Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour costs £7.99, and for a while it does feel a bit like you’ve paid someone to show you their carefully alphabetised 5K completion medals. A big part of the tour is a stamp rally. You are a tiny little person moving through dioramas formed by massive versions of the Switch 2 hardware and its accessories, and whenever you reach a new feature – a button, a port – a little stamp station pops up and you collect the stamp.
I love stamps, me, but this can be a bit much. Last night, I was wandering over a huge model of the Switch 2‘s Joy-Con 2 Grip Controller, dutifully looking at rubber pads that allow things to slot together safely. I have had more fun with Nintendo products. I say that, but have I had a more Nintendo-like experience? We will return to this.
So, the stamp rally can be slightly enervating at times, particularly since you have to unlock all of an area’s stamps before you can move onto the next. I also wasn’t particularly taken with the quizzes, that offer a range of facts on specific parts of the new console and then test you on what you’ve just read. Despite some witty alternate answers, it’s exactly like the kind of eLearning that large companies make you do – even when you just work in filing – to ensure that you know not to accept jewels from foreign royalty.
As a rule, I would do anything to duck eLearning, and I remember being particularly annoyed at it when I detected that I was having a modicum of fun on the test section. It’s the same thing here. I’ll laugh at one of those witty alternate answers and feel like my brain has conspired against me.
However! Here is the weird thing. The longer I played Welcome Tour, the more I had to admit that I was having fun. Some of the mini-games that pop up to showcase the console’s new and old design elements are kind of great. For example, there seems to be great anxiety internally over whether people will understand the mouse controls for the Joy-Con controllers, so there are loads of opportunities to play with these things in every way. You guide a ball through an electrical maze in one game. Then you putt golf balls about in another, or duck spiked asteroids in yet another. Every area you move through has a handful of these things, and while a fair amount of them are duds, a bunch of them are kind of brilliant.
What I really enjoyed, though, more than the mini-games even, are the demonstrations, which are less game-like but still enormously playful. To test HDR, a concept I have struggled for years to understand, largely because I zone out whenever anyone mentions it, I got to trigger a bunch of fireworks and then pause as they sent constellations of sparks scattering across the sky. I could switch between HDR and, and whatever the opposite is (I still zoned out a bit) and it was kind of fascinating. Ditto the upscaling demo in which you look at an object in two different resolutions and can occasionally spot a UFO as it zips past. You can move the separating bar back and forth with the Joy-Con. It’s all lovely mindless fun.
But then things got a bit deeper, and I felt like I was actually learning something truly interesting. Not about the Switch 2 and its hardware directly – I still had to take the game’s final boss quiz about six times because I wasn’t really engaging with the details – but about the spirit of this weird company that makes such ingenious games and hardware – and that charges for something slightly indulgent like the Welcome Tour, which should probably have been a pack-in.
The instance of the fingerpost came with a demonstration about rumble, which the Switch 2 calls HD Rumble 2. In this demo, you have to mute the console and kill any background noise and then? And then you just listen to the rumble, and the game takes you through a bunch of different rumble speeds. Why? Because each speed plays a note at a different pitch. In the end, you can hear a Mario coin sound – you can probably hear it in your head just as I type those words, such is the brand power of this stuff – delivered purely with rumble.
Let’s linger a little here. Two things, I think. Firstly, this is the Nintendo difference, I reckon, that difference which can feel like it’s everywhere in a Nintendo game, but which can also feel hard to pin down. Other platform holders have made a fuss of rumble before – I remember for the Xbox One, Microsoft made people feel the trigger rumble without any visual feedback to tell the difference between a fireball, say, and a golf swing. But there is a moment with Nintendo when the company’s own curiosity seems to take over and a demonstration of rumble becomes a slightly child-like exploration of something’s potential – often its potential in seemingly irrelevant areas. Hey, this rumble’s making cool noises. Can we play it like an instrument? This kind of open-ended playfulness feels like it’s core to what Nintendo is doing a lot of the time.
