According to Video Games Chronicle, the Nintendo Switch is the most long-lived of any of the firm’s home consoles – judged by the time taken before a replacement hit the shelves. The Nintendo Entertainment System aka Famicom previously held the record at 2,686 days and with Switch 2 still to arrive, the current-gen hybrid continues to power on. Nevertheless, we believe that a reveal for the new machine is mere weeks or at most, a couple of months away and we’re starting to look back at the legacy of Nintendo’s mighty handheld. In the first of a series of pieces, we’re taking stock with our picks for the most technologically impressive Switch titles, beginning with our choices from the first party catalogue.
We’re not going to be covering every first party game here and it’s a personal selection from John Linneman and Oliver Mackenzie, but in each case we genuinely feel that Nintendo or its development partners have delivered experiences that far exceed expectations. And to a certain extent, those expectations are set by the nature of the Switch hardware itself. It’s using the exact same processor as the Shield Android TV – which never acquitted itself well as a games machine – and it’s doing it with significantly reduced clock speeds. And let’s not forget, we’re talking about 2015 technology.
That said, the Nvidia technology – particularly its GPU based on the Maxwell architecture – is capable of great things and while dated now, for its time, the Switch processor’s graphics capabilities encompassed all the modern features. The challenge facing developers was all about scalability – reducing resolution, frame-rate and fidelity where needed, tapping into the strengths of the architecture while contending with relatively minuscule levels of memory bandwidth. And these are the games where we feel that select studios absolutely triumphed – and while we aren’t ordering them as such, we do have one game that we feel stands alone. Luigi’s Mansion 3 may not seem like the most obvious choice – but bear with us as we explain why.
