Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who would buy that? Screen is too small to be of great utility for gaming, cellphones have awful battery life for gaming, controllers wouldn't be as nice to bind to such a device while sticking it in a pocket, and it directly brings it into competition with Apple and Android phone vendors. I love gaming as much as anyone else, but that makes a lot less sense than what Nintendo is currently doing. The Switch isn't a p…
> cellphones have awful battery life for gaming The video says the switch, depending on conditions has a battery life between 2.5 and 6.5 hours. That doesn't sound particularly better than a cellphone.
Nintendo Switch
121–130 of 431 posts
Re: Nintendo Switch
#122Oh for fuck's sake Nintendo. Just put all the NES and SNES games on a little ARM box, sell if for 100 bucks and watch the money pour in. // ThatPlayer: Of course not, but they could make deals for the popular ones, etc.
Re: Nintendo Switch
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe 'closer' but still 'ridiculously far'. You weren't going to coprocessor your way to a Mario 64.
I wouldn't call that 'ridiculously far'—it's "only" a 3x difference ;) The SuperFX GSU-1 clocked at 21MHz; the N64's RCP is 62.5MHz. (There's also an order-of-magnitude CPU power differential, but Mario 64 didn't use the CPU for much anyway.) Now, given that the SuperFX's lifetime was short and its capabilities were likely never fully explored/exploited in that lifetime; and given that the SNES's on-cart coprocessors…
The SNES was a 3.5 MHz 16 bitter. The n64 was a 3d-capable machine with a 100ish MHz R4k, the RCP, an analog controller, etc, in the box. The advance just seems enormous (matching similar advances in personal computers in the same timeframe). If I'm understanding you right, you're making a case the advance was maybe not as discontinuous. But the scale of it still seems qualitatively greater than any of the subsequent ones, to me.
Re: Nintendo Switch
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe 'closer' but still 'ridiculously far'. You weren't going to coprocessor your way to a Mario 64.
I wouldn't call that 'ridiculously far'—it's "only" a 3x difference ;) The SuperFX GSU-1 clocked at 21MHz; the N64's RCP is 62.5MHz. (There's also an order-of-magnitude CPU power differential, but Mario 64 didn't use the CPU for much anyway.) Now, given that the SuperFX's lifetime was short and its capabilities were likely never fully explored/exploited in that lifetime; and given that the SNES's on-cart coprocessors…
You can't compare clock speeds in that way and get an accurate picture on performance. If you could, then a 3.8GHz Pentium 4 would be faster than a 2.8 GHz Kaby Lake Core i7.
To give a better (but still not completely accurate) idea of how far apart the SNES and N64 were in power, look at the difference in MIPS (Millions of Instructions Per Second) in just their CPUs:
SNES CPU (Ricoh 5A22): 1.5 MIPS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricoh_5A22
N64 CPU (NEC VR4300): 125 MIPS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64_technical_specific...
Re: Nintendo Switch
#125That[1] was masterful marketing of an upcoming videogame console on all fronts. From the beginning it emphasises mobility with a (hopefully good!) smartphone app to manage online/local wifi matches, as well as multiple levels of play while on the go. It's reasonably priced (matches current generation in total at the register) and has an incredibly diverse range of titles to be excited about this calendar year. It man…
On top of this, I think they've made a fatal flaw when it comes to handheld pricing. If you remember, the 3DS launched at $250, tanked hard, and received a whopping 33% price cut only 4 months after it launched, followed by the announcement of the new 2DS which would be even cheaper. One of the things Nintendo produced the 2DS is because they found, to their great surprise, that almost 80% of 3DS customers outside Japan never took their 3DS outside the home. They weren't buying it for portability, like Japanese customers usually did; they were buying it because it was the cheapest way to play videogames, only a third the price of a console and with games that were half the price of console games (in many countries even less). Right now I can buy a 2DS for 105 and brand-new games for 40 where an Xbox One is 400 and games are 80 - 100. That's a big reason many of my friends have one.
Then note that they've also priced the Switch above the iPad Mini. Most handhelds are bought by parents for kids. If parents see that they can get an iPad for less than the price of this new console, they're very likely to: iPads are seen as luxury products with a wider variety of uses and many cheap games, and the iPad Mini is even more portable. This is the first handheld Nintendo have announced since iPads hit the market and I worry they haven't taken this into account.
For those customers, who make up a majority of 3DS customers worldwide, the Switch is a non-starter; it's likely to be considerably more expensive than its rivals, and those rivals happen to have either larger libraries, greater popularity, free online, and better graphics (Xbox One/PS4) or a luxury image, greater portability, lower software costs, and a wider variety of uses including educational uses (iPad Mini). I'm really hoping Nintendo succeeds, because I'm a big fan of theirs, but I worry they have totally killed the big draws to handhelds.
Re: Nintendo Switch
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
> cellphones have awful battery life for gaming The video says the switch, depending on conditions has a battery life between 2.5 and 6.5 hours. That doesn't sound particularly better than a cellphone.
Unplug your phone and play (or record) videos for a few hours. See where the battery is.
Re: Nintendo Switch
#127As pointed out by many gamers on Twitter: Switch officially ends the era of consoles with free online services[1]. [1] - http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/13/14261018/nintendo-switch-p...
Re: Nintendo Switch
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't call that 'ridiculously far'—it's "only" a 3x difference ;) The SuperFX GSU-1 clocked at 21MHz; the N64's RCP is 62.5MHz. (There's also an order-of-magnitude CPU power differential, but Mario 64 didn't use the CPU for much anyway.) Now, given that the SuperFX's lifetime was short and its capabilities were likely never fully explored/exploited in that lifetime; and given that the SNES's on-cart coprocessors…
>" The SuperFX GSU-1 clocked at 21MHz; the N64's RCP is 62.5MHz." You can't compare clock speeds in that way and get an accurate picture on performance. If you could, then a 3.8GHz Pentium 4 would be faster than a 2.8 GHz Kaby Lake Core i7. To give a better (but still not completely accurate) idea of how far apart the SNES and N64 were in power, look at the difference in MIPS (Millions of Instructions Per Second) in…
And how could it not be? The two systems were released 6 years apart (if you count SNES in Japan 1990), back when Moore's law was in full effect.
Re: Nintendo Switch
#129That[1] was masterful marketing of an upcoming videogame console on all fronts. From the beginning it emphasises mobility with a (hopefully good!) smartphone app to manage online/local wifi matches, as well as multiple levels of play while on the go. It's reasonably priced (matches current generation in total at the register) and has an incredibly diverse range of titles to be excited about this calendar year. It man…
Dragon Quest X launched in 2012 on the Wii, and from the way he announced it, it's not coming to the west.
Re: Nintendo Switch
#130How come Nintendo keeps having to completely reinvent itself every couple of years? They go from being on the verge of bankruptcy to a hit then back again. It seems like one tiny misstep and they're done. Microsoft is still spending accrued value from the 90's after tons of mistakes, why doesn't Nintendo have an easier life?
Nintendo's never been on the verge of bankruptcy. That's a ridiculous myth that's always tossed around by news sites to get more clicks. Nintendo is a surprisingly tiny company with billions in cash in the bank. As others have mentioned, they don't have backup cash cows like the other conglomerates so their short-term profits do vary wildly depending on the success of each platform, but the premise of one generation…