Nin­ten­do has announced their next con­sole. Titled the “Switch”, Nin­ten­do looks to cater to all types of gamers, Portable, Con­sole, Hard­core and Casu­al gamers may all find one aspect of the Switch that they must have in their gam­ing lives. Here is a run­down of what you need to know about The Switch.

What is The Switch? What Does It Look Like?

The Switch is Nin­ten­do’s 7th gen­er­a­tion Home Con­sole. The sys­tem itself is being mar­ket­ed as a “Hybrid” con­sole, being playable from pret­ty much anywhere.

The con­troller con­sist of a tablet, sim­i­lar to the Wii U with 2 “Joy-Con” Con­trollers that attach to each side of the tablet. The tablet sits in a dock that con­nects to the TV/Monitor allow­ing tra­di­tion­al con­sole game play. The Tablet can be removed from the dock and the “Joy-Con” Con­trollers attached to the tablet allows the user to take their game ses­sion anywhere.

The Controller:

The Switch uses a con­troller Col­lec­tive­ly named “Joy-Con”, Indi­vid­u­al­ly Joy-Con L and Joy-Con R. They are attached to the tablet them­selves via side rails on the tablet. Each can be used in a sep­a­rate hand like the Wii-Mote and Nunchuck. The Sys­tem Sup­ports up to 8 Joy-Con Con­trollers to be used at once. Joy-Con fea­tures “HD Rum­ble” to pro­vide tac­tile feed­back to the play­er. Nin­ten­do claims this new rum­ble sys­tem can sim­u­late ice bounc­ing around in a glass includ­ing the indi­vid­ual num­ber of ice cubes and fill­ing the glass with water. Joy-Con R fea­tures and NFC read­er, mak­ing The Switch com­pat­i­ble with Nin­ten­do’s line of Ami­i­bo fig­ures. Joy-Con L fea­tures a but­ton ded­i­cat­ed to tak­ing screen­shots and lat­er, record­ing game play, Sim­i­lar to the Playsta­tion 4 and Xbox One.

The Specs:

The Nin­ten­do Switch is a strange new con­cept for a con­sole, not quite hand­held, not quite a tra­di­tion­al home con­sole. Its specs show it being less pow­er­ful than the PS4 and Xbox One. It plays most of the games announced at 30 fps and between 720–900p, but Nin­ten­do has nev­er been one to rely on super pow­er­ful hard­ware, instead focus­ing on new ways to play the games you love. It’s eas­i­er to think of The Switch as an Nvidia shield when it comes to performance. 

The Switch uses a cus­tom sys­tem-on-chip from the Nvidia Tegra fam­i­ly of prod­ucts. No spe­cif­ic details were revealed beyond that it is “based on the same archi­tec­ture as the world’s top-per­form­ing GeForce gam­ing graph­ics cards”, and has a cus­tom API known as “NVN”, which is designed to “bring light­weight, fast gam­ing to the masses”.

Don’t expect ground-break­ing graph­ics to come from The Switch and you won’t be dis­ap­point­ed. Each sys­tem fea­tures 802.11ac Wifi con­nec­tions and each dock fea­tures a stan­dard eth­er­net port for wired net­work­ing while docked. 

The Switch ships with 32gb of mem­o­ry and is expand­able with SDHC cards.

Its Games Come On Cartridges!? 

The Switch’s soft­ware comes on Nin­ten­do DS type cards, but small­er and thin­ner. The Switch is also region free, mean­ing that all Switch own­ers can play any Switch game or DLC from any coun­try regard­less of where they pur­chased their console.

Does It Support Online Play?

The Switch will have an online net­work for mul­ti­play­er games, but like Playsta­tion and Xbox it will require a fee to use the ser­vices to play mul­ti­play­er games. The Switch net­work will not fea­ture a social sys­tem like Miiverse or Street­Pass and will instead rely on oth­er social appli­ca­tions and games to han­dle the social aspects of the net­work. Nin­ten­do will release a smart­phone app allow­ing you to down­load games to your Switch and man­age your net­work account and mes­sages while away from your console.

Will It Have Games?

The Wii U strug­gled to attract devel­op­ers, which caused the con­sole to strug­gle with the con­sumer. Nin­ten­do announced that 48 devel­op­ers were cur­rent­ly devel­op­ing titles for The Switch.

Here’s the full list of devel­op­ers cur­rent­ly mak­ing Switch games:

• 505 Games
• Activi­sion Pub­lish­ing, Inc.
• ARC SYSTEM WORKS Co., Ltd.
• ATLUS CO., LTD.
• Audio­ki­net­ic Inc.
• Autodesk, Inc.
• BANDAI NAMCO Enter­tain­ment Inc.
• Bethes­da
• CAPCOM CO., LTD.
• Code­mas­ters®
• CRI Mid­dle­ware Co., Ltd.
• DeNA Co., Ltd.
• Elec­tron­ic Arts
• Epic Games Inc.
• Fire­light Technologies
• From­Soft­ware, Inc.
• Frozen­byte
• GameTrust
• GRASSHOPPER MANUFACTURE INC.
• Gung­ho Online Enter­tain­ment, Inc.
• HAMSTER Cor­po­ra­tion
• Havok
• INTI CREATES CO., LTD.
• KOEI TECMO GAMES CO., LTD.
• Kon­a­mi Dig­i­tal Enter­tain­ment Co., Ltd.
• LEVEL‑5 Inc.
• Mar­velous Inc.
• Max­i­mum Games, LLC
• Nip­pon Ichi Soft­ware, Inc.
• Par­i­ty Bit Inc.
• Plat­inumGames Inc.
• RAD Game Tools, Inc.
• Reco­Choku Co., Ltd.
• SEGA Games Co., Ltd.
• Sil­i­con Stu­dio Corporation
• Spike Chun­soft Co., Ltd.
• SQUARE ENIX CO., LTD.
• Star­breeze Studios
• Take-Two Inter­ac­tive Soft­ware, Inc.
• Tell­tale Games
• THQ Nordic
• Tokyo RPG Fac­to­ry Co., Ltd.
• TT Games
• UBISOFT
• Ubi­tus Inc.
• Uni­ty Tech­nolo­gies, Inc.
• Warn­er Bros. Inter­ac­tive Entertainment
• Web Tech­nol­o­gy Corp

How Much Is It? When Can I Get It?

The Switch launch­es World­wide March 3 2017. The Switch starts at $299 usd. You can pre­order now

Will you be get­ting The Switch? Let us know Below!!