As the unofficial mascot of 8-4Play as well as one of the 5 regular listeners, I'm deeply offended that you forgot my name. It's fine though; I haven't lost any respect for Mark, Roy, Sarah, Graham, or G.G.
Anyway, on Switch: I personally was not blown away nor was I swayed to buy one upon release. I'm at the point where I think buying every 2nd Nintendo console is a pretty good way to go about things. I skipped GCN and played all those exclusives on the Wii. I skipped the Wii U and was hoping to play those games on the Switch, but it looks like that won't be a thing either, making it even less appealing for me out the gate.
The portability thing doesn't do it for me either. I don't want to play Zelda nor Mario on a bus and my laptop can play Civilization so I'm good for travel.
The only way I can see the Switch winning cool points in my eyes is if they finally do right on merging their 'virtual console' with their online infrastructure. Especially if it's going to be a paid subscription this time around, I expect there to be really cool monthly incentives to go back and play the old games.
For example, what if Ice Hockey was free for a month, there was online play, and we had the ability to compare our Win/Loss records with our friends/city/country/world? What if Metroid was free for a month and the online service kept track of your friends stats (who was fastest to get to Kraid, who picked up the most items, who died the least, etc).
At least this would create a cool sense of community around the Switch and it would give people a reason to turn it on every month to check out the new challenges. Sort of in the same way people obsessively played every crappy game on the 360 during the early days because achievement farming was more fun than the actual games being released.
Oh, and I have to say, as an ex-employee of the corporate man-fattening machine known as McDonalds, I always find it funny when people concoct schemes to get fresh or free shit. McDonalds employees are probably the least invested in their job out of anyone on the planet. You really don't need to be crafty; if you want fresh fries, just ask the kid at the cash. He doesn't care. Want a few extra nuggets in your 6-piece? Just ask the kid. He'll give you 8. He'll throw a beef patty in there too if you want. Want a half-milkshake, half-coke mix with some McFlurry stuff in there? Ask the kid. The kid will do that for you. Believe in the kid.
That's all for me. Thanks for the podcast.
-DYLAN