Remember, kids… Nintendon’t do drugs. Also, don’t buy home-printed Nintendo cartridges shipped out of The Netherlands. And if you do, be sure to crack a few open to make sure they’re legit. And if they’re not, and instead are packed to the brim with Peruvian fish scale and molly, then it’s best to dispose of them properly. Do not insert into console, to not crack open and consume, report directly to the authorities, or you’ll be off to the slammer.
Nintendo’s Switch has just reached the first year of its life on store shelves, and it’s become one of this decade’s most popular handheld consoles (even though yes, technically, it’s a home console as well). Nintendo’s development of the Switch OS has been rapid, and they’ve made many quality-of-life improvements to the gaming tablet and several patches have fixed some performance issues and given the console access to more applications and online services. But somewhere in the last patch release, a bug reared its head as the console crossed its first year of sales – a bug that resets your total play time.
Remember Miitomo? Neither do I. Which is probably why Nintendo has decided to put it out of its misery, and from 9 May your days of dressing up your avatar and doing suitably cute Nintendo-like things will be over. Miitomo was Nintendo’s first foray into smartphone gaming (the term mobile gaming is hard to apply when it comes to Nintendo, as the company basically owns the idea of mobile gaming in the traditional sense), and it isn’t particularly interesting.
Nintendo is one of the big three console manufacturers who have had success for many years with porting or virtualising older games onto their new consoles, usually without much hassle. If you were a Wii U owner, you had the benefit of being able to use peripherals all the way from the GameCube era, and you had titles sold in the Virtual Console market going back as far as the SNES. With the Nintendo Switch, much of that backwards compatibility is lost, and Nintendo will have to go through another round of updates making the games run on low-powered ARM processors. Recently, however, the company started to trial Wii games running through streaming services, and you have to own a NVIDIA Shield TV in China to access it. That might solve the power problem.
Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon are planned to be the last outing for the franchise on the 3DS. Judging by a recently released trailer, it’s going out with a bang. The updates to 2016’s Sun and Moon have added a range of new features that update the base games and draw on the franchise’s 21 year history.