 Hey everyone, before we get into today's video, I want to let you know that I'm giving away a copy of Animal Crossing New Horizons, a digital code on Nintendo Switch. To enter all you need to do is subscribe to the channel, hit the bell icon, like this video, and comment down below. In fact, if you do that on all of our videos this entire month through March 18th, you get additional entries per video. And yeah, the winner will be announced on March 19th. The digital code is actually already purchased. It's back here. Can you find it? No, you can. You can find the receipt, but you can't find the code. Today, the Nintendo Switch turns three years old. Well, yesterday, depending on if you're from Japan or other areas. But March 3rd is when I was able to actually play the Nintendo Switch. I stood in line at GameStop. And it was an interesting experience at GameStop because I actually had the Switch in my hand two hours and 15 minutes before midnight. I had the Nintendo Switch. I had the Breath of the Wild Master Edition, which is over there. I had all the Breath of the Wild Amiibo. I had one, two Switch. And I think I even had a Nintendo Switch Pro Controller all in two GameStop bags inside my local GameStop store. Just standing there, already checked out, but unable to leave the store, not allowed to open anything until midnight actually hit. Very, very weird, but that's just the way console launches work. You have to wait until midnight. So yeah, they were nice enough to at least do that. And so you don't have to like stand in line at midnight and then wait, you know, hours sometimes to get through the line. So it was cool. It was nice. And I went home. We did a really crappy unboxing video, Eric and I, of both of our Switches. And then literally at 1 a.m., I started a Breath of the Wild livestream. And so began my journey on Nintendo Switch. Now, obviously Breath of the Wild is something I had played at E3 2016 on Wii U. So it is a Wii U port to Switch. So 1, 2 Switch was really the first exclusive Switch experience I had. And I actually enjoyed 1, 2 Switch, but honestly, when I look back on the last three years of Switch, I just keep thinking that Switch is my favorite video game platform as an adult. And I've played quite a few from PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, obviously, you know, DS and 3DS. You know, DS was more at the beginning of my adult life, obviously 3DS as well. Vita, I played a little bit in there. PSP. But like, out of all these platforms that I've touched in my adult life, including gaming PCs, which by the way, I think gaming PCs need to be set aside in a conversation like this because it's a never-ending platform. It's not like there's new generation, like there's new generations of hardware, but you could play games across so many generations of hardware that, you know, gaming PCs don't count. Let's just put it that way. I've been a PC gamer my whole life. I'm going to throw that away for this discussion because the Nintendo Switch has become my favorite, I guess, home console, portable console. As an adult, it does both, right? You take this system right here, you drop it in the dock, and suddenly you're playing on TV. Heck, here's an OG Switch. Here's a Switch version 2. There's a Switch Lite that I don't own. Many different variants of it. And out of all of this stuff the last three years, I just walk away utterly impressed with what Switch has done to me as a gamer because you see, I am an adult. I am a parent of three children. And as I have discovered and didn't even realize, I thought I played a lot of video games growing up. I did as a kid, certainly. And as a young adult, you know, in my early college years, I still did play quite a bit of video games. But as I became a parent, I still thought I was gaming a lot until Switch came into my life. See, Wii U helped give me some gaming life back. I let my kids watch a show on TV while I sat on the couch and played on the game pad. But something about the Switch itself, just being able to take it out of the room, into the bedroom, into the bathroom, into wherever I was going on walks even, has enabled me to game in ways that I didn't realize I wanted to game in. And it's really made me more of a gamer. I spent thousands and thousands of hours gaming on Switch and I didn't spend that kind of time gaming on Wii U. I didn't spend that kind of time gaming on PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, at least after I had children, because I just didn't have the time. And what Switch has done is given me my time back. And it's not just because I have a YouTube channel now and I get to talk about video games. It's because Switch has created more time for me to play. Am I on a flight off