A few weeks ago while heading to Wisconsin I strolled into a Target on Nintendo Switch 2 launch day, an hour after opening, and snagged a Switch 2 with Mario Kart World. It seemed liked there was a steady stream of buyers. As soon as someone checked out another would arrive but there wasn’t really a line, per se.

I gave up on getting a Switch 2 (at least immediately) after failing to secure one during preorders. But I was keen on replaying Zelda Breath of the Wild in 4K after seeing so many YouTube videos showing how good it looked.

This began a quest involving Mac gaming, OLED monitors, and finding the zen of console gaming.

I got Breath of the Wild working using CEMU on my Mac mini running at 5K resolution 60 frames per second and it looked fantastic. My Mac was humming along without even kicking on the fan and the quality was unreal. Apple’s display is not ideal for gaming so I started looking into some fancy OLED 4K monitors. After tinkering a bit I got the game running at 4K 240 frames per second and it was glorious. It was like I was seeing Hyrule for the first time, just absolutely stunning. I settled in and decided I’m gonna replay Breath of the Wild over the next 6 months on my Mac.

But this came with downsides like:

  • Stutters from shader caching
  • Annoyances with button mapping and connecting my controller
  • Small thing: but the clicks to open CEMU, pick Zelda, get to fullscreen.
  • Figuring out how to transfer my save file if I wanted to put it on our MacBook Air to play away from my desk (I tried the built in macOS Screen Sharing but no dice. It doesn’t support controller input and neither does Moonlight for macOS.)

These are definitely the first-est of first-world problems, no doubt. But they’re friction and time-consuming and when you have limited gaming time (because you have a 1-year-old kid) it adds up.

So now I have my surprise Switch 2 and I happily paid $10 to upgrade to the Switch 2 Edition. After some difficulty downloading (hotel Wi-Fi is crap. Bring an ethernet cable, kids. Shoutout to the concierge who dug through the back office to find me one) I was ripping through Hyrule and it was stunning. It’s not as high-fidelity as it was on my Mac mini set up but there’s zero of those friction points. I can even switch (ha!) to handheld mode and take it on the go. That’s the joy of console gaming, especially with Nintendo where it’s plug-and-play and system updates take 30 seconds instead of 30 minutes.

My last anecdote with the Switch 2 is our first night with it: we were trapped in a hotel room with a kid who goes to bed at 7 PM. We sat on the opposite end from where the kid was asleep and we put the Switch 2 in table top mode. My wife and I each had a Joy-Con and we had a blast playing a few rounds of Grand Prix in Mario Kart World before heading to bed. (It wouldn’t be until the next week that I discovered the sheer delight of Knockout mode.)

This post is really just here to say, and it’s gonna sound dumb: I like when gaming is fun. You hit a button and the Switch wakes up and you’re right back to getting blown to bits by a Guardian or sprinting away from a Lynel. Nintendo just makes it so nice to play games and I’m excited for the Switch 2 era to kick off.