Tag: Nintendo

[NM] Nintendo Snubs Blizzard, Ignores Overwatch Switch Launch


After the dismal week that Blizzard has had, it’s hard not to pile on to the company while they are down. In that vein, let’s talk about Nintendo snubbing Overwatch.

To set up this story, Nintendo had a big event planned for Overwatch’s launch on the Switch which was yesterday (October 15). The event in New York City was supposed to be massive, we’re talking hundreds of people showing up with the first 150 having an opportunity to meet and greet various Overwatch voice actors. Very cool. You actually had to RSVP to the event in order to get a chance at meeting the people behind the characters.

And then on October 14, Nintendo cancelled the event with no explanation other than that the event was cancelled by Blizzard with no explanation. Since then Overwatch launched. You wouldn’t know it from reading Nintendo’s social media accounts because the company has just completely ignored that one of the largest games in recent years has come to its system.

Obviously this conclusion takes some extra reading in order to come to, but it strikes us as weird that Nintendo who are insanely eager to showcase any big release on their systems (their Youtube page is covered in launch trailers) would completely ignore the launch of a game as big as Overwatch. No tweets, no trailers, no acknowledgement whatsoever. You’d think Overwatch was some Unity asset flip coming out on the system, but even those get some recognition by Nintendo.

Maybe someone at Blizzard should learn a lesson about hospitality.

 

[Rant] Mobility: Mario Kart Tour Is Nintendo’s Latest Foray Into Childhood Gambling


Mario Kart Tour has picked probably the worst week to launch in the history of the septic tank that is mobile gaming.

This prior week of September 22 of 2019 the year of our lord, has gifted mobile gamers with something many of us could only dream of. Both iOS and Android users were treated this past week to the respective launch of Apple Arcade as well as the Google Play Pass, and in both cases users are still on their free trial. The services offer access to hundreds of games combined, in Apple’s case exclusive titles, free of microtransactions and predatory mobile shenanigans, and for what it’s worth high quality games for the mobile platform.

Then Nintendo sauntered in with Mario Kart Tour like a man with no self-awareness walking into a feminist AA meeting donning his unclean wife-beater, carrying a Pabst, blowing a big fart and then asking which one of the lovely ladies would like to take him home and make him a sandwich. Mario Kart Tour is a depressing game to look at, not only because it is a low-quality facsimile of the real thing but because of the knowledge that mobile expectations of workmanship are so low that people will eat up the shoddy, low-effort design and spit out lots of moolah into Nintendo’s open pockets despite the readily available, higher quality, also portable version of Mario Kart being a step away.

Mario Kart Tour isn’t here to give you an enjoyable experience, that is literally not what it was made for. It has one goal and makes that very clear from the opening second of the game: Money and gambling. Lots of money and lots of gambling, especially for you children. The first thing you do in the game is “fire the cannon,” which is Nintendo’s kid friendly way of saying “open this loot box you [expletive deleted].” You open a loot box to determine your first character. You open a loot box after your first race. After three races and a short tutorial, what do you do? Open a loot box. And the game doesn’t let you drift away from the loot boxes either. In typical mobile tutorial fashion, it will lock every other section of the game until you relent because dammit you’re going to gamble and you’re going to like it. Otherwise you’re going to have no game, you indescribably cheap cretin.

There are 20 characters at the moment in Mario Kart Tour and you’ll need to unlock them one by one using (you guessed it) loot boxes. Odds of unlocking characters varies from the “normal” 5% to the “super” .26%. Yea, if you wanted to play as any of the standard racers like Mario, Peach, DK, Toad, Bowser, etc, you’ll be looking at 1% odds on the loot boxes. Because this game isn’t about fun, it’s about maximizing profits off of FOMO, compulsive collectors, and children with mom’s credit card. The same goes for your cart and the umbrella, which also unlock via loot box and have non-cosmetic effects like giving you more items per box or increasing your combo boosts. If you wanted to know why Dry Bowser has a .2% chance of unlocking, see how many levels choosing him as a character nets you bonus items.

Nintendo has also already started dabbling in time-limited loot box drops. Tomorrow (10/2) is the last day to get Pauline, her yellow taxi, and fare flier cart piece. Each one has a 1% chance of dropping in loot boxes. It will absolutely not be in the next limited loot box. It may be available at some point in the future, then again it may not. If it does reappear, it may have a higher chance of dropping and it may have a lower chance. Nintendo will never tell, because shut up and buy more currency.

Rarer goods also grant more opening bonus points, and others just straight up grant you 2x and 3x combo points. That’s important because Mario Kart Tour is less concerned with your place and more concerned with your points. Grab up those hot racers and vehicles and you’re basically a good way to a perfect five star rating before the map even begins.

Mario Kart Tour is deceptive from head to toe. First of all the game tricks you into thinking that you are playing against other people. You aren’t, the online mode isn’t in the game yet to play multiplayer matches with people around the world. You’ll kinda figure this out on your own pretty early, but Nintendo went to some lengths to hide the fact that you are playing solo. For starters every other racer has a genuine Nintendo usernames (a lot of Japanese letters). When you launch a map it actually goes through the process of mock filling up a lobby. As a result, you’re often needlessly put together in matches with many duplicate characters. I can understand that online, but in single player? What a joke.

Matches now consist of two laps instead of the Mario Kart industry standard three, presumably because some cynical boardroom meeting looked at cynically collected data and cynically suggested that two laps was the perfect amount of time to keep mobile gamers’ attention and three laps was just way too long.

You might be thinking the same thing that I did when you read “Mario Kart Tour” and “mobile game,” and that’s “haha I bet this game plays itself.” It does. By golly it does. Mario Kart Tour has auto-acceleration and auto-turning. I have set my phone down and came back to find that my character almost always made it in the top 3. It’s fine, the controls in this game are rotten garbage anyway. I can’t count how many times I saw my cart drifting sideways in defiance of most laws of gravity. It’s like your car is being pulled on an invisible rope behind and invisible car. It never feels like you are actually in control, more like an invisible hand gesturing the racer toward more gold coins.

Then you have the membership, which is why I brought up the Apple Arcade information earlier. Mario Kart Tour wants you to pay $5 per month for its membership, the same cost that will get you access to hundreds of better quality games. What do you get for your $5 gold pass? You get extra rewards from racing in tours, you get extra badges from gold challenges, and you get access to 200cc. Yep. 200cc is locked behind a subscription. By the way, I played through a few races on 200cc and didn’t touch the phone screen. I came in fourth nearly every time.

If you’re looking for guidance on whether to spend money on Mario Kart Tour you just need to look at another one of Nintendo’s egregious cash farms: Miitomo. When the news came that Nintendo would be shutting down that gacha game, what was the company’s response? A big middle finger pointing at their no refunds policy. Who doesn’t salivate at the prospect of a Mario Kart game that Nintendo intentionally produced to feel like a crap Chinese knockoff, that you’re expected to lay down more money for than the price of a Switch console, that Nintendo will throw up a big f*ck you and remove access to all of your purchases for once the game no longer rakes in the enormous monthly average revenue they expect? I already have my wallet out but it’s being dropped into the furnace.

I have no trust in Mario Kart Tour. There is a weekly ranked cup that grants rubies depending on your overall score which should offer unlimited replay (keep your score up, be the best guy) but I don’t trust it. I got to #1 rank with no effort on the cup, the other people are just first names (Anna, Jose, Clara). Are they real people? Did I get roped into a group with 20 people who all have first names as their usernames? Does Nintendo hide the usernames and post first names? I don’t know. I don’t think I’d trust Nintendo that these are real people and not just another cog in the bullshot machine if they managed to show me government identification from each player in my crew.

Is anyone in a group where the first place has 13,944 points? Because that’s me. Please tell me you are real.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

[Bad Press] Kotaku Lies About Smash, Doubles Down


Kotaku UK, a website that bills itself as “Kotaku, but without the integrity of Jason Schreier.” When Kotaku UK isn’t pumping out plain old clickbait compost for articles, they’re pumping out slanderous clickbait compost.

