Past unique Swap video games and upgrades gobbling up treasured storage, the Swap 2 additionally sees the addition of GameCube titles to the retro library accessible to Nintendo Swap On-line + Growth Pack subscribers. Just like the traditional video games accessible for earlier consoles such because the NES, SNES, or Recreation Boy, these are all packaged in a single launcher, with each sport within the respective assortment put in directly.
That is superb for the SNES assortment—with round 80 titles crammed right into a barely-noticeable 267 MB bundle, who cares if there’s a bunch you may by no means play? But with simply 4 titles presently accessible (F-Zero, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, SoulCalibur II, and Tremendous Mario Strikers), NSO GameCube is already a 6-GB dedication. Unique GameCube discs may maintain simply shy of 1.5 GB, so every addition goes to see that launcher demand ever more room, and every undesirable sport may stop you from putting in one thing else you need to play. Whereas this solely impacts NSO subscribers who use the GameCube library, the liberty to decide on which GameCube video games get put in can be an enormous assist.
The Drawback With the Answer
Courtesy of Amazon
SanDisk
MicroSD Categorical (256 GB)
The excellent news is that Swap 2 nonetheless permits customers to develop storage by way of microSD playing cards. Drawback solved—simply whack a large capability card in, proper? Not fairly. Swap 2 solely helps microSD Categorical format playing cards. There’s good cause for this—the brand new commonplace affords a lot quicker knowledge learn and write speeds, permitting video games to load quicker—however the rule causes issues.
One is price. MicroSD Categorical playing cards price extra per GB of storage than their predecessors. On the time of writing, a SanDisk 128 GB card is $17, whereas its Swap 2-compatible microSD Categorical format card is $54 for a similar quantity of storage—a 3X premium. One other is card capacities. There are a handful of 1-terabyte microSD Categorical playing cards available on the market, however provides are vanishingly low, and costs are astronomical. Though you possibly can technically use a number of microSD playing cards along with your console, Nintendo advises in opposition to it, so swapping a number of smaller playing cards round is not an possibility both.
Extra confusingly, the SD Categorical format solely refers to hurry, not capability, which has its personal requirements. Most microSD playing cards you are possible to purchase, whether or not they’re within the Categorical pace format or not, are “SD eXtended Capability” commonplace, or SDXC. These can theoretically maintain a most of two TB of information, although the biggest respectable card you are more likely to discover on sale is 1.5 TB.
Nonetheless, in 2018, the SD Affiliation—the business physique that units requirements for SD reminiscence playing cards—launched SD Extremely Capability, or SDUC. This helps capacities as much as a staggering 128 TB, “no matter type issue, both micro or full measurement, or interface kind together with […] SD Categorical.” There aren’t any SDUC playing cards available on the market in any respect but, so we’re a protracted, good distance from with the ability to slap “even” an 8-TB card in your Swap 2 and set up all the things you could possibly dream of. In concept, although, certainly this implies you may someday have the ability to do exactly that?