Pokemon Go (a parent's perspective)

Pokemon Go is the newest mobile app sensation but you already knew that. It’s basically a Pokemon reskin of the Ingress app. A couple of years ago, I discovered Ingress. It sounded interesting and I almost tried it but I wasn’t quite clear on the premise and it sounded like it might be too social for me to enjoy. I like the idea of some kind of geocaching type game where you wander around and go to specific locations for... some reason. Now that it’s been injected with Pokemon, I’ve decided to try it. You know that if something that’s popular can get me to care, it must be REALLY popular.

Pokemon Go includes the whole first generation of Pokemon for you to catch. Back in junior high I had Pokemon Red for my clear Gameboy Pocket and I loved it. That was the only Pokemon game I ever played. The next installment to the franchise (Was it Gold and Silver?) was on GBC which I didn’t have and wasn’t going to get so I basically resolved to stop caring about new Pokemon games and I did. I know almost nothing about the other games or other Pokemon. However I still possess a veritable encyclopedic knowledge of the first game as if I’d just hundred percented it yesterday.

The new “game” mostly involves wandering around with phone GPS, finding Pokemon on your radar that you can approach and capture (not by battling) by flicking pokeballs at them on your screen. The mon hover over your phone’s camera feed with a drop shadow to make it look like they’re in the environment. It’s so simple even a “mobile gamer” can do it. There are also Pokestops in specific special places, monuments, churches, some businesses on your map that you can get items like Pokeballs, potions and eggs. There are also gyms you can find where you can battle rival teams, (blue, red, yellow.)

This game feels like it was made for me and yet it doesn’t. The concept is fun and I enjoy Pokemon but instead of a game that I go out and play, it turns out to be a game that I involve myself in as long as it coincides to a reasonable degree with what I’m already doing. The vast majority of Pokemon I’ve caught, have been at home, in the passenger’s seat of the car or at the grocery store. When I load it in my house, there's a brief moment where the GPS doesn't know where I am any puts me somewhere strange on the map. I've caught a few when that happens. I went to the library with my kids which just happened to be in range of two Pokestops which I farmed for items during the entirety of our stay. They refreshed every five minutes at most. If I go to the mailbox or the dumpster, I load the app so I can incubate my eggs as I walk because when you’re an actual parent of small children, you’re basically under house arrest and you need to take advantage of those brief moments where you get to leave in order to accomplish a mundane obligation because while you’re accomplishing that mundane obligation you can periodically check your phone to see if there are any Pokemon nearby.

The radar gives you a vague clue as to how close the nearby Pokemon are. They get a rating of 0-3 paw prints. Zero means they are appearing in your range. Every paw print I think is like 100 meters or something. For me anything above one paw print might as well be on the fucking moon. I can’t make time for this and I can’t just drop everything to heed the call of an adventure at any given moment and deviate from my current trajectory by a half mile to go get a poliwag behind some shady looking bar. Ever since I grew to level 8, the radar has been useless. It says everything is always three paws away. I don’t know why but I suspect it’s part of the app being shitty. I guess it doesn’t matter for a person that has to wait for pokemon to appear in their lap before they take action anyway.

The “game” is fun but not good, if that makes any sense. (I’m not putting it in quotes to be a dick. I legitimately don’t know whether to call it a game or an application. There’s not really an overarching objective and you can’t really lose.) It’s been plagued with server and sign in problems. It too often freezes when you catch something )but thankfully I have yet to lose a catch because of it.) Sometimes it just freezes outright. The UI disappears sometimes which means you just have to reload it. The journal function doesn’t seem to do anything. The pokedex feature is unuseable on my phone. It’s severely glitched in innumerable aspects, one of which is all of the text

B

e

i

n

g

j

u

s

t

i

f

i

e

d

l

i

k

e

t

h

i

s

.

This is the shittiest, most unstable app I’ve ever used aside from the new infernal MLB At Bat app. Man fuck that thing. The one they had before was fantastic. They didn’t need to change anything but they literally changed EVERYTHING and made it unusable in the process. It was like they took a sledgehammer to a Ming vase and left the mess behind calling it a new vase. Anyway, these nasty rough spots on top of the bare bones content make it feel like a beta stage application. That’s not to say it’s not enjoyable though I do suspect it’s going to lose its appeal pretty quick without some significant updates. Also it’s a free app and it’s up to you how much money you want to waste in it so I guess I should just stop bitching.

