Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival for the WeeOoo was announced and for a very brief moment: Animal Crossing fans were on cloud nine. Moment’s later, they crashed through the Earth’s crust and into the seventh circle of hell. The game is not a new proper AC game. It’s an AC multiplayer Mario Party like game with only a mind-numbing board game and no minigames to offer. It also requires the purchasing of amiibos to play. 
So what are amiibos? You’ve undoubtedly already seen them shitting up real estate in Gamestop and the electronics section of your local big box store. They’re those little plastic figurines of popular Nintendo characters that came out shortly after Smash 4 that can also be scanned with you're tablet controller to unlock various compatible game content. Back then, I tried for the longest time to figure out what exactly they were for. They just seemed so ill conceived with no solid focus. When they came out, they were sold as an unlockable AI companion in Smash that you could train with and which learns from you. So like something extremely trivial that should have been included in the game. “No, no,” cry the Nintendo slaves, “It’s okay that it unlocks trivial shit because it’s mostly just a nice figurine of your favorite characters for your shelf.” But why have game content that's only unlockable by a stupid $13 Happy Meal toy? “It’s just a bonus that comes with the figurine because Nintendo loves us,” argues the Nintendo zealot. Again, why have game content that's only locked on disk by a stupid $13 Happy Meal toy? Why have it in video games at all? What does it add to the experience to chop up a game into pieces which are then sold separately for obscene markup when you add it all together? If I want a video game, I'll buy a video game. If I want a toy, I'll buy a toy. I don't want to buy a toy if I want a video game. They don't need to be arbitrarily paired. 
Nintendo didn't even fucking know what amiibos did when they made them. They just kind of did this extremely esoteric thing but they were mostly just figurines. But it didn’t really matter what they did because Nintendo characters being a masturbatory fetish for thirty-something manchildren meant that they flew off of the shelves like guns before a second amendment repeal. They were a blown out of proportion massive hit for no other reason than NINTENDO CHARACTERS! The vast majority of Nintendo characters aren’t well written and have no personalities to speak of which means they are liked not because of who they are but merely because of which game they represent. Or maybe they just like how they look. Amiibos were so popular that scalpers started buying them up and reselling them to FUCKING IMBECILES for enormous markup. This combined with Nintendo’s artificial scarcity / limited runs made it extremely difficult for brainless Nintendo consumers to get their hands on them without spending a small fortune. This should honestly be considered as exploitation of the mentally ill.
This is like the Beanie Babies cancer epidemic 2.0. The scalping thing wouldn’t be so pervasive if A: the dumbass consumers refused to buy from scalpers, thereby not sustaining demand and making scalping not profitable and B: Nintendo stepped in and actually took action in order to get more amiibos to their fans. Since both the company and the end user are morons, nothing has changed and it just seems to be spiraling out of control with amiibos' ever-growing ubiquity.
Amiibos’ popularity helped them grow their demonic roots into more and more games, slowly becoming increasingly “important” with unlocking more content in each new title. Then E3 2015 comes. Please note the word “Amiibo” is actually in the title of this game. The game has actually become a showcase for plastic figurines. You absolutely need the physical amiibo characters in order to unlock them from the game disk and play the game. The game is useless without them. (From my perspective, it’s still a shitty, useless game no matter how you serve it up.) You buy the game and then you buy the ability to play it by purchasing stupid toys. AMIIBOS SHOULD BE MERCHANDISE AND NOT VIDEO GAMES. That slippery slope of more and more video game content getting locked behind amiibos that you Nintendo kool aid drinkers were so quick to dismiss as baseless naysaying has become manifest and reared its ugly head. I hope you’re fucking happy. You dug your grave. You people voted for Hubert Humphrey and you bought amiibos! You encouraged scalpers. You encouraged Nintendo to entertain this asinine and quite frankly irrelevant and highly detrimental practice for video games. If I still gave a shit about Nintendo, I would be so fucking pissed at you. Instead I'll just express my disgust and disappointment with you as a fellow human being.
The spurned hatred of this game by fans compacted with it only being on the WiiU and its requirement for purchasing amiibos that will be commercially unavailable from being scalped like a motherfucker, means this will be the lowest selling video game in recent memory.
The amiibo thing was an issue here but the biggest problem was that big AC fans that have been waiting patiently for a new real installment, only saw Nintendo giving them the finger while blowing raspberries. Oh, you want a new Animal Crossing game? Here, have the shittiest board game imaginable locked behind a $30+ paywall. Hahaha! To be fair though, I don’t think Nintendo did it on purpose. They are too fucking oblivious to make an informed decision based on anything physically happening outside of the walls of their headquarters that isn’t based on ROI feedback. They're basically just making games alone in a cave and then handing them out through a slot in a door.
