the occasional post

I got a Nintendo Switch 2 last week, after seeing it in stock at a store near my house. It’s my 14th Nintendo console, following the SNES, Game Boy Pocket, N64, Game Boy Color, Gamecube, Game Boy Advance, DS, DS Lite, DS Lite, 3DS, 3DS XL, Switch, and Switch OLED.

I got the SNES, Game Boy Pocket (clear), and N64 as Christmas gifts from Santa Claus, who exists. My aunt got me a Game Boy Color (lime green) for my birthday. I think my mom got me a Game Boy Advance because my friend’s mom got him a Game Boy Advance. That one came to Boy Scout camps with me, along with a worm light and link cable.

I don’t remember getting a Gamecube, but I know we had one, in my brother’s room. I had a PS2 in mine. We brought them downstairs as needed, like when we wanted to play Guitar Hero before school and wake everyone up. I reread a July 2002 Nintendo Power preview of Animal Crossing daily in the summer leading to its September release. It is my fondest Gamecube memory and the most pure hype I have experienced in my lifetime.

I got a DS early in the morning on release day, a Sunday (!), then played it in church. Have any other video game systems been released on a Sunday?

About a year later I won a PSP from McDonald’s. The terms and conditions section of the prize forms said I was too young to win anything. I begged them in the margins to send it to me anyway, and was astounded when it showed up in the mail.

The Wii came out while I was in college, right around the time my first DS Lite was stolen. One of my roommates and I waited outside a Target for hours to get it. This was back when the Wii felt impossible to find. It was a huge hit in our dorm. We’d take it into the common area and set up Wii Sports and play for hours as people popped in and dropped out. I had an Xbox 360 at that time, so I never got a Wii. I was too busy ending the Oblivion Crisis.

The 3DS came out while I was in grad school. It was the last video game product I preordered in a store, with deposits and receipts and everything. The old way. I took my girlfriend at the time to the mall on release day and we got two. Sometime after we moved in together I got a PS4. Later we got married.

It wasn’t clear whether our apartment had a bedroom and living room, or one giant room with a countertop between the sleeping area and the living area. The TV was on top of the counter, facing the couch. I came home to that apartment around 1:00 a.m. on 11.11.11 with a new copy of Skyrim to play on that TV.

We moved to a much better apartment and got a PS4 in the Infamous Second Son bundle. Soon after that I won some money doing improv and spent a hunk of it on a PSVita. I consider that my first Switch. If you were a Vita person you know what I mean.

By the time Switch came out I was deep in the PlayStation ecosystem, with a PS4, PSVita, and PSVR. I still used my 3DS (at this point an XL Animal Crossing edition) for Animal Crossing, Monster Hunter, and the occasional Pokémon – so all my favorite games except Elder Scrolls – but Switch was not launching with any of that. Switch just had a Zelda game, and Zelda hadn’t been great since Majora’s Mask.

The Splatoon bundle that came out six months later got me. It came with pink and green controllers and a matching case.

I lived on that thing during the pandemic, in Animal Crossing, on an island called Bongwater, which I’ve named all my Animal Crossing towns and villages since Wild World in 2005. Upgrading to an OLED Switch was a no-brainer at a stupid low trade-in price. The Vita had an OLED screen, so I knew what I was missing, and I missed it the whole time.

Now I am back to the bright grey blacks of LED on my shiny new Switch 2, which would have been called the Super Nintendo Switch if the geniuses in the decision room weren’t also cowards. If there’s any story behind this upgrade it’s that I bought it on a Friday night and spend the next day playing through every Mario Kart track with my cousins and their children, the next week off work playing Pokémon with my daughter on her summer break. I’m catching very powerful Pokémon and trading them to her so she can beat the Elite Four.

The new Switch was worth it to me primarily because Fortnite runs like stale junk on the old Switch, and I play a lot of Fortnite. I knew I was going to get Mario Kart World eventually because I always get Mario Kart, and it’s $30 off in the bundle. I knew I wanted to play Pokémon Z-Y, but not on the old Switch, which can barely run Violet.

The Switch 2 is big, but also thinner and lighter than I expected. Mario Kart and No Man’s Sky are gorgeous. Pokémon Violet is like a brand new game. I played Fortnite on a docked Switch instead of PS5 today on purpose. It doesn’t matter at all that the mouse controls are a joke in any fps situation. It’s not a mouse, after all, and I’m a gyro aimer. I do wish the battery and screen were better, but we all know Nintendo is going to put out an upgraded pro system in a few years.