Hey you! Get off of my cloud!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - It's still not his cloud.

If you are lucky, you won't remember that article from a month ago featuring LEGO-ified me. But at the end of that discussion, I said that my set comes with me standing on a very low cloud less than one Mario-length off the ground. I wrote that you could swap me for Lemmy, because the next LEGO Super Mario release also includes a LEGO Lemmy Koopa alongside LEGO Ludwig (...I really don't want to say LEGO me!) and LEGO figures are designed to have the same feet as one another allowing them to stand on interchangeable surfaces. Like the cloud. Therefore, you can recreate the Hotel Mario scene where that menace invades Lemmy Koopa's High-ate Regency Hotel, kicks Lemmy out, and then demands that Lemmy get off Mario's cloud. Even though it was Lemmy's before.

But besides recreating it with LEGO, you can also recreate that scene with Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, as I did:

It's totally off-screen in the video, but Lemmy actually gets on top of the cloud platform by footstool jumping off of Cloud Strife: putting another meaning to “get off of my cloud!” (As well as another meaning to how many clouds Mario claims to possess.)

In the decade since Paper Mario: Sticker Star released, I haven't seen anyone equate the TOTALLY RANDOM BIGGEST FAN THAT APPEARS OUT OF NOWHERE in Hotel Mario to the TOTALLY RANDOM BIGGEST FAN THAT APPEARS OUT OF NOWHERE in Paper Mario: Sticker Star. Which then made subsequent appearances in Paper Mario: Color Splash as a Thing, and even Paper Mario: The Origami King as a very random cameo on Bonehead Island. I'm not saying I'm the first person to ever think of it, but... I haven't seen anyone else. The Fan in Hotel Mario is EXACTLY like the running gag from the past Paper Mario games. They're both big. They both blow things away like clouds or fog. Especially in the Paper Mario stage in Super Smash Bros., where it blows away the cloud platform and anyone on it.

Sucks this happens to Lemmy Koopa a lot!


It's probably not a coincidence that there are big haters of every game the fan appears in. Ludwig at least liked Paper Mario: Color Splash and Paper Mario: The Origami King, though he has an overall unfavourable opinion of Paper Mario: Sticker Star and Hotel Mario. He considers it canon they are the same fan. Do you?

The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles Has Sold Half a Million Copies Worldwide!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Are YOU one of those? ...You should be.

Tonight... exciting news! CAPCOM announced that The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles—2021's Game of THAT Year—has sold OVER 500,000 COPIES! I'm assuming that the number also includes Ace Attorney Turnabout Collection. (Which should count as a +1 for both The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles and a +1 for Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy, as a bundle of both.)

YES! #TheGreatAceAttorney Chronicles has sold over 500,000 copies worldwide! Thank you to all of our passionate fans who have made this game a great success! pic.twitter.com/Er9STXhsnS

— Ace Attorney (@aceattorneygame) April 15, 2022

Obviously, that's not over 500,000 copies at 40 USD (its normal price) per sale. Who knows how many of those sales were discounted, given how relatively quickly CAPCOM started putting The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles at 25% off... and most recently, 37% off a few weeks ago.

As for the image in the embedded tweet, I'd like to note that prosecutor Barok van Zieks is holding up a physical PlayStation 4 copy of The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, while street urchin Gina Lestrade is holding up a physical Nintendo Switch copy of The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles... though I doubt her's came with a HelloFresh code like my did. And I still have my code, by the way, unused. But it's hard to push it when it requires an auto-renewing subscription for the fourteen free meals it offers. Ah... and even that “YES!” in the text is a reference to Ryunosuke's YES.

Common reaction to hearing good news about Ace Attorney.

By the way, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy is 50% off on the PlayStation store right now. Why? Dunno. Buy that too. PUMP ANY ACE ATTORNEY NUMBERS YOU CAN! The series has a franchise total of 8.9 million copies sold per as-of-December-2021 numbers. Can't wait for CAPCOM's next financials update to see if that goes up any higher!


What is keeping YOU from buying The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles? If you want it on Steam, it's also available there. If you want it on Xbox... oh well. Ludwig dangerously promises it's better than anything else in your backlog or what you're playing right now. Make it a million seller!


CAPCOM apparently considered The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles and its sales numbers immaterial to investors.

UK's Competition & Markets Authority Completes Investigation into Nintendo Switch Online

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - SCRUMPTIOUS outcome!