There are microtransactions where you can buy coins so you can buy items like pokeballs, lures, some kind of inventory upgrade, etc. However you can get all items you need for free by leveling up or visiting pokestops. If you buy microtransactions in ANY game you probably have too much money on your hands or should at least donate your extra money to someone more intelligent but with less money. There’s just something so shitty about buying advantages in games, especially when they let you circumvent playing the game whether it’s to get more Exp or acquire an item. I know you’re not playing phone games for amazing characters, stories and emersion. Why in the fuck are you even bothering with a videogame if you’re not even going to bask in the most basic catharsis of achieving or overcoming a challenge without throwing money at it? To hyperbolize, it’s like buying an Olympic gold medal on Amazon versus winning one. You only care about the end result when the journey there was the actual point. There should be a phone game where you pay money and then it just shows you the credits. That’s what you’re here for, right?

If you’re some kind of purist who only wants a traditional Pokemon game for your phone, you’re not going to enjoy this. It is severely stripped down and dumbed down for mass appeal which is saying something because Pokemon was never exactly complex. Your pokemon only know TWO moves which you have no control over teaching to them. That bit of technique needed to weaken a pokemon as close to KO’d without them fainting to catch them is gone. You “train” or evolve your pokemon from a menu screen by giving them candies or stardust which you get from catching pokemon. People say there’s a nostalgia factor but it seems pretty hollow and manufactured to me. Pokemon was about going on an adventure where you discovered interesting animals in different environments. You set off with your starter who learned and grew before your eyes and became your friend to the end powerhouse guy for fighting. You assembled your team of other pokemon who you chose and molded the way you wanted and thus became very attached to them. In Go you can catch any pokemon in the wild and the average level for them scales up as you, the trainer, level up so it’s like there’s no point in training anything unless you’re moments away from entering a gym. The minute you start investing candies and stardust into leveling a pokemon, you’re sooner or later just going to find a wild one that’s already more powerful and toss out the old one like a less shiny coin in your state quarter collection. It happened with my bulbasaur starter, (not that the concept of a “starter” even exists in Go.) There’s less point in evolving a pokemon because you can just find it’s evolved form in the wild or from an egg and it probably costs too many fucking candies to do it anyway and the candies are specific to breed and are a bitch to accumulate if you’re not doing it for a pidgey or zubat. The whole thing is so devalued and disposable.

This game wasn’t made for people with my forced lifestyle. I can’t play games whenever I want. I need to have a window of opportunity which usually only happens after 10 at night. Not only do I need that rare free time, I also need to be out of the house. I also just moved OUT of the city. I’m level 10 and I’ve never battled at a gym before because there are few of them and they take actual time to do versus catching or going to a pokestop. It’s an event that takes too much planning for me. It sounds pathetic but it’s true, I can’t even participate in one of the main components of the game. I HAVE SO MANY POTIONS AND REVIVES. I guess it doesn’t matter much because I’m always going to be lightyears behind the majority of other players who rule the gyms anyway. So to be frank, Go is fun but it’s more fun for people that aren’t me.

Super Mario Sunshine

Mario Sunshine for the Nintendo Gamecube is the predecessor 3D platformer following in the footsteps of the incredibly successful Super Mario 64. The two games have a lot of similarities but also significant diversion and certainly their own identities. Mario’s moves are more or less the same although I’m pissed that long jump and backflip are gone. But in addition he now has the sentient water tank called FLUDD on his back which allows him to shoot things with water and also serves as a jet pack. Well nothing can’t be improved by adding a jet pack so that was a good move. It is still bizarre that even with a jetpack the fastest way to get around is to spam dive to make Mario skip across the ground on his stomach like a stone on water. That doesn’t make sense on so many levels.

