I can’t express how much I hate Nintendo and the gaming industry at this moment. When I bought the Wii and tried my hand at Smash Bros. Brawl, from that instant, I had felt a sad… sad truth about this company. The real reason why people look down on Nintendo these days isn’t truly about their games (though it certainly helps), or their intrusive obsession with “innovation”. The real reason can be summed up in as little as 3 words.
No real freedom.
Nintendo (as far as I can tell) is the only company that literally does everything in their power to limit everything you can do with your gaming habits. Whether it comes to cheat odes for their games or even the console (the amount of hoops one has to jump through just to use an Action Replay device is absurd), they go out of their way to force you to play games one way or no. I’ve put up with only having 1 controller type for 2 generations while the first 2 they existed, we had tons of controllers to use at our disposal. The Wii was Nintendo finally giving us freedom to choose between different controllers to use. But they wouldn’t have any of it when it came to wanting us to experience their silly creativity. Playing Phantom Hourglass, I actually read a piece of dialogue from an NPC that said “some people may not like the touch controls, but after a while of playing, you really wouldn’t know what to do without them”. I’d have A LOT MORE FUN WITH THIS STUPID TITLE! What arrogance to tell me that I should be appreciative of controls that could cause me carpal tunnel syndrome!? You shoved your silly touch controls into games that destroyed them! (Star Fox Command!?)
But they are literally at the brink of insanity. What made me finally realize that Nintendo hates the very idea of giving the consumer any real freedom?
The death of my beloved Gamecube Memory card. There are several game saves that I have now lost. While a simple “you should’ve moved them to a better one” would be the typical response, there is one title I never had the choice with.
F-Zero GX.
I’ve read that you didn’t like this game, but hear me out. I loved this game to death. This game alone, was the first game I have ever legitimately practiced to death. I trained myself on every single course in the game. I studied every single level in Story Mode. I defeated Very Hard mode. EVERY LEVEL! I wanted every character, every course, EVERYTHING! I earned them all with sheer willpower and skill. For the first time, I could look at my game and say “I did all of that by myself”. I conquered what was considered the most difficult game on the Cube.
But now… that data… it is gone. Everything I worked for. Everything I earned. Gone.
And I couldn’t move the data to a more stable memory card.Why? Because the data itself was locked to the damn memory card! I didn’t understand. Why did Nintendo not allow me to move my save.
The reason, apparently, was because it would cost them millions.
How!? They had apparently created an arcade port called “F-Zero AX”. All of the new unlockable characters and courses that I had to unlock on the harder difficulties of Story Mode…. were already available on AX. Apparently, there was a feature that allowed you to take a memory card with a GX save on it, stick it in the machine, and unlock everything automatically. I wouldn’t have had to go through the sheer pain and agony of having to unlock everything.
But Nintendo, oh those incredible geniuses, figured that if the data on the cards could be exchanged between, no one would bother using the actual arcade machines, I.E. Nintendo loses money. So they prevented people from moving or copying the data. The problem with this idea was…. the severe lack of AX cabinets in America. There were only up to 20 units produced from what I’ve heard.
…….You’re fucking serious!? You mean to tell me that a device you never cared enough to release in mass quantities in the states is the very reason I couldn’t preserve game data so I wouldn’t lose all of my hard work!? You’d have to be severely lucky to find one damn machine near you just to unlock everything! How boneheaded do you have to be to make such a moronic decision such as this!? Now I have to start from scratch due to a boneheaded decision to lock the data on a save. It literally took me 3 years to unlock everything on GX
The worst part is this idea seems to be spreading. There are several PS3 games that have their saves locked. The general consensus is that it is done to prevent cheating (which in itself is an illogical move). But just like with DRM practices, there are far too many inconveniences. If your console or memory cards falter and you had locked data, it’s gone forever. Especially since in this case, Nintendo wasn’t even concerned about morality, they wanted to keep their profits! And didn’t bother to even try. Not to mention the Wii has several games with locked saves. And it appears that no one can seem to figure out why outside of being online.
To hell with Nintendo! If the “innovation at the expense of controller preference and gameplay I give a shit about” wasn’t enough to deter me from another Nintendo console, this horse crap with locked saves will do that alone. The proof of my effort to dig into the extent of the game is lost forever for the sake of effortless profit. How anyone can hold any respect for this company after these kinds of practices, I will never know.
Another satisfied customer.