Have you played the new gaming skateboard?

As I've already established in some of my other posts, I'm not a huge gamer. Of the games I do play, many of them are more old school. So I'm probably not the best person to ask when it comes to modern games and gaming systems.

But, for some reason, I really hate the Nintendo Switch. Well, I know the reason. It's because it's too damn wide and actually makes me cringe holding it. It feels like I'm playing a game on a skateboard. I guarantee that pretty much anyone could make a console like the switch, as it's basically just a tablet with some controls slapped on the side. They didn't even really try that hard to make it feel not so wide. They could have tried to minimize the bezels on the side and minimize the width of the controllers so it felt a bit better, but they didn't. They released a half ass designed console, and people love it.

_{Image by Evan-Amos 18 June 2017, Public Domain (source)}

I always knew that my pet-peeves in regard to design applied to web sites, but I wasn't really aware of them when it comes to hardware before the Switch. When picking it up, my face deformed into a grimace and I sort of cringed. I couldn't even use it really. I hated it. I'm glad I didn't buy it. Not that I necessarily would. I have a bunch of older consoles that I want to buy first.

Maybe one day I'll get one and make molds of the case and see if I can't mod it to be not quite so horrendously wide.

I wonder if Nintendo doesn't have a newer model of the switch in the works that solves the problem of it being horrendously wide. Or perhaps a slightly more portable model. Nintendo has done quite a few different models of various different portable consoles in the past. Perhaps they will with the Switch as well.

This weird discomfort with poor design feels so weird to me. I don't think I've really felt this badly about other controllers. The original NES controller was a right bloody nightmare, but I kinda just dealt with it. It would make my thumbs raw from using it for too long. And it was this little nightmare of a tiny little square box. The Sega Genesis controller in contrast was pretty lovely. It still had pretty hard buttons, but they weren't as bad, as they were concave to one's fingers. Trying to use the SNES controller was actually pretty bad for me though. I really didn't like it. The Xbox controller was pretty nice though. The PlayStation controller was pretty weird, but totally usable.

Using the Switch feels like picking up someone's hacked together console that they made at home. Or maybe some shitty Chinese controllers that snap onto some random cheap tablet. It doesn't feel like a completed, well designed product. It feels like something that was just a concept and rushed to production. Maybe that's what it was.

But, it doesn't matter what my opinion is. I'm not their target audience. I'd much rather get an old console and fix it up, or say I'm going to and get it working enough to use, then just use it that way. I don't play the latest games usually. To me they're not worth the money. I'd rather play some $5 games that I'll get just as much fun out of. Nintendo can't survive on people like me likely. Other than selling random old games on some console online, for the convenience. Maybe they could survive on ensuring that people could play their games on all their old consoles, and giving them access to a centralized store. Or maybe they make more money screwing over people, killing their stores for different consoles, and making them buy all their old games on new consoles. Then acting like emulation is all piracy, when so many of us have given them hundreds or thousands of dollars. But it's never enough.

Oh well.

My opinion doesn't matter.