to E3? Guess what? That's three hours I get to play Nintendo Switch that I wouldn't have been able to really play. Too many video games I wanted to play in the past. Yes, with 3DS and all this stuff, there's options to play. But Switch gives me home console games. It gives me Breath of the Wild. It gives me Super Mario Odyssey. Fire Emblem 3 Houses. It gives me the Witcher 3, for crying out loud, on the go. And that's exciting. And you see the ability to take the games on the go and play them on the TV. Even if they're dumbed down versions like Mortal Kombat 11 and Witcher 3 aren't necessarily the greatest or Doom isn't the greatest version of those games. They're still better than not having those games at all. And I think that's what makes the Switch platform so endearing to me, is that it has opened up a whole world of gaming to me that I've always had available, but not necessarily available at the times I actually have a capability to play. Now yeah, when you drop it on the TV and play in Doctor Mode, it's not the most impressive experience for a lot of these multi-platform third-party games, but it's still passable. It's still enjoyable. And when you have games like Witcher 3 here, now it's got PC Crosses. So if I want to play the highest fidelity with Hairworks on and 4K, 120 FPS, or whatever, I could just port my save file over to Steam and play it on my PC. So in some cases, you know, rare cases, I actually get to enjoy a nice portable experience while getting the best of the best visuals when I'm sitting down. So at home anyway. So I honestly think that Switch has just reignited my passion in gaming. And I think the Switch has reignited Nintendo's passion as well. We have gotten some of the best versions of Nintendo games. If not the best in the series, some of the best in a long time. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate to me is the greatest Smash Bros. game ever made, period. It even beats out Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 64, which was my previous favorite game in the series. You have Breath of the Wild. It is now my favorite Zelda game and not just that, my favorite game of all time. It's beating out games like Final Fantasy 7, or Ocarina of Time, or Majora's Mask, or heck, duh, beating out things like Secret of Mana, which was my favorite game of all time, until Breath of the Wild. So it's crazy to me that you have one of the best Zeldas ever. You have one of the best Smash Bros. games ever. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, which is just more Mario Kart 8 from the Wii U, is even better on Switch. So that's the best version of Mario Kart. Splatoon 2 is better than Splatoon 1, in my opinion. So Splatoon 2 is amazing. We had a brand new franchise in Arms Come Out, which is one of the most unique arena-style fighting games, period, in a long time, and I don't even like fighting games, and I think Arms is a lot of fun. It really appeals to me almost more than Smash Bros. in some cases. Obviously, Fire Emblem 3 House has hit a massive home run. We have another new IP and Astral Chain. The hits just keep on coming. Super Mario Party is one of the best Mario Party games in forever. Still not as good as, I'd say, 1 through 5, but one of the best since then. So that's crazy, crazy good news. Mario Tennis Aces nailed the gameplay, and is certainly better than Mario Tennis Ultimate or whatever the hell it was called on Wii U. That was just a tech demo, basically, and not even a good one. You know, you have Link's Awakening Remastered, who can complain about that? Luigi's Mansion 3, now that I'm playing right now, I'm playing Luigi's Mansion 3. This game right here, I'm playing Luigi's Mansion 3, and I'm just, oh, I'm gushing with excitement. It might be my favorite Luigi's Mansion game to date, beating out the original, because right now I have the original, and then Dark Moon, and I think Luigi's Mansion 3 might top all of them. Pokémon Sword and Shield, yeah, you could say what you want about the controversy and the National Dex and all that. Now, Pokémon, you know, let's go Pikachu, let's go Eevee, people getting... I don't know, I seem to be enjoying them, so I don't really have too many complaints. I'm not, you know, like some other fans that get that picky about those experiences, and I get that for hardcore Pokémon fans, maybe that's not it, but there's just so much to love. Even Yoshi's Crafted World, I ended up really enjoying it, and I did a review on it. That's a watch I enjoyed it. Snipperclips is a really interesting co-op experience, great for couples, and then there's, you know, some additions to Snipperclips and DLC and all that. There's even a physical version of it, believe it or not. There's just a lot to