Pre-orders are one thing, but there's something about lotteries and 'invitations' to pre-order hot-item electronics which rubs me the wrong way. "Here, it's our honour to let you give us hundreds of your hard-earned currency units, you lucky sausage! Gis a card number."
Still, it's the name of the game if you're a Switch 2 fan, and we Europeans should think ourselves lucky that we're not in the uncertain position of our friends across the Atlantic when it comes to guaranteeing (as much as you can) that there'll be a new console on your doorstep come 5th June.
For those of us waiting for the invite from Nintendo itself, though, it's been a bit of a bum-squeaker. True to our name, we're all hardcore Nintendo lifers around these parts and easily pass the playtime and NSO criteria for invite approval. And yet only one of us (looking at you, PJ) got an invitation email prior to today!
The rest of Team NL have been searching elsewhere for Switch 2 pre-orders — of which there are a fair few options, to be fair — but with ol' Ian Amazon promising delivery sometime between the 9th and 11th of June(!), how we wished we'd gotten the nod from Joe Nintendo. Invites will be going out through the 11th April, apparently, but it still felt a bit like a snub not to have been in the first wave. Is 62 hours of Xenoblade not enough, Joe!? I'm sorry I haven't finished it yet!!
And then! What drops into this writer's inbox but a cheeky invite at 16:06 local time! A fairly painless code input and checkout procedure later, and voilà. I'm shortly expecting a worried call from the nice lady at the bank who periodically invites me down to the branch for a coffee and a chat while trying to flog me life insurance. Probably best cancel that Amazon one, pronto.
Anyway, with so much uncertainty in the air, we thought we'd ask how you lovely people are getting on. Did you get the honoured invite from Nintendo itself? Have you got your pre-order in elsewhere? Are you looking on enviously from a pre-order-less place, perhaps? Are your local prices just too eyewatering to contemplate? Or — shocker — are you just not interested? (In which case, are you sure you're in the right place?)
Let us know in the poll below, and drop down to the comments to let us know your experience. You know, if you like.