Peekystar

“Why should I talk to you? I’ve just been talking to your boss.”

• Wilson Mizner, 3 April 1933, to a priest at his death bed

The Nintendo Network service, that handled online play for the vast majority of 3DS and Wii U games, Splatoon included, was shut down on the 8th of April. So yes, the official servers for Splatoon are dead.

In light of the imminent shutdown of the 3DS and Wii U’s online services, I’ve been revisiting Kirby Battle Royale and Mario Tennis Open over the last few days - as relatively obscure spinoffs with regional matchmaking on a decade-old system, it’s been nigh impossible to find an online match in them for years, but with the shutdown causing people to revisit these old titles one last time, it’s actually been possible to find matches again, and it’s been pretty darn fun.

Not necessarily; there are a few SNES games in the Switch Online library that weren’t localised and hence remain untranslated from Japanese, namely Super Puyo Puyo 2, Panel de Pon, Mario’s Super Picross, and Kirby’s Star Stacker. Though all of those games are puzzle games, which don’t necessarily need language to be enjoyed, whereas an RPG like Mother 3 would likely be much less enjoyable without understanding the dialogue, battle UI and so on.

Been revisiting an old favourite of mine from the Wii lately, Boom Blox Bash Party, a chaotic physics-based puzzle game that I reckon still holds up really well. Since the game has several hundred levels in groups you’re free to tackle in any order*, I simply resumed one of my old save files and took on levels in the sets I didn’t finish in that old save file, which if the file select completion percentage is to be believed, is still around half the game. I’ve even been dual-wielding Wii Remotes to take on some of the co-op levels.

Could also be useful because he claims to tape all your controllers. So if you’ve lost some, call up this guy and he’ll locate every controller in your house to bring them all together in a taped mass.

There isn’t a consistent answer here, since it varies wildly from game to game. Most games with online play will have some way to interact with friends, most often with private lobbies that only your friends can join or the ability to join a friend in an existing public lobby, but one thing that’s consistent throughout almost all games is that you can’t send out a call to friends to join you; If you want to deliberately organise some gameplay with your friends, you’ll almost certainly need some alternate communication method, since Nintendo doesn’t offer any.

I doubt there’s any technical reason for it, especially given that you can change your username at any time and other online services allow for longer usernames. I guess Nintendo just think that 10 characters is a reasonable cap for usernames.

I’d say the most interested I am in any upcoming game right now is probably Antonblast, a Wario Land-inspired platformer slated to release at some point this year. Was first introduced to its earliest demo by someone building a Smash Ultimate custom stage inspired by said demo, and have kept the game on my radar since then.

I seem to have reverted to my historic default of games I regularly play; Smash Ultimate, Mario Kart 8, and a rougelike. In the past, said rougelike was always Dead Cells, since it was essentially the only one in my library, but since mid-2023, I’ve started seriously using Steam, and through it started playing other rougelikes. Right now, my rougelike of choice is Spiritfall, which mixes platform fighter gameplay with the rougelike structure, which given my historic attachment to Smash and other rougelikes, makes it a game I was pretty much guaranteed to enjoy.

Whoa, don’t think achievements are all good! Video games left me with a chronic addition to achievement hunting that I only escaped from last year. To this day, I still have to fight the urge to take random objects and place them in obtuse places for the off chance that I’ll get an achievement for sticking a traffic cone on a road sign or something.

Much the same as last week for me. Beat Mario Wonder’s final boss; it, and especially the levels preceding it, were absolutely fantastic in my eyes. Also tackled said final boss with the Jet Run badge equipped, because that’s totally a good idea. Just need to sweep the game for collectables and levels I missed now, including every regular desert level in the desert world. Bit odd that they introduce the sand mechanic in the world’s Poplin House, only for all the levels using it to be optional.

Started the Triple Deluxe replay I was thinking about as well; thus far, I’ve bested the first world, affirmed I’m still terrible at the Dedede’s Drum Dash subgame, and had a very stupid (and very impossible) idea about trying to beat the game without the B button. Whilst you can damage all enemies with the Beetle ability’s hover (heck, I defeated the first boss doing just that), it’s a rather difficult strategy to execute, and Hypernova exists, which would dramatically inflate the B button presses every time it appears. Might be more feasible in Planet Robobot, though.

I got my hands on Super Mario Bros. Wonder on Wednesday, going in pretty much blind, and have been having great fun with it so far. I especially like the options you’re given to play with, whether that’s the easy mode characters of Nabbit and the Yoshis, the badges to augment your movement options with, the expert badges to actively hinder yourself with, or putting the talking flowers in German for no good reason. Only real criticism I’ve got of the game thus far is that worlds ending without bosses feels anticlimactic - I get that people didn’t like how samey and/or easy most of the boss fights were in the New Super Mario Bros. games, but in my eyes, it’s definitely a more climactic closure to a world to crush Koopaling #5, even if the boss fight is very easy, than to just be given the Big Wonder Seed in a house.

Once I’m done with Wonder, or possibly before, I might replay Kirby Triple Deluxe. I’ve been doing a few 3DS replays lately with New Super Mario Bros. 2 (beat all the levels and got all the star coins) and A Link Between Worlds (reached Lorule and felled the Theives’ Hideout; haven’t touched it since), and the mood has struck me to play Triple Deluxe again recently. Whether I actually act on this thought, we will see.

Okay, but what if some billionaire bought all the issues? Would that leave us with no issues because the billionaire paid to have them offloaded onto them, or low-quality issues because the billionaire now hogs all the premium paid issues?

A certain NES title that spawned a long-running franchise and half the genre’s name.

Curiously not the first time a classic novel in public domain received a sequel in the form of a Metroidvania videogame.

It’s an ad blocker blocker they’ve been implementing as of late. I don’t think you’ll be banned if you continue disregarding it, but they do eventually entirely block the video player unless you disable the ad blocker. However, in my experience, uBlock can block that message to resume normal watching. (Double Edit: This method did stop working on the 15/10/23, but started working again a day later. I guess it’s a question of if the filters have been updated to counter YouTube’s updates, though I did notice that viewing in a private tab worked when regular browsing didn’t.) Go to the extension’s settings/dashboard (on Firefox, do this by clicking on its icon in the top right, then the settings icon in the subsequent pop-up), then the Filter Lists, click “Purge all caches”, then “Update now”. Open an entirely new YouTube tab (or hard reload your current one by pressing Control + Shift + R), and the message should stop appearing, at least for the time being.

Oh, no no no, this is actually just a plane shedding its skin, like a snake. In actuality, humans just fly around in the shed skin; you wouldn’t believe the industrial plane farms we have to encourage the shedding of skin we can use.

I’ve started encountering the ad-blocker blocker myself over the past few days, but fortunately it proves to be terrible at its job in my experience, as a small X allows it to be dismissed after 3 or 5 seconds, which is outright better than waiting for the 5 seconds plus load time of a skippable ad, or the many more seconds of an unskippable ad or two. This might be useful for me if they ever decide to remove the ability to dismiss the ad-blocker blocker, though.

The 3DS did have a tool that let you transfer digital DSi applications from the DSi onto the 3DS, and same with the Wii U for Wii digital applications. Pretty sure they’re also planning to retain the current Nintendo Account system for the next console as well, so I’d say digital backwards compatibility is just as safe a bet as physical backwards compatibility.