And then there’s something else, which you might choose to call the Fantasia effect. There’s a moment in Disney’s Fantasia where Deems Taylor brings the soundtrack onto the centre of the screen – the actual visual soundtrack that lives on each piece of film – and explains that sound movies have this juddering, scribbly, twitchy line down one side of the image that contains all the audio. Then the orchestra plays, and this beautiful, Disney-animated line ripples with the improbable magic of sound, dialled up considerably, of course, forming puddles and doodles and fractals before diminishing to nothing. It’s this curiosity and wonder at how things work, at how things Disney has built itself works, that puts me in mind of Welcome Tour. It’s indulgence, sure, but it’s also wonder and pride and a need to tell everyone about how exciting the stuff you’ve just made is. (Even if you want to charge people to listen to you, granted. This is Disney and Nintendo after all.)
This brings me back to the stamp rally and my time pondering those rubber pads. Nintendo had clearly thought about the optimal place for these pads. The design teams had clearly realised something was needed here, but what? Pads? What kind and where? And now Nintendo wanted to tell everyone about it. Even in this stamp rally, then, there are moments of pride like this which are slightly intoxicating entirely because the things they’re exploring seem so insignificant or inane. There’s a moment later on when I was moving over the surface of a controller, and I realised that I could move down over the edge at one point but not at another, because the industrial design started as a gentle curve and then became sharped as it moved along, eventually becoming a little wall. You would only notice this if you were one centimeter tall and were walking over the actual surface of the controller. And I was!
What does this remind me of? Two things, I think. The first is that when I was a university student back in the mid-1990s, there was a really terrible dot matrix printer in one of the computer labs that could be relied upon to render any essays you printed in the streakiest, faintest, greasiest type possible, and would even tear the edges of the paper as it printed. This was the printer a bunch of us unfailingly went to in order to print out our essays – essays we’d often worked really hard on. Why? Because it was important to look like we hadn’t worked hard on them. It was important to look like we’d been accidentally brilliant, like we had created all this stuff without caring. Nothing, in the mid-nineties, was less cool than caring about your own work.
The Welcome Tour is the answer to that, not that I had considered it was a situation in need of an answer at the time. It’s a celebration of effort, of careful thought, and of the pride people feel when they put a rubber pad in just the right place, or put a curve on the edge of a controller just so. Maybe that is worth paying something for. I don’t know.
The other thing: when my friend first bought a Mega Drive back in the early 1990s, he spent hours just looking at it, at how beautiful it was, at how unusual its shape was, how sturdy its plastic was, how rounded its edges were, how lovely its type that read out 16-Bit or whatever was. He would lay on a couch and move it back and forth overheard, moving his eye in close until it became giant and otherworldly, until it felt a bit like the Starship Enterprise rumbling nobly into view. There’s a lot of that Starship Enterprise vibe to Welcome Tour. It’s a sustained act of looking.
And to wrap things up, that’s initially what I found so odd about all this. Part of me has always thought that Nintendo doesn’t really care about technology. The company’s made games that look like they’re made of paper and felt, and when it dabbled in VR it did it with cardboard. So it feels a bit weird to see Nintendo banging on about HDR and, in the later moments of the stamp rally, diving inside the Switch 2 console itself and letting you walk over its battery and its heat channels and all that jazz. It feels like Nintendo spends a lot of time pretending that this isn’t technology at all. It’s just imagination and playfulness.
But then it clicked. Nintendo cares about technology purely because of what it can do, not simply because it’s pursuing some cool envelope-pushing frontier. It likes the exploration side of it, even when that takes it away from the bleeding edge. Labo was a technology exploration, because someone had the inkling that cardboard might be an ideal material for stuff like VR and all kinds of weird console accessories. The famous withered tech ideas of Gunpei Yokoi were all about what forgotten, misunderstood tech could do – what it was capable of if you looked at it from the right angle. And so: rumble. Good for more than just making the controller shake. HDR: it makes fireworks look a little more fireworky. Dammit, I learned something after all.
Code for Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour was provided by Nintendo.
