Amidst everything going on, I appear to have won the small lottery that is “getting the opportunity to buy a Switch 2 via my Nintendo Online account.” I’ll admit that I completely forgot that I’d signed up to particpate way back when they announced that it would be a thing, mostly because I saw the requirements for eligibility and I’m not eligible according to them. I don’t share any of my data with Nintendo, I don’t get advertisements or emails, and there is nothing in existence that would convince me to willingly give a company my data in exchange for a chance to pay that company for a product I’m only interested in purchasing if it doesn’t inconvenience me. When I realized that those were required, I put it out of my mind and resigned myself to taking a lackluster stab at ordering one from a retailer online, which I forgot about until it was too late at night to bother with that. Which really goes to show how unexcited I was for the Switch 2. Still, when I got the email telling me that I could now purchase one (within a seventy-two hour window) and verified that this was not some attempt at hacking my Nintendo Online account (which it could still be since my only way to verify that this was correct was looking for other people getting emails from that same address and this could just be a giant campaign meant to steal the credit card and account information of a lot of Nintendo Online users that has fooled tons of people), I decided to wait a bit to actually buy it.
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Feeling Ambivalent About The Switch 2
I don’t think I’ve ever felt as truly ambivalent about something as I do about the Switch 2. These days, the word gets used to mean “no strong feelings one way or another” or something similar that implies a certain amount of neutrality. The definition of the world does involve a degree of neutrality, which is where the confluence of meanings began, but it’s pretty specifically about a net neutrality as your mix of feelings about something essetially cancel each other out. All of which is a bit of a hair to split even for me, but I have never felt quite so strongly and truly ambivalent about something before in my life so it felt like the specificity was worth the pedantry. I mean, better that than to continue endlessly spinning my wheels about the unanswerable question of whether or not I want to get a Switch 2 any time soon. It’s a bit of a moot point as of writing this (not quite) a week ahead of time, given that all of the preorders have been consumed and, even faster than the original switch, everywhere has sold out, so it’s not like I need an answer right now. My current policy of “get one if it’s easy to acquire without going out of my way” will work just fine for this situation, so there’s really no need to religitate it all over again. But then again, I wouldn’t be me if I wasn’t always relitigating things in my head and then writing about them on my blog, would I?
Continue readingGotta Switch 2 A Different Way Of Economic Planing
Well, we finally got the Switch 2 news that everyone wanted. And a whole lot of news people didn’t want. According to the reactions after the fact, the Switch 2 is far too overpriced, the games are overpriced, and Nintendo has ruined everything! That’s quite a lot of responsibility this one console release has to bear, especially considering that a launch price of $450 is fairly reasonable considering the other consoles on the market. I mean, sure, Nintendo has, historically, been the cheaper option and the underperforming console in general (in regards to the technical specifications, I mean), but I figured it wasn’t going to last forever. Screens are actually really expensive and including one on a console is a pretty pricey part, even if the rest of the console has cheaper parts to make up for it. All of which is to say that I’m not surprised, this is what I expected given the price increase in some of Nintendo’s most recent games, but I was a bit surprised by the lack of anything that made me actually want to acquire one on launch day. I mean, I got the Switch on launch day because of the new Legend of Zelda game that was launching with it and while the Mario Kart game coming out as a launch title for the Switch 2 is interesting enough to make me break my habit of ignoring every new Mario Kart game, I don’t think it’s enough to make me want to go through the hassle of trying to get one on the day of release. A month and a half after that, there’ll be a new 3D Donkey Kong game for the first time in decades and THAT is definitely intriguing, but I’m not sure it’s interesting enough to contend with scalpers, waiting in line for several hours, or endlessly refreshing a webpage in hopes of getting a reservation.
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