 Hey everyone, welcome back to the Nintendo Prime podcast, and I am your host Nathaniel Ruffaljantz, joined as always by Eric Moore. And this is it. This is the week that we essentially have been waiting for almost since the start of this very podcast. Oh yeah. The switch comes out baby. It comes out. So for our video viewers, just so you know, we're only doing four topics this week because we do not want to release a podcast on Friday. Because anything we talk about isn't really going to matter by Friday, is it? No, not at all. Ruffaljantz, One Two Switch, Bomberman, Snipperclips, all the crazy games coming out, and then obviously the switch itself. By then, anything we talk about is going to feel antiquated to me. And that's not anything. Obviously we could say we could talk about retro stuff, but we could come up with something. But let's be honest, we're going to be live streaming like crazy that day, all weekend, doing lots of stuff. So there's going to be so much content coming your way from Friday through the weekend that the podcast is just going to feel irrelevant. Right? Right? Yeah. At least for now. Obviously, listen next week because that's when we'll have a lot of impressions and a lot of stuff. But we are going to do our best to kind of hype things up for the switch because we're hyped. Oh yeah. And that kind of gets to our first topic this week, which is how hyped we are for the switch. So let's just, we've talked in the past about what excites us and everything about it. So some previews have now come out for it, and also for Breath of the Wild, which we'll get into on our next topic. But what I want to know from your end is this is like the first Nintendo console you've probably gotten at launch, maybe ever. Yep. Because I mean, you have a 3DS, but that wasn't at launch. Yeah, no. So we obviously know Breath of the Wild's the number one thing that's sold you. Yep. Number one thing. Well, what about the hardware itself excites you? Hmm. I like the fact that it's a console that you can just get up and go. And what situations do you see yourself using it? Because I've always said it's like nice to say if I go, but we live in Wisconsin, we have to personally drive ourselves everywhere. So it's not like something we're going to use while we're driving. Well, right, right. Well, I know I'll be playing it over my lunch hour at work. I can definitely tell you that. Um, I don't know, just apparently you can go out and go for walks with it. That's going to be nice. I mean, yes, you can do that with like your 3DS and whatnot, but this is like an actual home console. Nice, large screen, great graphics. You know, that's the part that I'm actually looking forward to. Nice. Um, for me, it's kind of a catch-trony to you because I was always going to get the Switch Day one because I do this podcast on a Nintendo site. I'm technically still editor-in-chief at Zelda Informer at the time of launch. The Breath of the Wild is kind of a big deal beyond just my personal hype for it. I feel like as editor-in-chief of a Zelda site, it's kind of important I play the latest Zelda game on the latest hardware, especially since it's 900p in docked mode versus the 720p that's going to be our Wii U. Plus, I assume there's better frame rates. We don't really know better draw distances. We don't really know because we haven't seen any Wii U previews. Every preview has been with the Switch version. Well, I mean, we've technically played the Wii U version. I know. But it is one thing we know about the Wii U version, but I'll bring that up in the next topic. All right. But what we know right now about the Switch in terms of the positives is that it does seamlessly transition from TV to on the go. Yeah. And I know I watched this earlier today. I watched this Teen's React to the Nintendo Switch where they showed off the Switch reveal, a couple Switch commercials, and some of the Teen reactions were like, yeah, it looks very smooth and everything, but there's no way it's that smooth. It is. Previews say it is. You literally dock it and it's on your TV in less than a second. You undock it. It's on your screen in less than a second. It is that smooth. We're not BSing you. And that's impressive because we've had some supposed clock speeds and stuff confirmed by Eurogamer because there was a recent update, one of their developer contacts. There was a recent update to the Switch that made handheld mode get a 25% boost in GPU power. Now, everyone's like, oh, so it's 25% better than dock mode? No, no, no. Because dock mode is supposedly running at 768 MHz and original handheld mode was only running at 300. And now there's an option in handheld mode to run it at 380 something or whatever. It was like a 25% boost. And it's like, that's great. That's cool. And knowing all that, there's a few takeaways from this because like you mentioned, you