Card Games? Horse Racing? What if PEGI Re-Rated Pocket Card Jockey?

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - This could age very well, badly, or not at all, depending if Pocket Card Jockey ever gets ported...

Over in Europe, they're under the Pan European Game Information ratings system, or PEGI. They're like the ESRB... but in Europe. Anyway, the two boards take a different view of simulated (not real money) gambling. In the ESRB, simulated gambling is betting with fake money. This will get your game rated T at a minimum. This is what you do with the Game Corner in Pokémon. ...That same simulated gambling Game Corner got Pokémon in trouble across Europe and Iran, though. And unfortunately the ban on the Game Corner has carried over to “faithful remake” Pokémon Shining Pearl and Pokémon Brilliant Diamond, with the Veilstone Game Corner now being replaced with the Metronome Style Shop where you can buy outfits for your trainer.

So we know Iran is psychopathic, but what kind of European trouble? They've never liked simulated gambling, and as of 2020, the PEGI policy has developed to be that any game with simulated gambling (“games of chance that are normally carried out in casinos or gambling halls”) that apparently teaches or encourages the player that gambling is fun is PEGI 18. That's the highest, most restrictive rating. This is further elaborated on AskAboutGames, which brings up the example of Overboard!, an adventure game, which is 18-rated in Europe and T-rated in North America due to a blackjack playing scene. They also said that gambling activities that are a plot point in a story are fine, but actually doing the simulated gambling activity is bad. “For example, this will include games that teach the player how to play card games that are usually played for money or how to play the odds in horse racing.”

Card games? Horse racing? I think it's time to talk about Pocket Card Jockey again!

China's Minor Game Restrictions Worse Than We Imagined—One hour a day for three days a week

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - So much for the videogame industry in China.

I have written a LOT about China and gaming restrictions in just this month. Let's briefly review.

Chinese state media bullied Chinese megacorporation Tencent earlier, comparing their mobile games to spiritual opium that is intoxicating the children with its addictive nature. (That's a very dishonourable comparison in Chinese culture.) China already had restrictions that kids can only play 1.5 hours of games a day... but Tencent would “voluntarily” bring that down to 1 hour a day to avoid the regulatory ire implied by the Chinese state media.

Less than a week ago, South Korea decided it would no longer be on the two-country list of governments that restricted minors’ ability to play videogames (it and China). In South Korea, kids can't play videogames between midnight and 6 in the morning. They're seeking to put in the legislative effort to abolish that restriction, leaving China by itself.

So what does China do now? As announced today, their bureaucracy is rolling out new rules: If you are under the age of 18, you can only play videogames for 1 hour a day... and only on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. And only between 20:00 and 21:00. You can't make those times? Too bad.

Finally Here: No More Heroes 3 Launched!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Yet despite my record of wanting it, I'm not getting it at launch...?

You can go back to the earliest Early Installment Weirdness articles on KoopaTV to know that I've been wanting No More Heroes 3—alternatively called No More Heroes III—on the then-current Nintendo console, the Wii U. I even put the existence of No More Heroes 3 on my...death wish list. Then skip to 2019 when No More Heroes 3 was announced, but I was concerned about its quality due to the game that came before it. The game proceeded to get delayed to improve its quality. An early build of it was shown at Nintendo Treehouse: Live | E3 2021... except only off-stream. The build was rough and had a lot of performance issues.

August 2021 Gold Joe boss fight video versus the early look from two months prior at Nintendo Treehouse: Live.

No More Heroes 3 has released today, at long last, but it also has an extensive Day 1 Patch download that is supposed to fix a number of problems, including performance issues. There might be more patches to come, so maybe it's better to wait for those first:

Pokémon TV Available on Nintendo Switch... Disables Video/Screenshot Capture

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - So... there's really no point...

The big Pokémon announcement of the week is brought to you by The Pokémon Company International: Pokémon TV App Available Now on Nintendo Switch. It's been available on their website for... I dunno, a decade. And for smart devices too. And now it's up on the Nintendo Switch. It's better than when Nintendo had anime episodes on Game Boy Advance cartridges, I guess.

Hoorah, more Pokémon stuff on the Switch! This could be very promising!
(Screenshot from Flea Waltz... more on what that is later in the article.)

