KoopaTV's May 2017 Review Newsletter

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - ...Oh hey, now it's June.

We just finished May 2017. What's May known for? The month of our founding, and the penultimate month prior to the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). Now we're going to have our busiest month OF THE YEAR.

But, prior to that, let's review our May. It was a great May, you know. Lots of fantastic content.

Top Five Recommended Articles of May 2017

This will be our first TOP FIVE in months! Yes, May is the first month since January that had FIVE articles every weekday instead of THREE. And there's certainly enough content to fill a top five, or even more. But then it wouldn't be selective, would it?

1. The Optimal Way to Play Team Kirby Clash Deluxe
2. Finally, The Paper Mario: Color Splash Review 
3. King Bowser's Cook-Out!! 
4. Sonic Forces: Custom Hero — Brilliant, or Disaster?
5. Terror in Manchester, UK! ...Hey, Where's Vortexica?

Those articles are presented in chronological order. Every article on KoopaTV is worth reading, even worthless ones like yesterday's.

Just like our articles, our readers are amazing. So on that note...

Coffee and Gaming

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - I play games and I don't drink coffee.

Late last night, President Donald John Trump tweeted, “Despite the constant negative press covfefe”. The tweet is now deleted, but it was there for a while and was apparently his most-retweeted tweet since his inauguration. In its place, the President tweeted this:

Who can figure out the true meaning of "covfefe" ??? Enjoy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2017

He never completed his thought. I thought “covfefe” was supposed to be “kerfuffle”, while most people think it was “coverage”. ...KoopaTV staffer RawkHawk2010 believes it was coffee.

So, rather than this week's Wednesday being a Wonderful Wednesday strategy guide for The Wonderful 1237 (it was gonna be Carly Fiorina's minigame!), it's going to be about coffee. What's there to say about coffee? I don't know. I don't drink it. But with respect to our normal publishing schedule, you could say that today is... A COFFEE BREAK!

Fire Emblem Warriors Not a Series Homage... and Advance Wars Has No Love

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Maybe we should've done the Memorial Day article on Advance Wars.

We've brought up almost everything from the Fire Emblem Direct again besides... Fire Emblem Warriors. It's not something I care about, and the latest news from Famitsu magazine will make it something I care about even less.

The biggest takeaway is this:

“The characters that appear are generally from Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light and Fire Emblem Awakening, as well as Fire Emblem Fates. This won’t be a gathering of the protagonists from across the series.”

This is in contrast with Hyrule Warriors, which IS a gathering of characters across the whole series, as you can figure out by all of the game-themed DLC packs. (And I didn't get it despite actually being interested in its characters because I sure ain't interested in Warriors gameplay.)

I guess it makes sense if you look at the results from the Fire Emblem Heroes Choose Your Legends ballot. (Check out the excellent analysis from Kantopia.) The top-scoring characters that weren't main protagonists are all from Fire Emblem Awakening or Fire Emblem Fates.

By the way, just to support my point from my Fire Emblem article about Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valencia, Fire Emblem Gaiden got the least amount of votes for its characters of any Fire Emblem game. It wasn't exactly close. Really, no one cared about or liked Fire Emblem Gaiden.

A Memorial for The Law, Which is Dead

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - The rule of law is dead on Earth.

I had three ideas for this year's Memorial Day article: This, something about the Fire Emblem series, or something about Vortexica. The latter seems... inappropriate and premature, even given recent circumstances. The middle is a bit redundant given Memorial Day 2016 (see the bottom of this article for a list of our previous Memorial Day articles), and I don't even think it's dead given the hope for Fire Emblem on the Nintendo Switch.

So, we're gonna get political (and/or Ace Attorney) again and just say the whole concept of the law is dead. My basis for this claim is what we said in a KoopaTV article in July of 2016: Hillary Clinton: The Dark Age of the Law.

The entire point of that article was making the claim that the law was dead due to its inequitable application between people like Hillary Clinton, and people like... everyone else. I wrote that,

“The man who will bring us out of these dark ages and into an era of brilliant golden light [is] [...] Donald Trump.”

WELL. We've had President Donald John Trump for over four months now. Is the law still in a dark age? What of Hillary Clinton?

This reoccurring music embed, along with, you know, the title of the article, should let you know my thoughts into the matter: 

The False Nintendo Marketing Spin on Team Kirby Clash Deluxe

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - A fun game that doesn't deserve disingenuous marketing.

Just a few days ago, Nintendo sent out a push notification to everyone who allows themselves to receive those on their Nintendo 3DS. It was about Team Kirby Clash Deluxe!

This free-to-play Kirby game is all the rage on the Nintendo eShop, and Nintendo just wanted to make sure everyone else got in the action. After all, it's a better experience when people on your Nintendo 3DS friends list are playing the game actively instead of just being stuck at Level 2 forever. (Looking at you, Ray and Nandin.)

However, this Nintendo-sent Team Kirby Clash Deluxe push notification made a variety of... duplicitous claims about the game's content and feature set.

This Miiverse guy got the push notification and is wondering where the new challenge system is.
(There is no new system. There is no update.)

There's poor people confused on Miiverse about this push notification, so let's clear the air about it. First, I transcribed the whole thing verbatim below. 

Leaked First Look At Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - After I called it fake news for months, Ubisoft apparently confirmed it somewhere.

I want to keep any and all Rabbids content on this website to a minimum. Unfortunately, Ubisoft and Nintendo are going to make that difficult over the next several months. Back during Ubisoft's E3 2013, RawkHawk2010 exclaimed:

“I can't believe the Rabbids are still around.”

The year after in Ubisoft's E3 2014, RawkHawk2010 said:

“Rabbids are hideous characters.”

Meanwhile, during E3 2015 I didn't know what the Minions were and thought that Electronic Arts made them up as their version of the Rabbids.

That's basically KoopaTV's Rabbids history, but it looks like there will be more to come. Ubisoft apparently has confirmed the existence of Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle after rumours and leaks were swirling in dark corners of disreputable media outlets. It's some sort of weird RPG...thing, featuring Mario, Luigi, Peach, Yoshi, and four Rabbids dressed up as those four characters.

The Wonderful 1237 Strategy Guides: Chris Christie

 By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - It's pretty obvious that Chris Christie is on Team Burgers.

Welcome to another edition of the 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.

(We had a brief break last week due to...important things to cover.) 

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 destroyed Marco Rubio, only to drop out of the race to serve as Donald Trump's henchman and lock-her-up chanter: Chris Christie. Unfortunately for Chris Christie, all of his servitude to Candidate Trump didn't help him in real life, and like real life, he is, on his own, a pretty weak candidate in The Wonderful 1237.

Candidate Stats

Base stats and growth:

Beauty: 0 + (1–2)

Cool: 0 + (0–3)

Cute: 1 + (0–3)

Smart: 0 + (0–2)

Tough: 0 + (0–5)

Average untouched stats after 14 rounds:

Beauty: 21

Cool: 21

Cute: 22

Smart: 14

Tough: 35

Average likelihood of surviving Iowa if untouched:

Less than average likelihood. (Chris Christie will have 10 delegates on average; need 11 to clear.)

“Versus CHR-R-R-R CHRIS CHRISTIE! ...Fight.”

Terror in Manchester, UK! ...Hey, Where's Vortexica?

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - If only we could talk with him ONE LAST TIME...

Tonight, United Kingdom prime minister Theresa May raised the terrorist threat level of her country to CRITICAL, up from SEVERE. Another attack, not counting the Manchester Arena terrorist attack (done by a guy named Salman Ramadan Abedi — I wonder which church he goes to?) that you'll hear about if you turn on the news (i.e. not KoopaTV), is IMMINENT. Scary. It doesn't get any higher than CRITICAL. Just because critical hits got nerfed in the Pokémon series a few years ago doesn't mean this is any less serious.

At the same time, this doesn't affect KoopaTV happily sitting by at our Sierra Leone headquarters.

Wait, what's that? KoopaTV staffer and British correspondent Vortexica hasn't shown up at our quarterly meetings? Well, WHERE THE HELL IS HE? ...Oh no... Oh no...

GameFAQs Best Year in Gaming: Round 5 — THE FINALS!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - The death match between 2001 and 1998.

Throughout this month of May, KoopaTV has been covering the GameFAQs Best Year in Gaming contest. This contest sought to poll the Internet (this year, mostly just GameFAQs users — but in previous years there were rallies have caught Internet-wide popularity and massive vote totals) on which year in the gaming industry was... THE BEST.

After getting through a Wildcard round, Round 1, Round 2, Round 3, and Round 4... we're finally at Round 5. In a 32 + 4 entrant 1v1 tournament, that's the final round.

Our gratuitous banner has the propaganda directly put on it!

It's 2001 vs. 1998. Vote for 2001. Please? Right here, today, on Monday.

I'll convince you why.

Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valencia... is Still Fire Emblem: Gaiden

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - The same Fire Emblem: Gaiden that is really weird and no one appreciated.

Today, Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valencia came out in North America. (Recall the Fire Emblem Direct.) This game is a pretty faithful remake of Fire Emblem Gaiden, also known as the second game in the Fire Emblem series that came out on the Famicom and was exclusive to Japan. Like many NES-era sequels, it was weird and really different from the first game (think Zelda II: The Adventure of Link), and it was less a sequel and more of literally a side-story. And then the third game in the Fire Emblem series included a remake of the whole first game in it, and it's weird how that whole thing turned out.

Anyway, I've been around many Fire Emblem discussions and message boards prior to the release of Fire Emblem: Awakening. I've come across lots of forum topics along the lines of, “Rank all the games in the Fire Emblem series from best to worst.” Now, random forum-goers can have lots of bad opinions, but Fire Emblem Gaiden tended to be in a lower-tier or some sort of question mark tier.

Many Western Fire Emblem fans, not having access to many of the Fire Emblem games through legal localised channels, played the “missing” games through unapproved methods. Favourites of these included Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade (the one with Roy, and the closest to Fire Emblem 2003 which was in America), Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, and for the really hardcore, Fire Emblem: Thracia 776.

Not many people sought out Fire Emblem Gaiden. But now, with faithful remake Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valencia? There's revisionist expectations.