know, great graphics, home console and portable. I think it's important to frame this conversation when it comes to that kind of talk because it's not as powerful as other home consoles, not even close. And Nintendo's keep home console, home console. Yeah. Because that's what Nintendo, that's what they're pushing in their marketing. But it's important we recognize this thing for what it really is. The most powerful tablet in the market. Oh, yeah. Period. Yeah. Even more powerful than the game shield. And all of a sudden the video it's supposedly even better than that. So it is the most powerful tablet on the market for gaming purposes. And it's a hell of a lot cheaper than all the other powerful tablets out there. Yeah. That run $800, $900,000 at times to get a powerful tablet. Yeah. Obviously, those have the benefit of they're not just for gaming. So you have an app store, you have proper web browsing, you have Netflix at launch, I said like, but that's because those are multi-purpose tablets for gaming specific reasons. This is the best. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I would agree. And, you know, I have a feeling that in the future here, probably not too far off, you're gonna probably have Netflix. You're gonna probably have a decent web browser you're gonna have. And that's the thing. Some people brought up, you know, like we found out last week, you know, no virtual console at launch. And it's like, okay, doesn't matter at launch at launch to me, it does not matter. What matters to me, I think the main reason why it doesn't matter to me right now is because I'm gonna be so involved with Breath of the Wild that it's... Well, that's the thing. At launch. Not gonna matter. You're not, you don't buy a console at launch for virtual console. Like that's the thing. Yeah, no. If you're buying it at launch, it's because there's a game or two that you really want to play. This case, Breath of the Wild. So I don't really care that there's no virtual console at launch. And you can bring that up as a negative maybe later because one of the topics we talked about maybe some things we're worried about. But no one worries about with me with the virtual console is just that we don't know anything. It's not that we know what's gonna happen, we just don't know anything. Yeah. But the thing is no virtual console at launch, no Netflix, no all this stuff, it doesn't bother me at launch. Right. So that's the thing. So for what I like about... This is actually something I like about the launch. And I hate saying like because obviously I'd rather have all that stuff at launch. But I like that the focus on this system when it comes out because it is a tablet. And that's gonna be the first thing people think is what other tablet things are gonna use it for. Yep. They are literally saying this is a gaming machine. Period. You are not buying this thing unless you want to play games. Right. You're not buying this so you can run Netflix. You are buying it to play games. Period. And that's kind of interesting because in the past if you look at some of the mass market sellers out there beyond Wii, like PlayStation 2 blew up because you could play DVDs on it. So you could justify, I'm buying this thing to play games and play DVDs. Right. PlayStation 3 have Blu-ray players. So I'm buying this for Blu-rays and for games. You're buying the PlayStation 1 to play music CDs on your TV and to play games. Yep. You're buying an Xbox One S like I did. Not because I cared about anything else with the 4K except for the fact that it has a 4K Blu-ray player. Yeah. And 4K Blu-ray players are even more expensive than the Xbox One S. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So it's like you'll look at all these other reasons that people buy electronics because they're multi-purpose. And Nintendo is like look there's other tablets out there. We're not trying to be them. We're not trying to be the 4K PS4 Pro, Scorpio, or even the 4K Blu-ray player. Although as we read in the spec sheet or whatever in the leaked document, it does support 4K video out for like Netflix sites or something. So it has potential that we do get 4K Netflix with it, which will be nice. Yeah, yeah. But that's not the primary purpose. That's just kind of in a side like, oh, it happens to support that but no one cares. It's just kind of it doesn't because it's not going to be used for gaming. Whereas like the Xbox One S can upscale everything to 4K. It's just upscaling. That's it. So I look at it as, for me as a gamer, I don't know how this is going to hit with mass consumers. I just said all these other things are massively successful because of the multifunction stuff. It's cheaper to get that multifunctionality than it is to get the individual functionality. So I think that's why this system is specifically made for gamers. Yeah. And I know