Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]

Happy to see that Nintendo is treating the switch more like how they traditionally handled their mobile platforms instead of their consoles.

Iterating instead of throwing out everything with each new version. There is a part of me that is going to miss the, do weird shit and see what works, Nintendo that brought us some really fun ideas. But a stable Nintendo just being able to continue putting out great games has its advantages.

I am curious about the specs, but honestly don't care much. The only real issue the Switch had was being able to keep up with some of the games put on it with FPS but it still had beautiful games (like Tears of the Kingdom). So as long as it is actually a decent spec bump I am happy and have zero care to compare it to the other consoles (but I am sure people are going too and scream that it is "underpowered").

The biggest thing I am curious about, will it be OLED since that will be disappointing to go back to non OLED from the OLED Switch. And Price.

Nintendo has tended to maintain at most 1 generation of backwards compatibility, though you can get some fuzzy ideas of "generations" in a few cases.

  Game Boy Color: plays original Game Boy games
  Game Boy Advance: plays Game Boy and Game Boy Color games
  Nintendo DS: plays Game Boy Advance games
  Nintendo DSi: plays Nintendo DS games
  Nintendo 3DS: plays Nintendo DS and DSi games
  Nintendo New 3DS: plays Nintendo DS, DSi, and (old) 3DS games
  Nintendo Wii: plays GameCube games
  Nintendo Wii U: plays Wii games

The Switch is a notable break in both of these lines, playing neither 3DS nor Wii U games.

Based on that list, they have tended really only to do that on mobile platforms. It was one of my favorite things about the platform, but it always felt like this was partially thanks to the older hardware still getting games well into the new hardware's life in many cases. Major games, I believe Pokemon has done this a few times?

Most of their home consoles were complete departures from previous hardware.

NES, SNES, N64, Gamecube all did not work with prior games were fairly different (ok admittedly the outward difference between the NES and the SNES were minimal but still no compatability).

So honestly I think it was more notable that the Wii could play Gamecube games than the other way around as far as Nintendo's track record goes.

First Wii was able to play Game Cube Games. WiiU was backwards compatible to Wii. All theses consoles used nearly the same chipset anyways.

I was always amazed the Wii with its full size discs could play the GameCube mini discs.

Ability to play smaller discs was normal in most CD-ROM and DVD players for many years before the Wii. A few people (probably half of whom have HN accounts) used to give out mini-CD business cards...sometimes even with truncated edges so the disc was not entirely round: https://www.duplication.com/cd-business-card-duplication.htm