Last night marked the launch of Smash Bros Ultimate 3.0, and also the release of Nintendo’s first DLC fighter Joker from Persona 5. As is standard for Smash character releases, Joker comes with his own stage, a number of costumes, and a number of songs. In other words, it’s the perfect time for tabloid e-zine Kotaku to rev up the faux outrage and find something you should be offended by.

Enter Laura K. Dale penning an article that posted today, “Super Smash Bros. Ultimate’s Persona 5 DLC Includes a Disability Slur.” Dale listened to the track “Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There” and decided that not only does the song use the term “retarded,” but apparently justifies its use by saying “I can say it” right after. Here is Dale’s personal transcript of the lyrics.

Oh Ah Hi
Are you ready?
Ready to pick up the pieces
Let’s go, let’s play, retarded
I can say it
Are you ready?
Uh Huh

The article got the attention of Erika Harlacher, voice actress for Ann in Persona 5, who confirmed that of course the song doesn’t use the word “retarded.”

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The article has been slammed even in Kotaku’s community as racist, as a large number of commenters are calling out Dale for essentially accusing an Asian singer of using a slur because of her accent. Folks in the comment section are calling out the article for shaming someone for not speaking English good enough for Dale to understand it, when English is very likely not her first language.

You’ll also notice that the title of the article doesn’t leave anything to theory and just straight claims that the slur is absolutely included. Dale goes on to wag her finger and wax poetic about how inappropriate this is for Nintendo’s “family friendly image.” It’s hard to imagine Nintendo would allow the word “retard” to get into a song. It’s easier to imagine that Kotaku UK knows exactly what it is doing and is deliberately pushing out a bit of defamatory content and outrage-bait to jump on the coattails of a big video game update.

Laura, for her part, has posted multiple apologies via Twitter and acknowledged that her conclusion to the song’s lyrics was wrong. Kotaku UK has refused to pull the article, has not posted a genuine correction, and has simply updated the article to essentially say “some people say it’s different, but we disagree.”

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It’s disappointing to see this level of reckless behavior from Laura K. Dale, who MMO Fallout generally holds in higher regard.

Gamefly You Fools: Luigi’s Mansion on 3DS


I recently revived my subscription to Gamefly (no, this isn’t sponsored) because I don’t have enough going on in my life outside of law school and these MMOs that I am allegedly playing. Essentially I wanted a cheap way to play some games that I have had my eye on but never really wanted to buy or more specifically put a down payment on at Gamestop and return within the seven day return period because the policy is great and no matter how annoyed the employees get there’s nothing they can do to turn me down. Is this justification for me writing off my Gamefly subscription as a business expense? If only I knew a lawyer.

The first game I’m going to talk about is one that is near and dear to my heart. I bought Luigi’s Mansion back on the Gamecube when it originally came out and I have to say the game creeped me out as a tween. It made me ask a lot of questions, like how in this timeline apparently Bowser is legitimately dead. The Mario series has always tiptoed around the idea of death, it’s a kid’s game after all, and Bowser has been “killed” and reanimated by Koopa and other figures numerous times through the series.

Porting Luigi’s Mansion to the 3DS instead of the Switch makes sense in a twisted sort of way. Way back before consoles could do much online, Nintendo had the plans to make the Gamecube a 3D capable system, they even went as far as creating a couple of prototype games that could take advantage of this technology including none other than Luigi’s Mansion. The technology for a 3D overlay on televisions was ultimately too expensive, but Nintendo basically had everything ready to go. They just needed seventeen years and a new system to accomplish it. I like to think that the folks at Nintendo had a serious discussion about whether to port this to the aging 3DS or the exploding Switch, and some guy who was on the original team threw a fit about not wanting his work to completely go to waste.