a lot of people like Nintendo are starting to go blue ocean again. Are they really? Because what's so blue ocean about this project at launch? The fact that you could take it on the going at home? What gamer doesn't want to do that? Well, right, right. Exactly. And on top of that, it doesn't have any of the services that other people want at launch. So the only people buying it are people that want to play games. Yeah. Yeah. That's something that excites me about that because this is, Nintendo's continued renewed focus on games and the renewed focus on making something that matters for gamers. As an example, I remember back when it was rumored at the time that it would have cartridges. We now know it does, that that was viewed as a negative like, oh, cartridges. Why would you? So what's cheaper with this blah, blah, blah? It's better for gaming. Yeah. Yeah. I never knew why they kind of went. I mean, I get it because CDs were the newest thing. And well, the CDs happened. There's a few reasons. One, they were really cheap. Cartridges are more expensive than especially back then like N64. Yeah. Yeah. The you spend 10 cents and get 100 CDs versus one cartridge was like freaking 10 bucks to produce. Yeah. So it it was a lot cheaper. And at the time they held a lot more data. Right. So like CDs made a lot of sense, but even with the Blu-ray discs on like the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One, that all made sense. Yeah. Because they hold more data and they're cheap to produce. And they output at, you know, like in case of like Blu-rays, you can put very high quality stuff. Yeah. Not 4K unless it's a 4K Blu-ray. The Squish novels do exist, but it was still really, really nice. And so it was always cost to performance, cost performance, cost performance. And what happened with the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One is they started becoming what I call the Vendor and PCs. Yeah. That's basically what they are because what they started doing is stripping away a lot of the conveniences of home consoles because PC gaming and in all time, it's just getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean the day that Switch comes out, so does the Ryzen CPUs. And that's AMD's new line of CPUs, which you probably haven't done a lot of research and do. Nope. But I know just based on what AMD is telling us, no one's done any benchmarking themselves yet. So we just have AMD benchmarks to work with that they are not only cheaper, they are better than a lot of comparable CPUs out of Intel. Now, are they beating Intel's top, top, top to your stuff? Of course, no, but they don't have anything released at that price point. Right. Like one of their CPUs was a six core or an eight core or something CPU that was like 350 bucks. And that was beating out a thousand dollar CPU out of Intel. Wow. So it's like, wow. AMD's just about to change the game and make everything cheaper again. And this is before they get their new GPU line, which is supposed to come out later this year, which supposedly performs really well. Again, we don't have enough information yet. But the point is that PC game is getting cheaper. And it's getting easier and easier even if you don't feel comfortable building a PC, which I understand why. Like our PC build took a long time for us, but that we use to edit all this stuff. Right. But like, it would take a, I could see us doing it under an hour easily. Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely. I could see us pulling off and under a half hour, to be honest, not even what we're doing. Well, right. There was a lot of, we didn't have as much experience lately putting PCs together. Right. I used to put to do a lot when I was younger. And so, you know, what tools I need, usually just Phillips, and then there was things like, Oh, I didn't consider out my placement of the radiator before. Right. Yeah. All this kind of stuff. And then worried about, Oh, did I break the CPU socket? No, I really didn't. But I just haven't right messed with them on a new wish motherboard in the last 10 years. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So now that I have all the experience, like, Oh, I could put that out of the computer again. Well, that and at the time, we were also really worried about actually breaking something. Yeah. No, I'm not. Because I've done more research. Like it's really hard to break a even if we didn't have static bands. It's extremely hard to actually burn something out from static. And if you're actually concerned, all you have to do is just plug in the power supply and just touch it randomly. Yeah. And it decharges you. But anyways, we were going to take the extra precautions because $1,800. Right. Right. And especially considering that it was going to break to do what it does. But anyways, that's at the high end. Most PC gamers are at