Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.
At the time of writing this, I’ve had my Switch 2—a press unit sent by Nintendo, it’s worth noting—for almost exactly 24 hours. In that day of futzing around with my new toy, I can easily say that the best games I’ve played on it were The Binding Of Isaac, a game I’ve already logged literally 2,000 hours with, and a mouse-based minigame buried a couple of menus down in the Bravely Default remaster. This feels at least mildly inauspicious.
“But what of Mario Kart?” the people cry out, and, yes, Mario Kart World is a very good Mario Kart game: The new courses are genuinely gorgeous—I giggled like an idiot the first time I realized the gimmick of DK Spaceport, which turns the original Donkey Kong into a switchback-heavy race track—the open world mechanics are intriguing (if a bit thin), and the battle royale-esque Knockout Tour mode is a thrilling, unpredictable distillation of the franchise’s automotive chaos. But it is still Mario Kart: It’ll kill in multiplayer, and it’s easy to throw on when you want to get a few quick rounds in. But, like the Switch 2 itself, the new game feels like a very safe iteration on what’s worked in the past—notably, the supported-for-a-literal-decade Mario Kart 8—rather than something thrilling and new.
The other game Nintendo sent me, Welcome Tour, is mostly just an oddity—because who doesn’t love cracking open a new toy and then coughing up $10 to tackle a series of quizzes and tech demos about it? There’s neat stuff in the package, which lets you run around atop and inside a Switch 2, familiarizing yourself with its buttons and features. (Anything that shows off the new Joy-Cons’ rumble technology is genuinely impressive; there’s an early maraca-shaking demo that pulls off an amazingly effective brain trick.) Mostly, though, it feels like a way to shame me into buying a new TV that’s technologically worthy of the console: There’s nothing like rolling up to an in-game demo kiosk only to be told that the 15-year-old flatscreen I bought secondhand off a guy up in the Portland hills doesn’t have the juice to process a glorified screensaver.
Other offerings feel similarly thin. The addition of GameCube games to the Switch Online Expansion Pass system comes with all of three whole titles—F-Zero GX, The Legend Of Zelda: Wind Waker, and Soul Calibur 2—with my only real note from trying them out being that Soul Calibur 2 matches load so quickly that there’s no way to spam Raphael’s “No good!” line while waiting for the start of the fight. (Thus diluting a hugely important part of the experience.) When Nintendo first previewed the system a few months back, I was struck by how few genuine Nintendo games they were planning to offer to entice people to buy the system, and that’s exactly where I’m at now that it’s actually in my home. I’m excited to dig into third party stuff like Toby Fox’s Deltarune (which timed its movement to a four-chapter paid product to its Switch 2 launch), and I want to see how Hitman: World Of Assassination puts the system through its paces (once it actually finishes downloading, filling up a hefty chunk of my in-unit memory). (My old Switch SD card won’t work in the new one because it’s not an Express.) But so far, the Switch 2 is a beautiful object that doesn’t actually do a whole lot.
And, honestly, it is beautiful: For my big-dude hands, the ergonomics of the system are almost infinitely better than the Switch 1, with a solidity (but not a heaviness) that makes this a much more viable handheld for me, a guy who almost exclusively played his original Switch in docked mode. The Joy-Cons feel great, the screen is amazing, and it all runs beautifully smoothly. It just… doesn’t have all that much stuff to run.
(The system’s mouse controls—where you detach the Joy-Cons, turn them sideways, and then hope your couch/pants are clean enough to get a good read—feel especially weird in the context of all this, by the way. Mario Kart, the supposed system-seller, doesn’t engage with them at all, while Welcome Tour can’t do much more than simulate some of the hottest GameMaker games of 1998. The only game I found that actually made them feel a little cool was the “air tour” mini-game added to the menu in Bravely Default, which treats the double-mouse thing as a sort of crude VR controller, creating an experience that was a bit like a one-person Spaceteam. Turning the ship’s wheel, flipping buttons, pulling a big whistle—it sounds asinine to admit it, but it’s the most purely happy I’ve felt while playing the new system.)
New software is, of course, coming. (Having played Donkey Kong Bananza at the preview, it’s going to be a day-one get for me when it arrives in July.) For now, though, I find myself mostly replaying Isaac, a game with no Switch 2 enhancements, and which I have logged literally weeks of my life playing already. The Switch 2 is a really good way to play it, provided you have half a grand to drop on it. Some day, presumably, it will also play other things.
