually affect things, and in several cases (e.g. the Game Boy, the Wii, and the Switch come to mind) the objectively 'worse' console (from a tech perspective) was more successful by a country mile.

Strongly agreed. When I think of the best Nintendo products the words “fun” and “play” spring to mind.

AAA gaming on the other hand, either resembles sports, shallow short-form media, or Oscar-bait melodrama. Very little fun to be had.

What ever happened to fun and play?

I can't remember where I read this, but I came across someone talking about the fact that these AAA photo realistic games are hugely expensive to make, but if you look at what young people are spending their time playing, they're games like Fornite, Minecraft and Roblox. As soon as I read this, it clicked for me.

I have two teenagers (15 & 17) and this is exactly right. My son plays games all the time and although he's played Elden Ring and GTA and other games of that sort, over the years I would say 80% of his time has been Minecraft and this other 2D game with a platformer vibe whose name I forget that has procedurally generated maps. He's frequently calling me over to his computer to check out his latest architectural creation in Minecraft. I know it's not just him, because he plays multiplayer with his buddies as well, and again, a lot of it is these games with quite frankly primitive graphics. But they're fun!

I'm a huge Nintendo/Mario fan but I've recently been playing through Astro Bot on my PS5 and I must say, when you combine super fun mechanics with amazing graphics and performance, it's quite an experience! But there isn't nearly enough content like this on the non-Nintendo consoles, so point is definitely not lost on me.

I play one game at a time for about a month and then move to the next. When I first played Mario Odyssey on my switch I was over the moon with how much pure fun it was compared to all the good looking and serious RPGs I played in the decade before. I had forgotten games can be this enjoyable. Nowadays I try to do these super fun games in between my souls-like sessions.

Focusing on tech or unoriginal production values (that's photo real! You don't need a great art director, you need a photo..) is appealing to companies because it's predictable vs the creative uncertainty and subjectivity of "fun".

Astro Bot won game of the year because it had amazing graphics and physics and had Mario-tier fun. The team actually made a cryptic shout out to Nintendo at the award ceremony.

Nintendo has great games, but the resolution on TVs, even cheap ones, is outstanding now and it goes to waste using a Switch.

Playing a great game that also uses what the TV has on offer is really the best experience. If we get 4k and ray tracing on Switch I’ll be stoked.

The “is this fun” part is the reason why I bought a Switch in the first place. Still the only console I’ve ever owned

I love the “just start playing” ethos of most Nintendo games. Reminds me of the games I used to play as a kid. No long story or exposition - just a game load screen and a start button

Do they? I haven't seen a meaningful improvement in video game graphics for at least 5 years, maybe even 10.

A lot of that was necessary for Nintendo get away from the "it's a video game console" comparison after the video game market crash. That's why the NES looks like a VCR too.

Don't forget Stack-Up! :P

When you try weird shit you’re bound to have failures. Nintendo has a remarkable success rate with their weird shit, though.

Not just Nintendo. The PlayStation 4 controller had that touchpad in the middle that also clicked in to act as a button. I played a lot of games that used it as a button (usually to open a map, or something) and don't remember a single game that used it as a touchpad.

I think someone at Nintendo has a brother-in-law that owns an IR sensor manufacturer. Only explanation for that feature being in every right joycon.

As a mouse mouse. It seems to have an optical sensor on the inside edge (the side that attaches to the console) and the video shows the joy cons zooming around on that edge.

or the upcoming civ 7, or any number of games!

First Wii was able to play Game Cube Games. WiiU was backwards compatible to Wii. All theses consoles used nearly the same chipset anyways.

for what it's worth Nintendo had planned to make the SNES backward compatible and that intention influenced design choices, particularly the very similar CPU.

I know, and you can basically restore full GameCube compatibility on the Wii U via Nintendont. Neither of them let you use the actual physical games from the old system, and needing to perform jailbreak hacks to use them and load ROMs on anyway doesn't count as much as out-of-the-box compatibility.

The New 3DS consoles did have double the RAM and an improved CPU and GPU, so there were quite a few games like Minecraft and the SNES Virtual Console that could only run on the New models.

There are a handful of more New 3DS exclusives than there were DSi exclusives. Both revisions failed to garner enough market for developers to try to target them.

Super Smash Brothers worked very well with the second pad.

IIRC Xenoblade Chronicles and Fire Emblem Warriors were the only ones I really cared about. Lots of people held onto their old hardware; probably wasn't worth excluding them.

The biggest advantage of owning a New 3DS turned out to be the huge performance uplift. A fair number of games ran at double the framerate or only supported 3D mode on the newer hardware. Code Name STEAM had substantially less downtime on the New models because the AI could process turns faster. Several reviews for Hyrule Warriors Legends flat out said not to buy the game unless you had a "New" model due to performance issues.

"Generations" is a fairly subjective term all things considered, and I basically acknowledged it by saying these things are fuzzy.

As the sibling post mentions, they all have exclusives, however, which is something Sony has refused to allow for PS4 Pro and PS5 Pro updates. And even though Nintendo considers the GBC to be the same console as the original GB when it comes to tallying sales figures, it's a rather significant upgrade. Slightly better than NES full color games, double the processor speed. It made a compelling upgrade and target for developers.

All of those have games exclusive to them.

3DS has like ~15, though some heavy hitters (Xenoblade and Fire Emblem), DSi has like 6 no-names (and, technically, a whole lot on DSiWare); but there are many GBC-exclusive games.

