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Comment by talles | Hacker News Reader

Nintendo is not Nintendo-y enough for a while now. The switch system UI is bland and on launch the gray switch was the one being presented.

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Speaking of - does anyone know of an HTPC frontend which duplicates the look and feel of the Wii menu?

Who even runs HTPCs these days?

I was interested in disconnecting my smart TV from the internet and using a replacement which I am in complete control of.

As to "who", some part of the demographic who runs JellyFin/Plex/Etc.

people who appreciate that Roku is a marketing company and not a gadget company

It's so odd to see Nintendo who hasn't competed on hardware specs for decades to release new console without atleast some gimmick(s) to sell their severely underpowered hardware.

Absolute zero gimmicks and zero excitement.

I personally dont care for gimmicks, but I expect them from Nintendo.

People are speculating that you can use the controllers like a computer mouse. You can see an allusion to that towards the end of the video.

That's a really old-school gimmick if so.

Retro things have a habit of coming back. See: polaroids

Yeah, and this might make first-person shooters and some strategy games play a lot nicer if (big if) it works well. Perhaps the next iteration of Mario Maker might also make use of it.

They had it right with motion controls on the Wii. I could headshot on the Wii edition of Resident Evil 4 so effectively it was cheating.

The Switch also has motion control for fine aiming in some games (Zelda, Borderlands 2). Joysticks for gross movement then motion controls for smaller adjustments. Much better scheme than Xbox or PS.

Strategy games might benefit.

Resi 4 on the Wii was so good. It was a good game anyway, but the aiming was precise and a hell of a lot of fun. I think about it a lot. I'm hesitant to play the remaster on my steam deck because I doubt it's possible to be as good

That sounds like such an obvious oversight with benefit of hindsight. They could have instantly plugged Valorant/Apex gateway into PC established by YT Live/Twitch through that if only they had it on the right joycon.

The Lenovo Legion Go I think has this for FPS games. Joycon like thing goes into a little slider adapter and becomes a vertical mouse.

Yeah, I am not a big fan of the Switch UI. They really took out the "surprise and delight" compared to the Wii U and 3DS. Very bland and straightforward, and yet somehow awfully slow and laggy.

I disagree. I find it delightful. The sounds are awesome.

Have you scrolled through the Switch store? The UI freezes for seconds at a time while network requests lock up the main thread.

That's the only part I don't like about the Switch OS, and, yes, it's very bad. And it always baffles me why they wouldn't improve the app that generates revenue of all things.

And you can only buy one game at a time, and have to enter your password in for each one? I like to do all my game research and shopping in one evening and buy 3-4 games at a time. If there's a way to do this I would love to know how!

The sound design is in fact delightful. Nintendo is great at sound design.

Didn’t a third party company design the Switch UI?

That sounds like an extremely unlikely claim

There's a very good reason for this: The whole OS is under 400MB. Every Nintendo Switch game cartridge comes with a full copy of the necessary OS on it.

Every game card is playable, no matter how out of date the Switch is, without any internet connection.

I'll take that kind of functionality before "surprise and delight." We might get "surprise and delight" this generation though, if in part because the change to a modified Samsung NAND over Macronix might be cheaper at larger capacities if rumors are correct.

400MB is huge, and cute touches can be very small.

It's not that large considering the size of NVIDIA drivers + WebKit alone.

By comparison, the Wii U with it's "nice touches" was over 5 GB.

The necessary OS for running the game doesn't need webkit, and I doubt the important part of the nvidia drivers is super big.

I would doubt they made a build of the OS without webkit, or else you’d have a OS without captive portal or eShop support. Feels annoying.

> Every game card is playable, no matter how out of date the Switch is, without any internet connection.

This is mostly accurate, but not entirely afaict. I had to connect my switch to wifi in order to update the OS to play Xenoblade 3 (or Tears of the Kingdom? It's been a while).

Might be TOTK; I personally updated an offline Switch to use Sonic X Shadow Generations from the cartridge alone yesterday.

I hated the 3DS UI. It was not exciting, it was bad and inconsistent. At least with the Switch it is unobstrusive.

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