Nintendo is extremely salty because people would prefer to play AM2R than Federation Force.
Nintendo Gets Fan Games Blacklisted from Game Awards
Nintendo simply cannot help themselves. Things were just beginning to look up for the company – Pokemon Sun & Moon have been a huge success, and they have a new console launch right around the corner, which looks to be priced as a bargain. Lusipurr.com had just finally at long last managed to switch *zing* over to positive coverage of the company – but this is Nintendo we are talking about, and nothing is ever so straight forward with them. Earlier this year Nintendo lawyers took down the top-tier fan projects AM2R and Pokemon Uranium. One is not going to get into the rights and the wrongs of this move, as Nintendo is hardly the only company to take down such games, and there is arguably a practical legal rationale for them doing so. It does however take an especially insecure and shitty company in order to throw their weight around to get said games removed from an award category for ‘best fan creation’ at The Game Awards. It also takes an especially cowardly invertebrate to just roll over and cuck for Nintendo, which is precisely what Geoff Keighly did:
“It was a bummer to see that happen, but it was something that unfortunately from a show perspective, we had to remove them because we couldn’t obtain the clearance.
the show is potentially at risk for take down as well.”
This is precisely why the viewership for The Game Awards was like half of what it was in 2015. Nobody is interested in watching such a highly compromised cuckfest which does not have anything relevant to say about anything. Imagine what kind of a hollow victory it must have seemed for whichever of the two remaining entries in the category that went on to win. Whoever went on to ‘win’ must have known that they did not actually win anything, and they did not face off against the best of the year’s fan creations. It is sort of almost impossible to imagine AM2R not winning the category in a fair competition.
What makes this all the more hypocritical is all the fuss that Geoff Keighly made about Konami not allowing Kojima to collect his award in 2015, and then turning around and excluding AM2R and Pokemon Uranium from the awards at Nintendo’s say so. As for Nintendo, they are probably just being salty crybabies because Metroid: Federation Force did not get nominated for anything on account of being terrible. Allowing these fan creators to be acknowledged for their awesome work does not cost Nintendo anything, and as we saw with Pokemon Go the existence of derivative products can actually grow the market for the core series. Nintendo really have acted just like Konami here; inconveniencing fan creators purely out of spite – which makes them look fucking terrible.
Wild Arms is set to see a return…
The Return of Wild Arms and Arc the Lad?
Are there any readers who are fans of Wild Arms? Yes? Well then are you keen to see a new entry in this classic JRPG franchise? And what about Arc the Lad? Oh, you would like to see more of that too? Great – because Sony totally has you covered! Wild Arms is being rebooted into a completely original story with returning characters. The project is being handled by many people who worked upon the original game, including series producer Akifumi Kaneko. Meanwhile the story of Arc the Lad is being continued with this installment, and many people who worked on the original games will be returning to develop the project. This is great news so please look forward to playing these games – on your telephone!!
Seriously, fuck Sony. If any dick move could actually manage to best Nintendo this week, then it was this one. The reason that this stings so much is that Sony is pumping out mediocre shit like The Last Guardian and Uncharted 4 for their flagship PS4, and then they turn around and develop their actually appealing content for the freaking telephone – because reasons!
If there is any actually good news out of this it is that Akifumi Kaneko has been trying to get a new Wild Arms game greenlit for ages, so it is very nice for him that he can be working on the series again. Also, this means that Wild Arms and Arc the Lad are not dead, so there is always that. As for everything else, the situation is looking pretty grim. Even in the eventuality that these turn out to be actually good games, it sounds as though the likelihood of a Western localisation is doubtful – a fact that multiple articles have mentioned, without actually stating what led them to this particular conclusion. The games are being produced by an internal Sony division called ForwardWorks, which began operating on April 1st of this year. Yeah, that joke pretty much writes itself.
Watch Dogs was sold to gamers as a graphical powerhouse.
Failure to Launch
Watch Dogs 2 was released several weeks ago, and one is very happy to report that it has sold as well as it deserved to, which is to say terribly. Current global sales on the title are a little sketchy at present, but what is clear is that in its first week on sale in the UK it was unable to sell as many copies as Infinite Warfare in its third week on sale – meaning it sold fewer than 80,000 copies. By contrast the original Watch Dogs sold 380,000 during its launch week, making Watch Dogs 2‘s first week of sales in the UK less than a quarter of what they were for the previous game. The game’s performance was actually so bad that Ubisoft felt the need to step in and damage control:
““We’re incredibly happy with critics’ and players’ very positive reception of Watch Dogs 2, which should bolster support for the long-term success of the game. It is true that first-day and first-week sales for a number of big games, including Watch Dogs 2 and titles from our competitors, are comparatively lower than previous versions in previous years.
“However, we expect both week-two and week-three sales to be above traditional sales patterns. There is a trend toward games, especially high-quality games, having stronger and longer ‘tails’ as favorable reviews and word of mouth spread. Watch Dogs 2 is already considered a tremendous addition to the open-world action adventure series and we’re confident that millions of players are going to love it.”
There were no week two and week three sales – Watch Dogs 2 vanished from the charts. The game is a huge bomb, and it is probably finished as a series – yet it is not at all difficult to discern how we got here. The game is a smug hipster vanity project, and clearly up its own arse – this is a design sensibility that does not play at all well outside of San Francisco. Beyond this the game is an open world Ubisoft game, which is precisely the kind of game that gamers have become vocally bored by. Finally, the previous game in the series was seen as a massive disappointment. After being burned by the original Watch Dogs many gamers rightly adopted a skeptical mindset, and did not have this skepticism dispelled prior to release. Hopefully we have seen the last of this garbage.