the low end. You're talking under $500. And you're talking about consoles that cost $400, $500. And so why would you get a home console over it? Well, convenience, right? You know, that that's ultimately what home console gaming is always provided is convenience over PC gaming. PC gaming has always been ahead visually. It's always been ahead control wise because, Oh, there's motion controls. Yeah, you can make those work through your PC. Yeah. So like, there's nothing that the consoles can do the PCs can't. And PCs now have easy ability to hook up. You can buy living room PCs now, like easy ability to hook up to your TV, media centers, etc. stuff that's always been around, but usually took a tech head to figure out now it's becoming more consumer friendly. Right. Yeah. And it even started kind of dating back to maybe the Microsoft XP days, when they used to were certain to sell media remotes with some of their stuff, and you could use their media center with the remote on your TV. Yeah. But again, it wasn't popular bad, then PCs were still kind of expensive. Now it's cheapening out. And PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, as much as I enjoy, especially the Xbox One, because that's the one I own, installs suck. Yeah. Their patches suck, especially apparently on the PlayStation 4, they purposely limit the download speed. So like it's why so you can have like a one gig day one update and you might not get to play for eight hours. Yeah. It's stupid. So gaming's becoming less and less convenient unless you're a digital purchaser and you preload everything. So like if you buy like, say you buy the new Madden game, you preload it when you're downloading it before it comes out. So of course you can play it right away at midnight. Yeah. But are you still allowed to play other things while you're actually downloading it? Well, yeah. I mean, you can. Okay. They let you multitask. Okay. And you can play online. Obviously you got, I don't know, I think it actually pauses the download when you play an online game on those systems. It's been a while since I've done an actual digital download. I usually buy physical. I like having resale value because a lot of the games I play are things like yearly releases like Madden. Yeah. I'm going to resell it, you know, whatever. For the only 10 bucks, then they're going to turn around to sell for like 20, 25. Well, if they never sell it, you know, copies of Madden. Most of the stores I've been sitting around because no one buys them, buys the old copies. Anyways, so I kind of turned that all around to the switch and where I was talking about it being a gaming focus platform. And think about the thing that Switch is doing. One, it doesn't have all these extra stuff at launch. So it's definitely only targeted at people who want to play games. Yep. Two, it's convenient. Oh, yeah. The whole thing of in the dock on the go. That's one convenience. The other convenience is popping the cartridges and play. Yeah. Done. Yeah. Right. And no installs, like updates will download in the background. Yeah. That was one thing we learned. We learned that the rest of the wild people who have it is if there's an update that comes out, it's downloading in the background, you can still keep playing. Oh, wow. That's nice. And the thing is that is nice. You can do that with other games. Obviously, in other systems, I just said that. But again, it feels like it's better on the Switch because of the fact that I also didn't have to install the game to play it. Yeah. You just pop the cartridges in and you go. That and to me, cartridges seem a lot more rugged. Like you drop a CD and you run the risk of scratching the crap out of it. These cartridges are actually smaller than the 3DS cartridges. Oh, really? Yes. So like even easier to lose. Yeah. I can pretty well lose my 3DS cartridges. It's really easy. I mean, obviously, I'm going to be keeping everything in, you know, because we have the special ditch in Breath of Wilds. So if there, I'm hoping there's a game pouch in there. So I think there is. And if there isn't, then I'm going to buy one of them. They have like a little hard separate case that I could just set on my desk and it can hold like 20 games. Yeah. And that's hopefully going to hopefully fit in there. And obviously, you can always just keep them in your cases and put them on your shelf too. That's always an option. Well, right. But who does that? I have children. So like, I'll have the cases on my shelf or maybe someday in the background of my videos, but I'm not going to keep the games in there. Yeah. I have children. I got to keep them on a reach. But it's all to me about convenience for gamers. And that's what I really, really love about this console. You know, everything about it just feels convenient from the fact that you have what you need to play it on the go right