 Hey everyone, it happened! What do you mean, Halloween was yesterday? It's November, you're a dog. Who's gonna tell me this? Why didn't someone put it in the script? Halloween was yesterday. How's it going everyone? Welcome back to the Nintendo Prime. Oh yes, I planned to actually get this video out yesterday, but it is what it is. We got some good news for you today. We got four stories to bring to you. Some controversial stuff, some non-controversial stuff. You know how it is when it comes to covering Nintendo news. We cover all of our bases. That being said, hey, remember Dreadtober? Remember how we were given away multiple copies of Metroid Dread? Well, due to obviously the channel being hacked and some things being delayed, we are extending the period that you guys can enter that Metroid Dread giveaway until the 21st of November. That's right, so you have an extra few weeks here to enter, there'll be a link down in the description or the pinned comment to enter. Thank you so much for entering. I wish everybody luck. We'll try to get everything back on track here once we start some stuff. I got some meetings with some people later this week to try to make things a little simpler moving forward when it comes to this kind of stuff. So thank you guys for your patience and let's get right into your Nintendo news. All right everyone, so there's this weird thing behind me, some game or whatever that some company is making that supposedly Nintendo's going after. It appears that Nintendo is going after yet another fan game. Now normally we don't like when Nintendo goes after fan games, but this one's a little different. It's not really your traditional fan game. This is tweeted out by the company behind it says, holy hell, hashtag one up private beta test was chaotic fun, five X since test net. Crowd loves the game. Join the telegram to play it against other online players and spread the word hashtag P2E and then they give a link to their official website. The Twitter account is game one up token by the way. And Nintendo has gone after and taken out some of their videos that have appeared on YouTube because they're using Nintendo's assets and they will be selling this game. So this is basically an indie game that use Nintendo assets. And yeah, like clearly use Nintendo assets including sound effects like the fireball, the one up coin, the hitting of the blocks. I mean, the question blocks and the blocks themselves are all from Mario. In fact, I think almost everything stolen from Nintendo was from Mario. Very clearly a ripoff of Nintendo assets. But let's just say the people behind it are not happy or maybe they are happy. They gave an official response through Kotaku to this. And it says one up platform admin who is known as Link could the Nintendo references getting more obvious. Had this to say about the project. I'm a community manager for an anonymous team for an anonymous team. Why is the team gotta be anonymous? What? Working on a cool indie concept. The goal is to innovate on top of an amazing idea. Infernal plus had launched in 2019. Nintendo had shut them down for innovating and are known to do that. We just created a beef up version of it with a combat system. Goal was to innovate privately within the community to showcase what's possible if we all contribute new ideas. We just feel like corporate ideas are drying out in nearly dead. So just that little mark there is interesting because the game that referencing was basically this without the combat and was chock full of Nintendo assets. And even if you're just gonna do a proof of concept for a game, there are literally free to use unity assets and other assets out there that you could use that are copyright infringement free. There's not really a reason to specifically use Nintendo's assets outside of I want the attention of using Nintendo's assets. Nintendo shut down the prior attempt to make this a full game because of the use of Nintendo's assets. And they appear to be going after this one again for that, but here's what's weird. The people behind it are really in denial of what they're doing, even though it's very obvious. I mean, this admin's username is literally the name of a character from the Zelda series. They went on to say this about the Nintendo fans that are bringing attention to this. For all the Nintendo sims having a panic attack, fear not, it was private test videos, which they posted publicly on Twitter, that's not. All right, can you put out there to grow the size of the community? Oh, so you admit that you put out these videos featuring Nintendo assets, ripping off Nintendo's assets to grow your community because it's using Nintendo assets. You probably understand without those Nintendo assets, you wouldn't have got the attention. You see what you're doing, just admit to it. Anyways, they go on to say, when we go live, the entire game will have custom art with none of the original Nintendo fan made sprites. What about the sound effect? You're also using Nintendo sound effect. This was just a proof of concept. The engine is custom made and will be used for other original games. The