 Hey everyone, welcome back to Prime News. We have six really big stories for you today, spanning from a little bit of negative with Nintendo, with Nintendo Switch Online, and some stuff they're doing with older platforms as well. But then we have some positive with some brand new trailers and information for a Switch exclusive coming out in July. We also have potential rumors floating out there around Nintendo's exact plans for the month of June in terms of talking about game news. And yeah, there's some updates on that long. There's ongoing Metroid Prime remake rumor. We got some new details on that as well. And oh, by the way, we kind of end the show today talking about two massive pillars in the video game industry, looking to actually be bought out. And this is simply incredible to be completely honest. And I don't really know where the chips are going to fall. Now, all that pizza, we are giving away two copies of Mario Stryker's Battle League. Mario Stryker's Battle League is an upcoming game coming out on June 10th. And we are actually doing this giveaway to kick off our Prime Gaming Fest event happening on June 9th at 9 a.m. running through June 14th. So yeah, pretty awesome. And by the way, we're actually kicking off the event not only with this giveaway. So if you wanna enter a head down to the pinned comment or to the description, we also are doing a Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Tournament that you can sign up for right now. Again, details on that will be down in the pinned comment and the description. Without further ado, let's get into our very first story. And this deals with the WeNDS eShop. So the WeNDS eShop went down a couple of months ago at this point without any explanation. No maintenance on the maintenance page, no word from Nintendo. They just sort of swept it under the rug. And at the time we said, I think Nintendo's hoping that we just forget about it. Well, it's been now two months and they're still not back. The WeNDS, basically the WeNDS no longer have anything internet-wise to use anymore. They cut off online support a while ago. Now they cut off the shop, which means you can't re-download anything. That's obviously the big thing here is people are worried about digital purchases. They made virtual console games on WeNDS. Yeah, you can't re-download them anymore. So you can't get them on a new We by re-downloading. You have no access and it's been two months. And if you remember, Sony got quite a bit of backlash when for the same era, PlayStation 3, they were actually trying to do the same thing and shut down the shop. And there was so much internet backlash that Sony backtracked on that and ended up not closing up their digital shop. Well, Nintendo didn't announce anything like Sony did. They just did it and have gotten away with it now for two months. And so GameXplain wanting an update to this actually reached out to their contacts at Nintendo, asking again, hey, why are these shops still down? Is there an update on this? To which Nintendo simply said, no comment. If you ever wanted evidence that Nintendo is attempting to close shops and sweep it under the rug and hope we all forget about it, this is the evidence right there. Nintendo is still refusing to even make remarks about these shops being down for two months now. It's very clear it's not maintenance that's keeping these shops down, right? It's two months. They clearly do not plan to bring them back. And this is obviously the scary thing is since Nintendo is not communicating about this, are they gonna communicate when they drop Wii U and 3DS? Are they gonna communicate in 10 years, 15 years when they decide to shut off Nintendo Switch servers? That's the thing that makes it scary is the lack of communication. Like they at least warned us when you could no longer buy Wii U games, but they're not warning you when they're gonna actually turn off the Wii U shop. Oh, we'll continue just to leave the Wii U eShop open for an unspecified amount of time. That's the key thing, unspecified. They warned us when we could no longer buy things on Wii and DS, but it was always an unspecified time when they would take the shops down. That unspecified time seems to have happened two months ago and that sucks. There's no communication, no chance for fan feedback. And maybe that's why Nintendo wants to avoid that situation where Sony made the announcement before taking down the shop. It had a whole bunch of backlash. Nintendo was like, hey, let's just do it and see how many people actually care. And while there's a number of us, content creators maybe making a little bit of noise about it, at the end of the day, I don't know that it's a big enough chunk of the audience that Nintendo's ultimately going to care. I don't think the backlash is really that much. Just look at how people are quickly moving on to conversations about upcoming Switch games instead of focusing on this. But it is important and I wanted to bring it up because hey, this could affect us down the line with platforms you might care more about and have more digital games on. You know, like a Nintendo Switch or a 3DS. Now we get to talk about Kirby 64. It arrived in the eShop like last week or the week before. I don't know, it's a rather recent release and all of the patch notes and updates we've seen to Nintendo Switch Online seem to show that Kirby 64 had the least amount of work done before release. And there's one thing in particular that's exclusive to this version of Kirby 64 that's not in the original and that is a massive game breaking bug. So, found this originally on Nintendo Switch Reddit and it says, Kirby 64 has a game breaking bug in the underwater levels on Nintendo Switch Online. Getting hit by certain damage sources underwater causes you to enter a hit stun forever and you need to quit the level to fix it. I don't remember this happening on the original hardware. And when I'm obviously later to confirm this doesn't happen in those same situations on