The other event that proved to be severely inflammatory was the showing of Metroid Prime: Federation Force and some sort of blaster ball soccer drivel. They’re for the 3DS and feature little deformed chibi Federation guys who look like Playskool toys. From the outside looking in, it’s just the same innocuous shovelware spinoff stuff shit out by Nintendo on a monthly basis. Nothing of note here. But Prime fans who haven't seen a Prime game in eight years, because it's been finalized as a self-contained trilogy, and would be elated with a surprise new installment or just a Prime-like game, weren't emotionally prepared to see this. It’s actually been five years since the last Metroid title, period which I believe was the infamously despised Other M, so everyone was already bitter and starved to see a new kickass Metroid game. This was not what they were waiting for. This offering communicated to fans that Nintendo doesn’t give a fuck about what they want and instead of just making the tried and true real game they’ve been waiting for, spent time and many resources developing something they never asked for and then slapped the name Metroid Prime on it, similarly to the AC Amiibo garbage. There is actually a petition to get this game cancelled. The coldest reality is that there will be no real Metroid on the U either and the wait continues.
Watch this guy’s face the very second “Metroid Prime” flies up on screen in the E3 trailer. That’s the look of a man who has died inside.
Some might argue that these fans are whiny, entitled little bitches and Nintendo should have the freedom to piss their own money away on their infantile fantasy ventures but it’s been EIGHT YEARS or at least FIVE YEARS after a shitty game. You don't seem to have any issues creating a new DS iteration every couple of months. Is that where all of your manpower is being siphoned to? There is no excuse to not hear these people and throw them a fucking bone in that time. Like it or not, Nintendo, like all businesses, is in a position where they can’t just do whatever the hell they want with their IPs and have everyone be happy with it. If they want to survive as a business, they have to know what their fanatical consumers want and produce it for them instead of hanging them out to dry, or worse, taunting them purposefully or in a ludicrously unintentional manner. In the eyes of a fan, they just performed a silly ventriloquist act with Prime’s corpse. Leaving it alone in its casket would have been preferable. Imagine if Valve Announced Half-Life 3 and then added that it was going to be a Space Invaders clone where you shoot headcrabs only for Android and iOS. You don’t do that shit. Nintendo CAN continue with it’s own moronic, waste of time and resources, projects but only within franchises that receive adequate attention with proper games. You want to keep pulling that stupid shit, give them a substantial game to chew on first and they'll be a lot more receptive. Or just don't call it "Metroid" but ESPECIALLY not "Metroid Prime."
If you look up the E3 trailers for Federation Force and Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival, you’ll see that they both have about an 80% disapproval rating. Tennis is about 50/50. That’s incredible. It’s almost like people actually stopped for a minute and thought about it. Wait a minute. They’re not even trying. They’re just slapping established franchise names on minigames. They’re not going to give us anything substantial for the WiiU.
Apparently some big titles will be held until Nintendo’s next Console codenamed the “NX” which, knowing Nintendo, will likely end up being called something about as tactful as the “Nintendo Piipii Pu.” Kind of ominously, Zelda U was never mentioned which probably just means that it's out of the release time-frame scope which they were talking within but still, that would have been something meaningful to people. Intelligent people are questioning this apparent abandonment of the WiiU by Nintendo. Idiots are sucking their thumbs and rocking back and forth in the corner, chanting, “The NX is coming. The NX is coming. Everything is fine. The games are coming on the NX. I am fully prepared to invest in another Nintendo console.”
The backlash happening now is the result of a long buildup of silent suffering and waiting and hoping that Nintendo will momentarily cease jerking themselves off for two minutes and pull through this time and fans have finally snapped. Nintendo doesn’t know what time period they are in. They don’t know what the video game market is like. They don’t know what current trends are. They don’t know who their customers are. They don’t know why people like their games. They don’t know what their fans want. They don’t stand up to help them when they are victimized while trying to obtain their products... until very recently when they upped production. They’re at a crossroads now. They lost core gamers when they made the Wii. They lost the casual gamers from that when mobile games became big. They failed to establish relevance with the next generation of gamers and the next one after that. The people they have now in their console market, whether they know it or not, are mostly older die hard fans of their older franchises that linger mostly because of that mental photo of the joy that they experienced with those characters when they were young and here you are, denying them that. If you do anything to drive off those people, who do you have left, Nintendo? Not even scalpers.
