Interesting, but not necessarily appealing. That’s a description you could use for just about every piece of Nintendo hardware that’s been released in the last decade, and it looks like the Nintendo NX won’t be any different. At least, that’s what I can gather from a recent report from Eurogamer, which claims that Nintendo’s next console will be a handheld console that can be plugged-in to a dock that connects it to your television, therefore turning it into a normal console. It seems like Nintendo might be stretching the NX a bit too thin by trying to do too many things at once, but I guess we’ll have to wait until the console actually releases to know for sure.
Nintendo’s upcoming NX will be a portable, handheld console with detachable controllers, a number of sources have confirmed to Eurogamer. On the move, NX will function as a high-powered handheld console with its own display. So far so normal – but here’s the twist: we’ve heard the screen is bookended by two controller sections on either side, which can be attached or detached as required. Then, when you get home, the system can connect to your TV for gaming on the big screen. A base unit, or dock station, is used to connect the brain of the NX – within the controller – to display on your TV. For more on the console’s power, Digital Foundry has a deep-dive look at the chip Nintendo has chosen as the centrepiece of NX, according to numerous well-placed sources: Nvidia’s powerful Tegra mobile processor. NX will use game cartridges as its choice of physical media, multiple sources have also told us. Considering NX’s basis as a handheld first and foremost, the choice may not come as too much of a surprise – although we have heard the suggestion Nintendo recommends a 32GB cartridge, which is small when considering the size of many modern games. Naturally, we expect digital game downloads will also be available. We were told Nintendo considered but then decided against making a system which supported digital downloads only.