Luigi’s Mansion also happens to be one of those titles that kids like me would make fun of other gamers for spending their meager allowance on. I love Luigi’s Mansion, but I refuse to pay full price for it at the age of thirty as much as I did at the age of twelve. The full game, assuming you’re stopping to take in the sights, can be beaten in less than seven hours. In my days we called that a half-Blockbuster. You rent it on Friday/Saturday and you’ve done everything by Sunday afternoon with enough time left to still neglect your homework due Monday. It’s a great game, no doubt, but something that short needs to have some level of replayability otherwise why keep it in your collection?

This marriage of gameplay and technology doesn’t show up empty handed, and Luigi’s Mansion offers something old, something new, something borrowed, and something Boo. We have our basic story; Luigi wins a scary mansion in a contest and he heads over to meet up with Mario to give it a once-over before he presumably torches the place for the insurance money. Mario enters the mansion before Luigi gets there and goes missing. Luigi follows and gets attacked by ghosts, only to be saved by Professor E. Gadd, who looks like an infant and equips Luigi with a powerful vacuum capable of sucking up ghosts.

In a sense, Luigi’s Mansion is an early game in the Boss Rush genre with some Metroidvania thrown in for good measure. You control Luigi in what is a mostly linear path throughout the mansion, unlocking doors, clearing rooms of various ghosts, and finding keys and gems and completing puzzles. What difficulty there is comes from the “portrait ghosts,” the unique looking ghosts that Luigi eventually turns into fancy portraits. These bosses generally have their own mechanics on how they fight, how to expose their hearts and vacuum them up, and how to even activate them to begin with. Again, I use the term “difficulty” with some leeway. Luigi’s Mansion isn’t exactly difficult, certainly not Nintendo difficult.

But Luigi’s Mansion has a metric ton of charm to it, like how Luigi will start humming in sync with various parts of the game’s soundtrack and if you are in a room that hasn’t been cleared of its ghosts or Boo, you’ll hear them mockingly singing right along. Replacing Luigi’s Game Boy Horror from the original game is the…Game Boy Horror in this game. It’s a spruced up version that is constantly on display on the bottom screen with a minimap letting you know where you can go and what your progress is at any given time.

Luigi’s Mansion features a new co-op mode where a second person can take on the role of Luigi’s gooey clone Gooigi and you can tackle the mansion together. I don’t have any friends, so I did not test out this feature. One thing completionists will like is that the game now allows you to re-fight bosses in order to get a better rank (sucking them with less falls) without playing through the whole game over again or save scumming. If you want the best portraits, it’s a lot easier than the last time around.

Luigi’s Mansion is a wonderfully charming game. If you played the Gamecube version and want to revisit it on a modern console, go right ahead. If you didn’t play the game the first time around, I wholly recommend at least renting it.

Sony Still Lying About Commitment To Cross-Play, Says Dev


This week Andy Mcnamara from Game Informer sat down for a softball interview with Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios chairman Shawn Layden. The two discuss a few topics regarding the Playstation and games, but at the end of the interview Mcnamara brings up the topic of cross-play. Layden’s response? All publishers have to do is ask.

“People keep saying, “Why doesn’t Sony allow more people to have it?” We’re open for business on this one. All it takes is for publishers and developers who wish to permission it. As ever, just work with your PlayStation account manager, and they will walk you through the steps that we’ve learned through our partnership with Epic on how this works. I don’t believe right now there is any gating factor on that. I think they’re open to make proposals, because the Fortnite thing worked pretty well.”

A great response, except it’s still a complete falsehood. Chucklefish’s CEO chimed in on the issue in a ResetEra thread noting that the developer did exactly what Layden suggested; they asked their account manager. The manager’s response? In no uncertain terms, absolutely not.

Hi all,

CEO Of Chucklefish here, we just launched Wargroove with crossplay between PC, Switch and Xbox so I wanted to chime in.

We made many requests for crossplay (both through our account manager and directly with higher ups) all the way up until release month. We were told in no uncertain terms that it was not going to happen.

From our side, we can *literally* toggle a switch and have it working. Of course policy work might be more complicated for Sony.