Three years ago, I wrote how the United Kingdom's Competition & Markets Authority (CMA) launched an investigation into the major console holders and their subscription services to see if they are predatory. I've always held that they are predatory, especially auto-renewal practices (especially given the absence of manual renewal!). Other people didn't tell me that they WEREN'T predatory; they just told me that it's normal. An injustice being widespread doesn't make it acceptable. That makes it all the more important for it to be identified and corrected.

Finally, after three years, the CMA has concluded their investigation. Yes. They're predatory and weren't legal... AND they have compelled all three of Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft to make changes.

No Hopes for a guy named Shez

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - I can't quite put my claw on it, but that name really bothers me.

Time for another night of Nintendo putting out a game trailer and me talking about it. This time for Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes. I really almost wrote Houses. ...And I almost forgot to write Warriors. Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes is the game that I was about to be excited about when there was a new Fire Emblem game to be announced at the February 2022 Nintendo Direct, only for it to be a Warriors game. Anyway, there's a mysterious mercenary here:

Shez is the mysterious purple-haired person. Are they the mercenary? ...Or is Byleth the mysterious mercenary? I mean, Byleth literally is a mercenary. And they ARE mysterious. The Ashen Demon. It seems like Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes has Byleth as an antagonist that almost killed off this Shez guy (like Byleth has canonically slain several other people prior to the events of Fire Emblem: Three Homes without any emotion)... but Shez survives somehow (it looks like Shez was on the ground and Byleth was about to finish them off... so why is Shez still alive?), got to Garreg Mach Monastery, and all of a sudden the timeline has changed because Shez is impactful for some reason.

Shez's name also can and should be changed. It bothers me.

Kingdom Hearts IV is a thing; Darkside comes back

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - It predates Gigantamax Grimmsnarl!

The folks at SQUARE ENIX (and Disney I guess) had a Kingdom Hearts 20th anniversary announcement trailer over the weekend. I set the below embed to start four minutes in so you can skip the mobile trash portion. That said, the presence and start of said mobile trash did set people's expectations very low. But like the last Pokémon Presents a month and a half ago (which was for... some anniversary or another), which started with lame mobile trash news and ended with a mainline RPG announcement... Well, the same thing happened here with Kingdom Hearts:

It looks like Kingdom Hearts IV takes place with a Sora that looks so “realistic” and like a Japanese male pop-star that I actually thought was another character entirely (because Kingdom Hearts games are totally fine with having Sora-like protagonists that aren't Sora... well, kind of are, but, eh, I dunno, it's complicated). And then at the end with Donald Duck and Goofy looking for what seems to be Sora just made me think that guy WASN'T Sora. And it totally made sense to me that Sora ditched Donald Duck and Goofy and nearly every Disney reference when going to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, which is why they are looking for him while non-Sora with normal feet and proportions is off fighting that Darkside. ...But, no, apparently that actually is Sora, and Goofy and Donald Duck just don't know he's out still being a hero and literally running towards danger.

When Employees PROTEST Vaccine FREEDOM of Choice?!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - You WANT to not have autonomy?

With the Chinese Communist Party Virus (CCP Virus) becoming less of a problem as time goes on (barring new mutated variants that will turn out to be more deadly), employers are feeling much more comfortable demanding that their workforce come back and work out of their physical office real estate. They say it's because they wish to foster collaboration and company culture and they want to see everyone's smiling faces again. If I were you, I'd doubt all of that and think it's a mixture of the real estate lobby and managers wanting to exert control over employees.

Gaming industry villain Activision Blizzard (which has a bad company culture and it's fine to protest THAT) is one such company that is calling for employees to return back to the office. However, unlike many other employers that say that if you don't get hit by the Poison Jab you will get fired, Activision Blizzard is saying that, due to the trajectory the CCP Virus has taken, you will not have to submit proof of vaccination to return to the office, which is what they want to see out of their employees in June. (Although Activision still would like employees to report if they are vaccinated or not just to have the data to make future decisions.)

As a response, the Activision Blizzard King ABK Workers Alliance, a faux union, organised a walkout (of a virtual variety, which... I guess just means an extended lunch break away from the computer?) demanding that Activision Blizzard MUST require all employees to be vaccinated. They also demand that employees should be able to choose, indefinitely, whether to work remotely or in the office. While I'm totally in favour of that latter demand, the insistence that your fellow employees must be vaccinated is stupid. You should celebrate that corporations are ceasing in their slimy takeover of your personal bodily autonomy, not demand that they bring that back! Anyway, Activision Blizzard clarified that they are putting the power into individual studios at the company to decide office and vaccine requirements and policies instead of implementing it entirely top-down. Blizzard, for example, is allegedly saying all of them still gotta have the vaccine mandate.

