The Nintendo Switch traumatized my family and I cannot forgive it
Halfway through October 2021 my youngest daughter, just 7 years old at the time, came to me with concern in her eyes. The Nintendo Switch wouldn’t turn on, and its last few moments of operation were concerning. Something about a download that had just completed, she said, and a button that said “update.” That was […]
Halfway through October 2021 my youngest daughter, just 7 years old at the time, came to me with concern in her eyes. The Nintendo Switch wouldn’t turn on, and its last few moments of operation were concerning. Something about a download that had just completed, she said, and a button that said “update.” That was the end of the line for that particular unit, but only the beginning of my troubles with a console that would proceed to try my patience until this very day — an experience that makes me loath to consider buying the Nintendo Switch 2.
The Hall family had been victim to a technical snafu as old as mobile devices themselves, the dreaded low-power firmware update. That’s when a device, like an iPhone or a graphics card or a $250 red-and-black plastic hunk of shit, loses power while it’s upgrading its most important layer of software. Firmware refers to the pieces of code that tell a device that it’s a device and not a 398-gram brick, and as I took the tripartite console from her tiny little hands — where it was cradled like a dead bird — I knew that it was a total loss. But that wasn’t the worst part.
Inside that black mirror of despair were dozens of tiny, furry neighbors — her digital friends from Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The new island backup feature had only recently been introduced, and her idiot father hadn’t yet taken the time to perform the arcane rites required to save a Nintendo Switch game to the cloud.
Her friends were all dead, of that I was sure. So, too, was the bell-selling knickknack shop that she and her older sister had built from scratch before showing it off on the Polygon Twitch channel. My house, my wife’s house, those damnable ladders and bridges that took weeks to build, and, of course, the peach trees that we all loved so much… none of them were ever coming back.
Ultimately, it’s my fault. I’m the user here, and it was my error. But I get to be angry at Nintendo for not making something like backing up hundreds of hours of irretrievable gameplay, shared joyfully during the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, just a little bit easier or — dare I say it — a feature that gets turned on automatically from the start.
Everything about the Switch is a quirk, and some of them are more obnoxious than others
But Nintendo doesn’t treat the cloud like other console manufacturers do. It doesn’t treat online storefronts like other console manufacturers do, either. Or onboard storage. Or game cartridges. Or online multiplayer. Or friends lists. Or televisions, for that matter. Everything about the Switch is a quirk, and some of them are more obnoxious than others.
While having our original Nintendo Switch replaced by a refurbished one set me back pert near $120, I’ve easily spent at least that much buying additional controllers over the years. Both of the original Joy-Cons that shipped with our original Switch suffered from Joy-Con drift, something that my children suffered through wordlessly for months before I realized it.
“What is happening to Mario?” I asked one day while watching the girls play in the basement.
“Oh, that’s just how the controllers work now,” said my oldest. I was incredulous. There is no scenario where I would accept anything other than absolute obeisance from a human input device, but here my kids were making do, trying to complete nefarious jumping puzzles with a joystick that was barely capable of walking a virtual avatar in a straight line. Suffice it to say that they eventually lost the taste for piloting the tiny red plumber — especially when it took the better part of two months to get our controllers back after being repaired under the warranty.
When the next two broke, I just threw them away. It wasn’t even worth a trip to the post office for me.
Today we’re in a better place, thanks. The girls both have healthy relationships with video game consoles like the Xbox Series X, with iPhones and iPads, and with Windows PCs, as well as a catalog of games that each of them can call home. But they remain literally afraid of the Nintendo Switch, a console that let them down multiple times for various reasons. I can’t even coax them to bring it along for road trips.
They won’t forget that experience, and I won’t either. And that’s why I’m waving off the Nintendo Switch 2. I’ve got enough to worry about in the year of our lord 2025 that risking a visitation from another wonky portable console isn’t even on my radar.
