Enlarge / A selection of Nintendo consoles that can not play software designed for the previous Nintendo console... (credit: Getty Images)

As we've gotten further from the Switch's early 2017 release, there has been a lot of chatter and speculation about the system's inevitable successor. And among Switch owners, there's plenty of concern over whether an upcoming "Switch 2" will be backward compatible with the thousands of games already available on the current Switch.

For now, Nintendo is remaining frustratingly vague on that key question. In an investor Q&A (partially translated by Twitter user Cheesemeister ), Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa said that "while our company is always considering various specs for future hardware, I will refrain from making specific comments about future hardware here... Our company wants to continue offering unique ways to play with its integrated hardware and software business, so please look forward to it."

It's hard to read too much into that non-answer, considering that Nintendo hasn't formally announced any details about its next console hardware yet. Later in that same Q&A, though, Furukawa noted that "as for the transition from Nintendo Switch to the next-generation machine, we want to do as much as possible in order to smoothly transition our customers, while utilizing the Nintendo Account."

Enlarge / Tools with great potential often require great effort to unlock. In Zelda games, that usually means a number of Heart Containers. In the emulation underground, you need title keys, shader caches, hotfixes, and a willingness to download from some sketchy sites. (credit: Nintendo/YouTube)

Perhaps woken by news of its next premier first-party title already looking really impressive on emulators , Nintendo has moved to take down key tools for emulating and unlocking Switch consoles, including one that lets Switch owners grab keys from their own device.

Simon Aarons maintained a forked repository of Lockpick , a tool (along with Lockpick_RCM ) that grabbed the encryption keys from a Nintendo Switch and allowed it to run officially licensed games. Aarons tweeted on Thursday night that Nintendo had issued DMCA takedown requests to GitHub, asking Lockpick, Lockpick_RCM, and nearly 80 forks and derivations to be taken down under section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act , which largely makes illegal the circumvention of technological protection measures that safeguard copyrighted material.

Nintendo's takedown request (RTF file) notes that the Switch contains "multiple technological protection measures" that allow the Switch to play only "legitimate Nintendo video game files." Lockpick tools, combined with a modified Switch, let users grab the cryptographic keys from their own Switch and use them on "systems without Nintendo's Console TPMs" to play "pirated versions of Nintendo's copyright-protected game software." GitHub typically allows repositories with DMCA strikes filed against them to remain open while their maintainers argue their case.

Enlarge / If the Xbox 360 could handle Call of Duty 2 , then the Switch could handle a scaled-down modern CoD port, right? (credit: Activision)

Since their surprise December announcement of a 10-year deal to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo consoles, Microsoft and Activision have expressed confidence that the Switch hardware can handle their popular shooter series. But that confidence didn't convince the UK government, which says that it has "seen no evidence to suggest that [Nintendo] consoles would be technically capable of running a version of CoD that is similar to those in Xbox and PlayStation in terms of quality of gameplay and content."

That blunt assessment is just a minor part of the Competition and Markets Authority's sprawling, 418-page final report on Microsoft's proposed Activision purchase. That report blocked the proposed merger over concerns surrounding the cloud gaming market, but when it comes to judging Microsoft's console competition, the government body clearly considers the Switch in a class by itself.

"Overall, the evidence shows that the product characteristics of Nintendo Switch are significantly different from those of Xbox and PlayStation, including its technical specifications, capability to host graphically intensive games and prices," the CMA writes. "Xbox and PlayStation are more similar in this respect."

Enlarge (credit: ustwo)

The studio behind Monument Valley , one of the best mobile games ever made , made a Netflix-required mobile game in 2022 that you almost certainly didn't play, let alone see. Desta: The Memories Between is now out on PC and Nintendo Switch , and I highly recommend you seek it out if you lean toward coming-of-age stories, turn-based strategy, dreamlike surreality, or nailing someone in the face with a perfectly angled ball.

Desta is a college-age British youth who's anxious about returning home to a widowed mother, friends left behind, memories of their late father, and a lot of unresolved feelings. You guide Desta through anxious dreams that are, very conveniently, expressed as grid-based, turn-by-turn dodgeball fights. Can you resolve the guilt of falling out of touch with your best friend from high school by pulling off the perfect bank shot off their dome, catching the ball on the rebound, then hitting them again? In Desta , you can, and I swear it works.

