Nintendo Blew 5 Million Dollars on a Nintendo Switch Super Bowl Ad

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - The ad has low ratings, and isn't memorable versus other ads and the actual game.

Let's get this out of the way: All of the people on KoopaTV's staff who refer to the sport as just “football” (as opposed to “American football”) wanted the Atlanta Falcons to win last night's Super Bowl, Super Bowl LI (51). (It's football of the Madden NFL variety rather than the FIFA variety.) I'll write more about general sports-stuff later in the article, because sports and KoopaTV don't normally mix so that can hide at the bottom. However, this time, it's worth talking about because of Nintendo's Super Bowl appearance.

Last night was the first time, ever, that a Nintendo product was advertised for the Super Bowl! (Not counting the Pokémon 20th anniversary commercial that wasn't really advertising anything. Maybe THAT explains why Pokémon Sun and Pokémon Moon sold so much?) It was the Nintendo Switch. In the fourth quarter, this 30-second spot costing $5 million was aired:

There is also an extended cut three times as long located here, which features women winning every time they're paired up against men. ...It's just something that stuck out to me. Anyway, just because it's longer doesn't make it better, so let's talk about what tens of millions of people actually saw on television.

The 3DS Lives! And Pokémon Sun/Moon's Amazing Sales

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Plus, why the Nintendo Switch launch line-up is the way it is.

It's that time of year... Nintendo has released more Investors Relations documents! While we may not be investors (...well, I'M not. Maybe YOU are.), there's still a treasure trove of information us interested consumers can eat up. To be specific, it's the Corporate Management Policy Briefing/Nine Months Financial Results Briefing. If you actually do own stock, you might want to check out the financial stuff here, though I don't think any of it is particularly interesting besides Nintendo of America's Seattle Mariners baseball team sale having a comically large impact on their performance. (...That's what I find comical, anyway.)

I guess the big, stand-out news I care about (Animal Crossing on mobile garbage is delayed to after March, but no one's looking forward to that, right? It just means Nintendo only has three smartphone games out by March 2017, not five like they promised.) is how amazingly Pokémon Sun and Pokémon Moon did, sales-wise. The details of which are also pretty interesting.

In the span of a few weeks, the two games put together are the third-best selling games of the Nintendo 3DS, ever.
They'll probably surpass Mario Kart 7 very quickly, if they haven't already.

Isn't that... fantastic? It seems the months of drip-feed information and a massive 20th anniversary celebration resulted in sales. Nintendo also cites Pokémon GO as a contributing factor. That last one, if true, may explain two tidbits of information regarding how Pokémon Sun/Moon got such high sales:

KoopaTV's January 2017 Review Newsletter

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - We're announcing a huge, major change with KoopaTV's output.

We're a twelfth done with the year. It's kind of a disaster, in that I originally typed “January 2016” in the article headline. Yes, I'm STILL having trouble coming to grips with what year this is.

That's not the only problem we're facing, however, so let's start with... BAD NEWS.

KoopaTV Article Production To Be Cut 40%

Horrifying header, isn't it? But it's true. You see, given the recent global conflicts of the world and a certain President of the United States (not President Barack Hussein Obama — we're done with him, finally) trying to make a name for himself, KoopaTV is caught in a precarious position.

Remember: Our Earth headquarters is in Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone is a Muslim-majority country filled with dark-skin people. It's a ripe target for some immigration policy and economic controls, and Sierra Leone itself is fed up. On the Sierra Leone side, they're trying to boycott America. On the American side, they want to restrict immigration and imports from Sierra Leone. We at KoopaTV condemn this behaviour from the man whom we helped elect with our election meddling.

As a result, we must smuggle our articles into the United States (where KoopaTV's servers are located) from Sierra Leone through the Southern border, which is currently under extra scrutiny as work on THE WALL is beginning. Due to the added costs of having to perform this measure, and the fact that we're making no additional revenue (0 + 0 = 0), we are making a Three-Fifths Compromise with you, the reader, to only have three articles a week instead of five.

We plan for articles to be published Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, effective immediately.

That said, if something very important needs to be published on a particular Tuesday or Thursday, we'll try to do our best to smuggle it as soon as we can!

We will try our best to make up for the lost quantity with added quality. We once had a lengthy discussion back in 2015 about what would happen if KoopaTV went to one article a week instead of five. Going to three seems like a balance, doesn't it? (Not that balance is always... good.)

Personally, I was extremely upset that Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma was robbed of a chance to win Best 3DS Game of 2016 on KoopaTV, or be nominated for any other category. As I admitted back in November 2016, I haven't played it even though I've owned it for a while — and I STILL haven't played it. Surely, KoopaTV being a time-suck is somewhat to blame? (So are Pokémon Moon and Paper Mario: Color Splash, though.)

Nintendo Switch Ends Region Locking; President Trump Begins It

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Going from region-locked games to region-locked people.

One topic not covered in KoopaTV's 1,000+ article history — and just because I don't care about it — is the subject of region-locking. Did you watch the Nintendo Switch Presentation from three weeks ago? They had a line about region-locking no longer being a Nintendo policy starting with the Nintendo Switch, which apparently pleased some people out there.

Nintendo has been region-locking their consoles for a while now, basically meaning that Americans can't play Japanese games imported from Japan on their American systems. Why anyone would want to do this to begin with is beyond me, because I'm not into playing games in foreign languages. I guess the only people who could possibly benefit from the removal of region-locking are Europeans? I dunno, you can tell me what benefits this actually has for the Nintendo Switch.

While Nintendo is liberalising the export of games, the United States of America's new president, President Donald John Trump, is restricting the export of terrorists. More specifically, he signed Executive Order 13769, or Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States. This puts a temporary (few month) ban on nationals of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, and Yemen entering the United States — until the Trump administration can figure out how to best set-up their vetting processes.

So far, so good. After all, who wants people from Iran coming in? They're monsters who ban Pokémon GO and want to nuke America. Well, the problem is that the Executive Order seems to not have been written properly, and there is a lot of confusion about it.

KoopaTV is now on the GAB Social Network!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - They're either gonna love us, or ignore us. Or maybe despise us. I dunno.

KoopaTV is extending its reach across the world wide web's social media platforms. This time, we've joined up with GAB, a social media service dedicated to free speech. In fact, their “mission is to put people and free speech first.”

That makes KoopaTV quite in-line with GAB's values, so we signed up. It's an invite-only thing, but GAB approved of our application in about a week. They actually said when we signed up that it'd take a week for them to process our request, so they kept their promise. Good! That automatically makes them better than some of those OTHER social media services.

Behold! KoopaTV's GAB account is here at https://gab.ai/KoopaTV !

Screenshot of our GAB account taken this morning. We've had it for a few weeks but wanted to populate it first before advertising it.
If that article about Hideo Kojima looks interesting to you, read it here.

You can classify your post as Politics, Technology, Entertainment, and other things. Most of what we have is Entertainment, because it's literally a game controller icon. You get 300 characters per post, and after putting the url in it's about 240 — it's unlike Twitter which has a set amount of characters taken for every url (about 23). When making a new post, you can't upload an image file, but you can search Giphy to attach a .gif, which is something I haven't done because KoopaTV articles very rarely use .gifs. It'll take the first image it can find, which is the author avatar. So it's just a bunch of my face. 

Well, that's never bad.


If you want a GAB invite, KoopaTV can get you hooked up. Meanwhile, you can hook KoopaTV up with...yourself... and join KoopaTV as a social media manager! Ludwig sure doesn't want to be running all of these accounts by himself, and he sure isn't using them effectively. Have a big impact on KoopaTV's traffic with your knowledge and competence in social media.


KoopaTV has updated the Knowing When We Update article for the first time in a year and a half, so check that out for a comprehensive list of knowing when KoopaTV has a new article!

Hideo Kojima's Toxic Mono-Entertainment Philosophies

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Kojima puts the Hideo in hideous.

When legendary game designer Hideo Kojima isn't awkwardly embracing Geoff Keighley, he's in Tokyo working for himself at Kojima Productions, currently trying to develop Death Stranding, a game we know nothing about other than that it's disturbing and inappropriate, reflecting Kojima's creepy fantasies.

Kojima recently took the time to speak with BBC's Newsbeat gaming reporter Steffan Powell, who asked Hideo Kojima some questions. While Mr. Kojima refused to give any more details about Death Stranding (not that I was wondering, personally), he did provide information on the current status of his philosophy regarding the entire umbrella of the entertainment industry:

“Things such as games and music and novels and movies and all of these things will kind of mesh together into one type of entertainment. [...] The time you have to choose what media or entertainment you experience is dwindling. [...] More and more people are looking at types of media that combine elements together. [...] If we just make a game people are less likely to choose that as something to do. They would rather engage in something that combines different forms of entertainment together. That's where we need to focus our efforts, on this convergence.”

To be fair to Hideo Kojima, he's not saying he WANTS that kind of thing. That's just where he sees the entertainment industry going, and he's going to try to have a first-mover advantage into it.

That said, he probably has that futuristic vision because it confirms what he's believed for years, not because he has any hidden insights or market research that the rest of the world doesn't have. So let's talk about it.

Nostalgia and Video Games: What's Enticing About the Retro World

By BRANDON WILLIAMS - The beauty of nostalgia is knowing a game is still great 20+ years later.

IIf you’re a gamer, then you’re probably familiar with the feeling of nostalgia. Nostalgia is that strong sensation you get when you dust off your old copy of Pokémon Stadium, blow on the cartridge, and recreate your childhood team that helped you beat Gym Leader Castle, and it’s immensely satisfying for most gamers.

Nostalgia is frequently brought up in discussions of classic video games, but it doesn’t have to be delegated to a spot in history. By building upon video games of yesteryear, new productions can capture that classic feeling while still updating the content for the modern age.

Once upon a time, video games were produced with less-than-stellar graphics and considerable technical limitations. And they took the world by storm. While video games have made mountains of “improvements” from the days of Super Mario World, contemporary games could stand to benefit from some reintegration of classic trends.

Don’t believe me? Just think back to the iconic features that made retro games so addictive.

Get ARMS to EVO 2017!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - ...It'd be funny.

I sound like RawkHawk2010 right now, but it would be funny. ...Lemme back up a bit.

This year's Evolution Championship Series 2017, or EVO 2017, is taking place this July 14–16 in Las Vegas. It's the world's premier fighting game tournament. I've talked about it before. Multiple times. As the one dude on the staff who actually follows two eSports: Super Smash Bros. Melee and Super Smash Bros. For the Wii U. They're both gonna be at EVO 2017! Yay.

We're gonna talk about that bottom-right box, ‘cause it's not a game called VOTE.

However, this year, EVO is holding a charity drive contest (all proceeds to Make-a-Wish International): Nine games are nominated to be the COMMUNITY CHOICE game that people will then sign up for and play competitively. The game that raises the most money gets the slot, and the deadline is February 8th.

These games all have established communities and fanbases... and then there's ARMS. 

The Nin Godzilla?!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - This could be a new IP... via self-fulfilling prophecy.

In the deep depths of the Technology news of the Wall Street Journal in the business section for today (page B4, Tuesday, January 24, 2017) was a short story about Nintendo! What'd they do now? It was written by a seemingly strange man, the Wall Street Journal's Takashi Mochizuki, who is their technology reporter in Tokyo. It was headlined,

“Possible New Character Is Teased by Nintendo”

(It's an easier read than the above “Ford Invests to Promote Online Auto Loans”.)

What is it? This thing... the Nin Godzilla. Otherwise known as ニンゴジラ. (ニン is the “Nin” in Nintendo's Japanese name, and ゴジラ is “Godzilla” in Japanese.)

Source: An error message at store.nintendo.co.jp
Note that ニンゴジラ doesn't appear, so that's a fanon name.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Nintendo's Japanese site's online store is allowing customers to pre-order “semicustomized versions of the Switch console”, and the dinosaur appears as “an error message saying the site is overloaded and can't take orders.” Well, at least that means there is demand for the Nintendo Switch! (Or Nintendo has healthcare.gov-esque server problems.)

So... is it a new IP or something? 

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild — Wii U, or Switch?

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Will you SWITCH your pre-order to a SWITCH?

Contrary to the sub-title, I don't have The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild pre-ordered. The last The Legend of Zelda game I ever pre-ordered was The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, which has a very similar development history with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: Multiple delays for multiple systems. At least the best version of that was the GameCube version, which is the one I pre-ordered. But what's the best version of Breath of the Wild?

On a feature level, the Wii U and Switch versions of Breath of the Wild are the same. On a technical level, the Nintendo Switch version is superior, according to a differences list that Nintendo provided to GameSpot. These technical differences include a higher resolution and crisper sounds on the Switch. The controllers are also obviously different, and I have no idea how the Switch's Joy-Cons compare to the Wii U GamePad since I haven't held the former. (Maybe I should ask Bowser Jr.?)

Unless you're in my situation, figuring out which to get isn't hard.