nintendo ↘↖
Exciting Entertainment Evolution
Now that E3 is all good and done, I’ve decided that I’m more excited than ever for the video game industry, following the feeling that a crash is coming and I would welcome it. E3 came around with three different conferences with very different levels of reception. Say what you want about them all, but I looked at the implications to the big picture. If you look around the internet, you’ll see defenses of all three consoles, and differing reasons to pick one over the others. Shots have been fired, lines have been drawn, and beatdowns have been administered. For the first time in years, we have a real console war.
Oops, I accidentally made a meme.
Tee hee
{Mischief in Miiverse, part 3}
The Greatest Ideas of 2012 (or possibly stupidest)
- An all you can’t eat buffet
- Group and military discounts on gastric bypasses
- BBBBBB, an 8-bit-style game about avoiding bees
- A fighting game where all of the characters are unnamed. The community would have to nickname all of them.
- My Little Oni
- An informant named Depperthroatt, who gives intel with an extremely disjointed and vulgar manner of speaking
- R.L. Steins;Gate
- In the 19th century, stomach worms were sold as a weight loss product. With current genetic engineering technology, we could bring that back — worms built with a lifespan of a few days and only eating fatty material in the meantime.
- Open a Kickstarter for $50 to buy the domains jme.com, fubmede.com, and venguaq.com and have them all redirect to http://www.bemanistyle.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?23-Forum-Boredom
- A fighting game with only effeminate gay dudes, to counteract the girls fighters that are all the rage
- Gangsta Tower Defense
- A new Pokérap with all 649 current Pokémon
- A kusoge game development contest
- A creepypasta Mega Man ROM hack that details his sad recent history, ending with his burial
- Regular Expression Show
- Kickstarters to stop other Kickstarters
- A Kickstarter equivalent for bounty hunters
- Kickstarters for ransoms. Milestones include parts of the victim and coerced personalized messages from them.
- Bullet hell Connect Four
- In a fighting game, keep control after timeout. If they keep fighting for too long, they’re bombed and DQed.
- Ms. Fortune as a Happy Wheels character
- How to protest excessive file-sharing penalties. Get busted for downloading music and get hit with 5 years in prison and the maximum fine. On the way to court, stab an innocent child and get arrested again. In the ensuing trials for both, say “At least the punishment feels fair now.”
- A JRPG with a schizophrenic. Your party is your multiple personalities and fight-or-flight makes them split.
- A game show without a host, i.e. one run by GLaDOS
- Dadaist martial arts
- I hear that Minecraft fans have a tendency to gang up on gaming YouTube channels and dislike all the videos if they want them to produce Minecraft videos. Rather than ostracize them, I would dare them: “If all of my videos get 500,000 dislikes, I will start doing Minecraft videos.” The ensuing war will be highly entertaining and the high dislike counts will attract bile fascination.
- YOLO: The Game - An online game that bans your IP when you die. You literally only get one life ever.
- A Twitter app called “YouTwit”, which narrates your tweets as the computer from Courage the Cowardly Dog
- A live-action adaptation of Flatland
- A fighting game whose rules shuffle randomly. It’s impossible to master, but that won’t stop dedicated fans.
- Wolfensteins;Gate 3D
- A JRPG where the protagonist is unconcerned with the crises that surround him, because he knows the ending
Mischief in Miiverse! Part 2
Let’s hope this escalates into some big gaming website front page story.
Playing La-Mulana the right way.
Patch the Shell Horn while you’re at it.
Order now.
"Last Story Appreciation" done called me out [Update]
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we didn’t have to resort to operations with any kind of opposition to be heard by people who make things to pass the time? Now I don’t care much for politics, but when people resort to protesting, it seems to me that democracy has fallen short. Good thing gaming is not a democracy. But that anyone still thinks so needs to check if they can present only partial support for a product or company by buying only part of a product. Voting with your wallet is a completely broken and impossible concept because we can’t choose to reward good game design and punish bad business practices at the same time (at least not legally). The “THOUSANDS” of regular gamers represented by Operation Rainfall should be millions, because that’s how many gamers matter. Unfortunately for them, their ideology is that of a special interest, overinflated sense of importance and all.
In an ideal democracy (there you go using that word again), everyone’s word matters equally. Because Operation Rainfall’s members are the ones writing paper letters and going on the media and thinking that video games are more worth their attention than anything else that could benefit from such actions, they think they should be rewarded over those who see through their self-serving campaigns. And they are, with more opportunities to feed into something that countless other games never had and never will. They tell people to go buy specific games and gain from their months of hard work, but they implicitly suggest to those who do to say Operation Rainfall sent them. If they really cared about localization of high-profile games that according to them are unfairly denied chances in English localization, they wouldn’t put so much effort into making a name for themselves first. But Exy, if they don’t have a notable media presence, how are they supposed to effect any change in the industry? Instead of working within the current system to give thousands of people a label, they ought to be trying to break it so that the games of their choosing should not have to be spoken for like children begging for a limited-release toy. Do they really care about Nintendo’s well-being, trying to get them off their laurels so they can let niche gamers stop making begging videos, or are they just trying to become Nintendo’s guardian angels as far as the headlines are concerned and look good while doing it?
The answer is on you. As you can see from my meandering train of thought above, I wanted to stop doing this long ago, but myopic activists like the one linked just won’t let me put it to rest. I really don’t want this blog to become a single-target soapbox. I didn’t name it after a play on a 3DS title so I could take potshots solely at a Nintendo-centric organization.
[Update May 6 2012] It appears that the post this responds to no longer exists. Does this mean I win? Pity I decided against quoting it here.
I totally called it: Operation Rainfall reveals their true colors [Update]
Operation Rainfall danced the victory dance last month with the limited release of Xenoblade Chronicles in North American GameStops. Pyrrhic as that was, everyone seems to be happy and content that Nintendo finally threw them a bone. I’ve gone on virtually all of last year saying how Operation Rainfail is selfish and not as virtuous as the press makes them out to be, but I didn’t think that I would be able to add narcissism to their list of sins as well. I’ve been meaning to write this forever, but the below image forced me to shove it to the top of my to-do list.
Never mind that the website makes clear that this is “NOT FINAL ART”. Forget the obvious implications of calling these three games “an epic collection”, even though the website also states that the word “epic” has lost its meaning yet they still saw fit to use it for publicity purposes. Let’s not even mention that they are now collecting money that will somehow allow them to market these games to publishers in exchange for one of the above boxes. “Operation Rainfall Presents” three games that they think they have any claim to whatsoever, as punctuated by the huge logo on the front giving themselves a huge pat on the back.
