Yes, yes – we know the Nintendo Switch is old now. There comes a point in every console’s life when the games start to dry up and we look to the future — and the Switch is in the fall of its years. Back in May, two months into its eighth year, Nintendo said that a new hardware announcement was coming sometime before April next year, and with that confirmation comes the sense that the really good stuff will be saved to launch the next console with a bang and bang.
However, looking back at past Nintendo systems, that doesn’t necessarily mean the Switch will be running on fumes for the rest of the year. You’d be forgiven for thinking that Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was the Switch’s last hurray, and then along came Super Mario Bros. Wonder. You might have thought that the launch of the Switch in 2017 meant that the days of the mighty 3DS with quality exclusive software were numbered, but as we’ll highlight below, that wasn’t the case. In fact, Nintendo has good form when it comes to releasing brilliant games at the very end of a console’s life cycle, and having sold over 140 million switches, there’s a good chance there’s still gold in the first-party hills, as well as all the third-party stuff we already know about.