love. I even, heck, I'm not gonna lie, I spent hundreds of hours playing NBA 2K games on Switch. I just picked up NBA 2K 20 for 20 bucks, brand new, and I can't wait to dive into it. I know I'm not a fan of the micro-transactions they put in the single player, but for 20 bucks, I'll play as Giannis in the books and try to win the title. Why not? I love sports games, and it's nice to see a full-fledged NBA game, the best NBA game, to be honest, on Switch. In fact, EA and other companies, let's get Madden and FIFA and stuff over, because why not? There's obviously an audience for 2K. Why wouldn't there be an audience for that? Honestly, the Switch has just been amazing. Nintendo, first-party killing it, indie games are killing it. I mean, can we even talk about indie games? The blossom tales of the world, and that might not even be your favorite. There's Hollow Knight and, to be honest, there's almost two. If I'm going to dive into indie games, it's going to be a 20-minute video on its own. There are so many amazing indie games. I mean, I've been playing a lot of Galliant S or whatever. I've been playing a lot of lately. There's just too many. Silksong, I mean, God, when's that coming? Oh, I played that back at E3. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3, we have that in that indie game, but another exclusive game on Switch. There's just so much going for it. Remember, on Autobot Traveler it was exclusive? Remember that it's a multi-platform now, because we're getting a sequel. My mind is blown at how amazing this platform is, and we're getting all these really nice exclusives or timed exclusives, all these amazing indie games, we've got Cuphead on Switch now, and we're also getting the multi-platform AAA third-party games. Some, not all, things aren't perfect, and we get a lot of the games late. We're going to get Doom Eternal late. We did get Mortal Kombat 11 day in day, but pretty much every other major AAA multi-platform game on Switch, NBA 2K, has come out late on the platform. But we're still getting them, and that's way better than a Wii U, when we got them for like a year, maybe two at most, and then they dipped out, and that was that. We don't have everything. We still needed the Call of Duty as the world on here. We need to get other games on here. But, you know, what we are getting is making Switch so amazing to me. Again, if you prefer some of these multi-platform games, that's fine, go play on your Xbox or PlayStation 4 or your PC. There's no problem with that. I don't care if you prefer those platforms, but I don't have the time to sit down and game like I once did, and Switch is enabling me to be a gamer. Again, like I once was when I was younger, before I had more responsibility on my shoulders, before I needed to make these videos. I don't even need to make them. I enjoy making them, before I enjoyed making these videos. And obviously, you know, the joy of being a father and raising my kids and having to show up at school when they're sick and all this. It's amazing that I can find time to game like I once did because of this platform. I feel like I don't have to sacrifice being a gamer to be a dad. I don't have to sacrifice being a gamer to provide for my family. I don't have to sacrifice things I enjoy, you know, in life, like gaming, to do other things I need to do to be responsible as an adult, paying bills, family vacations, all of that stuff. So, my takeaway, Switch the last three years, it is my favorite platform as an adult. And I say as an adult because my favorite platform of all time is still the Super Nintendo, and I won't be able to judge if this passes the Super Nintendo until we get to the end of life. And then I can maybe declare, hey, Switch is the greatest gaming platform ever made, but what I can say is Switch is on its way to being the greatest gaming platform ever made, at least for me. So, I want to know your fondest memories with Switch so far the last three years. I want to know what your great takeaways are with this platform. And I just want to know in general, do you like your Switch? It's not perfect. There's Joy-Con drift issues. There's BendGate where the Switches were bending. Obviously, the hacking community has done some things. Everything isn't exactly the way it wanted to be. I've had stick grinding issues with the pro controllers and nothing's perfect. But it's almost just good enough to not matter to me. Anyways, let me know what you think about Switch the last three years down in the comments below. Your favorite games, all that jazz. There's so many more that I didn't even cover because there's just an incredible, incredible amount of content on Switch. That's all I got for you. So, happy birthday, Switch. Three years old.