As with the original Switch, my favourite button on the Switch 2 is the screenshot button. And if you were to look at my screenshot library after this weekend you’d see a trend emerging. One image after the next, all focused on the weird, perversely beautiful world of Donkey Kong Bananza. Radioactive grasslands. Teetering bosses. Bizarre colour-clash combinations. But more than that – clipping! Oh the clipping. You never saw so much clipping.
Do I mean clipping? Maybe it’s “near-plan fading”, or something similar. What I mean is those moments in 3D games where the camera has to disappear part-way through a wall in order to frame the action. Those moments where you understand that polygonal geometry is always thin – it’s always Euclidean “breadthless length” thin. I remember seeing the first 3D games when I was at university, Tomb Raider and later on Mario 64 in my case, and being legit scandalised by the way that the camera would pass through a wall and render an image that was functional but imperfect. After years of the deft rigours of 2D games, the idea that 3D games would allow you to glimpse them like this was weirdly troubling.
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For years, it felt like 3D games got better at hiding this side of themselves. They gave the camera bigger areas to play in so it never had to drift out of bounds. They gave it special case programming for narrow spaces. Maybe, too, the games themselves became moderately less ambitious, in the way that the film camera became less ambitious when silent movies transitioned to talkies and the restless flights and twists and dives of things like Wings were replaced with shot, reverse-shot.