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.

3DS has hardware support for GBA games too, actually, though these only got distributed via the Ambassador program.

Also had VC for most of Nintendo's platform.

I know, and you can basically restore full GameCube compatibility on the Wii U via Nintendont. Neither of them let you use the actual physical games from the old system, and needing to perform jailbreak hacks to use them and load ROMs on anyway doesn't count as much as out-of-the-box compatibility.

Fair. A shame, still, especially for GC compat on WiiU.

The problem in both cases is that the consoles were actually missing a key piece of hardware: the ability to read the disc or cartridge.

If you're a hacker-type person who has already digitized your gamecube collection (or, let's be honest, downloaded the games illegally) then this doesn't matter. But for regular consumers, there needs to be a way to verify ownership.

Nintendo could have made some titles available digitally (which is what I wish they'd done), but that requires getting content rights sorted out for games that have never been sold digitally before, so the full catalog would not have been available. Also, there would have been a ton of hemming and hawing about "Nintendo is making me buy my Gamecube games again?!?" No comment on whether such complaints would have been reasonable.

The problem is deliberate hardware choices. They may be reasonable choices, but if Nintendo wanted to prioritize forever backwards compatibility, we could still have a GameCube-compatible disc drive and GBA and DS compatible catridge slots.

This is fair, although I do think the choice was reasonable. Disc drives are an expensive part, and consider how much space a cartridge slot would have used on the 3DS...

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I have long had a total fantasy in this vein... what Nintendo could have done is release add-on hardware to read old media. Imagine a hybrid mini-disc and cartridge reader which connects to the Wii U via USB, and a Gameboy cartridge reader which connects to the 3DS via... uh, possibly NFC, Gameboy games are small and the games could be read once and cached to internal storage.

You could use this to add backwards compatibility all the way back to the NES and Gameboy! Games from consoles two generations back could have been run natively, everything older could have been trivially software emulated.

I don't think such a product would have substantially interfered with Virtual Console sales, it would have been too niche. Probably too niche to make sense in real life... but in my fantasy, the goal would have been PR. It would cement the idea that buying a Nintendo game is an investment which Nintendo will support long-term; whether a large number of people make use of that ability is irrelevant.

You could probably do effectively that by just shipping a usb drive. After game from the NES-N64 are just a few GB.