Unlike a predetermined finite selection of Pokémon episodes like on the GBA, the Pokémon TV application has always had the first two Pokémon anime seasons (Kanto and the Orange Islands) and then a rotating selection of Johto, Hoenn, Sinnoh, Unova, and Kalos seasons. It's consistently had the whole Sun & Moon series once that came to exist. Yeah, unfortunately, you can't watch any anime episode at any time, unless you're only interested in Kanto or Alola. ...And you shouldn't be, because the best seasons aren't either of those. (Sinnoh, the best season, is what's available now.)

However, both the Game Boy Advance Video and the Nintendo Switch Pokémon TV application share an identical fatal flaw that makes them... well, useless. Or, at least, inferior.

(South) Korea Looks to Liberalise Child Game-Playing Times

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - You should think about the fact they had this authoritarian scheme in the first place.

According to The Korean Herald (an English-language newspaper), two ministries (The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family) want to change how—more precisely, when—children are playing videogames in South Korea. Previously and for the past decade, players aged 16 or younger were banned from playing videogames between midnight and 06:00. This is enforceable from the videogame provider level, as in videogame companies will be fined and/or imprisoned (who exactly in the company would get locked up wasn't clear) if children were playing late-night games. Multinational corporations often didn't want to deal with this, so kids games (the article cited Minecraft) were restricted to non-kids entirely, which I'm sure ruined its marketability.

While the Ministries announced their intention to change this system, it requires South Korea's legislative body to actually amend their “Youth Protection Act”, which wasn't future-proofed, so it already doesn't include mobile games, social media, streaming services, and browsing KoopaTV. Rather than also subject those things to bans, the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family decided to just leave it up to the parents/legal guardians.

I get the feeling this might be less a freedom thing and more of a geopolitical thing. Here's what the article notes from the Ministry's announcement:

How did THE PEGASUS DREAM TOUR turn out? Paralympic Games Tokyo 2021 Begin!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - I don't think it ended up well...

You might remember me hyping up (sorta) THE PEGASUS DREAM TOUR by JP GAMES, Inc. It was supposed to be a sports JRPG and have really cool art design. Then the Olympics got delayed, and the game did too. KoopaTV had reached out to the developer in 2020 and got a reply that it'll come out in 2021. And so it has for two months now, right before the beginning of the Tokyo 2021 Paralympic Games. That's started now! ...KoopaTV will not do a reaction log of its opening ceremony like we did with the standard Olympic Games. There's no personal significance for us, since Koopa Kingdom isn't competing in it.

As for the officially associated videogame, JP Games once said they wanted THE PEGASUS DREAM TOUR to be as accessible and available, platform-wise, as they could get. It's only available on iOS and Android, however. And for some reason, the smartphone I have access to isn't allowed to download it. It's not available. Why? I dunno. Seems to meet the requirements. It's a free-to-play game with in-app purchases. According to reviews, the game is remarkably unstable and crashes often.

No one really seems to be talking about what the game is actually like, and all JP GAMES is doing is marketing collaborations/ambassadorships with real-life musicians or para-athletes or whatever with their in-game avatars. Like, their YouTube channel lacks... actual gameplay of the game, but they do have their social media people in wheelchairs.

And they seem to LOVE this Pikotaro guy:

Gaming Media Outlet "Gamasutra" to Rebrand to "Game Developer"

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - That means the media outlet will be called “Game Developer” as opposed to them starting to develop games.

This isn't normally the kind of story KoopaTV would cover, but I find it fascinating for several reasons, so here we go: Gaming media outlet Gamasutra will be rebranding to Game Developer, after its defunct Game Developer magazine, which it was a sister site for that outlasted the print sibling. That's happening this week and they'll drop the gamasutra.com domain for gamedeveloper.com. They claim that gamasutra.com articles will properly redirect to the new site... and they better, since KoopaTV has cited them on many occasions. It's a publication meant for game developers, and there's sometimes content by game developers (like postmortems). The parent company also brings you Game Developers Conference, after all. There's often lots of very interesting information, even if the site's politics are... the usual. (Not like this site's, of course.)

Why should another website write about that website's branding change? I think their reasoning is very interesting. It's as follows:

“ That said, even with Gamasutra's reputation and editorial vision, the name was always cringey, and alienated people outside or adjacent to the game industry. The name was (and is) typically met with a "what'd you say?" or impressive side-eye. I don't blame people who reacted that way, because as much pride as I have working on Gamasutra, I've felt the same way. I and the people who work on the site have for a long time.

