Review: Nintendo Switch is impressive, but needs more games
Once you're back home, just slide it back into the docking station to play games on a big-screen TV.
When the console starts selling Friday, for $300, the Switch will have a paltry nine titles, leaning heavily toward familiar franchises such as "Just Dance" and "Skylanders."
Nintendo's Wii U console bombed when it came out in 2012, and its long-held dominance of the portable game market has been usurped by smartphones and tablets.
The Switch is a gutsy attempt by Nintendo to reclaim its territory in both the home and portable markets.
Or just prop the tablet on a table with a built-in kickstand and use the Joy-Cons as wireless controllers, just as you would at home.
To play a solo adventure like "Zelda," you'll need all the buttons on both Joy-Cons.
[...] Nintendo also wants you to play socially, so each Joy-Con functions as a freestanding controller for party games like "Just Dance 2017" and "Super Bomberman R."
Nintendo says more than 80 games are in development, with homegrown franchise titles like Super Mario Odyssey, ''Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Splatoon 2 coming this year.
[...] Nintendo hasn't said whether the Switch will get some version of its Virtual Console, which delivered classic hits from the company's 30-plus-year history to the Wii U.
The Switch hardware is very impressive, and the ability to easily take a game from the living room to the laundromat scratches an itch I didn't know I had.
It doesn't have all the functions you want from a tablet; there's no web browser or video apps like Netflix, for instance.
[...] it doesn't (yet) deliver the range of games you want from a home console.