The Problems with Every Nintendo Console

Or "why I'm very concerned about the viability of the Switch 2."

Nintendo used to take risks. Sometimes it paid off. Sometimes they landed flat on their face. This is a story about the latter and why I think the Switch 2 might also fail.

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Nintendo makes great games, but their track record when it comes to hardware? Well, it would be generous to call it a mixed bag.

This article isn't going to be a lament about slow or outdated hardware. Nah. I believe that the preoccupation with specifications and performance numbers is an advertising-borne mental sickness.

Instead, I believe that consoles and PCs should be judged on their merits as a complete unit first and foremost (and their mod-ability a close second).

That's why I'm writing this article. I'm diving, head-long into the most egregious issues with Nintendo's systems. I'm going to order this list chronologically where we'll cover mainline consoles and we will touch on hardware revisions when relevant.

So let's get into this list!

1985 - The Nintendo Entertainment System

The Nintendo Entertainment System - By Evan-Amos - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11408831 — The NES with its signature, rectangular, anti-human controller.

The Nintendo Entertainment System, the NES, or the Original Nintendo as we called it back in the day... Nintendo's first true home console.

This was the first console I ever played. It was incredible. I remember sitting on the floor at my friend Caleb's house. We played Super Mario Bros 3 on his family's CRT. It was like playing a cartoon.

But before we could actually get the game to work, we had to blow into the cartridge to "clean the game."

A GIF of blowing into an NES cartridge — Don't do this.

It's common knowledge nowadays that you should not blow into the cartridge since the humidity from your breath and any particulates that might accompany it will only serve to make the situation worse.

A GIF of loading a cartridge into an NES — You can hear the pins screaming from here...

Despite playground wisdom blaming a dirty cartridge, that usually wasn't the actual problem. It was the fundamental flaw in the design of the cartridge loading mechanism.

When you'd load a game into your console and press it down, you'd end up bending the pins on the motherboard. Eventually you'd deform the pins to such a point that they'd no longer reliably make contact with the cartridge. And if the CIC Security Chip on the motherboard couldn't communicate with the cartridge, you'd get the notorious blinking red light.

This blinking red light actually was because the CIC chip was resetting the machine because it couldn't talk to the cartridge. — This blinking light was caused by the CIC chip resetting the machine over and over again because it couldn't talk to the cartridge.

Nintendo's very first mass-market system and they're already off to a bad start. This doesn't bode well for the next 35 years... [ominous musical sting]

Flaws:

The loading mechanism destroyed the cartridge contacts.

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