There comes a time when all consoles must make that final journey to the Grey Havens. Sometimes the Havens are the loft. Other times they’re eBay or the eager clutches of a younger sibling. That’s the idea, anyway. There’s something new on the way. One in, one out.
I’m not certain this holds true for handhelds, mind. Handhelds fit into life much more elegantly and more personably, and so they have elegant and personable ways of hanging around. I don’t know how many stacks of old bills and loose papers in my house are weighted down by vintage Game Boys, for example. (Okay, I do. It’s two stacks. But that’s still quite a lot really.) And there’s the DS by the coffee table, that is somehow always charged and ready for Code Name STEAM. (Just me?)
So what about the Switch? Will it stick around or not? Like a lot of people, I suspect, I have a Royal Mail tracker page already open on a tab somewhere and I check it about a dozen times an hour – Switch 2 has definitely been ordered. Will it actually dispatch? But while I wait, I still play the Switch, and it still, for some reason, feels kind of new to me.
And I recently bought a new game for it. Probably the last new game I buy for it? Who knows. Fittingly, it’s a new old game. It’s Burnout Paradise. I think this is probably one of the greatest games ever made, there was also a sale on, and I was just eager to see a classic in a new form. I’ve been playing Burnout as a potential farewell to Switch, then. And it’s been an ideal send off.