buzz is great though. At least people are getting to people talking about new ideas. What's interesting as well, and Nintendo life goes on to note this, is OneUp platform hasn't been shy about Mario's inclusion. With a September blog post, even describing the project as something that would bring Mario and friends to the blockchain, all wrapped up in a 2D battle royale concept based on classic retro games that we all know and love. If Mario was a selling point, and if Mario was a selling point, was removing him from the game ever really paid attention. Currently OneUp's blog page is still using Mario assets without Nintendo's consent. Imagine the matter of time for Nintendo presses further. And this is the issue. I don't know a problem with fan games in general, but when you're trying to make indie games that are built on blockchain technology, and going to be NFTs, and going to be all about making profits, like here's the thing, everything about what they're doing is in the vein to eventually turn this into a money maker. And to advertise this as, oh yeah, man, we're making a battle royale kind of game. We're bringing Mario into the fray. No, you're not. You can't, you legally can't do that. You do not own Mario. You are, like, you can't argue, oh, we were going to get rid of all these assets. There was gonna be all original. When you were marketing the game with Mario, you're using Mario assets all over the stamping and marketing. You know what you're doing. You wanted to bring as much attention as the game as possible. Knowing Nintendo would never let this game actually come out in the state it's in, flip it into original assets that nobody ends up caring about. Hoping that there's enough carryover of people who saw the footage like this, got a little interested and go, hey, yeah, you know what? When this is all original, I'll check it out. You know what's a better idea? And I get that getting attention in the indie space can be hard. You know what's a better idea? Just make a good game. You know what happens with good indie games? They rise to the top. They get to the tippity-top of that mountain because they're good. You think Hades is so widely mentioned as one of the greatest games to come out in the last decade because of who made it, because of media partnerships? No, it's because it's great. And if it was a really bad game, no one would even know what the game is. And the fact remains, there's just a lot of really bad games in the indie scene. Some of it's understandable because these could be new developers fresh out of college, trying to just get their grounds and what they can make out the gate is a bit more simplistic and maybe a bit more buggy than they can make after they get some experience under their belts. So I understand there's a process in why there's a whole lot of crap indie games. Also, there's a lot of crap indie games. There's a lot of cash grabs out there. And this thing looks like some sort of cash grab idea. You're advertising it with Mario. You're using Mario assets. Now you're backtracking now that Nintendo's taking out videos and going, oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This was just a proof of concept. Who proofs of concepts with assets they don't own? People don't do that. I mean, they do, but they shouldn't. There are plenty of free block. I mean, unity comes with block assets. There's plenty of free assets out there for stuff like this. I don't really, I mean, the more and more I look at this story, the more this guy just sounds like an asshole. I think this whole situation is very clear and obvious what they were doing. It does what it does. He's calling Nintendo fans simps. I don't really care. Call me what you want, man. I'm a multi-platform gamer. I was just played hours of Age of Empires 4 over the weekend, man. I'm PC. Do you know what? This story doesn't deserve any more attention. All right, folks. So this trailer playing behind me is the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pass trailer officially uploaded by Nintendo. And the thing with this trailer is it has now become the most dislike video Nintendo has ever uploaded to their channel. At the time of me recording, it has 121,000 dislikes to just 17,000 likes and it has surpassed quite quickly, in fact, less than a month. Well, actually, I think just about a month. It has surpassed the previous most dislike video on Nintendo's channel, which was 2015's upload of the original Metroid Prime Federation Force trailer that had 96,000 dislikes and when this story initially broke on the internet, it was at 100,000 dislikes. It's already had 21,000 cents then. This thing might hit 200,000. It's probably gonna hold the crown for quite some time for Nintendo's most dislike video. It does have over a million views and so compared to the views, the overall dislikes, I guess, aren't that bad, but I don't know. I don't know if Nintendo's just laughing their way to the bank. I just wanted to bring this story up because it's kind of relevant as we get into the next story that's gonna deal with why N64 emulation on Switch Online Service is not where we want it to be. All right, so Modern Vintage Gamer put out a video talking about the Virtual Console or Virtual Console on the Wii and Wii U, even going back to the GameCube because there was an N64 emulator on GameCube for the Ocarina of Time Masterclass, all that stuff that came out as a bonus with the Wind Waker. And he talked about how emulation has progressed from then to today when it comes to Nintendo's official internal emulation and specific to N64 games because obviously he made a video previously as of I'd N64 emulation on Switch just isn't very good and can be a lot better. It's gonna be passable for the general public but for anyone who actually cares about this, as an example, if people thought about input lag, well, the input lag's similar to the N64. That's true, but what if you first played N64 games on Wii? Yeah, the input lag wasn't there. So what now? Here's the thing. Nintendo used to handle these things very differently and I'm gonna put a link to Modern Vintage Gamers that you did down in the description to get your full details. There was a certain person that used to work at Nintendo that handled essentially all their N64 emulation. When they released the Ocarina of Time Masterclass pack on the Nintendo GameCube, they created a custom emulator that was completely modified specifically to Ocarina of Time to produce essentially the exact same experience as you got on N64 without the input lag. So if you played on a CRT TV back then with GameCube, you actually got an almost a better experience on GameCube than you got on original N64 hardware. Then on the Wii, as they brought out the virtual console and had 21 N64 games added to it instead of using a generalized overall emulator like Project 64 or something like that, they custom built their emulator for each specific game released. And so it turned out that all of the games on the Wii Virtual Console were actually running very, very well, not only really low input lag, almost zero bugs and running almost as originally as intended according to what it ran like on the Nintendo 64, sometimes even better with better frame rate. This is because again, they custom built each specific game's own emulator. So they might have a base emulator somewhere underneath it all, but they customized that emulator on a per game basis. And because of that, you ended up getting a very good experience. Now, this person who was behind all of this ended up leaving Nintendo in 2011. And from that point forward, we obviously got the Wii U and then the Wii U's Virtual Console. And starting with Wii U's Virtual Console, that is when Nintendo first introduced an overall generalized emulator. So instead of customizing the emulator for each N64 game, they decided, here you go, here's an overall emulator, just like you can download on a computer and just throw all your game files at it. And this led to a lot of bugs and a lot of issues that they did try to patch over time with individual game patches. But the bottom line is because the emulator wasn't customized to each game, it was just a factually worse experience than literally booting up the Wii on your Wii U and just playing the games there. So yeah, kind of a rough spot. And then the same thing has now happened with Nintendo Switch Online. They are again using a generalized emulator for all of the games. Now this might allow them to release more games because they don't have to spend as much time customizing the emulator, but also it's gonna lead to more problems. So more games, more problems. That's not always the best approach. Obviously we would prefer Nintendo to invest in customizing the emulator for each individual game so you get a better overall experience that's more close to the original experience on N64, if not the improved experience on the Wii. But unfortunately that's not the direction Nintendo's going. I wish they would find a way to go back to that. Probably not gonna happen. We're probably just gonna have to accept it. I know we sometimes say don't accept this, complain. Nintendo's not gonna do anything about it. They didn't do anything about it from the Wii U. They're not gonna do anything about it now. All we can hope, I guess at this point, is that Nintendo understands the frustrations of some of the more, the audience that's more upset about this because again, not everyone's upset about it and tries to just implement some improvements over time to the actual emulator and on a per game basis. Even when you download like Project 64 or whatever on your computer and try to emulate N64 games. Yeah, sometimes you have to get customized ROM files and all that to actually run the games properly. So it is what it is. I wanted Nintendo to do better because they have done better. So when people come at me sometimes about being too critical about the N64 online stuff, it's like, hey, Nintendo actually actually did this better on the Wii. Sorry for expecting them to do that again. My bad for expecting Nintendo to do what they've done before. So our last story just deals with Nintendo closing down a couple offices here in North America. So they have now