Do you live in the US and in a non-urban area (e.g. not NYC)? If so, you probably have no reason to use the Switch outside the house. You may have a car commute and live in country where playing handheld games outside isn't normal.

I say this because growing up in a suburb, not many people played their GBA/DS/3DS outside. We all just brought them to each other's houses or played them in cars.

Now that I live in NYC, you might see me playing on my 3DS or Vita during my subway commute (I'm too scared to take the Switch out since it costs $300). In Japan, handheld games and consoles are becoming the norm, so it's very common.

I will say the ability to go from couch/TV/projector to bed and still be playing the same game is awesome.

And yes, FFVI is the best JRPG of all time.

Previously my argument was that I wasn't going to spend a few hundred dollars to play games hunched over a handheld in my living room as that's the only place I play. The switch happily fills that niche of having handheld titles but still being a capable living room console.

It seems to me that Ninetendo are great at finding ideas that at first glance seem really silly, but were borne from research into the real world outside of the typical gamer echo chamber.

As for the second part of your comment, it's simple. Playing handheld video games in public is not typical or socially normal in the US... unless it's on your phone.

WiiU has your back there too, assuming your house is not too big. I do kinda wish the Switch managed to keep the feature of dual screen play. Not having it makes my hopes for a new Mario Maker for Switch pretty faint.

> And yes, FFVI is the best JRPG of all time.

Preach.

And yes, I live in the US in a small town and my commute to work is on the order of ~5 minutes.

Nintendo’s gimmicks of today are tomorrow’s table stakes. See: shoulder buttons, analog sticks, rumble, wireless, motion, portability.

It was better suited to the kinds of things liked by the mainstream audience, but it wasn't inarguably better. The Genesis had higher resolution graphics for most of its games, a sound chip that didn't sound muffled all the time because of severely limited sample memory, and a faster CPU meaning less slowdown and loading delays (cartridge systems still had loading delays, because when storage space costs that much you compress things as much as possible, and decompress into ram at runtime). The SNES has nothing like the games by Treasure for the Genesis.

> a sound chip that didn't sound muffled all the time because of severely limited sample memory

Huh? SNES sound chip, SPC700 has 64KB of RAM, supported 8 voices and had 32 kHz sampling rate.

For comparison combination of Z80 and YM2612 used by Genesis had 8KB of RAM, supported 6 voices and had 22 kHz sampling rate.

That said, I agree that SNES sound does sound muffled, although this is mostly due to Guassian filter involved. The available RAM didn't help, but Sega Genesis had even worse in terms of available RAM.

> a faster CPU

Until you realize that all instruction execution times are multiples of four cycles. Yes, the CPU is 7.6 MHz, not 3.58 MHz, but effectively SNES CPU is slightly faster for FastROM games (not all games used fast cartridges however, for slower cartridges, SNES uses 2.56 MHz clock). Not much, but...

Technically true, but misleading, because the 22kHz only applied to the DAC mode. The effective sampling rate (sampling rate needed to reproduce the output using PCM synthesis) of the FM synthesis mode is about 53kHz. And the Genesis also had a 4 channel (3 square, 1 noise) SN76489 PSG integrated on the VPU die, with effective sampling rate of about 224kHz, which could be used at the same time as the YM2612. In practice the frequency response is bottlenecked by the analog parts, but it still beats the SNES. The limited RAM is also of little importance because FM synthesis can generate complex tones without it.

In contrast, SNES music is entirely sample based, so it's entirely dependent on sample RAM size (unless you're streaming samples from the cartridge, which is too expensive to do during gameplay). Theoretically it could use extremely short looping samples for PC Engine-style wavetable synthesis (which to my ears sounds better than standard SNES music), but AFAIK no commercially released game did this.

>Until you realize that all instruction execution times are multiples of four cycles. Yes, the CPU is 7.6 MHz, not 3.58 MHz, but effectively SNES CPU is slightly faster for FastROM games

The Genesis not only had a faster clock, but also a wider data bus, more registers, wider registers, and higher memory bandwidth. You're right that "megahertz myth" comparisons are invalid, but you're wrong that this lets the SNES win. https://segaretro.org/Blast_processing has some detailed technical comparisons.

The SNES was the perfect combo of better color pallet, better gfx effects, better audio, and a better controller, compared to it's main competition. And to be fair, without the slew of brilliant games produced for the system, all that would have been for naught. But it was the whole package that made that system great. It had the best of all worlds at the time.

Of course today building a "most powerful" console would be complete folly with the PC gaming platform around, and no console maker even tries, though Sony and MS might fight amongst themselves. At the time however, consoles were truly head and shoulders above what common PC's could do in the 2d and audio realm.

And don't forgot some of the excellent SNES ports of arcade games (and the controversy over the "bloodless" Mortal Kombat on an otherwise superior version compared to Genesis).

I still rue the day when my local arcade was shutdown and replaced with a clothing store. Damn you, kids these days.

Hah, come on now. For all the merits of Chrono Trigger, what goes with everything? That's right. Guile theme.

Case in point: TMNT: Turtles in Time

I think Odyssey is the first that has enough variations that you can't just use button combos for some. I tried playing it with a wired controller without accelerometer support while a nunchuk was out to get fixed, it was had to do a lot of the moves.

For me it isn't even about taking it outside or play while commuting so much as being able to pick it up and play it on the couch, at my desk, while watching food cook etc. Also the ability to just pick it up, take it to a friends and play games I own but they don't on their TV.

I use it regularly in handheld mode and in fact Switch is my first Nintendo console, which I would not buy if it wasn't portable.