Nintendo switch clock speeds: 307.2MHz

"Hobbled performance"... What's with the negativity? Power management = good. I'm sure the more basic games will do just fine on the lower clock, and won't need to spin up any fans this way.

 

Well, we "know" that the Nintendo games will be good anyway. But it's a portable. Nintendo is only portable. Japan's fault it seems.

 

Please, Nintendo, i love you (loved?) but it's time to go 3rd party only and focus on the games.

 

Nintendo has never been that, and will never be that for as long as they make their own hardware. You buy a Nintendo console for Nintendo games. You don't buy a Nintendo console for a likely sub-par port of Skyrim.

 

You certainly weren't a VG player in the 8 and 16-bit times?

Nintendo back then had top notch quality hardware and the best home ports around. Now it's a pale, sad shade of its old self. I was buying Nintendo as much for 3rd party masterpieces as for the 1st party titles.

 

The NTSC Nintendo Entertainment System had a poor design and most do not even work as you needed to blow in the cartridges.
They hardwired Famicom controllers to the console and if your controller broke you were in deep shit.
They started out pretty rough.

 

I don't know. From a quality stand point the similar path didn't work out so well for Sega. I view Nintendo as one of the few high quality game makers (that actually understands how to make fun games) left; would hate to see them turn into something similar to what Sega became.

 

I disagree, the NES / Famicom was actually pretty well designed and appropriate for the time.You are talking about issues people have with them now as if it was like that from day 1. And you don't need to "blow in the cartridges". You need to clean them like any cartridge ever. The connector in the NES over time can loosen up though. But cleaning the cartridges properly usually gets the job done. Unless the connector is really dirty or screwed up.

If your hardwired Famicom controller broke you could have the machine serviced or bought a controller that plugged into the expansion port. So again I don't see any of this. You do know that the NES dominated the video game market for years right? They usually call that success. Not "pretty rough". The SNES also did very well. It did have much better competition than the NES/Famicom.

The Nintendo of the NES and SNES was different to what they later became. There were lots of 3rd party titles. You didn't buy a NES or SNES just for 1st party titles. I certainly don't remember everyone own Sega Master Systems and Atari and then groaning about having to buy a NES just to play Mario. Nor was there people with their TurboGrafx 16 or Sega Genesis that groaned about having to buy the SNES just for Super Mario World. It wasn't a thing back then. Their first two consoles stood on their own in their generations. It's with the N64 against the competition of the PS1 and Saturn where people started thinking having just the Nintendo console didn't give them access to enough games or all the ones they wanted.

Back to the Switch, there are so many rumors out there about it. This stuff about technical specs seems negative. But who knows how reliable this source really is. And then if it is true, there are other rumors from developers saying things like they had Dark Souls 3 running on it, or things about UnrealEngine 4 running on it. It makes sense for them to want to save battery power where it is possible. But I hope the system doesn't end up like the tech gap between the Wii and PS3/X360, or the WiiU and PS4/X1. If it doesn't end up looking night and day worse then I think it'll be ok. I don't think Nintendo's 1st party offerings will have to worry about anything. They're likely to look nice just because of their art style and won't have the issue of 3rd party games which can be judged on different platforms.

 

A bunch of people commenting on the NES/SNES arent old enough to have had it at the time.

 

If the switch console sells well then developers will want to make games for it.
So if you want a console to succeed and have a lot of games, then you buy the console.

 

You can hardly compare a present day company to itself from 30 years ago, the entire market is vastly different.

 

I think the "doing more (gaming) with less (hardware)" philosophy that some people seem to associate with Nintendo applied most strongly to their portable products, so I guess it depends on wether you see the Switch as a handheld or a console first.

> A bunch of people commenting on the NES/SNES arent old enough to have had it at the time
> the entire market is vastly different
And a bunch those claiming the NES dominated the market aren't aware that it didn't do so everywhere, e.g. in the EU, where it was just another (comparatively expensive, I think) machine amongst a sea consisting mostly of home computers. I for one didn't own one myself - had an Atari ST instead, but played it at a friend's occasionally.

 

The Switch confuses me, it's hard to tell what Nintendo is trying to do. Are they trying to make portable gaming a more viable thing for "hardcore gamers"? If that's what they're trying to do, then they're really missing the mark by making it so underpowered in comparison to a Shield. Or are they perhaps just putting another gimmick into their latest console that won't be used by the majority of its players? That's not the way to go either, people are tired of that. Just look at the Wii U. Not to say that the Wii U failed because of its second screen gimmick, I think it was more to do with a lack of interesting software; but it definitely contributed to its downfall.

You're exactly right, Europe was heavily into 8-bit computers and the Sega Master System; Nintendo didn't do anywhere near as well as they did in other territories (Sega was even dominant in Australia as far as I can tell).

 

I don't think it would be the same for Nintendo, since the main reason Sega stopped making expensive, innovative games (like a lot of their Dreamcast output was one or both of those) was because they had gotten themselves into SO MUCH DEBT in the 90s (starting with the Genesis/MD add-ons, then the Saturn flopped in the US/EU, then the Dreamcast couldn't save the company's hardware division). Nintendo doesn't have much, if any debt that I know of, so if they were to abandon hardware and focus on software, they wouldn't need to trim a ton of people to do it. Whether some would leave because they don't want to work on non-Nintendo hardware is not something I know.

The NES/Famicom did dominate the US and Japanese markets. The PC Engine did well-ish later in the lifespan of Nintendo's console, but in the US there was no serious competition. The Master System bombed hard in both markets, and in the US at least, home computers were a pretty much completely separate experience. Like a lot of popular NES games wouldn't get any ports to PC (and other microcomputers were nonexistent at the time, except maybe the C64), and Nintendo's anti-competitive policies killed any idea of porting most games to the Master System.

I'm pretty sure Nintendo is trying to consolidate the handheld and console (though they said that the Switch won't replace the 3DS, much like the DS didn't replace the Game Boy line, which is why new Game Boys are coming out today). Admittedly, the thought of seamlessly taking my game of Zelda from my big screen straight to the bus on a tablet is pretty sweet. Though a lot of the things they showed in that demo video were gimmicky as hell (like everyone at a campground gathering around a 9 inch screen to play Mario Kart).

 

Also the same type of people who say 'The Beetles' were the best band ever.

 

The NES/Famicom did dominate the market. The North American and Japanese markets. And yes, I am aware the story was different in Europe and other PAL territories. But I'd consider having the vast market share of the NTSC market qualifies as dominating the market in general.

 

No one can argue they didn't do well in North America. I remember when you weren't playing video games, you were playing Nintendo!

As for the Switch, couldn't they technically scale the chips back up should they ever feel the need to? Maybe this is more of a game by game basis, where more simple games will clock down for extended battery life. I dunno, I think we need to see what they actually end up doing before everyone starts freaking out about this.

 

Population of USA: 319 million.

Population of Europe: 743 million.

U wot m8?