The New Nintendo 2DS XL, Hey! Pikmin, and Miitopia... Plus...

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - More! I want more! More! Hahahaha!

There isn't much good about today. Well, it's the two-year anniversary (or, rounded by a weekend) of Miiverse being ruined with its redesign. Miiverse has never been the same. (It got demonstrably worse.)

But I have nothing much to say about that that I haven't been saying for years now, so let's look to the current day. Today, Nintendo has multiple releases for their Nintendo 3DS family: A hardware revision in the New Nintendo 2DS XL is the biggest attraction. I'm not sure how much marketing attention Nintendo is putting on it, but in terms of specifications, the New Nintendo 2DS XL is the best 3DS family handheld they've made yet.

I'm not entirely sure who the target audience is supposed to be. 2DS owners looking for an upgrade? Customers who have never owned a 3DS or 2DS of any sort before who suddenly are interested? (There won't be much of those.)

Meanwhile, Nintendo is releasing Hey! Pikmin (read my impressions of its demo here) and Miitopia (check out its E3 2017 log here) today as well. Those games range from boring to mediocre.

Nintendo's Quality of Life Initiative — Immortal?

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Then as the old saying goes, he who Koops and runs away, lives to Koop another day!

The first quarter (Q1) has ended for Nintendo (as of June 30), and so we have some new sales numbers. 4.7 million Nintendo Switch consoles sold (an increase of 2 million in 3 months), and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has sold 3.54 million copies, compared to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild only selling a total of 3.92 million copies. Neither the Switch or Zelda numbers include my own post-quarter Nintendo Switch purchase.

We can also now say that it's not FAKE NEWS if you made a story like, “Nintendo Switch has sold more hardware in four months than the Wii U has sold more in five months.” However, that's not this article's headline, since there's something else a bit more interesting.

Two weeks ago, Nintendo released their annual report for the fiscal year ending 2017. In it, they mentioned this in the “Research and development activities” section:

“Moreover, we are working on the development of a new product that improves people’s QOL (Quality of Life) in enjoyable ways. Our aim is to enable consumers to make daily efforts to improve their QOL in a fun manner by making sleep and fatigue status visible and offering various services based on this information.”

The same statement was also included in Nintendo's 2016 report (substituting “we are” with “Nintendo is”). 2015's version was a bit longer:

The Wonderful 1237 Strategy Guides: George Pataki

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Find a way across that chasm, and find it now!

Continuing our week's theme for washed up relics of the past, we have a fan-inspired/-salvaged strategy guide on a loser. Why is KoopaTV publishing strategy guides, and what game is the guide for? Why, it's for KoopaTV's browser-based Flash game (play it while you still can!), The Wonderful 1237! The Wonderful 1237 features seventeen unique minigames, all from each of the seventeen Republican presidential candidates you will be competing with should you play the game. (You have until 2020, so get to it.)

As explained in the Wonderful Wednesday article about those minigames, I'll be writing these strategy guides — one for each candidate, in a specific order. This one is about the guy who was the governor of New York from 1995 to 2006: George Pataki. He was also one of the first candidates in real life to drop out of the Republican presidential primaries, and judging from his statistics in The Wonderful 1237, that is likely to happen in the simulation as well. He's the third worst character in this game, and is bad at everything. Still, his minigame is fun, and you can play it at the bottom of this article.

Candidate Stats

Base stats and growth:

Beauty: 0 + (0–4)

Cool: 0 + (0–2)

Cute: 0 + (0–2)

Smart: 0 + (0–3)

Tough: 0 + (0–2)

Average untouched stats after 14 rounds:

Beauty: 28

Cool: 14

Cute: 14

Smart: 21

Tough: 14

Average likelihood of surviving Iowa if untouched:

Very unlikely. (George Pataki will have 7 delegates on average; need 11 to clear.)

“VERSUS... George Pataki! Fight.”

Adobe Flash's End of Life

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - You fixed your last faucet you revolutionary pipesqueak!

You know, this is NOT supposed to be “beloved old things are dying” week, but yesterday we wrote about MS Paint being deprecated.

