The months of anticipation for the Nintendo Switch 2 ended this week as the first buyers brought their consoles home and prepared to play games. But not everyone has had a seamless experience.
As reported by IGN, some Switch 2 boxes bought at a GameStop store in Staten Island, New York had store receipts stapled to them — and those staples poked through and damaged the devices’ screens. Several posted on social media to show the effects of the stapling. Some have expressed surprise that the screen is so close to the top of the packaging for the Switch 2.
The screen, by the way, includes a preinstalled protective film that owners are urged not to remove. The «anti-scattering adhesive film» is meant to keep glass from going everywhere in the event that the Switch 2 screen breaks.
Meanwhile, be careful how you unbox your Switch 2. CNET’s Faith Chihil says it’s not immediately clear which side of the packaging is the front, so don’t rush and accidentally open it the wrong way: «It’s possible you may, in the heat of victory, open the box upside down, causing the contents to nearly spill out all over the floor (or, in my case, the backseat of the car).»
Those gamers who found staple damage on their Switch 2 screens didn’t have to suffer for long. GameStop says it offered console replacements and, in an X post, noted, «Staplers have been confiscated.» The post included a video clip from the 1999 movie Office Space featuring red Swingline stapler lover Milton.
Fine, but how do those cartridges taste?
Once the switch is (safely) unboxed and ready to play, gamers may be wondering how durable the hardware will be. There’s no need to run a torture test. JerryRigEverything on YouTube already did it for you.
In the 11-minute video, the YouTuber does a scratch test on the build-in plastic screen protector, which is vulnerable to marks from metal. He recommends an additional screen protector to avoid those permanent marks.
He also taste-tests the tiny cartridge for Mario Kart World, which is yucky by design. Nintendo coats cartridges with denatonium benzoate to make them bitter and to keep kids from eating them. The rest of the video is an ASMR nightmare of knife scratching and scary console bending. The good news is the Joy Con magnet-attached controllers get JerryRigEverything’s approval for their durability, and the console as a whole, he concludes, is a big improvement over the original Switch.
If all this talk about the Switch 2 makes you want one, but you haven’t yet put your money down, be sure to check out CNET’s Switch 2 stock tracker.