the original hardware. This is an emulation specific fix. Now, to give Nintendo a little bit of credit they are probably going to patches, right? They made several patches to fix things with Ocarina of Time on the platform and many other bug fixes including Mario Kart 8 or Mario Kart 8, Mario Kart 64. So they have gone through the process of actually releasing patches and fixing these. And since this is getting some traction out they're probably gonna patch the Kirby 64 as well. So one benefit of things being online like this is patches can come and fix it. But something like this feels like it should have been caught. This isn't even that hard to trigger. This isn't like something that you have to go out of your way to intentionally trigger. This is just naturally can happen when you get hit underwater by certain enemies. Like getting hit by enemies just in a very basic way should have been something properly tested. Clearly wasn't. They probably didn't even get to the underwater levels to test them out if I had to guess because it definitely seems like they just sort of threw this at the emulator. It looked like it ran. Someone played it for a couple hours and said, screw it, let's throw it out there. And unfortunately that's not a proper testing job. I do wish they would hire a QA tester sometimes that would play through the entire game before they have decided to release it because this probably would have been caught in that case. But hey, it'll get patched. It's unfortunate, but it just showed just a smidge of, I don't wanna say laziness, but carelessness in how they're releasing some of these games because a bug like this is a little bit inexcusable. Didn't even exist in the original game on the original release. So like this is just something that, this isn't like the water has changed colors or the fog is missing. This is like literally something that makes you lose progress and that's not good. Now next up we're gonna talk about Live Alive. It's coming out in July. It was originally a Japanese exclusive game. Now I don't know a lot about it, but there were three brand new like sort of commercial trailer things that dropped you guys can watch here. And I'm just gonna read some description of this off of the Wikipedia because I don't know a lot about this game because it was Japan exclusive. So it says Live Alive is a role-playing video game and which the player takes on the role of eight different protagonists through nine scenarios. While each narrative has the same basic mechanics, individual stories have unique gimmicks. These include the use of stealth, the lack of standard battles or using telepathy to learn new facts to progress the narrative. With the exception of one scenario, the player character navigates themed environments ranging from the overworld area to dungeon environments. Battles are triggered differently for each scenario. Some are random encounters, some enemies have sprites which can be avoided while others are entirely scripted. The turn-based battle system is used across all scenarios and features the player character and sometimes a party fighting enemies on a seven by seven grid with characters able to move and perform actions such as attacking and using particular skills. Skills can be used without limit, though some take multiple turns to charge. Some abilities imbue tiles with extra properties such as healing a character or dealing elemental damage. There is also a different skill system in place. There is gaining levels with experience points which unlocks new abilities. Though another character's progression is locked behind story events. In one scenario, techniques are learned through scene and opponent use them. Each character can also equip and use items such as accessories to boost attack or item to recover health. If the player character or party is defeated, the game ends. And that's just kind of a general gist of the original game. And obviously, I'm really excited to see this. I like turn-based JRPGs. This is one that actually did not commercially do well. When it originally came out, it only sold like 220,000, 27,000 copies. And that's not a lot. It actually was considered a flop which is why it never really released outside of Japan. I'm very curious if now coming back out on a really popular platform like Switch, if it's gonna get that reinvigoration like Autopad Travel and others did, and if people are gonna start treating this like this is a brand new IP because hey, there's only one game in the series because it's not really a series. I guess it's only one game only. One hit wonder that wasn't really a hit. And what's gonna happen moving forward. So yeah, I think it's gonna end up selling very well on Switch. And that lets us get into our next story. And this one is a bit of a doozy. So we have a sort of rumor. I'm saying this, it's worth talking about, but it's still gonna be sort of a rumor just based on what the source said. So it says Nintendo is planning to do a number of small showcases in June, a number. So this would be like three, maybe four, instead of one big one. So basically they would have some sort of show thing every week in June to show off various games instead of doing one big Nintendo Direct. Now, this comes from Jeff Grubb. And I wanna be very clear on this. This is the most faint of rumors from Jeff Grubb because he went on to say, he heard this is something that Nintendo has considered, but he has not been able to actually confirm it. So this basically means you just kinda heard a whisper from a guy who knows a guy. And he didn't actually wanna report it, but basically a bunch of viewers were pestering him. One of his games beat podcast things. And he just said, okay, well, I've heard this thing that could happen with spreading out the news over multiple events in June instead of one Direct doesn't actually have any confirmation on it. So yeah, it's just something to worth considering. So could Nintendo actually, instead of doing one big June