It helps that developer ustwo brings all its powers to bear on Desta 's dreamy visuals, evocative soundtrack, and wonderful spoken dialogue. You could ignore the narrative if you wanted to get straight to the increasingly complicated battlefields—the story bits are short and direct and easy to skip. But I'd bet that you'll get pulled in.

Enlarge / Enough taking in majestic beauty, it's time to build! (credit: Nintendo)

For decades, solving puzzles and figuring out how to advance in Zelda games followed a well-established pattern. You'd hunt around a dungeon for a key item, use that item to get around some obstacle and/or beat a new boss, then explore the overworld until you found an area that was newly accessible with your shiny new item.

It's been over six years since Breath of the Wild turned that basic design on its head . Traversal abilities like climbing and floating made it much easier to carve your own path through the game's wide open world, to the point where players can technically run to the final boss after completing the tutorial area . The game's early introduction of Link's magical new abilities has also led players to craft some incredibly inventive and unintended solutions to the game's shrine puzzles and combat challenges.

After spending an hour or so playing a near-final build of Tears of the Kingdom , it seems clear that the newest Zelda sequel is determined to go even further in letting players craft their own creative solutions to the game's challenges. In doing so, though, the game seems to have gotten even further from the basic Zelda gameplay loop that served the series so well for so long.

Enlarge / How long until these Joy-Cons experience the dreaded "drift"? (credit: Mark Walton + Sebastian's hands)

Nintendo has agreed to offer free lifetime repairs of Nintendo Switch controllers experiencing the dreaded "Joy-Con drift" to consumers across the European Union.

The move comes in response to years of organized complaints and a pressure campaign from the European Consumer Organization (BEUC). In a 2021 report , that organization logged "nearly 25,000 complaints" from European Switch owners regarding Joy-Con drift, which causes a Switch joystick to register phantom inputs even when it is untouched in the "neutral" position. The BEUC's formal complaint cited the Joy-Con hardware for "premature obsolescence" and said that it's "high time for companies to stop putting products onto the market that break too early."

"Nintendo takes great pride in creating high-quality and durable products and is continuously making improvements to them," the company wrote in a note recently posted on its UK support page (as first noticed by Nintendo Life ). "Therefore and until further notice, Nintendo offers to consumers who purchased the respective product in the [European Economic Area], UK, and Switzerland that repairs for responsiveness syndrome relating to control sticks will be conducted at no charge by official Nintendo repair centres."

For a major game that was first announced nearly four years ago and is set to launch in less than two months , we've seen remarkably little gameplay footage from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom beyond some very sparse trailers . Nintendo set out to partially fix that today, releasing a new video in which Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma showed off some of Link's new abilities in a guided 10-minute gameplay presentation.

The most impactful new ability on display was called "Fuse," which lets Link put together two disparate objects to create a new one with a brand-new effect. In the simplest example of this, Aonuma fused together a basic tree branch (which breaks incredibly easily even during simple fights) with a rock, creating a makeshift hammer with a lot more power and durability.

Tree branch + boulder = makeshift hammer. (credit: Nintendo )

Unlike in Breath of the Wild , where Link had to hunt for the most powerful weapons, the focus here will be on creating those weapons from component parts, Aonuma said. Fusing a long stick with a pitchfork can give you a longer attack range, for instance, and fusing various materials to arrows can create useful side-effects like freezing powers or a homing capability.

Enlarge / The big old question mark just got a lot bigger... (credit: Nintendo )

As the Nintendo Switch approaches the sixth anniversary of its launch, Nintendo has been extremely coy about the prospects for a true successor to the console (no, the Switch OLED doesn’t count). This week, though, a stray redaction in a government document regarding the proposed Microsoft/Activision merger has some industry watchers speculating that the announcement of a Switch successor could be coming in the near future.

All that speculation focuses on a single line buried in 43 sprawling pages of appendices in a report from the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, which recently came down against Microsoft's planned acquisition of Activision . In discussing services that could plausibly compete with the cloud-gaming features of Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass, the appendix notes that Nintendo Switch Online "is only available on the Nintendo Switch device and [redacted]."

That telltale "and" is interesting, of course, because Nintendo Switch Online is currently only available on the Nintendo Switch (as the name implies). The CMA redaction following that "and" could easily describe a forthcoming console that Nintendo doesn't want formally announced via a regulatory filing (e.g., "...available on the Nintendo Switch device and [another console Nintendo is currently developing]").