A new wave of rumors are doing the rounds regarding the near-mythical Switch 2. Nintendo’s much-deliberated follow-up to its seven-year-old handheld console was most recently speculated to have an 8" screen, after Sharp Corp reportedly massively upped its LCD screen production. Now we have word that it could be getting a very welcome improvement to its Joy-Cons: magnets.
If you own a Switch, and even if you wear Switch-based t-shirts and have posters of Yoshiaki Koizumi on your bedroom wall, you’ve likely had a moment where it’s taken you five goes to get the joy-con to slide into its stupid little rails on the side of the screen. Probably right when you’re in a hurry because it’s your train stop and the doors are about to close. Imagine if, instead, they just thhhhhw-clicked into place with the healing power of magnets?
That’s the rumor coming out of Spanish gaming site Vandal, which says it’s received a tip-off from an unnamed peripheral manufacturer. And that’s good enough for us to repeat?! Well, actually, Vandal has priors in this regard, being the site to correctly break the story about the existence of the Switch OLED model.
Vandal repeats the crappy news that it’s unlikely that the console—which current Kotaku Queen Carolyn Petit repeatedly refuses to let me call the Super Switch U GX—will appear in 2024, and endorses the increased screen size we’ve long suspected. But the important news today is this new mechanism for connecting Joy-Cons.
A controller than just magnetically snaps to the side of the screen sounds absolutely fantastic, right up until I think about how I hold a Switch and start to worry about exactly how strong that bond would be. And if it’s powerful enough to keep the thing feeling sturdy when I’m playing on the move, how hard is it going to be to get them to come off when I want to play on my couch? I mean, does anyone know how magnets even work?
Of course, it also raises the issue of backward compatibility for existing Joy-Cons becoming more unlikely. But, you know, there’s no heavenly decree that the controller for your previous machine should work with the next, and good luck plugging your Wii U controller into your Switch. Still, a lack of compatibility would suck if you’ve got a favorite set, or just bought an overpriced branded pair.
Or maybe Vandal’s completely wrong! Let’s not forget that Nintendo hasn’t even announced a New Switch-i XL, let alone what sorts of features it might want to include. Perhaps Shinya Takahashi and Yoshiaki Koizumi are laughing into their sleeves at all this speculation, while the company continues developing its underwater-only 1-dimensional gaming glove.
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