These are some of its recent toys, and to their credit it seems to me they deeply understand (like Disney) how to serve as a home for beloved characters and re-release new twists on their adventures across decades.
Other characters, now homeless with their platforms and companies shut down, now make appearances in the Nintendo-world.
Well, my kids love it, and it hits a few of the points you mention. My 8 year old son loves the fact he can play with a few friends (or his sister and a couple friends. They play Minecraft on it all the time, and when it's just him and someone wants to watch TV, he uses the Wii U tablet to play without a TV. It really is the midpoint between a Wii and the Switch. Add to that stuff like Just Dance and New Super Mario Bros (which allows 4 players at once, in coop or less than cooperative styles), and it really is a good toy for groups of kids.
Nintendo has always been going strong, knows exactly WTF they're doing, executes with precision more or less, and is pretty much always successful. A resurgence in attention has nothing to do with the company.
Perhaps, but I'd definitely class the Wii U as a misstep - sold poorly and clearly wasn't the right device for the market at that time. I really don't think Nintendo was sure at all what it was doing with the Wii U.
I've seen some theories that the reason the Switch has been so great is that given the relative failure of the Wii U they didn't have time to screw up the Switch with the usual supply of badly implemented software features that Nintendo have a bad habit of doing. Unlike the Wii, 3DS etc there is no step counters, web browsers, virtual console, streaming services, audio recorder, pointless low quality stereo cameras etc at launch on Switch - just a simple, lean focus on fun games. The 3DS and Wii were especially bad for pointless built in extra software. I'd honestly be perfectly happy with my Switch if none of those features, perhaps with the exception of Virtual Console, ever come back.
I also love how Nintendo are really embracing the indie game community with the Switch, a pleasant surprise given the less than brilliant relationship Nintendo has had there in the past.
PlayStation is easy. One, two, three, four. Not hard to tell the difference. Xbox is a bit stranger, but still easy to tell apart because against its numbered and we’re used to numbered things being different from each other.
But Microsoft is headed down a Wii U-like path with the Xbox One... even as a gamer (who admittedly doesn’t own an Xbox), I have no idea if the Xbox One S is newer than the Xbox One X or what the difference actually is, and it’s not intuitive that the Xbox One S is actually appreciably different than the Xbox One other than being smaller.
Sony may find themselves in a similar pickle if people stop buying PlayStation 4 games because they’re unsure if they work on their PlayStation 4 Pro Or vice versa.
Perhaps? Man, the virtual console is a major draw for me. I only have a few games on it, but I view it as integral to the device. Every Nintendo platform needs a way to play the first four Super Mario titles, the early Zeldas, Metroid and Super Metroid at a minimum.
Nintendo owns its survival on handhelds. Pokémon prints money since 1996.
Wii U was probably profitable. Not a success like a company like Nintendo needs, a strategic misstep that didn't impact their fortunes significantly. Hardware-wise it was a very direct descendant of the Wii (and gamecube). Relatively low development cost. The games developed for it are being ported to the switch to great success.
The Wii itself was still a G3 PPC chip, just add a few hundred Mhz
It also had more RAM (which allowed the "Twiizers" attack over a decade ago)
All the Wii-centric functionality (USB, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, SD card, etc) was abstracted away inside an ARM co-processor inside the GPU. Named "Starlet" by the homebrew community
Wii software was then written that would simply poke at the API's it exposed to add that functionality
It might be possible for Creatures Inc and Game Freak to have The Pokemon Company create a Pokemon game for PlayStation (it's not known how ownership/control is divided), but it couldn't use the name Pokemon, the Pokemon logo, or any of the existing Pokemon characters.
And regardless of who owns Pokemon, Nintendo is the one selling Game Boys and DSes to play it on.
It's a complicated arrangement, but they're definitely banking off the success of the franchise directly and indirectly.
"Wouldn't it be great to have a home console that you can take away to the other room for when someone else wants to use the TV?"
The difference is that the tech with the Wii U wasn't good enough yet to make a really great product. With the Switch it is now cheap enough to make a really high quality product.
Switch feels like a lesson learned.
It seems that you're approaching this from a mathematical logic standpoint - if we have a definition of A, then either each X is A or is not A, and since (1) definition of "toy" is based on certain characteristics and the set of "video game consoles" all have the same values for these characteristics, then they either are toys or not.
However, the things we're discussing here are based on subjective feelings and nuance, and are also recursive - in this domain, we assign the statement "X is A" a higher probability just because people in general agree with the statement "X is A" (think Wittgenstein's "meaning is use").
Using mathematical logic in such domains is not very constructive.
Toys aren't just for kids, just like fun isn't just for kids.
(In case you didn't get it: All of those words once meant or possibly still currently mean the opposite of the way in which they're being used in this comment. Language is what you make of it.)
Just because something is for one group, doesn’t mean that it’s illegal for another group to use it.
Yeah, I think the Switch is for children. I think it’s designed to appeal to kids and be sold, primarily, to kids. I also think that a lot of adults appreciate it regardless because a good toy can appeal to more than just the young.
If you think adults can gain no value from a toy, you are definitely not living the happiest life you could live.
So the more sandboxy a game is (Minecraft) the more it is a toy, but the more you are on rails or limited in what you can do (Tetris), the more it is a game.
No. This is, in fact, the point of contention here. I've heard ads and people calling boats, cars, tools, new games, and so on toys. A few dictionaries I checked agree. Several people in this very thread have the same opinion.
The Switch, of course, did it perfectly. Daaaaaad don’t want to go out I haven’t reached a save poi... oh wait. Can’t play Switch because your mother is watching TV? Yes you can. Want to play Mario as a fun, motion controlled casual scroller? Yep. Want to play Mario as the single best speed-running title around with a pro controller? That too.
The Wii was a fantastic toy! Well executed motion controls, with games that took advantage: The kind of game that a six year old and sixty year old could play against each other in a fair match.
The DS, a plasticy clamshell with the heritage of the bomb proof gameboy, was in the hands of kids everywhere, that graphics by necessity somewhat simpler, but no less satisfying.
And then: the Wii U. It was not whatever the aforementioned things were, or maybe it was in a failure-of-execution sort of way. I never saw a kid particularly excited about playing the Wii U. Too much video game, not enough toy.
The Switch doesn’t have gimmicks, it has features. It’s not a primarily first-party console, it has hundreds of indie games on the Eshop from a dollar up. It’s not great because it can be played in the hand and on the TV, it’s great and it can do those things.