Today, Adobe announced that Flash, once a bedrock of the Internet, will no longer be supported by 2020, and has set Flash to an end-of-life death journey. Adobe has specified this applies to Adobe Flash Player, and not other things using the Flash runtime, such as Adobe AIR. That's particularly important to us at KoopaTV right now on a game development basis.

RIP Flash, 1995–2020.
(Image made in Paint. Gotta use it as much as I can!)

Flash is already the butt of the Internet, with HTML5 being the new standard-bearer. Mozilla Firefox regularly puts warning messages about Flash content on the Internet. I'd know. We'd all know that Flash would be killed off pretty soon, making this less sudden and scary than the Paint situation and a lot more like Miiverse's end-of-life. (By the way, as a result of our article last night, Microsoft is making a modification to Paint's fate!)

While 2020 is a long time away, I've recently (before today) been reminiscing about the older times on the Internet, back when Newgrounds content creators were Internet celebrities and YouTube was a much smaller competitor for Internet domination, rather than a mega behemoth. The world was a better place then. George W. Bush was president, and videogame-based music videos like these three have mostly withstood the test of time and are still better than the majority of the garbage on YouTube by content creators today:

Skipping Windows 10: VINDICATED! Paint: DEPRECATED!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - He wants to shut us down, friends! What are you gonna do about it?!

Exactly one year ago, I wrote that I was barely clinging on to an incredibly vulnerable (from a security standpoint) Windows 7 PC just so I could avoid getting automatically upgraded (against my will) to Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system. Many back then questioned what I was thinking and how I could be justified in opposing a FREE upgrade.

Let's just say that I knew the sorts of things that would be happening later on. Take, for example, the Windows 10 Fall Creators update. What's the biggest so-called feature? The deprecation of the beloved program, Microsoft Paint, otherwise known as MS Paint. That means that, like Miiverse, Paint is on its way to being removed in the future and will no longer have any updates. When in the future will it suddenly be obliterated off your computer? We don't know.

What I can tell you is that this ain't possible if you're not on Windows 10. Which I'm not. So I'll be keeping my Paint safe and sound, which is good, since KoopaTV would not be possible — at least, not the way it is today — without Paint.

All of these images are KoopaTV-related!
(Consider some of those a sneak peak to future content.)
(Here are those Splatoon 2 articles for images 5 to 9.)

On that note, what the hell is Paint 3D?

Splatoon 2 is Released!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Must-buy game for the Switch, and my gameplay thoughts.

Last Saturday, I actually began playing games on my new Nintendo Switch. I played The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and then once it was around 6 PM Eastern, I spent my night playing the Splatoon 2 Splatfest demo. According to the Nintendo Switch Parental Controls app (it's substituting for an Activity Log), I played The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for 3 hours, and then the Splatoon 2 Splatfest World Premiere for 3 hours and 20 minutes. Of the two, I actually enjoyed Splatoon 2 more than I did with Breath of the Wild!

As I wrote yesterday, I played just enough to become an Ice Cream King and not one match more, and I played as the Splat Roller the whole time. Here's how my Splat Roller was at the end.

The Splatoon 2 Splatfest Scoring System

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Team Division victories?

Last week, we got a very sweet, dessert-esque taste of how Splatoon 2 Splatfests will work. It's especially delicious because Team Ice Cream won. Given how dominating the Popularity score was for Team Ice Cream (76% to 24%), I get the feeling that they actually WON'T re-run this Splatfest.

We also got access to the official rules document for those Splatfests:

Three factors: Popularity, Solo Division victories, and Team Division victories.

 

If you remember Splatoon's scoring system, it was a function of Popularity and Wins. First, it was Popularity + (Wins * 2), but then the 2 became a 4, and the 4 became a 6. Regardless, percentages always mattered: The scores were a function of the percentage figures. You could be unpopular and still win.

Splatoon 2 changes that completely. 

The Wonderful 1237 Strategy Guides: Mike Huckabee

 By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Soft-spoken, and a lovely guitarist.

Ready for some music appreciation? Rather than write about leitmotifs again, I actually want to write another strategy guide for KoopaTV's amazing browser-based Flash game, The Wonderful 1237. The Wonderful 1237 features seventeen unique minigames, all from each of the seventeen Republican presidential candidates you will be competing with in the game as you try to become the Republican nominee for president. ...This one deals with one of those seventeen.

Y'all are familiar with the Wonderful Wednesday article about the game's endorsement minigames, so you know about the nearly one dozen strategy guides I have written so far for each of those. This one is about the guy who was the former governor of Arkansas, an enemy of the Clintons, and a proponent of the FairTax: Mike Huckabee! I thought, back at the beginning of the primaries, that Mike Huckabee would go really far. He's great at talking. He's cool. He's experienced. He was even a Fox News contributor, so every Republican likes him. His favourable numbers were all high! Unfortunately for Mr. Huckabee, this support never happened. Fortunately for him, at least he's one of the top candidates in The Wonderful 1237.

Candidate Stats

Base stats and growth:

Beauty: 1 + (1–4)

Cool: 2 + (1–5)

Cute: 0 + (1–4)

Smart: 0 + (0–3)

Tough: 0 + (0–2)

Average untouched stats after 14 rounds:

Beauty: 36

Cool: 44

Cute: 35

Smart: 21

Tough: 14

Average likelihood of surviving Iowa if untouched:

Quite likely. (Mike Huckabee will have 14 delegates on average; need 11 to clear.)

“VERSUS... Mike Huckabee! Fight.”

"Miiverse Ended!" Text Datamined: So What?

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - What difference, at this point, does it make?

If I asked you a week, month, or months ago, “Do you think Miiverse is going to end eventually?” you would say yes. It's an intuitive, natural answer. All things come to an end, and Nintendo's social network is clearly on its last legs. It's not being supported by the Nintendo Switch. The console it was built for, the Wii U, is no longer being supported. The other system that's piggy-backing on it with a post-development integration that they never bothered to complete, the 3DS, is on its last legs.

It really shouldn't surprise anyone who has put any thought into it: Miiverse won't be around much longer. It served to bolster word-of-mouth and add value to a console that didn't have an obvious value proposition (the Wii U), and as a result, I've logged many thousands of hours into Miiverse. That dwarfs any actual game-playing I've done. Miiverse is what is keeping me using the Wii U at all, and it's actually still doing a pretty good job of that. Nintendo would much rather I spend my fun-time playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on my brand-new Nintendo Switch than screw around on Miiverse on the Wii U. I wonder how their IT administrators feel paying Amazon CloudFront lots of money every month to support shit-posting in the New Super Luigi U Community, and little kids in the Team Kirby Clash Deluxe Community who don't know that the game is LOCAL MULTIPLAYER ONLY. They also gotta pay companies like Emoderation Limited to do moderation work for them...

So why is everyone freaking out about text a dataminer allegedly found in Wii U system update 5.5.2 that indicates Nintendo is planning to end Miiverse? (Note: KoopaTV can't confirm this information, but that's not the point here.)

Good Thing ARMS Wasn't At EVO 2017!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Boy, that would've been a mistake. But there are some consolations.

When I wasn't playing the Splatoon 2 Splatfest demo on Saturday (congratulations to Team Ice Cream!), I spent the weekend watching the EVO 2017 fighting game tournament.

It was a great set of tournaments, and, man, that Super Smash Bros. For Wii U top 8 was intense. Congratulations to Salem on his win over ZeRo (aka Scarf Boy), who subsequently went and deleted his Twitter after being on the winner's side of the bracket. He lost the best of 3 out of 5 to Salem, and then he lost another 3 out of 5 after the bracket reset.

Salem giving a big goofy grin as he is crowned the winner, while ZeRo's face is weirdly distorted in the corner.
(...Or he naturally looks disproportional.)

I wrote six months ago about EVO 2017, and how they had a community choice charity-driven Player's Vote. Back then, I advocated for ARMS to be the ninth game to be at EVO. This was before we actually knew anything about ARMS. Well, as a follow-up, here's how ARMS did at raising money: