For a brief, beautiful moment on June 5, the world was overrun with go-kart-racing cows. The Nintendo Switch 2 had just been released, alongside new game Mario Kart World, and people were understandably delighted by the opportunity to drive as the adorable Moo Moo Cow, who until now had only been seen as an obstacle on Mario Kart’s farm-based courses. The novelty has since faded, but those initial hours of bovine mayhem provided the sort of silly, social, organic fun that Nintendo needed to herald the Switch 2’s arrival. Mario Kart World didn’t seem like a weighty enough title to hang a console launch on, but it very well could be — assuming the memes keep coming.

I admittedly wasn’t very excited about the Nintendo Switch 2, and I didn’t seem to be alone. A few days before the Switch 2 launch, I did a quick poll of Vulture’s gaming Slack and my various group chats of gamer-y friends to ask who had preordered a console, and no one had. Most said they were either waiting it out — for the holiday season, a new Animal Crossing game, or different color options — or picking up a Steam Deck instead. It’s hard to say why the enthusiasm isn’t there. Uncertainty around pricing certainly contributed, and the lack of an exciting launch library didn’t help. There’s just kind of a vibe that the video-game industry needs a paradigm shift, not a new, slightly better version of what we already have. After spending a weekend with the Switch 2, I can’t say that I’m any more optimistic about the future of gaming, but I am less convinced that the new console is a flop.

Most of the marketing around the Switch 2 and Mario Kart World highlighted the game’s new open-world Free Roam mode, but I’m having way more fun in the Knockout Tour, also new for World. It combines the best of Mario Kart racing with the best of its Battle modes, in which the goal is not to finish in first place but complete some other objective. (Mario Kart World includes Battle modes Balloon Battle and Coin Runners, which are exactly what they sound like.) Instead of competing in a series of discrete races, like in Mario Kart’s standard Grand Prix tournament, Knockout Tour is a continuous race across six connected courses. You never stop driving and just have to be in the lead at the end of the race to win. At the end of each course, the last four drivers to cross the finish line are eliminated.

It’s more of a mind-set shift than a mechanical one. For most of the race, you’re trying to avoid last place rather than stay in first, so you pay much more attention to the drivers around you. It’s the sort of thing that’s harder to describe in a press release or Nintendo Direct presentation (or, for that matter, a review). Free Roam mode is impressive, but after a few minutes of driving around looking for challenges to complete, the experience starts to get boring. Knockout Tour, on the other hand, has completely replaced Grand Prix as my default Mario Kart mode. It’s a small but impactful tweak, and has a greater sticking power than the gimmicks that Nintendo can’t help itself from peddling.

The Switch 2 console itself certainly gets a bit gimmicky. One of the first things you learn about in Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour — a glorified tech demo that should come free with the console but unconscionably costs $10 — is the new mouse functionality. You can turn the Joy-Con on its side and use it like a mouse for point-and-click games. It’s a cool idea, but in practice, they’re too narrow to use comfortably for very long, and either Nintendo’s claim that you can use them on any surface, including your lap, is laughably false or I have an exceptionally bumpy lap. Switch controllers, including Pro Controllers, are compatible with the Switch 2, but they won’t wake the console from sleep mode, which means you’ll have to walk over to the dock to turn the console on anytime you want to boot it up on the TV. (Or play with the Joy-Cons in the included grip, which is somehow even less comfortable than the last one.) These are all easily ignored nitpicks, but part of the fun of a new console is complaining about what they didn’t get right.

Nintendo did get a lot right, though. The problem is that most of the changes from the Switch to the Switch 2 are unsexy quality-of-life improvements, which are hard to get an audience excited about. There’s more processing power and storage. The screen is bigger, with better resolution. The Joy-Cons connect the sides via magnets, so you can take them on and off one-handed with a satisfying snap. The kickstand is sturdier and can be adjusted to different angles. For the first time, there’s a native voice-chat function. These are all useful features, but none of them would be enough, on paper, to convince me to drop hundreds of dollars on a new console. Holding it in my hands, where all of those little changes add up to something solid, is an entirely different story. The new console looks good in my living room and feels good to play. For the first time since Blue Prince commandeered all my attention, I’m reaching for a Nintendo console when I have a few minutes to game.

So is it worth spending $500 on what is, right now, essentially a Mario Kart World machine? Probably not. But the games will keep coming: Donkey Kong Bananza releases next month, Pokémon Legends: Z-A will follow, and the console will apparently be able to run Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition when it’s released later this year. Your mileage may vary on how much FOMO you can handle as the Switch memes continue taking over your feed, but if you’re a Nintendo fan, it probably won’t take more than a few laps.

 Sometimes small tweaks are the keys to success.