Just wanted to provide some balance on the issue and say that it certainly isn’t a question of developers having not contacted their account managers or having dropped the ball. We were told no.

Meanwhile Nintendo and Microsoft have just recently struck a deal that will see Xbox Live come to the Nintendo Switch.

Source: ResetEra

MMO Rant: Onigiri On Switch Is A Pathetic Mess


Sporting Playstation 1 graphics and Super Nintendo performance, Onigiri is the most pathetic thing that will release on the Nintendo Switch in 2018.

Onigiri is such an offensively incompetent mess that I find it hard to believe that the game wasn’t made this bad on purpose, either as a method of intentionally driving a business into the ground to fulfill a personal vendetta, or it’s just the front for an international money laundering operation like a pizzeria run by the mob that gets its real money selling heroin on the side. Am I saying that developer Cyberstep Inc has underlying motivations for releasing this game on the Switch apart from releasing a game? Yes. Yes, I am.

And I do so because the alternative is to admit that Cyberstep is one of the worst developers to put out an Asian MMO, which is like giving the worst score of a pool of test takers that already sit in the .001 percentile in a classroom full of baboons. With this show of competence, I wouldn’t allow any of Cyberstep’s developers to boil me water for tea out of fear of somehow managing to be poisoned in the effort while my house burns down. It astounds the mind that people come into work on a daily basis, call this game a job well done, and actually get a paycheck to put this stuff out. The folks at Cyberstep do get a paycheck, right? This isn’t an involuntary internship program that specifically hires poetry students with no programming knowledge?

I’m going to state the obvious and point out that Onigiri is a port and isn’t new. It is, however, a port from a 2013 game. Yes, this game came out in 2013. It was ported incompetently not too long ago to the Playstation and Xbox where it exhibits most of the same problems that it does on the Nintendo Switch.

And where to begin with the Switch problems? Onigiri runs at a wonderful five frames per second, generally getting down into the slideshow territory the moment you try to do, well, anything. It doesn’t help that the game has a draw distance of roughly twenty feet resulting in the Amiga-tier engine barely capable of loading the double-digit polygonal structures without nearly dying of an aneurysm every two seconds. Movement is a frustrating tango of slightly touching the stick only to have your character always take four or five more steps than you meant which means navigating small spaces will have you contemplating death. Combat would be just barely passable if the creatures didn’t have the habit of disappearing and then reappearing about ten feet away. Throw in a UI that is a mess to navigate and you have a game that takes longer to download than it does to recognize that it’s an unfixable disaster that needs to be deleted.

I considered whether or not posting this article would ultimately be pointless. It’s fairly obvious from the state of the game and its continued quality over the past five years that the developers don’t care. I would be incredibly surprised if the developers go home from work every day with an attitude with pride in their work and less of a “well at least I’m getting paid from this dumpster fire of a company” line of thought. There’s no information in particular to give out since the game is free and very obvious from the start that it is of the lowest quality trash. So I formulated it as a rant.

I suppose my ultimate ending here is that I am disappointed with Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo because this proves that their quality assurance is a myth. Every so often we hear about games being denied release or patches being delayed because the developer didn’t pass the stringent certification from one of the three console manufacturers. If Onigiri is the kind of product that passes, I can’t imagine what a horrible state of existence those games were in for Nintendo to give its stamp of disapproval. It also marks a point where game consoles are no longer the curated stores that they once were, but are now willing to accept every mouth-breathing developer who shoddily compiles some code and calls it a game.

Those of you who read MMO Fallout will know that I don’t attack gamers as part of my coverage, but I think we all know who is playing this on Switch and saying “it’s really good quality.” Cyberstep’s main customer base are the depressingly lonely, the kind of people so sad that they look at these horribly drawn and posed anime girls and ultimately decide that the game is of decent quality because they’re kinda cute and they imagine a different reality where they can hold hands and kiss these anime ladies and the ladies like them and don’t bully them with their bad words like “you’re in your 20’s, shouldn’t you get a real job and move out?”

And for the record, I have nothing against people who like anime or even those who have waifus and like sexy anime girls (or sexy anime boys). If you’re going to like a game because it has cute anime girls, there are so many titles with better graphics, better girls, that are also free or pretty damn near close. There is also an internet full of drawn and animated media available for free if you need to get your rocks off. Have some standards, don’t be such a Thirsty Joe that you start deluding yourself into thinking games like this are good because of some of the NPC models.

Japan Criminalizes Editing Save Games, Punishable With Jail Time And Fines


Today’s news comes to us from Japan, and if you thought the recent Korean law criminalizing paid boosting was an overreach, just wait until you see this.

Japanese lawmakers passed an amendment to the Unfair Competition Prevention law that makes the modification of save game data illegal within the country. The law not only effects services that create tools to modify game saves but allegedly also includes individuals who make the modifications on their own games.

Guilty parties may be punished with forced payments to the game developer, as well as prison time of no more than five years and fines of no more than 5 million yen, possibly both.

Nintendo appears to be behind this new legislation.

Source: NintendoSoup

Forbes Accidentally Leaks Diablo III On Switch


Whoops!

Blizzard was hoping to WoW the world tomorrow with the announcement that Diablo III would be coming to the Nintendo Switch, a reveal that may go down as one of 2018’s worst kept secrets thanks to a long series of rumors and possible teasers that the game would indeed be coming to the platform. Unfortunately Forbes blew the news a bit too quickly, with coverage of the embargoed news briefly going online before quickly being pulled off.

As they say, the internet never forgets, and intrepid young sleuths were able to get their hands on the announcement and its details. It looks like the game will be sold as the Eternal Collection, including Reaper of Souls and the Rise of the Necromancer expansion, and will also include a number of Nintendo exclusive cosmetics. Cosmetics include the Ganondorf cosmetic armor set (naturally), tri-force portrait frame, and chicken pet and Echoes of the Mask wings.

Diablo III on Switch will also allow up to 4 players on a single system, four players on separate systems wirelessly, and online on Nintendo Switch (launching in September) and will cost $59.99. Forbes’ details were confirmed by Kotaku who also had access to the embargoed news. As Nathan Grayson points out, this is also the first Blizzard game on a Nintendo system in 15 years.

Blizzard is reported to have several Diablo projects in the works, with this presumably being one of them. Most assuredly there are more announcements in the works, however your guess is as good as ours on when Blizzard is ready to have them leaked announced.

FTC Warns Console Manufacturers: Your Warranties Are Illegal, Change Them


The Federal Trade Commission has issued a warning to console manufacturers: Your warranties are illegal and must be altered within 30 days. The letters were sent to all three console manufacturers: Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo along with Hyundai, HTC, and Asus according to a Freedom of Information request sent by Vice.

The FTC warning is in relation to provisions in each company’s terms of service that claims to void your warranty if it is repaired by a third party, as well as those fancy “warranty void if broken” stickers that we have all seen on our consoles at some point. This language is illegal, according to the FTC, who also note in their letter that the 30 day provision does not prevent them from taking legal action on any past or future violations.

“Provisions that tie warranty coverage to the use of particular products or services harm both consumers who pay more for them as well as the small businesses who offer competing products and services,” said Thomas B. Pahl, Acting Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

All six companies have 30 days to change their policy or face legal action.

(Source: FTC, Vice)

[Less Massive] Nintendo President Satoru Iwata Has Passed Away


gamiwataface530

Nintendo of Japan has announced with heavy heart that President Satoru Iwata has passed away today at the age of 55. Iwata has been with Nintendo since the early days of the Famicom, moving up to the position of director in 2000 and president in 2002, before becoming CEO in 2013. Unfortunately Iwata fell ill with a bile duct growth, forcing him to miss last year’s E3.

The announcement posted by Nintendo of Japan:

Nintendo Co., Ltd. deeply regrets to announce that President Satoru Iwata passed away on July 11, 2015 due to a bile duct growth.

Satoru Iwata will be missed. Our thoughts go out to his family, friends, and coworkers.

(Source: Nintendo.jp)