I’ve played many Mario games before, (unless you’re counting as a percentage from overall Mario games,) but none of the more recent ones on consoles like the Galaxy games. This was the first time I’d heard many of these characters speak in full sentences. It was weird. So that’s what Bowser sounds like… I don’t know. I guess I was expecting to hear King Koopa from the shitty TV show.

The HUD is overly designed. I hate that text box… or boxes… or curved slots? For individual text lines? Seriously, I’ve never seen anyone exercise such flagrant disregard for graphic design in such a critical feature of a video game. It makes overbearing sounds as the text types out too. Oh, well while we’re at it, could we also have fireworks that go off every time it completes a new word and then a little trumpet fanfare sound every time it moves down a line too? Every time you stop for two seconds these stats comes up to suffocate your view. Look, if I want to see all that shit I’ll pause the game and look at it. Right now I’m trying to either figure something out or enjoy the scenery. In Delfino Plaza there’s this stupid message text crawl at the bottom which I have never read. A lot of stuff should have been simplified here.

I actually like the setting of the tropical island a lot and the fact that you can actually see the other levels off in the distance like you’re in a legitimate geographical location that has relevance to the other locations is really cool. But when I look closer, some of the set pieces and even some of the levels in general are really hit and miss. I liked the resort level just because the sun is perpetually setting there and the shadows are long. It’s just an odd time of the day that you rarely see highlighted in videogames. The splitting manta ray boss was a bit excessive though. And then I realize that every other chapter in the level takes place inside the hotel which just feels really confining for Mario. It is a different take on things which I appreciate to some degree but why so much of it?

I like Pinna Park I love the rollercoaster. But at the same time I hate how many of the rides don’t look real and useable. On the ferris wheel at the top of the hill, there’s no dock or ramp where the gondolas go through to indicate where people could board. No one ever rides it. The wheel doesn’t stop. You can’t get inside the gondolas. The only one that can use the fucking ferris wheel is Mario and that’s only if he executes a perfectly timed misty flip with a shitty camera angle onto the roof of a gondola. Amusement park patrons aren’t going to jump over a death defying gap to ride on the goddamn roof of the ferris wheel gondola. Same thing for the inverted ship rides. There are no seats. You can’t go inside of them. You can only stand on the deck until it swings so high, you fall off of it. What is even the point of this? Mario can’t even ride it. Everything feels like a facade or a decoration.

I did the minimum number of chapters on Ricco Harbor because just looking at it makes me angry. The platforming design is just so bad. It’s like they just tossed a bunch of mesh partitions together at random and said here, go apeshit. There doesn’t seem to be a clearly defined sensible path through it. They just saw that it was possible to get to the top of it and called it good. Oh and don’t forget to add a ton of shit to knock the player off so that they can have even more fun climbing up it again. A lot of stuff is like that. You stop and look at it for a long time and go, “Is this what I do?” I feel like most of the platforming sections that I solved, I solved because I found an exploit somehow with the jetpack, not because I mastered a well crafted puzzle.  

In SM64 probably 80% of the stars you could get without having to enter the specific chapter at the beginning of the level. You could select Boil the Bully going into Lethal Lava Land and end up going exploring instead and get the star for Red Hot Log Rolling or Hot Foot Into the Volcano. You didn’t have to commit to doing a single specific star which was good because It fostered a sense of adventure in the player and didn’t stifle them finding their own fun or objective. In Sunshine not only do you have to commit to a single scenario and a single achievable shine sprite but you have to do each one of them in order. If you get stuck on one, you can’t even access the ones after it until you beat it and there are ALWAYS going to be ones you don’t like and have no interest in doing. Why make us do them? It’s like if you went to Disneyland but had to adhere to a strict sequential regimen of a single attraction per hour and everything else was boarded up and inaccessible. Can’t do Space Mountain until you suffer through Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln.

Easily the worst part of this game is the isolated floating platform segments where they take away your FLUDD and stick you in some unincorporated bottomless pit room with a linear course that leads to a star. It often ends up being an extremely tedious gauntlet of trial and error that is entirely devoid of fun. The only reason I try to do them is so I can do something else which is an awful paradox to be trapped in. Why am I here? What does this have to do with anything? It doesn’t fit into the layout of the levels at all. They aren’t even in the levels. It’s like the designers had no more ideas on how to incorporate puzzles or games into the levels so they had to resort to just throwing in these arbitrary segments as filler. This looks like something someone made fucking around in Gary's Mod for half an hour. They feel like some kind of bonus stage or challenge mode which I would never bother with especially when they're all about as terrible as Rainbow Ride. Sometimes these segments are tied directly to the chapter select at the beginning of the level so you just go directly to them at the start without even entering the true level. Other times you find them in warp pipes or caves or whatever hole or doorway you come across and that is just the absolute fucking worst. Not only did you have to get to that spot which in itself can sometimes be a hassle but instead of being rewarded with a boss or cool sub area to explore, you get this nonsensical garbage.

Most of the time it’s not even a coherent platforming course. It’s just random shit that’s hard to jump on suspended in space. Do you remember where you went when you entered the pyramid in Shifting Sand Land in SM64? You went inside a MOTHERFUCKING PYRAMID, that’s where. The inside of a pyramid which had enemies, interesting, thematic, dynamic platforming and hazards. It even had a boss in there. You know where you didn’t go? Some lazy-ass abstract purgatory occupied primarily by levitating square watermelons and enormous sugarcubes. Every time I go in one of these places, I’m fooled into having a short burst of anticipation for new exploration, adventure, creativity and FUN. I expect it to be like the pyramid or the sunken ship or the volcano. Where will this hole lead? What will be in there? Oh, nevermind, it’s one of these… again. It’s like if you opened a buried treasure chest and inside was just a piece of shit. I can recall only one time where going in a hole gave a good payoff in Sunshine and it was the underwater cave with the ruins in Noki Bay.

So actually getting to the premise, there’s an evil Mario going around vandalizing the island and Mario who happens to stop by the island because… food, gets a community service court order to clean things up. Just plead guilty, Mario. We know it was you. You looked exactly like a satanic T-1000 and went around painting shit with a giant paintbrush. That was you, right? Well it turns out Shadow Mario is actually Bowser Jr. who has apparently mastered the art of shapeshifting somehow. Then the princess gets kidnapped. I’d complain about this story being played out but I like Castlevania so... Anyway, there’s a little simily I like to use to explain Bowser Jr’s role in the Mario universe. Bowser Jr. is like shit… That’s all. I don’t know why the Mario team feels demonically compelled to create a baby/kid version of every single Mario character. The games can be childlike but they don’t need to be made infantile by turning them into the fucking Muppet Babies. You know where I don’t want to see babies ever? In a video game that I’m playing. It’s like Nintendo’s target age demographic is aging inversely to the age of their actual fans.

There are puzzles that keep reappearing throughout the game like the eight red coins. I never minded that one because it was flexible enough that it could be integrated into any level in an interesting way and still feel fresh and fun. (e.g. the Red Coin Fish (but not the bird)) But how many times do I have to see that stupid giant squid with the cork in it’s mouth. You are also obligated to hunt down Shadow Mario once per level which is actually what progresses the story. This is simple in concept but annoying. You just chase him around the level, trying to hit him with enough water to stop him. This would have been a lot more fun if they actually designed some way to run, aim and shoot simultaneously. Instead you have to either stop to shoot which is only useful in the short moments that Shadow Mario stops when you fall behind which is lame or you shoot in short bursts while jumping which is lame and highly inaccurate. A couple of times I lost track of Shadow Mario and didn’t know where he was. Needless to say, I lost interest. Gee, it sure would be cool if there was some other objective I could work on right now instead. I guess I could collect a hundred coins for a star. Wonder which will take longer...

I’ve never been a fan of Mario’s vocalizations. They’re just stupid. No one sounds like that. I guess they weren't that annoying in SM64 save for the incessant hooting he does when he has low energy. Unfortunately they got worse in Sunshine. Not only does he hoot with low energy, he also does his yah wah hoo’s (etcetera) in a listless monotone like he’s Ben Stein which unfortunately is not as funny as it sounds. It’s like he’s contractually obligated to do it even when it’s exhausting or contrary to how he truly feels. It’s weird. Then there’s the gratuitous fast paced grunting when he carries anything and the constant Woowoowoowoowoowoowoo when he does hand over hand monkeybars like he’s Jabberjaw or Curly from the Three Stooges. Why?

