Nintendo has an announcement for their 3DS E-shop in NA. Let’s take a look, gentle reader:
ORIGINAL GAMES
NightSky launches Oct. 25. NightSky is an action-puzzle game that offers an ambient game-play experience with cerebral challenges that fill uniquely designed, picturesque worlds. Each of these worlds is broken into different areas in which the player must maneuver a sphere by using realistic physics to advance.
Crashmo launches Nov. 22. Players can embrace the laws of gravity and challenge themselves with a whole new kind of action-puzzle play in this exciting sequel to the critically acclaimed Pushmo. New gravity mechanics and gadgets like floating blocks, doors and move switches await, testing players’ skills as they push, pull and slide each puzzle’s colorful blocks in order to climb to the top. Just be careful where those blocks are moved—unsupported blocks will come crashing down. Crashmo contains lots of puzzles to test your brains, and enhanced puzzle-creation and -sharing features mean that even when all the puzzles are cleared, the fun never has to stop.
Fluidity: Spin Cycle arrives on Dec. 27, letting players tilt, turn and even rotate their Nintendo 3DS system 360 degrees to maneuver a puddle of water named Eddy through a maze-like, magical world. Change from liquid to a block of ice or a steam cloud to solve fun, gravity-defying puzzles and defeat Goop monsters. Fluidity: Spin Cycle features a new storybook setting to explore that spans the ages, from a lost world full of dinosaurs to the modern world and beyond.
Three original games from LEVEL-5 and several well-known Japanese collaborators will launch in the Nintendo eShop for Nintendo 3DS before this holiday season. The first of these games, SUDA 51’s LIBERATION MAIDEN, is set 100 years in the future, when the president of Japan boards her Liberator, Kamui, and fights to free her country one region at a time. AERO PORTER by Yoot Saito and Yasumi Matsuno’s CRIMSON SHROUD are also slated for release by the end of the year.
Get ready to unleash pedestrian-tossing pandemonium with Grace and Savannah in Tokyo Crash Mobs, a fast-paced action-puzzle game coming to the Nintendo eShop for Nintendo 3DS in early 2013. Players will need lightning-fast reflexes and an eye for strategy to survive the three chaotic weeks that lie ahead for our heroines, as they take on anyone and anything that gets in their way.
RECENT NINTENDO 3DS HITS AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD
Super Mario 3D Land, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D, Star Fox 64 3D and Mario Kart 7 will become available for purchase from the Nintendo eShop on Oct. 18 at a price of $39.99 each. Additional Nintendo 3DS software currently only available at retail stores will become available in the Nintendo eShop in the future.
VIRTUAL CONSOLE
Mario Golf (launches Oct. 11)
Castlevania: The Adventure (launches Oct. 25)
Ninja Gaiden (launches Nov. 8)
Zelda II – The Adventure of Link (launches Nov. 22)
Wario Land II (launches Dec. 20)
Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels (launches Dec. 27)
Where is the account system? Why are you wasting our time and your time with putting out these things on the E-shop when there is no account system? What year do you think this is, 2006?
And the Virtual Console is so utterly incompetent. There is absolutely NO reason to ‘trickle’ out games that are twenty years old. This is not maintaining the value of the IPs. This is maintaining the reputation that Nintendo has no idea how to do online.
I don’t see Amazon saying, “With our Kindle, we are releasing the old books in a trickle starting with Beowulf and moving on up to the Aeneid. This is all Kindle users get for the first year. Then, we get even more modern with some Marlowe, and perhaps three years into our lifespan, we might get to the 19th century works. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll get to Mark Twain before the lifecycle is over. Oh, and here are some works by indie writers who can’t get past the slush pile. We will use Kindle’s ‘social integration systems’ to push these crappy books onto you. Behold our marketing.”
I don’t see Netflix saying, “You want to watch old movies? OK. But we must do it in a trickle as to make sure to build up momentum. First, we must start with the silent movies. Next year, we’ll put up the black and white films. Then the following year, we’ll start to put up the color films of the 1950s. Perhaps we might get to the 1980s movies by the end of the lifecycle. But probably not. After all, you have to leave something for dessert. We can’t just put out ALL our movies out there. Ho ho ho, no, that would not be CREATING VALUE so therefore we must put out a trickle.”
I don’t see Apple, when they made i-Tunes, saying, “We will stagger our music shop titles so that we push momentum of our hardware. So we start with the music from the 19th century. The following year, we get up to the 1920s and some jazz. Then the 30s. Oh, and here are some indie music bands no one gives a crap about. Let us push these amateur bands on you using our social structures we designed in every hardware. This is the marketing of the 21st century! Ha ha ha.”
