There is an anniversary today. It’s for a gaming console, and it’s now been out for five years. I’m not going to say its name, because I don’t want it to feel bad, but after five long years it still doesn’t have some basic features I’ve literally been asking for since day one. (No, it’s not a NeoGeo Color.)
I’m speaking, of course, about folders and eShop music. Hopefully that doesn’t give too much away. (No, it’s not a Nokia N-Gage.) Folders have been a standard feature on many systems going back more than a decade–Sony’s PlayStation Vita had them in 2012, and I took a frankly embarrassing amount of pride in arranging my digital games into neat little pockets, where I could ignore them in favor of playing the system’s surprisingly decent port of Mortal Kombat.
And yet, this other console, one that has now been sold to the general public for five years (no, it’s not an Amstrad GX4000), offers no effective means for organizing your games. They all just kind of sit there on your home screen, unless you have too many games, and then they’re dumped onto another screen that can only be arranged in a few ways, but not into folders that would allow me to keep better track of them. Sorry, Owlboy, maybe I’ll play you one day when I scroll past the dozens of icons for things like TumbleSeed and Fast RMX.
Then there’s the buying experience. In the past, browsing the online store of this company’s consoles was accompanied by a pleasant bit of music. There were various catchy tunes on two of the company’s platforms, and the older system had a hit that led to one of the all-time great YouTube videos.
But there’s this other system–the one turning five, which Google would have me believe is called a “wood” anniversary–that doesn’t have music. (No, it’s not a Sega 32X.) You just browse through game after game, again without a great sense of organization, hoping to find what you want as quickly as possible in order to escape this joyless, music-free void. Given how poorly the shop runs, maybe it’s for the best that the console isn’t trying to do anything more, but I’d happily let the rows of games load even more slowly if I could simply enjoy a bossa nova beat.
And so here I am, years after I first published a story asking for these features to be added, to make another plea. I don’t want to call you out by name, because this is my favorite gaming console of all time. (No, it’s not an Apple Bandai Pippin.) Let’s just call you “Bintendo” and your system the “Snitch.” Please, Bintendo, bring these features to the Snitch. I promise to even buy two copies of your next huge game, Breadth of the Mild 2. Make a great console greater.
(No, it’s not the Epoch Cassette Vision.)
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