So I did a dumb thing last night. I set an alarm for 2:45 in the morning, made a pot of coffee I definitely didn't need, and sat on the couch in the dark watching Nintendo's Switch presentation stream out of Tokyo. My cat was extremely unimpressed with this decision. So was I, around hour two.
For anyone who managed to sleep through it: Nintendo finally showed the whole picture on the Switch. $299.99, launching March 3rd, the tablet-with-detachable-controllers thing we'd all been staring at blurry photos of since October. Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a launch title, which honestly is the only piece of news I needed to hear to feel okay about the coffee.
But here's the thing nobody's going to lead with, and the thing that's actually bugging me: there's no Mario game at launch. They showed off Super Mario Odyssey, it looks great, New York-ish city level, Mario in a suit for some reason, but it's a "Holiday 2017" title. That's a ten-month gap between console launch and the game that has sold every single Nintendo console since the NES. I get that Zelda is carrying a lot of weight here and by most accounts it can carry it. Still, launching a Nintendo console without a Mario platformer feels like opening a diner without coffee on the menu. You can survive it. It's just weird.
The other thing that got glossed over on stage and then quietly confirmed in a follow-up Q&A: battery life is somewhere between 2.5 and 6 hours depending on what you're playing. Six hours if you're doing something light. Two and a half if you're running Zelda at full tilt. That's a pretty wide range to build a "play anywhere" pitch around, and it's the kind of number that sounds fine in a press release and then becomes a real problem on an actual plane. I fly maybe four times a year and I already know I'm going to be the guy hunting for an outlet in a Delta gate area with this thing plugged in.
Joy-Con pricing is the other thing I want to complain about, because apparently I'm in a mood tonight. A pair of Joy-Cons runs $79.99. Individually they're not much cheaper. For a controller that's roughly half the size of a normal controller and snaps onto a tablet, that price stung a little, even accounting for the HD rumble stuff and the IR sensor Nintendo was very proud of during the presentation. I don't doubt the tech in there. I doubt my willingness to buy a second pair for couch co-op without wincing.
What they didn't talk about at all: online service pricing, virtual console, any of the account infrastructure stuff. Nintendo said "more details later" roughly four times, which after eleven years of doing this blog I can translate for you: they don't know yet either, or they know and it's not going to go over well, so they're punting past the honeymoon period. Either way, I'd rather they'd said nothing than said "more details later" on a loop.
None of this is a knock on the hardware concept, to be clear. Pulling the Joy-Cons off a tablet and handing one to a friend to play tabletop mode is a genuinely clever bit of design, and the fact that the same box goes from TV to handheld to "on a plane tray table" without a different SKU is the kind of idea that sounds obvious in hindsight, which is usually how you know it's good. The Wii U tried a soft version of this with the GamePad and never stuck the landing, mostly because there was no handheld mode without the TV nearby. This actually solves that.
I'll probably still buy one in March. I just wanted to get the caffeine-fueled 3 a.m. complaints on the record before three weeks from now when everyone's decided the Switch reveal was flawless and I've forgotten I was annoyed at all. That's usually how these things go around here — the initial reaction is messier and more honest than the eventual consensus, and by the time the reviews land in spring everybody's memory of launch week gets sanded down into a tidier story than what actually happened on the couch at 3 a.m.
Anyway. Back to bed, or at least an attempt at it.