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.
For real it has. Burnout works beautifully on the Switch. It’s relentless, but I also know this game so well I’m happy to play it lying down, lying back, propped on a few pillows or the edge of a sofa. Renderware makes the whole thing very readable on a smallish screen, too. The game has a funny thing where the image is always surprisingly dark – or rather the shadows are dark and the light is blinding, tainted a slightly alien green. That works pretty nicely on Switch, because I can always make out what’s going on, even when it’s going on very quickly.
It’s nice to say goodbye like this, at incredible high speeds, moving through familiar streets and showering them with sparks. It’s nice to tick off time until the Switch 2 arrives with how many crash gates I’ve destroyed and how many billboards I’ve ripped through. It’s nice to capture that twin nature of both the Switch and Burnout Paradise: they’re both incredibly unusual things, and yet they both now feel so warmly smoothed-out and familiar to me. They feel like part of the family.
So why say goodbye in silence and in stilted settings with small gestures and sad hearts? Why not say it at a million miles an hour, seconds away from wrapping yourself around a central reservation? Speaking of collisions, I had been told by someone that the Switch can’t really handle Paradise, that the faster you go the more the image degrades to keep the frame-rate constant. How weirdly perfect. It feels like I’m driving so fast reality is coming apart. And once it’s come apart, what next? A new console, and a new reality.