It's unclear if Activision Blizzard's June time-table is still a voluntary suggestion or what, but their statement suggests that employees can work with their manager for individual working arrangements. Whether or not that's actually true is also unclear, but at least it sounds softer than when other companies say that the only way you get to keep working from home is if you have a religious or medical exemption. (And they have you fill out a complicated privacy-violating form to demonstrate that.) It's also unclear if employers that went and previously fired people for not being vaccinated will go and rehire those people when they've ended their vaccine mandates...though those people probably no longer want to work for such a stupid company. Vaccine hesitancy is a valid position to have, especially with these very old vaccines that are so far separated and out-of-date from the current virus strain. You gotta wonder if these employers are doing it to give Big Pharma a favour.

I do see some people say that the protestors should suck it up and come back to the office and focus on making good videogames. That's a stupid bit of commentary from people who I don't think actually work and haven't learned any lessons for the past couple of years. You don't need to be in-person in an office with other people to do things, especially a lot of the tasks that come with videogame development. Online/virtual collaboration and communication is a thing. Documentation, programming, design, etc. is just as workable in your home as in the office, if not better because you don't have hours sucked away every day commuting or going out for lunch because there isn't a viable in-office cafeteria and you don't want to starve during the day. At home, you can just use the fridge. Really, as long as your equipment at home is strong enough (and your company should provide you the equipment) and you have a carved out space for it and a quality home Internet connection, I'd say working from home is more productive and far better. You likely also have much better toilet paper at home, among other office hygiene concerns. It's a good idea to empower middle managers to allow their employees to make the case that they are more productive to work from home and actually grant them that ability, rather than not being able to do that because of some top-level idiotic corporate declaration.


It sounds like Ludwig might have some personal experience or know people with personal experience, given the passion in his writing on this topic. Ludwig thinks demanding people get vaccinated is idiotic and anti-employee, but also forcing people to come to the office is idiotic and anti-employee. Maximise choice and comfort, treat your employees like the adults they are, and you'll get good results. KoopaTV itself is a remote-only work environment, too, if you're interested in looking into working for the site that brings you this article and many more!

8-Bit Big Band's "Meta Knight's Revenge" won 64th Grammy Award for Best Arrangement

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - CONGRATS TO CAPTAIN VUL.

In contrast to whatever was going on at the Academy Awards (otherwise known as the Oscars), the 64th Grammy Awards for music seemed to be a decent affair that I still didn't watch (neither did most people based on its almost record-breaking low ratings). However, it did feature something very good: the 8-Bit Big Band's rendition of Meta Knight's Revenge (from Kirby Super Star, which you can play on Nintendo Switch Online) was nominated for “Best Arrangement - Instrumental or A Capella” (as opposed to best arrangement with lyrics, a different category) as the only videogame music-based song... and ended up winning. Surely you wish to listen to it:

As far as I can tell, this is the first time a videogame-based arrangement has won this award. And that's great for videogame music (though it's not the first videogame-related music to win any Grammy period; that was Civilization IV's Baba Yetu for Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalists). 8-Bit Big Band specifically wants to do things with the videogame music canon like other arrangers do with movies or television soundtracks. The band also has substantially more production value than an average game arranger on YouTube. Its founder, Charlie Rosen, was a Broadway guy. Here they are awkwardly running up to accept the award:

We won a grammy. We really did it.@CRosenMusic @the8bitbigband pic.twitter.com/cQ21iWa9Go

— Button Masher (@Button__Masher) April 3, 2022

But I'm most excited for the fact that the above music video is probably going to get a lot more attention this week and beyond, and it opens up with the best character in all of Kirby: Captain Vul! This is great exposure for him.

Captain Vul, by virtue of being by far the tallest member of the Meta-Knights, also gets the most screen space here.

Captain Vul is a great character. Though it's Meta Knight's award (and any outlet claiming Kirby won the award is FAKE NEWS). But here was Captain Vul's reaction upon hearing that this song actually won a Grammy award:

Captain Vul loves cows, just like me!

I'd really like to know how this song actually got nominated to begin with. And if it's apparently easy enough to get nominated and win, then we should be seeing a lot more of these nominations way more often in the future. And I think that's good!


Ludwig personally prefers Super Smash Bros. Brawl's jazzy rendition of Meta Knight's Revenge more. That screenshot at the end was a result of Ludwig and fellow KoopaTV staffer Witch Princess playing Kirby Super Star via Nintendo Switch Online right before this article was published. Ludwig took a screenshot every single time Captain Vul talked. You can also see that KoopaTV staffer Heavy Lobster was in the music video.