In one chapter there’s a contest to find the largest watermelon on the beach and roll it to the competition official. On the way there is all manner of enemies and obstacles that can break the watermelon and make you have to start over. So I find a watermelon that’s bigger than everyone else’s and successfully bring it in and the guy says this.

Says the guy hiding his blind lazy eyes behind sunglasses. I assume his hand is clutching an invisible cane. Complete, bold faced, weapons grade horseshit. Just come out and say it. Say “I want the one way up on top of the hill because it’s the biggest pain in the ass to get.” You don’t need to be coy with me. I’ve played video games before. I’ve seen this trite phenomena many a time now.

Yoshi, (yoshies?) are in the game and rideable though I don’t really know why. Instances where they appear are so few and they don’t have much of a purpose. They basically only exist to remove undulating gelatin zig-zags, that block all of maybe five things in the whole game. Any time you have to use Yoshi to do something, the challenge is centered around the fact that Yoshi controls like complete ass compared to Mario with a jetpack. This whole thing has a similar feel to many of the characters and game mechanics in Banjo Tooie. It’s just one of those things that the developers clearly wanted in and were grasping for any excuses to include regardless of whether it made sense or added anything worthwhile. Each time you have to find a yoshi egg somewhere but you can only hatch it if you bring it the correct kind of fruit. And here is mostly the only reason to include fruits in the game. Instead of making and shooting eggs, the yoshi piss a stream of colorful juice out of their mouths to simulate FLUDD mechanics. In place of the water gauge you have a stomach full of juice. This is both the yoshi’s life and ammo gauge. It also drains slowly over time. if you don’t keep feeding your yoshi with fruit, they evaporate. They also evaporate if they touch water. They also have a three light years long tongue. This must be some different kind of yoshi breed because it pretty much flies in the face of everything I’ve learned as a yoshi biologist up to this point. Also why have they not died out from natural selection if they can’t go without eating every two minutes and can’t fucking touch water?

In closing here are some arbitrary gripes. It’s great how coins that pop out of something last all of half a millisecond before disappearing. What the hell? Did that bird just try to take a shit on me? That damn Delfino Plaza song sounds like a sped up version of the Motel Six song and is going to drive me insane if I hear it one more time. Who is this racing dumb fuck? Let’s all give him a round of applause for winning the Delfino Ugliest Stupid-Ass Motherfucker Competition out of a whole island of mutant goo monsters and a princess who looks like a sentient inflatable sex doll.

Nintendo's E3 Misadventures Part 2

Okay, so Mario Tennis: Ultimate Smash on the WeYou  got mixed reactions but the important thing is that many people expressed displeasure with it which is totally understandable to me. It’s another fucking Mario Tennis game. Even if you insert Mario characters, how much enjoyment can you derive from literally just hitting a ball back and forth? Not a full price stand alone title. Not something to announce on the big stage in E3.

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.     

Nintendo's E3 Misadventures Part 1

I don’t really care about current events involving video games or even current video games to a large extent. If you hadn’t noticed, this place isn’t exactly a hotbed of up to the minute news and reviews and that’s exactly how I like it. The only reason I pay attention to E3 at all is because I enjoy watching a bunch of out of touch suits fumble around as they try to connect with gamers in a meaningful way that will get them interested in their products, in the same way a bird might try to sell bird nests to some fish. To put it matter-of-factly, I like watching them fail. I don’t even care who it is failing. Every year delivers something substantially stupid or some royal screw-up. Last year, Microsoft stole the show by announcing that they wanted to rape everyone within a ten yard radius of an Xbox One. This year, they relinquished their title of Most Fucked E3 Presentation to Nintendo.  

First a list of one thing that I liked from each console just to soften the blow.

Sony: The Last Guardian… even though that bird aye aye thing is really ugly.

Microsoft: Rare Replay… but then I see Banjo & Kazooie’s Nuts & Bolts model on the cover, ALERT: FOREIGN CONTAMINANT

Nintendo: Star Fox: Zero… Amazing! I can’t believe the N64 is getting a new game!

