Dazzling-Ducks t1_j85ldf0 wrote on February 11, 2023 at 8:19 PM

Nowadays Nintendo products break just from basic use. I’ve been through three pairs of Joycons and I’ve never even dropped or abused them or anything.

chaivpush t1_j85nagu wrote on February 11, 2023 at 8:33 PM

I miss pre-Wii Nintendo.

yamiyaiba t1_j87ptqz wrote on February 12, 2023 at 6:52 AM

Pre-N64, really. I know this is a bit of a hot take, but the N64 started their downfall. Bizarre, nonsensical button layouts, an obsession with cartridges (which they tried to remedy with a failed disk peripheral) and other nonstandard game media formats, and just an overall obsession with using older tech than their competitors across multiple generations, that even still has persisted today in the Switch (though only in horsepower, really).

Their insistence on supporting primarily first party titles, with everything else taking a distant backseat, is mind boggling to me as well. And frankly, that's largely why their hardware has lagged. First party wise, Zelda and modern 3D Metroid are the only things to really challenge the hardware constraints, and it's easy enough to tell those teams to just deal with it. Everyone third party just has to down-port and crapify the graphical fidelity. There's a reason the eShop depends on 5 year+ old indie titles to still anything third party. If I didn't own those games on 2-3 other platforms already, I might be tempted.

Don't get me wrong, I know they're still successful. But I don't think they're good the way they were in the past. SNES and GBA were, IMO, the last truly great home and portable systems they made. Everything beyond that was contingent on gimmicks. I'm sure that's partly my nostalgia talking, but I do think it's telling that they're so dependent on remakes/ports/emulation of those eras and earlier.

hamidgeabee t1_j88vu12 wrote on February 12, 2023 at 3:06 PM

I believe it was an article in an old Nintendo magazine or maybe GameInformer that I read this, but their obsession with cartridges came from polling parents in the 90s about if they thought their children could handle CD style disks without breaking or scratching them. Parents felt more comfortable buying cartridges for their children due to fear of damage so Nintendo stuck with cartridges.

Dragmire800 t1_j85y5pp wrote on February 11, 2023 at 9:51 PM

I got my switch on launch day and my joycons have never given me any problems.

Team_Rckt_Grunt t1_j86kf5q wrote on February 12, 2023 at 12:39 AM

That's lucky. I know someone else who hasn't had joycon issues, but I also have an OG switch and I haven't replaced the joycons yet... but only because I'm too broke to buy a second pair and the logistics of shipping them back are confusing to me. The drift is so bad it is literally unplayable on handheld mode, I currently play all games on the tv with a separate controller. If I use the joycons it makes it impossible to even select things from a menu because it cycles through the options at high speed when I'm not even touching the stick.

I love the switch in general but the joycon durability is... Not ideal. Hit or miss, shall we say.

Jdoggcrash t1_j86shoq wrote on February 12, 2023 at 1:43 AM

I’ve had three pairs of joy cons including the ones that came with the switch I bought. All three have drift. None of them as bad as yours but at this point I just bought a regular controller and play on the TV like you. Not worth it to keep spending money on the hope that this won’t happen again with the next pair.