Another week where Nintendo does a series of terrible things and the whole Internet cries out for their blood. From doing nearly nothing about hardware issues, to restricting game sales in some territories in the aim of price control most likely, to arbitrary video takedowns because YouTube in itself is a broken system anyway, a lot of people are swearing they’ll never buy anything Nintendo again. We’ll see how they act within a year, or even a few months.
While they’ve been doing the same types of terrible decisions for years now, I don’t think anyone’s really acted on any threats, but the way things go now, I wonder if it’s just a matter of time before some psychopath sends in some real or facsimile explosives or bioweapons to try to make some point. That’s certainly not going to be my reaction to a game company, as there are far worse things to solve that might result in a more extreme response if all non-violent options are exhausted. I can only hope we don’t just devolve into a non-civilized species of raw violence for the sake of violence. At least my recent encounters with humans in the rare trip outside have just been avoiding each other in the aisles as I would usually do without the context of a plague, so we’re not that far gone. Hopefully not having to suffix that with a “yet”.
I, too, have encountered the “drift” thing after putting a lot of hours into Animal Crossing, and finally was able to get around to requesting a repair since the shops started reopening. While I could probably do it myself, I feel the company that made the things should pay for it, at least pay someone to do what I’d do instead of me putting down about $20 for a decent replacement joystick. Yes, just the one part, well, the part itself may be less, and going really cheap might just cause more issues. Controllers are definitely too expensive for what they do. The Steam Controller had a lot of innovations that are just starting to appear in console controllers and that went for less than even an Xbone controller now at launch. Look at things like the touchpads (now present on the PS4 and VR controllers), the back paddles (some accessory being added to the PS4 controller and the Xbone Super Expensive Elite thing), the weird vibrating speaker-like tone generators (essentially HD Rumble). Something like that would be worth a decent price, but they just ended up having them on clearance for real cheap because they were still trying to figure out how to sell hardware, and seem to have nailed it with VR kits.
At this point, I haven’t bought a new console in years. Specifically a new console. I’ve bought recent consoles secondhand, essentially anything after the Wii U, so that would be the PS4 and the Switch. In fact, the fact that the Joy-Con lasted as long as it did even secondhand is something, and I try to not absolutely destroy controllers either, but putting a lot of time into a virtual island will wear on things. We’ll see how the A button holds up later on. But the point is I still don’t see myself buying a new console even later, and not sure if I’d do it secondhand either. I have a lot of consoles, and they’re taking up more than a full TV stand shelf, so at this point you get to see just how weird it is to buy a whole new machine to play games with better graphics. This next generation is probably the average visual peak because hardware can effectively play the part of an animated movie in real-time at this point, complete with ray-tracing reflective stuff. I don’t see that it could really edge much further unless someone designs something really power-hungry. Really, I’d just like to have a consistently upgradeable machine that can play nearly anything from the past and into the future, such as a PC.
My next move would be to build a new PC to play VR stuff there. While I do have PSVR on the PS4, which works fairly well even in my limited space, setting up the likes of a Vive or an Index could be difficult. Even if I did the jury-rigged PSVR to PC hookup, I’m not sure how much would work anyway. And if I decide to go for a console instead, I’m thinking Saturn. That can be expensive as it is, which is why I’m wondering if they’ll do a mini version with a hopefully good game selection, and not do a big regional split like some mini consoles have had because a lot of the games were Japan only. I know there are mostly working emulators at this point for it, as difficult as it’s been, I just haven’t had any personal luck trying to set one up.
As far as games for my current consoles, I think they’re about to dry up as far as new offerings. Nintendo still claims they have a few years left in the Switch, so I don’t know that they’d actually fix the issues that already has in favor of making something new, which hopefully has none of these issues. However, the major shift of attitude towards graphics is a threat to them, and has caused various ports from more powerful consoles to suffer some kind of weird performance thing. I think there will be far fewer games for the system once the next-gen things are out, and it’ll just be back to a few first-party offerings on a few various ports from the generation before. I don’t even know if I’d get any more of those games anyway, as I’ve already seen the likes of Smash, Animal Crossing, and whatever they’re doing for a new Pokémon, which I’ve decided to borrow again to wrap things up whenever I feel like I could go to a library for a few minutes, instead of buying. Unlikely to check out the DLC thing for it. If they actually wanted to properly bring back something like F-Zero or Chibi-Robo or one of several other neglected series, then maybe I’d look into it. Of course, waiting for a sale is a test of patience with them. It’s almost like they think they’re the Apple of games, and Apple is wanting to get more into games anyway.