Hey everyone, I'm Jeff Bakalar.
I'm here with the lovely Scott Stein.
We just got back from a live Nintendo Switch debut event here in New York City, and we're back to talk to you and each other about what we thought of that event.
So Scott.
Yeah.
What did you think, man?
This was a crazy sort of First hands on with the Nintendo Switch.
We know all the details, we know it's coming out March 3rd, it's $300, but this was the hands on stuff.
So how does it feel to play Nintendo Switch?
It was a lot of expectations.
Is this gonna be like a 3DS, is this gonna be a Wii, is it gonna be a Wii U?
It kind of felt like all of them, but it also felt like, if you've ever played An Nvidia Shield tablet, which has got Nvidia tech inside.
Basically it almost felt like an Android tablet or a Windows tablet into which they're running Nintendo.
I don't know how to explain that.
It felt really nice.
But the actual tablet has more of the feel of almost a PC component.
Yeah, it's heavy, it's a little heavy.
It's a little heavy, it's got vents on the top.
That's the machine right there.
That's the whole thing.
And the controllers are nice.
It feels like a 3DS type of control with the analog stick of a Wii game pad.
Right.
So in terms of how it feels to play, you have that game pad tablet thing, the 2 Joy-Con controllers that flank it on either side can come off, and when you take them off, there's these little sort of half crescent.
controllers.
And I found them to be very small and maybe not the most comfortable little things in the world.
Yeah those got weird.
They were a little bit like super powered Apple TV remotes.
There are a lot of buttons.
There are more buttons than you would find on your Wii remote.
Yeah, it's kind of disorienting.
We played a game called One, Two, Switch.
And you and I were milking.
We were milking cow utters.
Collaborative milking.
And every time we would milk them,
Every time we would milk them, they would just vibrate and feel weird and I thought that was a strange example of the power of this thing.
Yeah those are like an away from a TV thing where we were supposed to just be playing at a party game close to each other.
They claim it's a very advanced tactic.
To me they felt more like a
Kind of like better haptics that you get on a phone or maybe the Xbox controller.
But not super strong.
Not super strong.
They were talking about rumble HD, I don't know why it's HD.
No.
I don't know how you can classify rumble as HD, but this did not feel superior in any way.
No, I didn't feel [UNKNOWN] clinking of ice cubes in a glass.
I didn't feel the cow udder, thankfully.
Right.
But it was a vibrating
Different pulsing that was going on.
And the question is in the games will that matter.
I noticed when you tilt some of the games like the arms, the boxing game we did, it would give you feedback on how much you were tilting, but I'd get the feel on what that meant.
I think that we can kinda gloss over for now, you'll have to experience for yourself.
Overall I think people are gonna wanna buy that pro controller that's $70 extra
To me, that kind of feels good.
The grip that will house the two crescents, that comes with the box, so you can kind of decide if you like how that feels.
So that's our feels to play.
When you're holding the tablet, the right joy con joy stick is a little lower than the one on the left.
That was a little unusual.
And I found that to be a problem when we were trying to split it in two.
They map it out.
The screen looks nice but 6 inches, so it's crisp but not great.
Right.
There's a pretty significant bezel around.
So let's go into the games real quick.
You and I first started playing that game arms This was like the accordion hands boxing.
What did you think of that?
I though arms was a little hard to control.
I thought it was fun once you start getting into it.
But understanding how you curve your shot because not only can you throw your punch with motion controls But there were some Wii Sports type angling of shots, depending on how much you twist your wrist.
Yeah.
There were a lot of buttons, so again it was, which shoulder button are you pressing?
It's weird-
Getting a feel for that.
When you hold it in the profile sort of like thumbs up grip that they keep on [CROSSTALK] describing.
You can hit a lot of buttons by accident, however you decide to hold it, you are going to have the option to hit a bunch of things.
That's a great description.
There are a lot of buttons Every surface.
And then they didn't get into that one of the controllers has an IR camera.
Right.
That can recognize gestures.
At the bottom, yeah.
Yeah, so that wasn't employed in games so the question is if it's only on one, which games will do that and how?
There's a lot.
We'll get to the questions we still have at the end of this.
Then we played Splatoon 2 Which I thought was pretty good.
Yeah.
We were playing it on the tablet.
I didn't really, I don't like the lean aiming thing that they do.
They let you in the first game make it a analog thing, so hopefully that won't be a problem this time around.
What did you think of Splatoon 2?
Solid.
It shows you can play a TV game on the go.
Right.
So, I thought it did a good job with that.
The screen size seemed right.
It felt like playing a Wii U game.
But on the game pad but fully on the go.
I'm a little uncertain about how much of the game can be played hunching over that smaller screen.
It felt like I wanted to see more, maybe just that I was looking for details and doing that but it definitely was functional.
For sure okay Zelda
I didn't play Zelda that much at this event.
I played it at E3.
I keep looking at that gameplay.
Yes, this is the game to play.
Obviously, it's really the only game to play.
But it looks a little choppy.
I just think there's maybe gonna be a bit of a performance hit.
When you bring in mobile, I don't know yet, we don't have it.
But I'm not concerned, I just notice that.
Yeah, saw a little bit of that, too.
I was watching people play, I was walking around and observing a lot of the game play.
I mean, how Zelda plays in general, but the game It's weird because the Switch is supposed to go into two different types of processing modes.
You know, when it's in the dock-
Right, it gets full power.
Over clock, yeah.
And so that's going to give it potentially a little bit more graphics boost and so how does that even out when you're playing on the go versus there?
[INAUDIBLE]
Does that mean when you're playing Zelda portably, that's the two and a half hour battery life that they were
Low balling it
Yeah, maybe.
We'll see, then we played Sniffer Clipper or what is it?
Snipper Clipper.
That was kind of the surprise of that event and that Sonic Mania.
Yeah Sonic Mania, which is a 2D,
Basically like Sonic 4 or whatever the last one was.
Right, it's a truly remake, an ideal retro Sonic, coming up for other platforms too, Xbox One
Real quick, we gotta wrap it up, what's the outlook, what questions do you still have for me?
I like the price, I'm very concerned about the fact that there's only one real launch game to get.
Zelda, you know, looks great, but if I don't like Zelda, I'm not buying this thing.
You've got the new Mario game coming this holiday, that's a long ways away.
I think people have every right to sort of be a little skeptical about why am I buying this if there's only one game, what are you concerned about?
I want to see what else it does.
They didn't talk about whether it streamed stuff, the other Nintendo like the Wii u does stream Amazon and Hulu.
Right.
Sounds like a small thing, but I mean, if you're taking this on the go, connect it to your TV, giving it to a kid, or by a Kindle app, what else does this do?
We don't know about the interface or the apps.
And then games, retro games, or the NES classic.
Yeah, what's the deal with that?
What's the online like?
Right, we heard about this service that's gonna cost money, this online service.
They're gonna give away one game, is it one game a month or is it you can rent a game a month?
And the retro game?
So what the virtual console stuff how many of those games can we play because people want to play those classic games and are we gonna have to reboot again because clearly yes but how many times are you gonna do that because you have all these games you already bought,
So I have to buy these again, what's the deal.
Right are they just gonna sell these one by one or I'm concerned and curious about this
So that's going to do it for us.
Thank you so much for watching.
Nintendo switch coverage is all over CNet.
So make sure you watch and read.
And catch up on everything there is to know about Nintendo's brand new console that comes out March 3rd for $300.
It's right around the corner.
The review.
Really soon.
It's going to be coming real soon.
You want to ask us a question on Twitter?
I'm @jeffbakalar.
He's @jettscott.
Make sure you do that and we'll see you very soon.