People only tolerated the staggered releases of the Wii’s Virtual Console because it was brand new service that Nintendo had not done, and we know that legal rights were being obtained over time. Something like the Virtual Console hadn’t really been done before. So we were all very willing to allow Nintendo to ‘learn’ as it went along.
What Nintendo is doing now is saying, “F you, we want to behave like it is the 20th century and pretend we aren’t in competition with PC emulation or anything like that.” Today, only an idiot would be a passionate consumer of Nintendo’s E-shop. Who on Earth would pay $40 for software that has no account system where it cannot be bound to any other hardware? At least the cartridge can go into any 3DS hardware and likely the upcoming backwards compatibility of the next system. But Nintendo is jerking the consumer around in one the most atrocious ways I’ve ever seen.
People are not going to accept this level of incompetence when it comes to online. Complete amateurs, who have no experience in the game business, are making online game shops that are running rings around Nintendo’s E-shop.
Here’s an idea. Why is Nintendo even controlling the E-shop in the first place? Nintendo doesn’t control the retail stores. Why can’t we have non-Nintendo E-shops online where there is some competition. If Sega wants to put all their games up for sale and Nintendo doesn’t, that’s fine. Instead, we have a controlled market being manipulated by Nintendo to ‘trickle out software’ at certain times because Nintendo thinks online shop rules should behave by the same rules of the retail shop. If that’s true, then why would anyone want to shop at the online shop? It is showing Nintendo has given NO thought but is only using a ‘one-size-fit-all’ obsolete business model and trying to ram online selling into it.
We are not Japanese. Our hands are larger, yet tiny Japanese buttons are forced on us despite the hardware being region locked. We’re not fans of anime yet we’re forced with atrocious anime storytelling from Metroid: Other M and modern Zelda games. And unlike the Japanese, we are not scared of something called ‘personal computers’ which we use from desktops to smartphones. Every Western E-shop has a library of things to buy, and they are account based. Only does Japan do it differently. NOA is not doing their job. They should have said to NCL, “Hey, in Americas, it is culturally not acceptable to trickle out games that are decades old because everyone is used to E-shops, from professional ones to amateur ones, that don’t do it. In the Americas, it is considered ‘highway robbery’ to sell digital downloads without an account system.” For all we know, NOA might have said that but NCL arrogantly steamrolled ahead. “It works in Japan, therefore it will work everywhere else.”
I am SICK and TIRED of the Japanese BULLSHIT. It goes beyond just modern times. It goes back even to the 8-bit and 16-bit generation. Remember Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest? The Americas got that game instead of Final Fantasy V because the Americas ‘just don’t understand RPGs’ so we had to be ‘tutored’ to understand it. I’ve been puzzled as to why Dragon Quest 1 came out in the United States with all these ‘guides’ like maps for everything, a leveling guide, and all that. They thought Americans were ‘too stupid’ to understand it. I find this hilarious since the United States invented the RPG. Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest were nothing but child like incarnations of the RPG. Yet, due to their ‘event’ like sales in Japan, the developers began to treat these child RPG series as SERIOUS BUSINESS which has turned them more and more into laughingstocks in the West.
Iwata has publicly declared that Japan is ‘ahead of gaming trends’ and cited DS erupting in sales in Japan years before it did so in the West. But wait a minute. The Wii erupted in sales in the West when it was launched. And the 3DS, despite doing well in Japan, isn’t doing well in the West. Perhaps the DS erupting in the West two years after has more to do with the change in software and hardware? DS took off in the West with NSMB DS and the introduction of the DS Lite.
To the contrary, Japan is BACKWARDS from the West in many ways. In the West, you are competing against PCs be it PCs as workstations or PCs as smartphones or tablets. One of the things people will not accept is the Japanese way of doing the E-shop. I’m not saying that Nintendo should ‘work to market it further’. I’m saying it will never work in the West. Selling decade old products at a trickle pace or selling digital downloads with no account system is not acceptable. No one will ever accept it. If they wish to do business outside Japan, Nintendo needs to modernize. I know they don’t want to hear that, but there it is.
And if you’re going to put games up for digital download, why not put up the Japanese 3DS games NOA is refusing to localize? This is NOT the 1980s. With online selling, the concept of software remaining in Japan (outside legal issues), will not be tolerated. America didn’t tolerate leaving software like Xenoblade in Japan and that was a retail game. It is going to be ten times worse now that everything is digitally transmitted.