Comment by ToucanLoucan
2 days ago
The Switch is genuinely one of the last pieces of hardware I was really excited about, and I can't say that about much anymore. It's extremely well put together, I've repaired mine a number of times with no issues (honestly opening anything made in Japan is a joy, the engineering is so good) and the specs leave a lot to be desired, which is unfortunate, but at the same time, you wouldn't know it while using it. The XBox is such a curmudgeonly slow experience to use, everything in the menus takes forever to load, the dash jerks and lags, and it's just like... this machine can run Halo Infinite, why does it struggle so damn hard with just... boxes and jpegs?
The Switch has a similar issue occasionally in the store application, but outside of that, settings are snappy, updates are practically instant, it turns on and off so quickly. It's what consoles are supposed to be.
And honestly in this same vein, the PS5 is also bloody impressive, but that impressiveness came with an impressive price too. The Switch costing as little as it did and still holding it's own is so cool.
We have a switch and an XBox and after liking the 360 back in the day the newer XBoxes just make me want to tear my hair out. They sold us all on bigger and bigger hardware to get rid of load times and they ended up with the system with the worst load times going all the way back to the 70s. Sometimes it seems like it takes 10 minutes to start up and actually play a game, and then there the updates.
My son got a Forza Horizon game for Xmas and it immediately said it needed to download 128GB from the internet before he could play it. With the way it worked out he didn't get to play it on Christmas day as it never finished downloading before we had to go leave to visit relatives.
Just a horrific experience compared to Switch.
Unfortunately the situation with needing to download huge updates is also occasionally present on the Switch. Several third party AAA games (EA sports titles come to mind) ship small cartridges and a require big downloads to the SD card to be playable. Switch game downloads (usually) aren't as large as Xbox/PlayStation downloads, but the wifi chip in the OG model was so slow, they might as well be.
Except for the drifting joycons problems. We had to replace many. Hope Switch2 fixes that drift.
The new one is rumored to feature hall-effect sticks on the Joycons which would hopefully solve that issue.
I kind of like the joy con issue, as it means I can send the controllers back to Nintendo and get them fixed for free, even when the problem isn't the joycon - it's the kids destroying the controller.
https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/region/d/joycon...
(Nintendo has always had excellent support - I remember getting a Gamecube refurbished long after the Wii was everywhere).
You can get free replacements btw. My original switch from release finally got drift in the latter part of last year. Nintendo had replacements to me within a few days at no cost. Rare to have such a pleasant experience with customer support, it was a flawless process
New Switch user, believe it or not. I just purchased my second 8BitDo controller with Hall effect joysticks this week. Hoping I can avoid the drift problem by avoiding Joy-Cons! (We usually play on the TV.)
Honestly I swapped them myself both in the Joycons and in the Pro controller a couple times each over the years. The modules cost like $15 through Amazon or Ebay, and unlike the XBox controller, they're separate modules with a ribbon connector instead of soldered in, which makes replacing them a breeze.