The Nintendo Switch has features that most people forget about

The A complimentary feature on PlayStation 5 Allows users to reward other players in multiplayer games, which can help promote kindness and camaraderie in the gaming community. But Sony has officially removed it from the PS5 This week for one reason: No one uses it. Most people (hey) don’t even know it exists.

This prompted a thought exercise: What other game consoles have more useless features? Take keys, for example. The Nintendo Handheld Hybrid certainly has a lot going for it Small tricks are quietly effectivesuch as Global zoom function. But it also has some things that get overlooked – or overlooked.

Function “Search for controllers”.

Among the many options in the ‘Controllers’ selection menu, the ‘Find Controllers’ function is gathering the most dust. Open it and you’ll see a list with the Joy-Cons associated with your console. Hold down the “A” button above the Joy-Con you see and it will shout. Quietly. At the frequency of hearing animals. It can help you detect any offline Joy-Con if it’s being misused, but it’s not capable enough to do its sole job — not to mention that you need at least one Joy-Con in hand to use it in the first place.

Unfortunately, there is no terminal function that handles this Hit the Joy-Con to drift.

News app.

Most of the seven permanent icons on the Switch’s home screen are really useful shortcuts to submenus. One, however, is only used by people who accidentally click on it: the “Messages” app. Open it up and you’ll see a reverse chronological feed of press releases digitized by year of Nintendo’s marketing machine. (When you boot up the console, you’ll also see the three most recent “stories” in the left bar of the screen.) But if you’re looking for gaming news, you’re not going to read it on a gaming console—you’ve presumably booted up, you know, play. If the text is too small, you’re not going to read it on that console. More likely to get your messages across Favorite gaming site.

Voice chat

Despite what you may have heard, yes, the Switch has voice chat! Little. It’s a complicated mess. On PlayStation and Xbox, if you want to start voice chat, plug in the headset and start voice chat. However, on the Switch, you must It goes through a multi-step process and introducing a companion smartphone app. Nintendo could have removed voice chat without bothering. In fact, if you use a smartphone app to talk to your party members, Discord does just that Right there.

Keyboard support

Everyone hates typing in a password (twice!) to buy something in Nintendo’s eShop, not to mention the console’s tiny on-screen keyboard. Doesn’t work in manual mode, but you can plug a USB keyboard into the dock and use it to type. But more: the time it takes to pull the keyboard out and plug it into the Switch dock takes longer than any task you’ve tried to ignore in the beginning. (If you need to get into the eShop faster, DEnable password requirements.) Nintendo may lose keyboard support without much fanfare.

Screen lock (or, if it’s an option)

Yes, the Switch’s lock screen feature is actually very useful, dare I say mandatory. Run it and it will give your console some sort of packet between wake and sleep states. To use your console, you have to press the same button three times, which prevents accidental activation when your Pi swishes. Obviously, this shouldn’t be an option: it should be the norm. Turn off the option and make the screen lock standard.

dark mode

I’m laughing! I laugh. But hey, on that note, wouldn’t it be nice if the Switch had more color themes in its background? Hello? hello where did you go