Entertainment

Games: The future of Nintendo is in your hands

Nintendo's 1980's favourite Game & Watch kickstarted the Japanese giant's love of hand-held gaming
Nintendo's 1980's favourite Game & Watch kickstarted the Japanese giant's love of hand-held gaming Nintendo's 1980's favourite Game & Watch kickstarted the Japanese giant's love of hand-held gaming

FOLLOWING months of speculation, details about Nintendo's eagerly awaited next console have finally emerged.

Playing to the company's hand-held strengths, the NX will be a portable console bookended by two detachable controllers – and while designed for gaming on the go, it will also plug into your telly for traditional couch-based fun.

Ever since their early '80s favourite Game & Watch, the Japanese giant has always been a market leader in hand-held gaming – and, as Pokemon Go, has proven, the public appetite for mobile Nintendo properties has never been bigger.

Nintendo has released four new systems in the last 12 years, each preferring gimmicks to competition-trumping power, so it comes as no surprise to see the NX continuing the company's withdrawal from the Sony-Microsoft struggle.

Harking back to their '80s heyday, Nintendo are even opting for cartridges as the NX medium of choice.

While download-era technophiles may deride the old-school format, it’s actually a canny choice, with flash memory now cheap as chips, offering nippy loading times and leaving your hard drive unsullied.

Powered by Nvidia's Tegra mobile chipset, the NX won’t match the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One for grunt, but rather than get into a technological arms race with Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo is instead playing to their portable pedigree – one which has seen the market-leading 3DS brand keep the company afloat in recent fallow years.

By choosing the road less travelled, the NX is unlikely to attract major franchises from third-party publishers, instead relying on Nintendo's in-house cash-cows.

There are four games confirmed so far – Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Dragon Quest X, Dragon Quest XI, and a new Just Dance from Ubisoft, though the French publisher has revealed they have “other surprises” in store for the new hand-held.

Rumours abound, however, of Wii U hits such as Splatoon and Smash Bros getting the NX treatment, and with the likes of Pokemon and Animal Crossing sharing screen time with Mario, Metroid and Zelda, the NX is unlikely to be software starved.

Combining home and portable gaming has been Nintendo's fevered dream ever since the Link Cable connected the GameCube and Game Boy Advance in 2002.

The NX will finally see the company consolidate their console and hand-held wings – if it delivers on the company's design genius (second only to Apple in the tech game) and at the right price, it could well become everyone's favourite 'other' console.

The NX will be officially unveiled in September, with a global launch in March 2017.