Please, people… just switch to Ultron. (Make sure to update your Adobe Reader).

Let’s address these one at a time…

The hardware is weak, but the market has spoken and to them at least, it doesn’t matter. If it DID matter, people wouldn’t buy them. Why would Nintendo spend the extra money when consumers have already decided they’re going to buy it in droves anyway? So they can spend more on manufacturing and make less profit? Yes, they wanted easy cash. What responsible company doesn’t? It doesn’t make any sense to spend a dime more on producing a product than what your customers demand. The limitations of the Switch are the fault of consumers who buy it, not Nintendo’s. If Microsoft could sell the same number of units Nintendo can by making a game system that cost $50 to manufacture and ran on 386, you can be damn sure they would too. I completely understand your anger - I’ve had to spend the last 20 years watching flocks of people buy inferior, overpriced Apple products and rave about how great they are. But like Nintendo, Apple only does it because the consumers let them get away with it. Your complaint is misdirected when it should be targeted at the customer base. But good luck teaching happy people who don’t know any better that the thing they like is bad. It’s not a great use of your time.

All of your other problems are perfectly reasonable, but if you think Microsoft’s plan if they buy Nintendo is to drop everything and start porting old titles or working on a new Starfox game, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed. Like Disney buying Star Wars, get ready for annual, mediocre entries in your favorite series cranked out by a revolving door of existing teams to maximize output. After a couple years of half-baked Mario and Zelda games, they’ll stop selling in the numbers Microsoft wants, and after the golden goose is dead, they’ll dissolve any remaining Nintendo assets into their larger acquisitions structure, lay off a bunch, and put the name in the vault while they look for something else to cannibalize.

Yeah, and it’s sold more units than the PS5 and all iterations of the current XBox combined, at a profit on every unit. Nobody’s out there holding a gun to people’s heads to buy the Switch, but they sell FAR more than either of their competitors in both hardware AND software. It sounds to me like you’re not actually angry at Nintendo, but angry at the majority of customers in the game industry that don’t share your disdain for less powerful hardware.

They already tried to acquire them once and were laughed out of the meeting.

https://www.engadget.com/microsoft-wanted-to-buy-nintendo-145746874.html

Sure, buying Nintendo would be a win for Microsoft, but Nintendo would gain absolutely nothing from the deal. Sure, there are people like myself who loudly and rightfully complain about Nintendo’s business practices, but at the end of the day, it took until THIS year for Playstation 5 to finally outsell them in a single year, and they’re not even CLOSE to matching total unit sales, and Xbox is doing worse than THAT. Add to that Nintendo’s software attach rate, and as much as I don’t like HOW they do their business, they’re WILDLY successful at it and making more money as a function of their costs than anyone else in the industry, so they can’t be faulted for continuing to do what is working.

I honestly don’t know what Phil Spencer thinks would be different than the previous meeting in another sales proposal today, especially given Microsoft’s INCREDIBLY weakened industry market position compared to Nintendo’s. Microsoft is only able to approach the idea from a position of power based on its market capitalization funded by its other businesses - in the gaming industry, Nintendo simply occupies the more advantageous market position.

Nah, I’m an idiot who happens to be an English teacher for foreign language speakers. Nitpicking bad language rule explanations is my job.

It SAYS that, but regardless of the source, don’t believe everything you read on the internet.

Will and would are both modal auxiliary verbs, and as such, don’t actually have a past tense in the sense other verbs do. They don’t have participles either. You don’t have “woulding” or “woulded”, and neither has a present or past tense either. Even if you wanted to argue it, what’s the past tense of other modal auxiliaries? What’s the past tense of “may”? Or “should”? And before you say “May have” or “should have”, then why isn’t the past tense of “will” “will have?”

The same is true of “can” and “could”. Could is NOT the past tense of “can” because a past tense for a modal auxiliary verb is nonsensical. What they MEAN when they write that is “could is a verb that can be used in place of can in some situations to refer to the ability to do something having taken place in the past”, but they are different words that happen to share related usage.

In the case of “will”/“would”, not even THIS makes sense. Will is used as an indicator to shift the following verb’s action into the future. The past tense of shifting something into the future means… what? Making something hypothetical?

While calling these verbs “past tense” is a functional shorthand for explaining their function, the reality is modal auxiliaries do not have tenses or other forms, and it’s disappointing to see the British council screw this up.