I was about to say that. Pretty much every unique Wii U game has been remastered for Switch.

The DS can't play GBC games at all, it doesn't have the Z80 CPU from that console to even provide backwards compatibility. Nintendo also removed it from the Game Boy Micro, making it a GBA-only console.

The world is noticeably empty due to hardware limitations.

The style is entirely informed by hardware limitations. They did their best with what they could.

Lack of ram meant it could only handle a couple trees at a time

I would say gameplay and art style instead of what the rest of the industry calls graphics (polygon count basically).

Nearly all Nintendo (game freak is not technically Nintendo) games look beautiful thanks to having a great art style instead of just focusing on higher polygon count.

I agree with you, but in some newer games it just doesn't make sense to me.

They want good graphics but the Switch can't handle them, but they still try to make them.

For example, Pokemon Scarlet & Violet.

Gameplay and the game design for me personally is really great, but I can't stand the graphics. I would rather play on worse graphics just to not have constant frame drops and in some parts of the game N64 graphics and in some 4K ones.

Agree completely. I loved Tears and didn’t once think it looked bad in any way. It was a very clever game and made me feel like a kid again. That’s what I’m looking for in a Nintendo game. I’ll jump on my PS5 if I want to be wowed graphically.

Exactly. If you want to be dazzled with AAA titles running at 120Hz/60fps/4k then there are plenty of ways to spend your money. Frankly that segment of the industry feels like a treadmill of never ending upgrades for the same basic game.

My whole family shares and island in animal crossing, firing up some arcade brawlers on the couch. We’ve been playing the hell out of our switch for years and never once have we complained that it’s not flashy enough.

TotK seems extremely washed out and low-contrast is a majority of the environments. I played a bit of BotW and thought it was much more vibrant.

It's a beautiful game, one of the first to use programmable shaders, and one of the earliest that doesn't look dated at all. The shaders make everything look smooth without looking blurry.

Loading screens are hidden, it's not like the contemporaneous PS2 game Mafia where you wait a few minutes to load, spend a few minutes driving across town on a mission to shoot up some people at a restaurant, get yourself shot up, then have to wait for it to load all over again.

Beautiful art direction to be sure.

But let's be real, it's Super Metroid. :)

I wouldn't blame Unity for this. It's perfectly capable of running games efficiently on mobile. Problem is people either don't know how to or don't care to optimize their games performance.

The Switch was weak when it came out. Decent PCs from that same year can handle most of these games just fine. It's not really the developer's fault when the Switch is the only platform with issues, and they're usually not "pushing the envelope" in any way. The fault here is Nintendo's, they didn't prioritize support for ported games, though admittedly they couldn't really foresee the indie game boom, since it wasn't nearly as big of a deal at the time, especially in Japan.

First-party Nintendo titles are more or less the only games that actually manage to "push the envelope" on the Switch, and that's because they have the resources and experience to do it. Even then, some games end up constrained compared to the original vision, because the hardware can't handle it no matter how much insider knowledge you have about how it works and how to use it right.

Most indie devs don't have time and money to optimize. They will make the game primarily for the biggest audience, and then make it somewhat playable for everyone else.

The closer Switch is to the Steam Deck, the more likely both will be targeted.

What a bizarre thing to say. People buy indie games for all sorts of different reasons, and sometimes it's the beautiful art style.

That spec seems fishy given both Ampere and Ada both have 1 RT core in each SM. 12 RT cores would make much more sense. The 1534 Cuda cores is also weird since 128x12 would be 1536. ALSO the leak says "Nvidia T239 Ampere (RTX 20 Series)" but Ampere debuted in the RTX 30 Series.

The leaks are a little inconsistent on this one.

On one hand, the base architecture is Ampere, but it's been repeatedly rumored that there are various backports from Lovelace. It's a weird mixture of the two, alone with some unique parts never seen elsewhere (a file decompression engine that accelerates LZMA, according to kernel commits).

It's hard to say then how powerful these raytracing cores are, or how many are even necessary for simple but beautiful effects. It's also worth remembering that the Switch bakes the graphics drivers into the game itself, uses data structures and shaders more native to the GPU without compilation, and has a custom low level graphics API called NVN (and NVN2), so performance is not necessarily linear compared to a PC.

OLED seems like a no brainer for a lifecycle refresh at the ~3-3.5 year mark. Particularly because they've done it before, and Valve very recently proved it's still a viable way to boost sales. Nintendo has had 7 years to prepare for this launch they likely have every mario, zelda, metroid release date pinned to a particular month and year through at least year 5. A display upgrade mid cycle is almost a given.

Honestly, if it keeps the price down I'm all for it. My switch spends 99% of the time in the dock, because I would far rather play with the pro controller on my big TV than play it in handheld mode. So I find the quality of the screen kinda irrelevant.

This is a statement that could only be made by an HN commenter. My wife has to drop into Arch to recover her audio every time she connects her Steam Deck to the TV. This is not a product ready for mass consumption.

[dead]

Have you ever tried to dock a Steam deck to a TV?

Have you ever tried to use physical media with a Steam deck?

Have you ever tried to get 5 hours of battery life with a Steam deck?

Have you ever put a Steam deck in your pocket? (I do have big pockets, but at least with the Switch Lite, it's possible.)

Nintendo will be just fine. I personally will never use a platform that can kick me out on a whim, or could screw me the moment Gabe Newell gets hit by a bus.