I don’t want to believe that I purposefully victimize Nintendo but they make it so damn easy and to be honest, with all the garbage they’ve pulled as of late, they deserve it. Their long record of incompetent business decisions and failure to adapt to the real game industry somehow never seems to phase them. They’re like Inspector Gadget or Mr. fucking Magoo. They keep doing stupid shit, completely oblivious to their environment and they continue to survive on sporadic bursts of dumb luck and even dumber consumers. Not this time. This is where the pendulum finally swings back. Mr. Magoo just got hit by a truck.

Everything seemed to be going fine or at least mediocre for Nintendo until what was expected to be their big presentation on the final day of E3. Ryu is in Super Smash Bros. 4 for some reason. Are people still talking about that shit? How long has that game been out now? The addition of a character to an already decent sized roster will never be something worthy of hype or even an E3 announcement, especially when it’s just another fighting game character you’ve already played as in seven different Streetfighter titles.

Anyway, Nintendo spent an inordinately long time talking about Yoshi’s Wooly World which is a game that is coming out in like a week and everyone is already well aware of so basically they just pissed away 10 minutes of E3 prime time. A big focus for them seems to be connectivity with amiibos here, which I will talk about in detail later. They are seriously touting the feature of unlocking shitty little character costumes for Yoshi with Amiibos as a primary component of the game. I’m not just throwing that word around either. A lot of the costumes really do look shitty. Humanoid characters don’t translate very well to Yoshi’s ugly bulbous frame. 

They end up putting the face on his nose in some cases. For the Mario costume, he gets this stupid ass mustache wrapping around his nose and a face reminiscent of an FAS victim. With the Samus costume, her visor goes on his nose which is nowhere near Yoshi’s eyes. Then he has an armored diaper for some reason. 

What the hell is the point of this? If you’re going to make a character inspired costume, then do it and actually think about what you’re doing. This looks bad and it makes no sense so don’t do it or it comes across as trying to shoehorn unnecessary shit into the game, which is exactly what it is. Many of these don’t look like designed costumes adapted to Yoshi. It looks more like you shrink wrapped a picture of a character around Yoshi and then called it good however it ended up. Try putting a little bit of fucking effort into it.

And on a side note the current character model for Yoshi looks terrible. His face is literally made up of primitive geometric volumes stuck together. It appears as extremely lazy design because it looks like there was no finessing or second draft or maybe that you had technical limitations that only allowed you to render basic forms. If you remove his eyes, his nose is bigger than his fucking head.

They also talked about Skylanders with Amiibos which is just gilding the lily. Oh, Nintendo. You’re so naive. For some reason you still believe that it’s 1994 and children are interested in your home consoles and don’t prefer things like Call of Duty and Halo. In reality you’re making products for a nonexistent child demographic that are actually being consumed by thirty-year-old men which is disturbingly similar to the MLP brony phenomenon.

Nintendo also talked about Mario Maker which is a game where you can create your own Mario levels using a variety of old school Mario assets. You can also play user created content. It’s kind of like Little Big Planet but with no professionally built story mode and like a fifth of the creative possibilities and honestly doesn’t look as fun. But I’m betting building stuff is going to be a hell of a lot easier with the tablet controller. It’s interesting but not enough to be a full priced stand alone game. The only playable content as far as I know is going to be user created which is always going to be 99% shit in any community. Oh and don’t forget the amiibo connectivity!

They didn’t say anything about the new Fatal Frame game which I believe is getting localized in the States. Last E3, I complained that they should be utilizing their rights to the franchise with the capabilities of their ill used tablet controller. They actually did it… in Japan. I don’t know anything about it or whether they integrated it well with the tablet but hey, it’s theoretically a step in the right direction.

Those are the things I recall that probably only I took issue with. Many Nintendo fans would lap that shit up, no questions asked like usual. But now we move on to the powder keg. These are the things that were so atrocious and despicable, so sacrilegious and demoralizing, that they actually snapped some fans, (the one’s intelligent enough to retain their independent thought,) out of their ether-like nostalgia haze long enough to express disdain for something with a Nintendo label on it.