This might be a more impressive musical accomplishment than the upcoming 30th Anniversary Music Fest!

Humour Under Assault and Battery

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Not only for making jokes, but laughing at them, too!

Yes, this is a take related to the Academy Awards (otherwise known as the Oscars), which is a ceremony that I and most people don't actually care about. However, as you likely know, an event happened at the most recent 94th Academy Awards of 2022 where actor Will Smith slapped comedian Chris Rock in the face because Chris Rock made a G.I. Jane joke about Will Smith's wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.

The details are unusually above the family-friendly atmosphere that KoopaTV coincidentally has, including liberal usage of a four-letter swear word. ...I'll use it in this article. But conservatively, you see. ...Alright, maybe a bit more.

Will Smith then won an award after the slap and was never arrested (though Chris Rock didn't want him to be), though he did resign from the Academy after. There is an upcoming meeting among members on what to do with Will Smith and his award and his future career, but that's not that important now. What's important is the mindset that makes you think it's okay to walk up to someone and assault them for telling a joke. Some call it toxic masculinity. Others say it's a man defending his wife's honour. But I think it's the same intolerance for humour that is sweeping the whole planet Earth.

But before that, I will say that humour is far from dead, even if it's been beaten up. There are many memes people made of the event. A lot of them videogame related! Here are some of my favourites:

Ace Attorney Trilogy HD Mobile Getting Replaced (everywhere else)

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Also, it's coming to Android outside of Japan for the first time!

A week ago, I wrote about CAPCOM's announcement that the crappy Ace Attorney Trilogy HD on iOS and Android devices in Japan are being discontinued on June 9, 2022, and will be replaced by a mobile port of the superior Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy 2019 version in the summer. Note that it isn't released for Android outside of Japan.

However, that was just Japan-only news. While some other media outlets extrapolated that this would be a global change, CAPCOM at the time only spoke of Japan. And then today happened and the discontinuation of the current iOS version (on June 9), and the pending release of the superior port (in the summer), was announced for elsewhere. As of today, CAPCOM has pages for this announcement in American English and Korean. I don't think the current mobile title is even available in Europe, so that makes it simple.

Like in Japan, you won't be able to download the crappy mobile app anymore or spend money on getting new episodes. You can still play it. I mean, it's still Ace Attorney. Even if it's in a terrible mobile version with bugs and audio issues. Ownership of the old Trilogy won't transfer to the new Trilogy.

But the important part here is that CAPCOM has promised to release the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy on iOS AND Android devices in English (and Korean). That means... new platform for Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy identified for English speakers!

No word yet on if the languages patch that was in the 2019 version of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy will be included. I would love to see Benjamin Hunter on other platforms.

Though, of course, we're talking about mobile trash. So I wouldn't love to see it, because I have no respect for that. Maybe some weird mobile-only “gamer” would.


Ludwig can't help but feel aggressive whenever mobile gaming is brought up. He knows that Ace Attorney fans would like to see news involving the seventh mainline Ace Attorney game, or a second trilogy of the fourth-to-sixth games for consoles now that the eShop is going away. But the Trilogy needs to compete with Skyrim for number of versions and ports it gets, and since it's the first three games, it gets first dibs on attention. Once it's ported everywhere possible, then CAPCOM will focus on the others.


The replacement happened... June 10, 2022. And the pricing is different between the Google Play and App Store versions.

Join the SSBU NintendoVS North American Open April 2022!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - After... eight or so months, it's back!

I'm pretty happy about this news: Today, Nintendo of America, in collaboration with eSports platform Battlefy, have launched the NintendoVS North American Open April 2022! This tournament takes place on FRIDAY, April 22, 2022, into Saturday, April 23. That fits the structure of the very recent Splatoon 2 North American Open March 2022, which also had a ladder on Friday into a Saturday bracket and then livestreamed final round, also on Saturday.

Nintendo's graphic designers gave up on making unique banners for these.

Also taken from that Splatoon 2 event? It's a North American Open. The last time there was a Super Smash Bros. Ultimate tournament on the Battlefy platform sponsored by Nintendo of America, it was exclusive to the United States—meaning it excluded Mexico and Canada. Fortunately, that means the regions have reverted back to how they were in 2019 and 2020 back when the whole of North America was included in those. I dunno why Nintendo went on a United States-only streak for a bit last year but I'm glad it's over. ...Of course, the regions weren't really balanced back then, either.

Anyway, rather than explaining in words how the tournament is structured, I decided to produce this picture that should get the concept across much faster: