The Wonderful 1237 Strategy Guides: Ted Cruz

 By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Shooting the finest Canadian bacon.

The article scheduling is going to let you see two very different situations: last week's strategy guide was on the very last minigame I developed for The Wonderful 1237, KoopaTV's awesome videogame pitting you against seventeen other Republican presidential candidates. You'll want to win more delegates than they get (1237 being the magic number), and each candidate's endorsement minigame is an important part of achieving that.

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 came in second place (in terms of delegate count) in real life: Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a man who has been likened to an Alolan Raticate on KoopaTV. (This should explain his... low Beauty and Cute stats.)

Candidate Stats

Base stats and growth:

Beauty: 0 + (0–2)

Cool: 1 + (0–5)

Cute: 0 + (0–2)

Smart: 0 + (1–5)

Tough: 1 + (0–5)

Average untouched stats after 14 rounds:

Beauty: 14

Cool: 36

Cute: 14

Smart: 42

Tough: 36

Average likelihood of surviving Iowa if untouched:

Fairly likely. (Ted Cruz will have 13 delegates on average; need 11 to clear.)

“VERSUS... TED CRUZ!
Fight!”

KoopaTV's March 2017 Review Newsletter

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - The Nintendo Switch has only been out for a month?

It seems like the Nintendo Switch has been with us for a long time now, right? But it's only been a month.

Well, it hasn't been with me at all since I don't have one, but at least one dude on the staff does. Regardless of us being the worst Nintendo site in the world for not going into a huge amount of depth of every aspect of Nintendo's new hardware release, we're still a fantastic website if you're not actually looking for that. Here's a few examples why:

Top 3 Recommended Articles of March 2017

Here are my top three recommended articles from the previous month, in chronological order. You'll want to read these... and the other ten articles published in March, because they're all worth reading.

1. Console Launch? On a School Day? It’s More Likely Than You Think!
2. The CIA's Assassination Attempt Against Waluigi
3. JonTron and Yooka-Laylee: The Ends Versus The Means

BREAKING NEWS: MOTHER 3 Virtual Console Release Imminent!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Coming out next week!

Oh man. Oh man. OH MAN. IT'S ALMOST HERE. IT'S FINALLY COMING. After way over a decade of waiting... MOTHER 3 will officially be arriving out of Japan in the way of Virtual Console releases!

Almost two years after I said the long-awaited cult game that's part of the MOTHER series (aka the EarthBound series), would be releasing “soon”, my very long overstretching of what “soon” means can come to an end. MOTHER 3 will be releasing NEXT WEEK! On your local Nintendo console's designated Nintendo eShop release day. This is according to several sources within Nintendo that KoopaTV has been in contact with. It's also supported by this new ESRB filing:

Look! Look! It's on the ESRB's website! It's coming, guys! All those Content Descriptors must've been what took so long.
(ESRB urls are notoriously unusable, so don't think anything of that one. You may need several searches to find it. Very finicky.)

The Wonderful 1237 Strategy Guides: Donald Trump

 By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Golfing, anyone?

Welcome to the beginning of a long line of strategy guides 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.

As explained in last week's 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 ultimately won the whole thing in real life: Donald Trump. As of the game, he's Candidate Donald Trump — one of many other candidates. However, as you can see below, he's among one of the more formidable candidates — though perhaps that will become more obvious as you compare him to others.

Candidate Stats

Base stats and growth:

Beauty: 0 + (0–4)

Cool: 1 + (0–4)

Cute: 1 + (0–3)

Smart: 0 + (0–4)

Tough: 4 + (1–5)

Average untouched stats after 14 rounds:

Beauty: 28

Cool: 29

Cute: 22

Smart: 28

Tough: 46

Average likelihood of surviving Iowa if untouched:

Extremely likely. (Donald Trump will have 17 delegates on average; need 11 to clear.)

VERSUS... DONAAAAAAAALLD TRUUUUUUUUMP!
Fight!

Rawk's Splatoon 2 Global Testfire Experience

By RAWKHAWK2010 - Splat2n.

Don't ask me why I'm writing this article. Because I'll tell you why: Ludwig doesn't own a Nintendo Switch and can't investigate this “Splatoon 2” on his own. And so as someone who does, the burden was placed on me.

I have no interest in Splatoons. I have no desire to engage with Splatoons. The character models irk me and Splatooners have a showy sense of self-righteousness of what it means to be a “‘90s kid.” And I may like squids, but that doesn't mean I want to squirm around in the presence of these unctuous squid...kids.

That said, I've participated in both Splatoon testfires. My memory of the first Splatoon Global Testfire has since been distorted by a series of unfortunate brain diseases (blame Sierra Leone), and my memory of the second has been distorted by the fact that most of my fascination with Splatoon 2 involved not actually playing the game. Namely, basking my nihilist squid in the sun was infinitely more rewarding than interacting with squid kids and their trifling reindeer games.

Every idiot who goes about with “Booyah!” on their lips should be boiled with his own ink.

