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Whoa, Friday the 13th. What an auspicious date for “an in-depth look at upcoming games featured in the Nintendo Switch Presentation.” That’ll be at 9:30am Eastern, the day after the 11pm Switch Presentation.
Why not spend the night between those two doing, I don’t know, spoopy stuff, like searching the woods outside your camp cabin or using a Ouija board or something?
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Shout-outs to plushsmith AnnaTheRed, who “couldn’t wait until March” to get one of these puppy controllers, so she made her own! I love this so much. More photos in her Flickr gallery!
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I’m not sure exactly how powerful-- since there are multiple Tegra chips and this one’s a custom one anyway-- but that’s the architecture inside the former NX, according to a blog post by Nvidia this morning.
“The high-efficiency scalable processor includes an NVIDIA GPU based on the same architecture as the world’s top-performing GeForce gaming graphics cards.
The Nintendo Switch’s gaming experience is also supported by fully custom software, including a revamped physics engine, new libraries, advanced game tools and libraries. NVIDIA additionally created new gaming APIs to fully harness this performance. The newest API, NVN, was built specifically to bring lightweight, fast gaming to the masses.
Gameplay is further enhanced by hardware-accelerated video playback and custom software for audio effects and rendering.”
Tegra is Nvidia’s line of mobile processors, found inside phones, tablets, that Nvidia Shield thing, and Chromebooks. Tigra is one of the co-founders of L’Trimm, who, along with Bunny, liked the cars that go boom. It can be easy to confuse the two.
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It’s like magic: the Switch is a handheld, it’s a console, it’s a really sweet-looking puppy.
UPDATE: Chiptune wizard Prof. Sakamoto tweeted this extremely helpful visual aid.
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Coming next March, the home/portable works like you’d expect:
“Nintendo Switch rests in the Nintendo Switch Dock that connects the system to the TV and lets you play with family and friends in the comfort of your living room. By simply lifting Nintendo Switch from the dock, the system will instantly transition to portable mode, and the same great gaming experience that was being enjoyed at home now travels with you. The portability of Nintendo Switch is enhanced by its bright high-definition display.”
Those pieces you can slip on the side are called “Joy-Con controllers”, which have their own charging station (or battery?) you can attach them to when not in use. One or two people can use their pair of controllers:
“One player can use a Joy-Con controller in each hand; two players can each take one; or multiple Joy-Con can be employed by numerous people for a variety of gameplay options. They can easily click back into place or be slipped into a Joy-Con Grip accessory, mirroring a more traditional controller. Or, if preferred, the gamer can select an optional Nintendo Switch Pro Controller to use instead of the Joy-Con controllers. Furthermore, it is possible for numerous people to bring their Nintendo Switch systems together to enjoy local multiplayer face-to-face competition.”
While Nintendo highlighted versions of its franchises like Mario Kart, Splatoon, Mario, and Zelda played on the Switch in its announcement trailer (with some third-party games), the company also listed nearly 50 publishers, developers, and middleware partners working with the upcoming hardware:
And just as many suspected, it’s a home and portable console, with a base station plugged into your TV when you’re playing at home, and controllers you can click to the sides when you’re taking taking it on the go.
It’s still set to release March 2017 -- more details (pricing, bundles, specs, launch titles, etc.) to come eventually!
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7am PT/10am ET, at nintendo.com (and also here). In the email Nintendo sent us, the company said “This preview trailer will serve as Nintendo's preliminary announcement of information regarding the platform.” So don’t expect everything. But, like, literally any information would be aces.
Oh, also, right now Nintendo.com calls the thing “our next home gaming system.” So either not a handheld or, if the rumors have it, not only a handheld.
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If you didn’t have all afternoon to spend watching Nintendo’s Treehouse E3 livestream, you missed a lot of fun moments -- like shirtless Link shivering in a frozen tundra, shield surfing down snowy mountains, a Shadow of the Colossus-esque mini-boss battle, or any minute of Chiko’s entertaining romp through the Great Plateau region, devastating the local Bokoblin populace.
