Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]

Huh. I guess updated ergonomics / QoL stuff and confirmation of backwards compatibility counts as enough of an update over the last hardware refresh. But zero info on anything that could actually make this worth a buy. Granted, this feels like Nintendo who will do anything to not get dragged into PS/XBOX flops discussions. But without any real upgrade or even games announcements, I suppose most people will keep holding off their purchase decisions for now.

The great thing about how Nintendo approaches games is that it is about game design, not triangles per second.

Coming from a modern console, the first hour of Tears of the Kingdom felt painfully sluggish.

One complaint from a catalog of how many games?

Tears of the Kingdom is far from the only Switch game with performance issues. Off the top of my head, the newest Pokemon games (and the next newest, to a lesser extent) run like shit on the Switch. I've heard complaints about other games too.

It was underpowered when it was released in 2016, so it really shouldn't be that surprising.

Again, from how many?

And if we are going to start counting frame drops as argument against focusing on gameplay instead of triangles per second, there is no safe platform then.

I don't think the number of games in the catalogue matters in this discussion? There are hundreds of Switch games that perform great, and I don't care because I will never play them.

When I play a game and there are frame drops, stuttering, lag, dropped inputs, etc., it reduces my fun just as much as if the game were poorly designed. Maybe that's not the case for you, maybe you don't care, but I do, so do others.

I don't think Nintendo should make a console that rivals the best machine money can buy. I do think they took too long to refresh the hardware in the Switch lineup and their customers are worse off for it.

So better not buy any computing device.

Having been through the demoscene and home computing days since their birth, I can only laugh when calling Switch underpowered.