And the stories of sheer cringe that I've experienced or heard have made me laugh, but equally made me shudder: A developer having to cite Gamasutra in front of government representatives to obtain funding; a teacher awkwardly telling new design students to check out this article on Gamasutra; a game industry reporter spelling out Gamasutra for an inquisitive Indian-American middle-schooler, pencil and notepad in hand. (That last example was of me.) On a more serious note, reporting on rampant industry sexism when our brand clings to a late-90s "LOL SEX" connotation is beyond the pale.”

I have to confess something at this point...

WarioWare: Get It Together! Demo Impressions

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Well, it's certainly an experiment...

Yesterday, Nintendo published a demo of WarioWare: Get It Together! on the Nintendo eShop. You might remember it from Nintendo's E3 2021, where it was a featured Nintendo Treehouse Live game. The full game will release on September 10, 2021, at a price of $50. It's developed by Intelligent Systems, and the last thing they did was Paper Mario: The Origami King. That specific bit of knowledge will come into play later this article.

The demo starts with an opening cutscene of the members of WarioWare Inc. gathered around Wario, with the mogul claiming he completed his project. ...Instead of working as Wario presumably planned, the device he was holding up digitised and inhaled all the employees, and the demo actually begins. This has pretty much the same premise as Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes, and that didn't go very well.

There's two modes: Start (for one to two players) and Local Wireless (where you and presumably someone else play with two systems). I only have one system and one player (me), so let's Start... By the way, Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes also had multiplayer... Anyway, the only thing to do after Starting is to press a Play mode with stages apparently made just for the demo. (You later unlock a Practice controls option.)

Mamoswine in Pokémon UNITE and China's Pork Diet

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - How about cutting off the pork diet to stick it to them?

Of the many relevant things I could talk about the day after the Pokémon Presents that was filled with fresh information about Pokémon Shining Pearl/Brilliant Diamond and Pokémon: Legends Arceus, I'm instead going to dedicate it to the... ~10 seconds of Pokémon UNITE Mamoswine footage. Somehow the game I've demanded that no one download is taking up my mind share. Anyway, we don't know when Mamoswine is coming. ...Just that it'll be in the future:

Mamoswine? What are you doing in Pokémon UNITE? ...I believe I know!

Why would Mamoswine get to come to Pokémon UNITE? Swinub and Piloswine aren't in the top 30 most popular Johto Pokémon, and Mamoswine isn't in the top 30 most popular Sinnoh Pokémon. Well, the answer came to me instantly: Mamoswine is coming to Pokémon UNITE to appeal to developer Tencent's home market of China.

KoopaTV's Live Reactions to the Pokémon Presents August 2021

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Sinnoh! ...And Hisui!?

Today we get to sit in on an approximately 28-minute presentation delivered by The Pokémon Company!

The Pokémon Company's Chief Operating Officer, Takato Utsunomiya (where's Ishihara?!) gave us a presentation covering mobile crap first, and then important updates on Pokémon Shining Pearl, Pokémon Brilliant Diamond, and Pokémon Legends: Arceus. We last got real updates on those when they were revealed in a Pokémon Presents from half a year ago. Now I'm enthusiastically back to live-react, and to try to pushback on my Sinnoh enthusiasm, HeavyLobster is here too. Follow along with our live reactions:

[8:47 AM] Ludwig Von Koopa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdja9m4YlT4
[8:47 AM] Ludwig Von Koopa: 12 minutes!
[8:57 AM] Ludwig Von Koopa: 10 minutes later...
[8:59 AM] HeavyLobster: I'm here.
[8:59 AM] Ludwig Von Koopa: But is Pokémon here?
[9:00 AM] Ludwig Von Koopa: They're late already.
[9:00 AM] HeavyLobster: I have Jigglypuff with me.
[9:00 AM] Ludwig Von Koopa: Late by over 30 seconds.
[9:00 AM] Ludwig Von Koopa: Now they have a countdown thing with  a"2"
[9:00 AM] Ludwig Von Koopa: But it's just "2" and not actually a countdown.
[9:01 AM] Ludwig Von Koopa: Now a 60-second countdown.
[9:01 AM] Ludwig Von Koopa: Does this go into the 28 minutes?
[9:01 AM] Ludwig Von Koopa: Or is it fake countdown + 28 minutes?
[9:02 AM] HeavyLobster: Can't wait for everyone to complain.
[9:02 AM] Ludwig Von Koopa: ...I can wait for that.
[9:02 AM] Ludwig Von Koopa: ...
[9:02 AM] Ludwig Von Koopa: Nevermind, I'll complain.
[9:03 AM] Ludwig Von Koopa: They're starting with Pokémon UNITE.