 Hey everyone. Welcome to the Nintendo Prime podcast. I am your hostess with the mostest, Mr. Nathaniel Rumpeljantz. As always, I am joined by Mr. Eric Moore. Hello. I just almost wanted to steal a live one, kind of funny there. I was going to call you the seducer, but I've been watching too many kind of funny podcasts lately. And then we are also joined by a special guest this week. Maybe we'll get him on next week, because next week is kind of a special podcast in my heart. Mr. Darren Hart. How's it going guys? Zeldinformer. He's officially my replacement at Zeldinformer, believe it or not. Well, it's official. He will be called editor-in-chief. Well, congratulations. As of May 1st. Oh, it's a big title. I don't know if I can handle it. He's basically editor-in-chief already. Yeah, I have been for like the past couple months. But maybe we'll go into that next week, because we have one more podcast recorded before my final day. And I know one of the segments I do want to talk about my time at Zeldinformer. So I hope I can get you back on for next week too, Darren. And I think you'll have more questions than I can really come up with myself to talk about Zeldinformer over the last eight years. So we have a lot to talk about this week. And first I want to apologize to our viewers, because we haven't had a podcast in weeks. So for those who paid attention to the last podcast we did, it was the very first time in probably two, three months that we attempted to have more than just Eric and I on the podcast. And the problem that we ran into that was that our setup wasn't working. You can see it in the camera. We have headphones on now. We can hear Darren. But that was the idea last time. And then it didn't work. So we had a pair of headphones down here. Audio was coming back in through the mics. And then these mics didn't record properly and sounded like we were talking through water or whatever. So the audio we had to use was actually the audio on the camera, which is really crappy. And it frustrated me so bad. I did not want to come back and do the podcast again until we fixed it. And here we are three weeks later. I think everything's fixed. It better be. I mean, I'm looking at the audio recording. It looks good. Yeah, yeah, it does. So but I think it looked okay last time too. So last time it didn't quite peak. Oh yeah, you're right. Yep. Anyways, this is what what happens when you record a podcast and there's no one behind the camera double checking things and fixing it as we go or telling us, Hey, you need to turn your mic on and off or whatever. Have you tried taking it off and on again? Oh, the IT club. So we have a lot to talk about this week, a ton. And not just because it's been three weeks, but because this has been a lot going on this week. And the first thing I want to get out of the way is probably the thing that we've talked about all three of us already subtly without actually saying a whole lot because we wanted to save our reactions for this particular moment. And that's because at the as of the day we are recording this podcast, the NES Classic Edition has been discontinued in North America. Rest in peace. So the NES Classic Edition came out November of last year. Most figured it was it was kind of like a temporary holiday run since Nintendo already announced the switch. And they didn't really have anything but Pokemon going on for the holiday season. So it's kind of like, oh, here's some filler go buy this. And it's really awesome. The NES Classic Edition is sweet. I mean, you get 30 of the best NES games of all time for 60 bucks. They have save states in them, like like you would have an emulator on your PC, you know, Nintendo France upon that. But here they are, they have save states in there. You that apparently from what I've been told and what I've seen in reviews of it, it is some of the very best emulation of NES games people have ever seen. Well, it does help that Nintendo did it, you know, what the Nintendo does on virtual console. So yeah, so yeah, so it's really, really excellent quality emulation. 30 of the best games you got save states, you had multiple ways to play it. Everything goes through HDMI natively now. So you could have you could force scan lines on if you want, you can get rid of scan lines, you could play full widescreen or the original four three. It was just really, really cool. It's a thing that wasn't possible with most of these games before virtual console. The only real complaint most had is that the controller's cord was too short. A reasoning behind it is that the controller also worked with Wiimotes. I think people would have just preferred a longer cord because they're not using this thing of Wiimotes. Yeah. But whatever. And now Wiimotes aren't even a thing. So I don't even know why Nintendo did that. But it is what it is. Because they had the technology. They have the technology. Gotta take advantage. But Nintendo kind of out of nowhere went to IGN and said, look, we're done with this thing. It is, we know that it was always meant to be a limited time thing, which Nintendo never actually officially announced it was a limited time thing. To be clear, people assumed it was limited, but Nintendo never advertised it as, oh, it's only out for a limited time. But anyways, that's just to kind of put the kibosh and some people, oh, it was always intended to be limited. But Nintendo said, you know, it was intended to be limited and that they underestimated how popular it was. And because of how popular it was, they kept doing more and more runs of it. And they understand that it's still difficult today to get a hold of it. And they apologize for that. And here's this thing that everyone wants. They can't make enough of them. They sell out as fast as they show up on store shelves. And so Nintendo's response is to just stop making it all together. Yeah, let's never accuse Nintendo of being greedy or cash hungry. Because obviously this is the exact opposite, where you have a product where the law of supply and demand is very clear here. There's not enough supply and there's way more demand than anyone could have anticipated. And they're just like, well, let's not do this anymore and not make a profit off of this ever again. That's basically what's happening here, basically. Yeah, it's it's insane. I was reading a comment by Jason Schreyer over at Kotaku and because he did the report over there of it. And you know, whatever, they were just reporting the facts, reporting the facts. We get to the final line in it. And I just it just it's so sarcastic. It just makes me laugh like it was something along the lines of so Nintendo released an extremely popular system that everybody wants no one can get enough of. So of course, Nintendo canceled it. And it's it's just so interesting how Nintendo came to this decision. Because one of the logical reasons is they can't make enough NES classic editions to keep up with demand. They can't make enough Nintendo switches to come up with demand. So one of them has to go, right? So get rid of the NES classic thing so they can make more Nintendo switches. That's that's what some people have literally argued with me today that this is this is why they had to cancel it. And the thing is, is we now know the Nintendo switch has moved 905,000 units in the United States in March. So it's probably moved over a million by now overall, just in the United States. So they're getting a lot of switches out there. I highly doubt that NES classic edition has anything to do with the switch supply line. They've been planning the supply line out for months and months and months. And the fabrication process isn't the same. So it's not like, oh, we have one line making NES classics. We have 10 lines making switches that one line that we're adding back in is going to make such a big difference to switches. And that's assuming they're going to be made at the same factories in the first place. And I know that, you know, the NES classic is a little different. Like the Nintendo switch is completely region free. So it's like one system. You just make it one time and it fits the entire world, which is awesome for production lines. NES classic is a little different. Like in Japan, it's not the NES classic. It's the Famicon classic. And it looks different. It's got different games. Europe has different games than the United States version does. I think even Australia has some different games than even the Europe people do. And they usually just get the exact same thing as the Europe people do. So it's a situation that I made a video about earlier and I was raging. I'm so upset about this. And it's not just because I don't have one, right? I never tried to get one. I never even bothered to look up if it was available. I didn't pre-order. It was something I always figured, well, this is really popular. It's going to be around for a long time. I'll just pick it up in a couple of years when the demand dies down. And it just happened to have a few sitting at GameStop or Walmart. And then I'll grab one and then I'll enjoy. And the thing is, I don't feel like I need the one right now because I've already played all these games. Right. These are some of the best games on the NES library. I grew up with it. I played them all. I'm in no rush to play them again, but it is something I would like to have for when I want to play them. Plus, we at Nintendo Prime, we like doing live streaming. Eventually I'm going to have to stream more than just Breath of the Wild. Although our fan base keeps demanding more Breath of the Wild. Like, when are you going to stream Breath of the Wild again? When are you going to do it again? There's so much Breath of the Wild. Anyways, we'll get to that topic later. So, Darren, how do you feel about this NES classic situation? I feel like Nintendo is making a big mistake because I personally know, I was talking to my great aunt a couple weeks ago and she wanted to buy the classic edition for her son, which would be my cousin. He grew up with, you know, the NES and really wanted one. She wanted to get him one for Christmas, could not find one, and she did not want to pay the scalper's price, which, let's be honest, who does? So I, you know, told her, yeah, I can't find one either. And she's like, well, if one pops up, would you mind letting me know? And I'm like, I mean, yeah, I can let you know, but probably not gonna, probably not gonna work. They sell out in like two minutes. I think the last time that I saw one go up, I attempted to get one. The second it went up, I went on the webpage and the webpage would not load, just like all of my previous experiences with different websites that have tried to sell the classic edition, they just sell out in seconds or minutes and the website just dissolved. And people that want it, what do they want it for themselves or if they're just scalpers, there's websites that aggregate all these retailers together. So like, they literally have those pages on like automatic refreshes like every 10 seconds. And when it comes in stock, I know some, I know one person in particular, they were able to make it so when the status changed from out of stock to in stock, it actually sounds off an alarm. So they can just have it auto refreshing the entire time he's sleeping. And then when it goes off, he just wakes up and it goes by the way. Okay, wow. And again, that's like massive scalper mentality, right? But it's also one of those things that if you wanted it legit, too, that's what you had to do. Yeah. And that kind of gets into my point on why I'm angry about this. It's not so much that I don't appreciate that it was a limited run. I think it had to be a limited run, because they eventually need to do an SNES classic, right? Probably an N64 classic, maybe even a Game Boy classic edition someday. Yeah, but do that down the line after like everyone has gotten the classic edition that they want. Yeah. And well, what I was kind of getting at is it's fine if they were going to limit run this, right? But limit like, as soon as you knew how popular it was, pick a date in the future, pick like August, we're going to be done making NDS classic as of August. But until then, we have planned to push out two or three million units between now and then. Please look for your retailers and then everyone would know you have X amount of months to grab one and not buy it from a scalper. And plus you have, you can have guarantees that Nintendo is going to start selling out bigger shipments of it because there's an end date and everyone knows when that end date comes, even if there's still say 500,000 of them still out on retail shelves, there is no more coming. So by through the next holiday season, they would sell out anyways, if there was extra in the shelves. So like my philosophy with this was Nintendo announces rather abruptly, they are restocking it through this month, but it's units they've already made. So they already have them in the warehouse, they're just slowly shipping them out to all the various retailers. But it's one of those, instead of announcing the same month that you're going to discontinue it, give us a warning and be like, we are dedicated to making sure everyone who wanted this thing can get their hands on it before we cut off the production line. Instead, they're like, hey, we know this is hard to get, we know it's difficult, we know there's high demand for it still and we're just not going to give you it. Tough squats. It's like, and what makes it hard to swallow, because I heard someone say, well, this must have been they're going to have virtual console coming soon to the switch. Of course they're going to have virtual console and switch eventually, but virtual console, you could never get these 30 games for 60 bucks. You could not get them at this quality emulation. You cannot get them with save states. There is absolutely nothing that really correlates between what you got in virtual console and this outside of the fact that virtual console, we hope in the future anyways, you'll be able to keep your games forever. There are some virtual console games with save states that call them suspend points. Yeah, some, some, but they're not all 30. Yeah, it was almost like they were experimenting and it led to this. Yeah, would you mind reading that comment that I had sent you? Can you read it? My screen's a little far away from me. Okay, yeah, let me find it. Okay, here we have a very interesting comment. Now this comment comes from some random person over at GameNizia. Yeah, I'm sorry, a person who typed this up. I don't, I can't see your name because I copied and pasted this quote, but kudos to you because it made me laugh out loud. So pardon me, because this is a little bit NSFW, but you're at the bar with your bros, just having a good time. All of a sudden, 4,827 of the most beautiful women in the world walk in and all crave your one friend's dog. They walk up to him and say, hey man, we're all clean, sexy and into what you're into and ready to, ready to plow. Calm down, you gotta get the joke out so everyone else at home can laugh here. And he just starts drinking off. Your friend is Nintendo. I couldn't even get through it without laughing, but that's basically that. You couldn't even get through it. That's basically it. Here's the, here's the just, here's the just of the joke. You're at, you're at a bar having a good time and you're at a bar with your buddy, sorry, having a good time. And in walks 4,827 of the most beautiful women in the world and they all come and they all want your dog. So they walk up to your friend and you're like, hey, we're sexy, we're clean, so you don't know STDs and they want to have some fun times with you. And instead of having fun times with those women, the friend is sitting there jerking off and the moral of the story is that your friend is Nintendo. Because all of your, the correlation here is that everybody wants this thing and Nintendo is just like, we're done. We don't need it. We don't need your money. We're done. And I mean, to be fair, Nintendo doesn't need our money. They're coming off one of the most profitable years they've had in companies history. And it feels weird saying that because Switch wasn't held last year, Pokemon Go technically isn't a Nintendo game. But Nintendo's shares went way up because of it. You know, they do get a slice of the pie. Yes, but it's a smaller slice than people realize. So yeah, it's very interesting that this is the way Nintendo's choosing to handle the NES Classic Edition. And it makes me not want to buy the SNES Classic Edition when it comes out because I feel like I'm going to be taking that away from someone who didn't get to play those games growing up, that wants to get into it at a cheaper price. Because I got to play all these NES games. I got to play all the SNES games, all the N64 games. All these games are going to throw in these collection packs. I've gotten to play. I don't want to take a cheap way to play that away from people who normally can't afford to do it. And it sucks that knowing that, oh, if I want all these games on the eShop, I'm going to have to go spend five bucks a pop. Like people don't realize how big of a price difference it is on the eShop compared to what you got in this Classic Edition. I did the math and this was last year. It would cost almost $300 to have all 30 of those games on your Wii U at the time versus buying the Classic Edition for 60. And most of those were very bad emulation, very bad coloration, sometimes laggy controls. And most of them did not have save states. So, and the thing is, I don't think that save states are really a VOL end all anyways, because I didn't grow up with save states. So it didn't matter to me. But we're in a world today where people download this stuff illegally for free and have save states and do whatever they want. So if Nintendo is going to offer it, they might as well support save states. But it's just upsetting that Nintendo went down this route. Now, Eric over here has been silent the whole time. And the funny thing is, the very first thing he told, he tried to talk to me about when he got here was, dude, you don't have any of this Classic. No, I saw your post on it. Yeah, because he saw the post that I made at Nintendo Prime. What are your thoughts on this situation? As someone that I know also wanted this thing? Oh, I most certainly wanted it. And it, you know, to what you were saying, the whole announced the same month. Well, not even announced the same month. It's halfway through the month. Yeah, you got two weeks. Yeah, right. Congratulations. Two, two weeks. Here you go. And by the time you hear this episode, you got like 10 days. Yeah. Yeah. So if I could right now, I would flip this table. That is how angry I am. That's absolutely ridiculous. Please don't. No, I wasn't planning on it. That's why I said if I could. If you guys are wondering why I don't want him to flip this table, it's not because of the mics. Go watch. I put up a video that's like an office tour. You'll quickly see why if he flips his table, I'm in deep doo doo. There might be no more Nintendo Prime. Right. Oh, anyways, it's. But yeah, it's so ridiculous that they didn't give a nice enough warning saying, hey, yes, this was intended to be a limited edition. Sorry, we didn't tell you this. So that's why we're telling you three, four months ahead of time, not two weeks. Like put a timer on it that fans know about. And don't do it. Like, don't make this announcement through a press website that not everyone in the world reads. Yes, IGN is the most popular video game website in the world. But not everyone reads that. Why did I not get this in my inbox? Why wasn't it sent out to all Club Nintendo subscribers or all, you know, all people that have Nintendo account right now. I'm sorry. Literally just chose to be a crappy replacement. Well, fun, fun story about my Nintendo. I can't call it a crappy replacement because Club Nintendo felt crappy because it used to give all physical things like awesome physical items for purchasing stuff. But you only got credit for purchasing at the time physical games, then they eventually advanced into digital. What I like about what they are doing now beyond that here is that they haven't sat there and over promised what my Nintendo is. You know what it is. You get some free games, you get some, you know, some digital stuff. And that is what it is in all of your games now, as of the switch anyways, physical and digital come towards it. So yeah, it's not as good as Club Nintendo used to be, but it never set itself up to be better than Club Nintendo. Still sucks. Whereas Club Nintendo used to Club Nintendo used to be like amazing. And then it was doing what what my Nintendo does now. And now my Nintendo just like, hey, like we're just owning what this is. This is a discount program and some free digital items. Basically. And the thing is, like it's easy to get it's easy to get mad about it. But Microsoft and Sony don't do this. Yeah, to have their discount program, you have to subscribe to their online service. There's no club that gathers points and rewards you for just buying games. Well, that's true. Yeah, that's very true. So that's the thing like Nintendo doesn't have to know other company does this like, I hate getting mad about it. It's like, no, Nintendo is done. They're done. They're done doing all the physical stuff. And that's fine. Because they didn't like we're not in that era anymore. This is a new era of Nintendo, where everything's digital. And I'm okay with it because I didn't expect them when they said they were going to play some Nintendo, I thought they weren't going to give us anything, to be honest. I thought it was just going to be you get like a 10% coupon for the eShop for one purchase. Like, so they've done a little better than that. What's really weird is that they have some games exclusive to my Nintendo, like the Twilight Princess pick cross thing. Really weird that I didn't think they do exclusive my Nintendo games. That's weird, but it is what it is. Anyways, so we're just going to kind of wrap up this section of the podcast. Let me throw one more thing out there too. My thought would be, why can't they just let the regions themselves decide whether or not they want to continue making this? They might have. Because here's the thing. It's only been discontinued in North America. Oh, yeah, true. So what the hell? So that's why people are like, oh, well, it must be to make more Nintendo Switches. Then why are they still making it in Japan? Why are they still making it in Europe? Why are they still making it in Australia? I never really thought of that. Yeah, you're right. It's only North America that has it cancelled. Damn, UNA. So it's like, it could be the individuals, it could be NWA being like, yeah, we're tired of supporting it. So it's not worth, we're not making enough money per unit to continue to support it. We were overwhelmed with Switch and fixing the left-wing kind of issue or whatever. Whatever the reason is, it's dumb. Because I mentioned this in my video about it. I said, they could raise, they could just say, look, we're going to continue to supply it, but we have to raise the price by 10 bucks. And people might get mad until they start realizing, hey, it's in stock now and I can buy it. Yeah. So they could have increased their profit margins and still sold out. Even at 40 bucks extra, I mean, 100 bucks, it's still, it's still a deal. I mean, I've seen scalper selling it for 200 pop. Right. It's still a deal. So it's, but I'm very angry about it. I'm a lot more calm now than I was at the time I made that video, but I'm just as upset about this whole thing. I literally, I was angry when I saw the audience, but then when I read that comment, I mean, it was kind of worth it just for that piece of gold. Yeah, just for the comment. There is that. Yeah. But you know, and I'm going to throw this plead out to our audience, if you can give me a logical reason why Nintendo would do this. And I've already gone through with some of the reasons some of our fans have given us and why they're not logical, why canceling it to make more switches doesn't make sense. Why? Well, it was always planned to be limited. So we should just be thankful Nintendo still did it for a few months. Yeah, that's what Nintendo is acting like, which by the way, hello, arrogance. You're basically saying, yeah, we only plan for it to be a month, but high demand. So we kept it going. But hey, you know, you should thank us. We're done with it. We know you still can't get one. But don't forget the fact that we aren't going to tell you that it was only supposed to be I love Nintendo, but this is them at their ultimate peak of just arrogant as hell. And they know they can get away with it because one, it was massively successful on a scale that they did not foresee. And they're still riding high right now off of that switch. Switch launch is like the best launch in internal history, and they are just sky high with how they're feeling right now. Their stocks are soaring, their mobile games are doing well. Nintendo is in a very good place financially. And everything seems to be going their way. And they know it. So they're like, yeah, well, this is some bad news. So we're just going to be arrogant about it. Because why not? Everyone's going to forget about it this week. Because why not? What I what I think was is I'm not going to forget about it is the fact that they did not expect this console to be this popular because I certainly expected it to reach maybe not the high when they announced that it is now, but it's close to it. Whereas it seems as they really didn't announce that social media blew up this at all. Yeah, when they saw what like you watch social media blow up about it when they announced it. And it's like, okay, we are way underestimating this. Look at the production. They didn't do that. No, they're like, oh, we'll go see how it goes. We'll sell it for the holiday season and be done. And that's what they thought internally. As I said, they never actually stated publicly it was only a holiday season item. So like, that's why I know some fans out there that said that even messaged us and said, this really sucks. It happened because I actually was going to wait a few years until the price came down on it, which again, it's already relatively affordable, but they might have just meant price come down as and they don't have to buy from a scalper. Yeah, because that's the only way to really get one right now. Yeah, I would definitely if I just walked into GameStop and someone sitting on the shelf, I'd pick it up immediately. But I mean, I tried to order one online like four different times and I couldn't. So I was just going to wait. And now I guess I won't because the whole situation is just absolutely ridiculous. It is probably the first time in a long time I've been legit angry at Nintendo for something they're doing because I give Nintendo a lot of free passes on things because I've been a long time fan. I don't want to say I'm a fan boy. I mean, I'm really Nintendo Prime. That's all you need to know about how much I love Nintendo. But it's one of those things where I'm also able to be openly critical when they're screwed up. And like they screwed up a ton with the Wii U. They even screwed up a ton with a 3DS early on. But they turned the 3DS around, they weren't able to turn the Wii U around. The thing is, I like my Wii U or when I had it, I liked it. But I don't have it now. There's a reason I don't have it now. The Switch feels like a better system to me. I don't feel like I need my Wii U. I feel like most of the games I like on Switch are probably going to come to, or liked on Wii U are going to come to Switch anyways. And in this case, I thought I had time to get the NES Classic because Nintendo never told me I didn't. And now they're telling me I don't have time two weeks before they're done. Not good Nintendo. Not a good look. And the thing is, I just hate that in the way they announced it, just they go into this big, oh yeah, we're not going to have it anymore. By the way, we know you can't get one. We know you can't get one, and we're not going to sell it anymore. Screw you, people. Yeah. We know you all want one. We know what they're difficult to get, and we're done making it. Have a good day. It's like, it's just, if they had just gracefully said, look, like if they had come out and said, look, because we're having issues with the production lines, we're just conceding that we're not going to be able to keep up to meet demand. So we're just going to have to cut our losses, and we're not going to be able to make any more at this time. Maybe we'll bring it back again in the future when we have our production lines in better order. We greatly apologize for the inconvenience. Please look forward to future announcements, you know, and then maybe even tease that you plan to do an SNES classic or something like get something to be excited about where it's like, okay, well, at least they're admitting that they just messed up and they can't keep up. So we're just going to stop it and cut it off now instead of trying to keep up and then come back out with it again, you know, in a year from now, you know, or whatever, when they're more capable and stocked and heck, they could even if they want throw the switch and is like, hey, look, we're trying to get a handle on our switch situation. We're going to put this on the back burner and we'll come back to it later. It's something like no, we're done. You can't get it. It's difficult to find. We're sending shipments out for like the next couple of weeks. Goodbye. And part of me feels really, really, really bad for consumers right now. And I feel like for consumers that we're planning to get this that haven't played some of those games. No, not even just that. But scalpers are having a heyday with this. I can guarantee it. Scalpers have a heyday with everything. Oh no. Just to give you an idea, on the desk right now, we have some of this Breath of the Wild amiibo. A bunch of these amiibo you still can't buy. You still can't get them. They're still sold out everywhere and scalpers are selling them for like 100 bucks a pop. I think the one amiibo that's ironically not up here that I have that is easy to get to the vocal blend one. I don't know why it's over there. I forgot to have it. Anyways. But yeah, I'm just frustrated. I think we're all frustrated because we all wanted one. We all thought we had time. And I feel bad for the people that were going to get their kids into it. Like my plan was to get my kids into any game. Oh, definitely. Simple to understand two buttons in a D pad. Yeah, they're going to die a lot. My kids already play like phone games like Aiden dies like every five seconds. That's just he's used to dying. So it won't even it won't even make him get mad because he's just like that's part of the game. He probably laughs every time he runs a Mario into a pet. Oh yeah, for sure. Runs the door going by dad watch to do game over.