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Time to switch Nintendo off?

Nintendo is a name synonymous with gaming.

The company goes back many years and has been the creator of outstandingly popular bits of hardware and the games to go with them.

Some of the most iconic games in history were created by Nintendo: Mario Cart, The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Brothers, Donkey Kong... the list seems endless.

Starting with the NES way back in the 1980s, Nintendo hardware has always been popular and became even moreso when portable gaming became a really practical thing.

The company has also been a strong innovator, with the Wii console breaking new ground in 2006 with its clever accelerometer-based motion controllers opening the doors to even more interesting game genres.

In recent years however, it's hand-held gaming hardware that has been the company's real focus.

The first hand-held devices from Nintendo were the "Game" and "Watch" consoles that launched in 1980 and were sold right through to the early 1990s. Although these enjoyed a level of success it wasn't until the iconic "Game Boy" was released in 1989 that the company really stamped its mark on this segment of the market.

About a decade after the Game Boy, with its tiny and rather low-contrast monochrome LCD screen, Nintendo released a significant upgrade in the form of the Game Boy Color. A couple of years later the Game Boy Advance saw a pretty major boost to CPU power with a new ARM processor and better graphics processing.

Since these early days, Nintendo has kept the hardware coming at a pretty consistent rate and, to their credit, usually provided a high degree of backwards compatibility with earlier game titles.

Also during this time, the company has been fiercely protective of its intellectual property rights and regularly goes after pirates or those who would dare to put ROM dumps of even its earliest games online for download. This is a major problem for those who enjoy "retro gaming" by running original Game Boy titles on modern hardware using emulators.

Despite this heavy policing, it's still possible to buy uber-cheap no-name hand-held gaming consoles loaded with hundreds or thousands of retro-games (including Nintendo titles) from places like AliExpress and they only cost a few tens of dollars.

This year, Nintendo launched the latest iteration of the Switch hand-held gaming console. Unsurprisingly this device is called the Switch 2 (who'd have thought?).

Offering a bigger screen than the original and a number of other advanced features, the Switch 2 has been an extremely popular device, despite the price. I guess loyal Nintendo fans will pay whatever the company demands to stay at the forefront of Nintendo gaming.

However, there's a dark side to this latest device.

I mentioned that Nintendo is almost paranoid in respect to protecting its IP rights and this seems to have driven them to take some really nasty steps to prevent users from fully owning their devices.

Clever code and hardware has now been included in the Switch 2 that effectively bricks the device when someone tries to circumvent the DRM. That's right, you don't "own" a Switch 2, you're simply buying the right to use it for as long as Nintendo choose to allow you to do so.

Even more worrying was this story where it's reported that Nintendo banned a Switch 2 owner simply because they purchased a game second-hand instead of through legitimate retail channels.

What? You can't play second-hand games on this thing without getting banned?

How over-zealous is that?

Fortunately, once you read past the click-bait headline, you'll find that once it was proven that the game in question was a legitimate version and not a copy, Nintendo lifted the ban -- however it does point to the insane sensitivity of the company to such things.

Perhaps a more worrying aspect of Nintendo's policies and attitudes is that anyone buying a Switch 2 second-hand will need to be absolutely sure that the device has not been bricked while attempting to jailbreak it (because that process is irreversible) and hasn't been banned from Nintendo's network. Failure to check such things first could result in you simply ending up with an expensive paperweight.

Fortunately, my interest in gaming waned many, many years ago so I don't see myself buying any Nintendo hardware or software at any time. I did spend a few days configuring a Raspberry Pi 5 as a retro gaming platform but even then, I lost interest a few days later.

Staying on top of the challenges that life throws at me is a big enough game right now so I don't need to spend any more time than necessary in front of a glowing LCD panel, no matter how large (like the TV in the living room) or small (as with a smartphone or hand-held gaming console).

Carpe Diem folks!

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