closed studios or I should say studio offices in California and then Toronto on Ontario, Canada. Nick Chavez, by the way, who used to be the senior vice president of sales and marketing has actually now left Nintendo. He was working at the California office. He has now left Nintendo and is now working at Kentucky Fried Chicken. He don't worry. He does have like an upper spot there. So it's not like he, you know, is going down a salary tier or anything like that. So he's not hurting. He probably voluntarily left. He actually replaced Doug Bowser, who used to do it before he got promoted to obviously president of Nintendo America. Nintendo did release an official statement on this too, Kotaku. And they said, Nintendo America headquarters are in Redmond, Washington and Vancouver. We are moving more of our employees and our operations into those headquarters and we'll be closing small satellite offices in Toronto, Ontario and Redwood city, California over time. So they're claiming they may not be completely closed yet, but they are closing. Devin Pritchard, executive vice president of business affairs and publisher relations for Nintendo of America will assume interim leadership of the sales, marketing and communication following the departure of Nick Chavez. Ms. Pritchard will oversee strategy and execution of sales, marketing, sales and marketing. So yeah, it's interesting to, it's interesting Nintendo kind of downsizing. They don't do this very often, by the way. They have restructured once in Nintendo of Europe and that cost about 300 jobs. Obviously we know they restructured Nintendo of Japan to combine all the studios together, but they didn't really cost anyone jobs doing that. We know obviously in the past, Iwata and other executives have cut their salaries so we don't have to hire employees. Nintendo doesn't traditionally like to fire employees. And Nick Chavez, by the way, doesn't sound like he was even fired. He just voluntarily left after he found out those offices were gonna close. Maybe he didn't wanna, it's possible he just didn't wanna move to Redmond, Washington. There are technically around 100 displaced employees. But again, Nintendo says they are gonna be moving a lot of those employees to their Redmond, Washington offices. The initial report on this, by the way, said some Nintendo employees were pretty upset about this, which I mean, if you live in California and wanted to work for Nintendo there and now you gotta move to Washington, a completely different state, even though it's to the north, you know, California is a pretty big place. I can see why that could be a little upsetting that that might be your only option to continue your employment is to completely uplift your family to a new state. That's obviously just like when Nick Chavez, not easy. So I can see why they could be a little upset and I'm sure the same is true for employees of the Toronto offices that are closing down. It is what it is. This just happens. I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner with the pandemic and everything. Nintendo, again, doesn't like doing things like this but they clearly wanna centralize everything through their two main offices in Canada and the United States and just kind of leave it there. They don't see the functionality reasons to maintain these satellite offices like that. What they mean by that is you have your main office and then you have your secondary and they don't feel like they need a secondary anymore, which is probably true for the most part. Now Nintendo could re-expand in the future and this move is likely not revenue-related because Nintendo's actually making record profit margins. I think this is mostly just a restructuring and unfortunately whenever you restructure, there are some people that get lost in this shuffle. So I wish luck to anyone who doesn't work at Nintendo anymore that they could find some gainful employment wherever they happen to be seeking it. All right, folks, that's gonna do it for today's video and you know what? I refuse to let Halloween die. I just don't, you know? Hey, and shout out to anyone who knows where this mask is from because yeah, there's an exact name for this mask and the whole get up. I don't have the red jumpsuit on me right now at the stairs, but yeah, obviously my big fan of a certain show on Netflix, me and my fiancee went on this for Halloween. I put a picture here, look at this. This is me in the costume, but also me with my two boys. I have three kids. My daughter went to the farmer girl and was with her biological dad. The, my other two, Mario, my oldest son went as Mario riding on Yoshi and my youngest one was Pikachu and they picked out their own costumes. So this was not like a Nintendo Prime dad influence. Well, I mean, my kids are bigger fans of Roblox than anything and these are the costumes that they picked out. I was very surprised through the youngest picked out Pikachu. I don't think he's even played a Pokemon. I didn't even know who Pikachu is. I have no idea. So anyways, folks, I'm Nathaniel RoboJance from the Nintendo Prime and you know what? Viva la revolution!