OPINION – The Nintendo Switch launched last Friday, taking over the mantle from the Wii U. The company tries to get closer to Sony and Microsoft with the handheld/console hybrid, but there are several issues with the first units that were sold. The beginnings are usually, though, but this might be a new level…

 

I’ll have to say something right now: I’m going to mostly focus on the initial technical difficulties of the Switch, so I’m not going to talk about the game library or the Switch‘s possibilities. Only the problems that were recorded and proven to be issues with the new platform.

Eye

Kotaku also wrote a recap about how a few people encountered faults while playing on the Nintendo Switch. For example, the dock, which is just mostly a piece of plastic with only a small cube of hardware in it, can end up causing scratches on the Switch‘s display. Nintendo acknowledged the issue so hard that they took the dock off the store. That’s just the beginning.

The screen vibrates, or even ends up having artifacts and other visual flaws due to a possibly faulty NVidia Tegra chip – sometimes I wonder if Nintendo got the leftovers from the manufacturer. Staying on the visual topic, there’s also dead pixels, and guess what? Nintendo calls it as a „characteristic of an LCD screen.” I don’t think there should be a dead pixel only just days after getting a Switch.

Ear

That was the warmup portion. There’s also unexplainable, random noises happening with a few consoles, sometimes even combined with locking up as well. There’s nothing better than sitting on a bus while playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and all of a sudden encounter a lock up with the audio also hanging up. You’ll likely gain the unwanted attention of the other commuting people by ripping your earphones out to avoid listening to that jarring noise. It has a bit of romantic touch to it, though. In case you don’t have that issue, you might be encountering overheating! Imagine the whole scene with the Switch burning your lap instead.

Jokes aside, PS4Pro previously wrote about how Nintendo potentially used the Tegra chip to save manufacturing costs and push the price down as well. Speaking of prices, a few examples from around Europe. Portugal, 330 euros, without a game. Germany, same price. Austria, 355 euros with 1-2 Switch bundles. Hungary, 388 with 1-2 Switch or 398 with Zelda. You might say „but post-communist countries” – okay: Slovakia, 325 euros without a game…

Hand

There are possibilities with the Joy-Cons providing fun, entertaining bugs. The left Joy-Con might not even be recognized by the Switch, and again, Nintendo‘s reaction was unbelievable: do not be near an aquarium, behind a TV, or less than 3-4 foot away from another wireless device. You might already hold your head in shock, but I’m far from being done. Joy-Con wrist wraps can get stuck, and they look hard to get detached going by the video I saw. I don’t think Nintendo planned the little controllers as such – could it be a design flaw?

Oh yeah, now that I brought up the video, I’m going to point out a few thinks with timestamps. Joy-Cons put together by the player and getting stuck (01:15), almost Skynet-like audio glitches with a graphical problem (02:01), the Switch not recognizing the game card (the guy should have tried blowing on it, that usually helps). Massive graphical bugs that make Breath of the Wild unplayable, unusable screen after one or two seconds (04:24). Design flaw with the positioning of the USB-C socket (06:04): you cannot use the Switch in the tabletop mode while charging it, and then I could also point out how the Joy-Cons can feel unstable on the Switch (09:37), not to mention the desync issue with only just a few feet away from the TV (09:50).

Nintendo

Nintendo already reacted to the desync problems with the Joy-Cons, but they are probably between a rock and a hard place about explaining (or not explaining) why Breath of the Wild looks to be the best experience in handheld mode. Still, we should consider the Switch’s „first steps” as the early days of the platform. I’m not dissing Nintendo, mind you, in fact, even the PlayStation 4 Pro had some problematic consoles in its first stock. Just take a look:

It’s too early to bury the Switch. However, there are way too many faulty consoles. There maybe even more technical crap with it than what I mentioned so far. I just remembered another Joy-Con problem: its Bluetooth antenna might be badly placed in the controller, which could cause desynchronization issues. If you say „then don’t hold it in a bad way” does not fix the problem: it stays there, you just avoid it. Did Nintendo have no way to address this problem?

Maybe… and this might be a conspiracy theory, Nintendo could have rushed the Switch launch. If they revealed it less than two MONTHS before it launched, that’s suspicious. Sure, you could say that the PlayStation 4 Pro’s reveal was similarly a short time from the reveal to the release, but don’t forget that the PS4 Pro was a stronger model of an existing console, not a brand new platform. There’s a significant difference…

So I’m saying that we should wait at least half a year, or until the arrival of Super Mario Odyssey, which will be an important first-party title in the holiday season. If Nintendo can’t fix the flaws that the Switch could have by that point, then the company is going to shoot itself in the foot again. Despite the new technological approach, it feels no more like a tablet, and you cannot even move your saves around multiple Switches, which is nothing short of being pathetic.

You can have lots of great, raving reviews for Breath of the Wild, but if your hardware is coughing, the software won’t run as it was supposed to do so either. If there’s a twelve-minute montage of the Switch in just three days, then that’s an awful first note in the song, to say the least!

I can describe the Switch as a car with a superb chassis and a troublesome engine… something like McLaren-Honda MCL32 in Formula-1 this year! You could have a decent aerodynamic setup if your engine blows up at every turn.

Will Nintendo end up seeing people „Switch” away from the Switch? The 3DS is perfectly fine, and that’s already an SIX-YEAR-OLD handheld platform…

-V-