What you don’t have to miss, though, was this rad sequence of Link taking down a Guardian. So dope. Breath of the Wild hits Wii U and NX in 2017!
From the E3 trailer posted earlier! Coming to NX and Wii U in 2017.
Just saying!
That’s the full title for the new Zelda coming to Wii U and NX next year!
Gorgeous! It’s already available to preorder at Amazon.
Nintendo is going all in to promote the upcoming Legend of Zelda release for Wii U/NX this week and next, launching Miitomo promotions and dedicating so much of its E3 activities around the 2017 game.
Check the schedule and Miitomo wigs:
Nintendo mystery console, the NX, will launch in March 2017, which seems super far away, but at least we’ll learn more about it at E3 soon, right? Actually..
We also now know that the latest installment for The Legend of Zelda franchise has been delayed and will release simultaneously to the Wii U and the NX next year, as the company is developing both editions in tandem.
Nintendo will put its complete attention on the new Zelda at E3 in a couple of months, bringing no other playable games or the NX to the event (“features, price, software at launch, and other details to be announced by the end of the year,” according to a translated Nikkei report posted by Guit3457.):
“Nintendo changes its approach to the show every year. This June, Nintendo will focus its attentions on the upcoming game in The Legend of Zelda franchise. The Wii U version of the game will be playable for the first time on the E3 show floor, and it will be the only playable game Nintendo presents at the show, in order to provide attendees a complete immersion. Additional information about Nintendo’s E3 plans will be announced in the future.”
Checking reactions online, people seem really upset by this plan. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I wasn’t going to make a deal out of these controller photos perkele37 posted on Reddit purporting they’re from the console’s dev-kit, as provocative as they are. But then Nibel shared this GIF of what the new Zelda game could look like played on the controller’s rumored display.
The original photos:
And more claims perkele37 published about Nintendo’s next mystery console and this alleged controller:
Like our friend Christian, though, I’m a little doubtful that Nintendo would abandon the directional pad and buttons for whatever this is.
We’ve long suspected that Nintendo’s next platform, the mysterious system codenamed NX, would be a hybrid handheld / home console -- the Wall Street Journal’s latest report about new Nintendo Dev Interface software kits going out to developers seems to support that suspicions:
“The exact shape of the NX hardware isn’t yet clear. People familiar with the development plans said Nintendo would likely include both a console and at least one mobile unit that could either be used in conjunction with the console or taken on the road for separate use. They also said Nintendo would aim to put industry-leading chips in the NX devices, after criticism that the Wii U’s capabilities didn’t match those of competitors.”
Cool! I’m down for a home system plus portable device thingy. Put me down for those industry-leading chips, too. Are we talking traditional, ridges, tortilla, kettle, or baked here? BBQ is okay, but is Sour Cream & Onion an option? We’re not including Pringles, are we? That’s a whole ‘nother bag of chips*.
*technically, can
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Square Enix unveiled the next mainline entry to the Dragon Quest series, which will have two distinct versions with the same story on 3DS and PlayStation 4 (similar to Level-5′s Ni no Kuni release). The company also said it's bringing the game to Nintendo's mystery NX platform, though Famitsu (which posted the 3DS shots above) reports that edition is only “under consideration.”
While Square Enix is developing the PS4 version on Unreal Engine 4 with the help of a developer named Orca, it's working on the 3DS edition with support from Japanese studio Toylogic (Kid Icarus: Uprising, Super Smash Bros. Brawl). It looks like the 3DS game will have 2D sprites on the bottom screen and a 3D world on the top -- at least while walking around -- but Square Enix showed battles can be played out in either 2D or 3D, as you can see here:
Square Enix intends to ship both versions of Dragon Quest XI in Japan around the series' 30th anniversary (the original game launched on May 27, 1986). The publisher also announced that the Dragon Quest X MMORPG will release to PlayStation 4 and eventually the NX. No word on plans for the West!
TinyCast 61! Nintendo's big smartphone partnership with DeNA! The mysterious NX platform! Level-5's upcoming fast food franchise! There's a lot to talk about, and we talk a lot about all of that this week, and we even left room to discuss another teen film from back in the day.
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