Close to the Metal Ep. 26: Nintendo Switch fills a gap in PC gaming

By Brad Bourque January 18, 2017

Love it or hate it, Nintendo is back with another console, and a loyal army of enthusiasts is once again clamoring for hands-on time with the form factor-shifting Switch. Among that crowd are PC gaming enthusiasts, and for good reason — Nintendo consoles have always filled a role that other consoles couldn’t, with a raft of exclusive titles across every genre, unmatched portability, and an intuitive design that encourages sharing and couch multiplayer.

The Mario franchise alone starts with platformers, and spreads out to everything from go-kart racing to the Olympic games, plus a number of successful RPG sagas that stretch back to the early days of Nintendo’s video game era. Add to that the incredibly successful Legend of Zelda titles and a library of Pokemon games, and you have a selection of exclusive titles that aren’t available anywhere else. On the other hand, Nintendo’s titles are divisive — either you love them, or you don’t care.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming

Hardware is another story. Nintendo’s mobile devices have always packed in top-notch battery life and unique form factors for on-the-go play. Having enough power while on the go is one of the toughest pieces of designing and manufacturing a gaming laptop, and few get it quite right. Sure, you can stream games in your own home, but on a long plane ride, a 3DS is the right choice.

Nintendo’s systems also fill a gap in the living room that computers are only beginning to explore. Games like Mario Kart and Wii Sports were so easy to pick up and play, they require almost no explanation, but their skill cap is higher than you’d imagine for such a simple game.

On this episode of Close to the Metal, we’ll talk all things Nintendo and PC gaming, from console exclusives to classic emulation, and everything in between.

Close to the Metal is a podcast from Digital Trends that focuses on the geekier side of life. It tackles the topics PC enthusiasts argue over in language everyone can understand. Please subscribe, share, and send your questions to podcast@digitaltrends.com. We broadcast the show live on YouTube every Tuesday at 1pm EST/10am PST.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Brad Bourque is a native Portlander, devout nerd, and craft beer enthusiast. He studied creative writing at Willamette…

Computing

Hurry! This Alienware gaming PC with an RTX 4090 is $800 off

Alienware Aurora R15 placed at an angle on a table.

Gamers who are on the hunt for a powerful gaming PC should consider going for the Alienware Aurora R15, especially with Dell's $800 discount for this model featuring the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card. From its original price of $3,900, it's down to $3,100 -- it still isn't cheap, but it's a reasonable price for a gaming desktop that will be able to handle even the most demanding settings. You need to hurry with your purchase if you're interested though, because we're not sure if the savings will still be available if you delay the transaction to tomorrow.

Why you should buy the Alienware Aurora R15 gaming PC
While its successor, the Alienware Aurora R16, is already out, the Alienware Aurora R15 remains one of the best gaming PCs that you can buy today. This particular build of the gaming desktop, which combines the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card with the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X processor and 32GB of RAM, is capable of running the best PC games without any issues. It's also well-equipped to handle the upcoming PC games of the next few years, so you don't need to think about upgrading any components within the near future.

Computing

How buying the wrong gaming PC can go horribly wrong

A gaming PC on a carpeted floor.

We all have that one PC horror story. Maybe you can laugh about it now, or maybe it's just a lesson learned, but it probably wasn't all too funny at the time when everything broke down.

I have plenty of stories like that, but a few of the worst ones that come to mind are all related to prebuilt PCs. Here are some of the prebuilt disasters I've seen over the years, and what to look out for if you're trying to buy a desktop PC.
It's better to be patient
I'm no custom PC snob, or at least I try not to be, but that doesn't stop me from warning the people in my life when they decide to buy a prebuilt. This is because buying a good prebuilt PC is not as easy as just walking into a store and picking out the first thing that looks decent enough. Much like PC building, buying prebuilts requires a fair bit of research for things to end well.

Computing

This new GPU feature is ‘a whole new paradigm’ for PC gaming

RX 7900 XTX slotted into a test bench.

Microsoft has released its Agility SDK 1.613.0, which features some critical components that will be shown to developers at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco next week. The most interesting component is Work Graphs, which Microsoft describes as "a whole new paradigm" for graphics cards.

Work Graphs enable GPU-driven work. Normally when you're playing a PC game, there's a relationship between your GPU and CPU. Your CPU gets work ready and sends it to your GPU, and then your GPU executes that work. Work Graphs is an approach that allows your GPU to schedule and execute its own tasks, which has some massive implications for performance.