Should I get a Nintendo Switch, Guru?

AThis is a tough one to answer, but you’ve obviously come to Guru for his specific curmudgeonly opinion, so let’s dig in. First, Nintendo has not been showering itself with silicon glory recently. And by ‘recently’, GaGu means ‘since about 1996’. It keeps making stupid hardware choices, and it gets away with them because it’s Nintendo. This time, it’s pushing some severely underpowered and low-res hardware in an era where its direct competitors are leaping to 4K.

Of course, Nintendo’s hardware always goes heavy on the gimmicks, and Guru would be hard-pressed to suggest that the Switch’s overall package is anything other than compelling. The high-res rumble of its clip-on controllers, the portability, the TV dock; it’s a bit of kit that begs to be played with, so much so that it transcends its dour interface, its early lack of games, and its questionable design decisions. Whoever made a dock that can potentially scratch the screen, and put the USB-C charging connector on the bottom of the tablet – which is meant to be playable when stood up on a kickstand – needs a good talking to.

The Switch launch has gone extremely well, based on that peculiar brand of Nintendo hype and a killer app in Zelda: Breath of the Wild. If you don’t care for hundreds of potential hours of whimsical Hyrulian adventure, right now there’s not all that much else to sell it to you – mostly Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for people who didn’t play it on Wii U (which is, to be fair, pretty much everyone) and dangerous time-sink Puyo Puyo Tetris.

The new Mario title, which is due just before Christmas unsurprisingly, will certainly make some moustaches stand on end, and the big N has many other franchises ripe for a bit of relentless exploitation. A price drop, which GaGu suspects won’t come for far too long, would seal the deal.