JonTron and Yooka-Laylee: The Ends Versus The Means

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - What do we think of this moral dilemma?
[Update 3/25/2017: There's a video version of this article at the bottom.]

And on one corner, we have the forces of JonTron and the “alt-right”! And on the other corner, there is the game developer Playtonic and the radical leftist videogame board, NeoGAF!

The current controversy of the week is this: Popular YouTuber JonTron, who has three million subscribers on YouTube (it's unknown how many of them are actually active), said really dumb/questionable/noble-but-poorly-articulated things in a political debate about culture, immigration, and race, with some left-wing guy. The substance of that issue doesn't matter to this discussion, but the end result is that JonTron, who is a (bad) entertainer, tried pretending like he's some kind of political thinker and it backfired. As a result, it divided his fanbase up.

This article isn't about YouTuber drama, because no one on this site cares about that garbage. What does matter is that KoopaTV's staffers have been warning about how JonTron is bad news in the industry, with particular interest on his voice-actor role for Playtonic (made up of former Rare Ltd. developers)'s Kickstarted game, Yooka-Laylee, which releases this April 11. Here are some prescient Rawk quotes from back in June of 2016:

Anatomy of The Wonderful 1237's Minigames!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Some overarching game design stories before I write specifically about each minigame.

I think the most technically awesome thing about The Wonderful 1237, which is a free browser-based Flash game that can and should play right from KoopaTV, is that it has seventeen awesome minigames incorporated in it. They just barely are able to be crammed in this jam-packed game, but they're there, modularly programmed, and self-contained. Those are all good programming principles.

Each of the seventeen Republican presidential candidates from the 2015–2016 primaries (with brief introductions to them here) gets their own minigame that you'll have to go through if you wish for their post-campaign-suspension endorsement, and their delegates. In each minigame, they'll give you some kind of instruction, leave you to it, and then tell you your score in the form of how many of their delegates you've won. (Any other delegates for a less-than-perfect score are evenly distributed to the other remaining candidates.)

The list of dropped-out candidates after Iowa and New Hampshire in a particular playthrough.
If you want their delegates, you'll have to play a minigame.

Where'd I get the idea to make a minigame compilation? (Well, The Wonderful 1237 is a lot more than that, mechanically, but the minigames is where a bunch of the development time went.) Am I going to provide a list of the minigames in here? (Yes.) What design philosophies did I have when making them? All of those will be answered, and more.

The Nintendo Switch Is The Anti-CIA Console!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - There's no built-in microphone hardware!

Two weeks ago, on March 7, WikiLeaks revealed Part 1 of the Vault 7 series (there's no Part 2 yet) — an information dump detailing the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA's) often-rumoured-but-unconfirmed capabilities. I wrote a (true) story about one of them: Remote vehicle hacking, which can be used for undetectable assassinations.

But there's a lot more, with their Embedded Device Branch and Mobile Devices Branch turning your electronic devices with microphones into covert listening devices.

BREAKING: CIA turns Smart TVs, iPhones, gaming consoles and many other consumer gadgets into open microphones. #Vault7

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) March 7, 2017

Gaming consoles, huh? Hey, one of those JUST came out from Nintendo earlier this month. The Nintendo Switch! Did the CIA take over the Nintendo Switch?

Let's take a look at the Nintendo Switch specifications to find out:

There's an audio jack where you can connect commercially available microphones.

Game Reviews: 5/10 is NOT Average

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Anyone who says that either doesn't know what an average is, or don't know how reviewers score games.

Throughout my experience lurking Internet conversations about videogame reviews, there's always been threads about reviews that give beloved games low review scores (such as 8.8 for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, or 7.8 for Pokémon Alpha Sapphire/Pokémon Omega Ruby) by certain critics. Sometimes there is THAT GUY who says something like...

Source: This GameFAQs comment in a thread about a 7/10 score given to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild by The Jimquisition.

“7/10 is not average... 5/10 is average.

7/10 = great game, far above average”

 
I don't want to pick on just that one GameFAQs user, but it's fairly representative of the kind of person I see, and they're sort of everywhere. A minority, yes, but still prevalent.

This article is for them. Because they are wrong. I think this next image more-or-less makes why they are wrong very obvious: 

Learning Points from The Wonderful 1237's Mechanics & Dynamics

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - These learning points are along the lines of “about the American political nomination system” than “about game design”, but...

Last week for Wonderful Wednesday — the article series where I try every week to write something about KoopaTV's free, fun, and browser-based game The Wonderful 1237 — I discussed how the Aesthetics of The Wonderful 1237 provided learning points about how the presidential primary process in the United States is treated as a horse race, and how detrimental that is to America.

This week, let's look at what the game's inner mechanics, and the dynamics (how the player interacts with it), can teach us. And by us, I mean you. Though I myself learned quite a bit about the subject matter through making this light-hearted “simulation”. Game development for learning!

I guess I should start by listing some of the mechanics and dynamics from The Wonderful 1237 and talk about each from there: