Nintendo NX: 10 Wishlist Rumours That Must Come True
Morphing controllers, a return to cartridges and much, much more.
Although they won't admit it, Nintendo might be slowly falling too far behind to ever catch up right now. Precisely because the company tend to stagger the release of their consoles to 'in between' that of the competition, it allowed the Wii to arrive and positively dominate the mainstream consumer base across the late 2000s, but once that momentum had halted, the Wii U was dead on arrival.
Nowadays, when we talk about the console race or the 'console wars', ol' Ninty barely gets a look in, and you can count the amount of incredible first-party titles on the Wii U on one hand. However, because they're on the back foot is precisely why the NX sounds so exciting. After all, an Olympic sprint always starts with such a potent ready pose.
For over a year now, we've heard tidbits in interviews alluding to a 'special feature' for the console that's never been done before, which in addition to full backwards compatibility - something that still makes Nintendo's consoles the most consumer-friendly on the market - would make for one hell of a reappearance.
As such, rumours and speculation have flooded the internet, and for what it's worth, if any of the following come true, Nintendo will well and truly be back in the driver's seat come 2017.
10. The System Is Returning To Cartridges
Although we tend to think of discs as a gold standard, the move to optical media was mostly in favour of data storage, whereas if you're ever prioritising load times, cartridges were seamless, being all data on the chip is 'locked' into the console from the get-go.
Evidence for the NX reverting back to this comes from a patent filed for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, where for some reason, Nintendo claimed ownership of "video game cartridges" in relation to its production.
Now, we know there's an on-disc Wii U version confirmed, so unless they're planning on randomly saying "And it's coming to 3DS, too!", the NX is the most likely candidate.
Weirdly and rather eye-openingly, although we left cartridges far behind across the late 90s, the technology behind them has been coming along steadily, as an article from ExtremeTech attests:
"The Blu-ray disks in the current Xbox One and PS4 top out at roughly 27MB/s of performance. Microsoft and Sony could theoretically boost that by adapting faster drives, but NOR flash can hit performance levels that leave even the fastest Blu-ray hardware in the dust." NOR flash is a product from Macronix, a memory manufacturer who announced they expected to provide chips for the NX."
Just imagine a system with almost zero load times, all the fancy graphics of the modern-day industry, and the tactile satisfaction of throwing a cartridge in every time you get home. Oh, and best of all? No installations required. Bring this on.