away, but also to play it with a traditional hold because it gives you a grip. Let's you take the Joy-Cons off, put them in there. You want to play your Wii, your Wii games. You want to play, you want to play traditionally with Breath of the Wild, but then you want to play Just Dance. The controllers already are what you need for Just Dance. You want to play a two player Mario Kart. It may not be the ideal way to play it, but you already have two controllers. As I said, maybe not the ideal way, but it's there. You don't have to buy more if you don't want to play two player. It has the convenience of if we want to play Mario Kart together, our switches can go together and we can have our own screen for everything. We don't have to split screen. Same for Splatoon. Same for probably any game Nintendo releases that's multiplayer anyway. I assume we're going to take advantage of local wireless connections. So everything just feels convenient. And convenience as a gamer, as a consumer, matters a lot to me. And that's maybe what I'm most excited about beyond the games. Games are ultimately why you buy it. Like, you're buying it because it's got Breath of Light. You're buying it because of Bomberman. You're buying it because of Super Mario Odyssey. You're Mario Kart. There's all these games that make you want to buy it. But what makes me confident in buying it is that it's providing me something that there is nothing else that provides it. 3DS does provide some of it. I'm popping the cartridge to play. Right. But even then, 3DS also feels extremely dated. It's very clunky and slow at times. Yeah. Yeah. It definitely slow at downloading updates, that's for sure. Yeah, that it is. I can't play it on my TV. So like, there's all these things, or I can't play them, like, some people can. You can't play on your TV in a convenient fashion. You can buy add-ons and just like I have it, I have a modded 3DS so I can record footage off of it. So technically, it makes it easier to hook up to my TV. But it's also really expensive, so that's not something I suggest. Again, not convenient. That's not insane. Like the 3DS is nice. It works for what it is. Which personally, I think since they're keeping the 3DS going, at least for another year or two, that I think they should repurpose its marketing. I think it should be marketed at children, whereas this should be marketed at adults for the Switch. Yeah. Because they should take the 3DS and be like, look, kids don't control the TV. Parents control the TV. So kids can control their handheld. And it's cheaper. You can get like 2DS units for under $100 easily at many places. 3DS units for under $150 in many places. And kids kind of have the cool thing, you toss in your backpack. You're not really going to toss a Switch in your backpack and bring it to school. At least you should not toss a Switch in your backpack and bring it to elementary school. College is fine. Proper case, but don't bring it to elementary school. You're going to get so much trouble playing that thing there. And if someone steals it, you're not going to get it. College kids, that's your own risk. There's what it is. You control it. Even high school kids, it's your own risk. I know some high schools let you carry your backpacks around with you all the time. I personally wouldn't do that because I don't want to. I wouldn't carry it around in my backpack. I wouldn't carry it around in my locker that's locked. Oh yeah, definitely. And just take things that I need in between classes. But some kids like carrying everything everywhere. I found that out even when I was at, I went to a private school and we still had kids that were like, oh, I'm going to bring everything with me everywhere. And I'm like, I guess I get that for security purposes or like, I guess you never forget anything. But it's like, yeah, dude, the school books are heavy. Yeah, that they are. No, thanks. Yeah, no, thanks. I'll just bring my one book to my one class. I know eight books to one. Yeah, I know. I kind of went half a day, half a day type of thing where I'd stop in after lunch and switch out my books for the back half of the day compared to the front half of the day. Yeah, so that's kind of how I ran it. I don't know. I'm excited for the system because it's just really everything about it feels convenient. The thing is, like you brought up a situation where you're going to use it like on the go. The only situations I think I'm going to use it on the go either if we go on there, like we go back to E3 plane flight. Oh yeah. We drive, so we go to a Bucks game in Milwaukee. One of us drives down, one drives back, the other one gets a place switched. Right, yep. Like there's all these convenient things that you can use it for. But the most time I'm going to use it is when I'm going to the bathroom. Yeah. Like I always like browse and stuff on my