What about the balance board? Does this update in the way the system can be used make the Wii a Gen 8 system?

Where do you draw the line?

Then you wouldnt mind explaining what the "hybrid" functionality is, would you?

And I'll say it again, both handhelds and home consoles are equally allowed to offer tv-play without changing their definition.

Adding that functionality to a handheld doesnt make it a hybrid.

Ray Tracing and SSD's is the technological definer for next-gen.

As for the Audio... We had 3D positional audio years ago... Aureal A3D comes to mind.
Then the industry went backwards for a few decades.

Anyone that calls the Switch "first gen hybrid" because it's portable and connects to a TV needs to look at the Sega Nomad. It was a portable, connected to a TV, allowed multiple controllers, etc.

Switch does this better than anything before or on the market in 2017 but it wasn't the first to have the concept.

Wii launched in 2006, same as the PS3, and the XB went a year before 2005.
Supposedly it had a GPU that was ~12 Gflops , compaired to the PS3's 218, and the Xbox360's 240.
So it was slower by a factor of 18 to 20 times the other consoles.

Did this show? well you could aruge that alot of multiplats (games of that gen) never made its way to the Wii.
Was there a graphical differnce between overall games of the generation between the consoles? ei. graphics.
Yes there was.

Did games play differntly?
Yes, but that was mostly down to the Wii motes (by design nintendo went to haveing theirs play differntly).
However yes, there were alot of games that just couldnt run on the wii.

If today you go lookup compairsion videos by Wii vs PS3/Xb360, do you know what you find?

Wii U vs PS3/XB360 videos.

Ei. you couldnt really compaire the wii to the ps3/xb360.

Wii was basically like the switch, a half gen type jump, not a full one.
It shows in the power of the device and the games. The fact that Wii U came so late, but got ports of PS3/Xb360 games, so you can actually start compaireing the games running on a nintendo device, also speak towards this fact.

Does that answear that question?

Nintendo basically dont fit the generations tagline anymore.
They dont care about competeing with technology or specs, or even release cycles.
Nintendo are their own generations, no longer belonging to the overall generation picture.


The differnce in performance, between the Switch and PS5/XSX, is actually worse than the Wii vs PS3/XB360.
That surprised me abit.

Yeah, guys. Keep coming with these arbitrary labeling and have a huge messed timeline. You are all so right

How many games used it on consoles?

A quick google search of "Aureal A3D games", and all I see pop up is a old video of half-life on a pc, with a fanmade mod, that uses it.
It sounds horrible.... ei. badly used.

I think this new level of audio (if game devs use it) should make for a very noticeable differnt between this gen, and older ones (atleast in audio quality).

The WiiU started the concept of hybrid play and brought two screen gameplay for their 8th gen console.  It was a colossal failure and was handled all wrong, but it still brought its own thing to the table.

The Switch is a hybrid because it changes its internal function on a hardware level pending on being docked or undocked.  It is not simply a handheld that outputs to a TV because what is output to the TV cannot be done in handheld mode.  The clock speeds change, the screen is enabled/disabled, the cooling system compensates, and the games literally perform differently based on portable or TV play.  Some games are even night and day when ot comes to visual fidelity between the two modes.

Not to mention there are games such as Super Mario Party, Ring Fit Adventure, and any Labo set that cannot be played in portable mode.  They are exclusive to the CONSOLE function of the Switch.

With the device changing its functions on a hardware level as well as games that can only be played in console mode, I don't see how it can be called anything other than a hybrid (which again is what it brings to the table for gen 9).

Yes easier to accept that nintendo do their own cycle.
And their apart in terms of release dates of hardware, and the power/capabilities of systems, so they no longer fit the overall "generations of consoles" debate.

Or maybe accept that generations are not about power and specs but the TIME that one of the big 3 release a successor.

Being apart a few years of the next Sony/MS console release doesn't cancel Nintendo's beginning on a new gen. Different gens can coexist for a certain amount of time you know... That's why PS4 and X1 won't stop existing once their successors come out

You can't just ignore a big console manufacturer company and say that they don't belong to any generation of the gaming history

No, generations are about time, and specs, and games of that gen.

What your talking about, is just a release number.
Switch is the 9th nintendo console, so its 9th gen.
Thats a release number.

a generation is a "whole" picture of consoles, that release around the same time, with the sameish specs, that play the sameish games.
(as it is with other "generations" when you use that word, applying to other things than consoles)

A console can also excist that isnt part of the "generation" narrative, because its too far apart from anything relateing to the word generation.
9th gen will be about SSDs, 3D audio, Hardware Raytraceing. The specs.
The time? well the Switch is likely to spend half or more of its life comepeteing against the PS4/Xb1.

Its not 9th gen.


Think back to 8bit games, and 16bit games, and the generations of those times.
Graphics were a bit part of it.

There will be a generation differnce, in such between the PS5/XSX vs Switch.
(switch will look and play, last gen, compaired to next gen)  (Halo Infinate is not representative of next gen)