8 Reasons To Be Excited About The Nintendo Switch 2
4. A Focus On Community
This entry comes with the typical asterisk of “took your damn time, Nintendo”. Yes, after stops, starts, rumours and “they’ll never do it”, Nintendo has discovered the voice call. Or perhaps the more appropriate phrase might be “have relented to the voice call”.
All jokes aside, it’s at least a very nice thing to have, even if we should’ve already had it a whole generation ago. It was also pleasant to see Nintendo being honest about it and showing a lot of the streams running at chunky, clumsy 480p 10fps.
That said, the brightest spot of this extended hand of the Big N is the very welcome return of a long-discarded feature. GameShare is the younger, better, sibling to the Nintendo DS’ Download Play. A perhaps forgotten section on the console’s home-screen allowed fellow DS owners to locally download a fraction of a multiplayer game. This meant your friends who didn’t own Mario Kart DS (for example) could join in with the fun (if they didn’t mind playing as Toad).
GameShare allows up to three consoles to download a full game to play together in a group temporarily, with the additionally spice being that it can be done online as well as off and that this can include games for the Nintendo Switch.
Whilst there are some understandable (and warranted) hesitations around what appears to be something that looks a bit like DRM when it comes to the Switch 2’s Game-Key Cards, this is at least a nice feature.
With the deep-dive repeatedly mentioning the C-button, it’ll be interesting to see how this evolves in future as “community” seems to be a bigger part of the Switch 2 pie.