phone. I mean, I might still do both. Yeah, right? Like that's one of the things like I keep thinking all these things I do with my phone now I'm going to be kind of doing with my switch. Listen to sports radio while playing. I'm playing baseball game with my phone. No, I'm not. I'm playing Breath of the Wild. Yeah, yeah. And then in bed. I think in bed it's just really nice. Yeah. And this all the time is too like, you know, we like sports. So instead of us taking over the TV to play Madden, we could play Madden. A thing and I'm playing against you, you're playing against me. And what's nice about us having two of them is that if Madden does come out, we can actually do like the online server thing and get fast simmy. Yeah, right. We do a lot of simmy. So yeah, that's the one thing he doesn't own the Xbox. So like when we do the simmy, we can't do it over because online, their online servers have really, really fast simmy compared to their local console. Anyways, you guys, that's something that I'll care about. But if Madden comes out for it. But yeah, it's I'm just really excited. I don't know if the excitement's coming through because it's just I'm still in a state of disbelief. Right. That we're under a week out. Like it's happening. Yeah. Everything's paid off. It's happening. We're going to be there. Yeah. Like it sucks for you because you got to basically go home and go to bed right away. But yeah, yeah, because yeah, because I'm coming home, like, like, but let's end this topic with talking about what are we doing day one with that switch? You tell me what your plans are. You have to go to work. So I'm charging it home by asleep and then taking it to work and playing it over my lunch tower. That's what I'm doing. Nice. Nice. So me, I get to take my home and film an unboxing. And then film another unboxing of the Breath of the Wild special edition. And then hook it up to my streaming setup and pray it all works. Like I'm not going to record like setting up like there's plenty of videos out there setting up the switch and everything. So I'm not going to record any videos of that. But the next time you'll see me after that point, we'll literally be playing with the switch on Breath of the Wild on the live stream. So I'm going to hopefully I'll get those videos edited if you come over Friday night. Working. Yeah, you're working. So Saturday, whenever you get a chance to come over, that's what I'll finally get to sit down and edit those videos and get them out. So hopefully I have them out that weekend. I would love to give them out the same day, but we'll kind of see what kind of see how it goes because I really want to just get straight in the live stream and I'm playing Breath of the Wild. I don't really want to waste all this time editing videos. I don't really want to record the unboxings, but since I can't live stream the unboxing anyways, I might as well record it. So that's my day one. And then day two again, more live streaming, more live streaming, more live streaming, just live streaming like crazy. And then finally, I think my day three is when I'll finally get more experience with the system undocked and doing other stuff, whether it's playing other games, whether it's trying to browse the internet, there's no web browser, but maybe they have there's someone talking about there might be a developer way around it. So I might try to see if I can get to the developer mode and get around it and try to browse the internet just to see if I can do it. Because you know, maybe it's a situation where every switch is a dev unit just like every Xbox one is a dev unit. I don't know. I'm excited. It's one of those things. One thing I am debating you guys can let me know in the comments is if you want me to do like like a Facebook or YouTube live of like literally us walking into the store and getting to it. I was kind of thinking that like like it's up to you guys you want to see because I'm going to be so pumped. I don't know if I'm going to be first in line because I'm not going out hours early because I already have it preordered. But I'll be out there about 30 minutes early and be you know obviously among the people getting out. I'm just I'm debating if that's something if you guys be interested in seeing the live reactions to us getting it and the excitement and everything and then obviously getting into the car and looking at a little loot and being like oh my god yeah right yeah right you have to go to bed that sucks I'm going to go well you never know I might end up staying over here and just sleeping sleep like yeah um yeah then I'll say you work and then work so yeah I'm going to be at work from probably 8 30 to midnight yeah so he's he's pretty much dead until maybe sometime on Saturday yeah until you get super addicted to the rough of wild that he's still asleep yeah right what's gonna happen