Direct, spread it out across multiple announcements, I guess that's something none of us were probably considering, but it's possible. It also could just mean, hey, Nintendo's gonna have that Pokemon event which would be hosted by the Pokemon company and then also be the June Direct. I have no idea. The fact that he hasn't heard enough to actually confirm it this close to June, remember like a week away from June. So the fact he hasn't heard anything when we're this close kinda makes me think, he's not willing to confirm it now. Chances are there's probably just gonna be a standard June Direct. But I wanted to float this out there as it is something that is being reported and just something to at least keep an open mind on. So next up, we have an update and a clarification on the Metroid Prime Remake rumor. So remember, the rumor started back in like 2018. Originally, there was gonna be like a Metroid Front Trilogy remake, HD remastering, whatever you wanna call it. And then later, I'm gonna find out, oh, it's just Metroid Prime one. Well, a lot of this stuff we got from Emily Rogers and then Nate Drake or Nate The Hate. And let's just kinda go into what they say here. Some new stuff that came from Emily Rogers on the FamilyCon board. So the FamilyBoards just yesterday, she said, back in 2018, Retro Studio's original plan was to develop and release the entire Metroid Prime Trilogy in sequential order. So she's claiming that was the original plan. That might help explain why it went through a longer than normal development cycle. So, hey, we're doing all three games. This can't just be like, you know, crap it out in a year, right? We're gonna need some time to do it right. But I don't know if those plans change once Retro took over development of Prime Four. So she is saying, hey, as soon as they got the reins on Prime Four, obviously the Trilogy was probably not the priority of the company. But she goes on to say, here's what I know. An HD Switch version of Metroid Prime One definitely exists. So she's like, planting my flag in the ground. Prime One HD exists. It's floating around at Nintendo of America slash Europe. I'm only able to confirm Prime One, but I won't rule out the possibility of the entire Trilogy. So she knows beyond a doubt, Prime One HD exists and is at Nintendo of America slash Europe kind of floating around, you know, maybe deciding what to do with it. What she doesn't know. I have no clue what Nintendo's plans for Metroid Prime Two and Three. She goes on to clarify though, Nate Drake, AKA Nate The Hate, says his source found remasters of Prime Two and Three sitting on a dev kit at Nintendo. So basically there's a dev kit somewhere at Nintendo of America or somewhere and they have Prime Two and Prime Three on their remasters. So HD of Prime Two and Prime Three. So that's where the whole Trilogy comes from is when you combine those two sources together, they're happening. Does this mean we're gonna get anything announced this June note? Does this mean we're gonna get anything out this year? No, it is Metroid Prime's 20th anniversary this year. So maybe things line up. I guess we'll see, huh? And our last topic is just something that's been happening over the last week and a number of things have come up. So Electronic Arts is up for sale. They are trying to be bought out. They had a deal on the table with NBC that fell through. We found that out quite recently. So NBC will not be buying EA. And there's a whole bunch of other people involved and potentially buying EA from Disney to a whole bunch of major corporations. We haven't heard Microsoft or Sony uttered yet or Nintendo for that matter. Not that Nintendo could afford them. Not that Sony could afford it. Microsoft probably could. We saw what they've paid for Activision Blizzard or what they're attempting to pay. But it wouldn't make sense to them to try to acquire EA right now. If they're Activision Blizzard, they're trying to get that approved. Once that's approved, that's when you see Microsoft maybe acquire some other things. It's quite interesting to see EA for sale. EA is actually worth quite a bit of money. So I don't really know what's gonna happen there because we're talking about maybe the most expensive sale of all time in the industry. But they're not the only ones. So Yies Guimont, the CEO over at Ubisoft has been really fighting against takeovers and sales for quite some time. But a new report has come out today. That Ubisoft is actually going to be exploring a buyout which means they're gonna sell the whole company so long as their share prices can get up to about 60 euros, I guess is the way to look at it. So once their share prices get up to 60 euros per share, that's when they want to buy out. So basically they have a target value they want to hit that they're willing to sell for that they're unwilling to sell for right now. And yeah, you can see right now where they're currently at with their stock prices. This is quite interesting that these two massive ones, EA being the bigger of the two, are looking to be bought out. We have entered this realm of buyout city and I'm relatively okay if these studios get bought out by other third parties, you know, if Tencent gets involved and also people don't hate Tencent, Disney, et cetera. They get involved in these buyouts. They can at least keep the games multi-platform. Obviously what people worry about is, is Microsoft gonna swoop in and buy anything? Is Sony gonna swoop in? Is Nintendo gonna consider Ubisoft too big of a partner to potentially lose? And are they gonna try to swoop in and buy Ubisoft? There's a lot of considerations here. And by the way, I don't think Nintendo's gonna buy Ubisoft. I don't think Nintendo's buying EA either. I think both of those are gonna be priced too far out of what Nintendo's comfortable spending. And I think, you know, based on the target price Ubisoft's going for Nintendo wouldn't be able to afford them anyways. So, and that's with cash on hand. Not that Nintendo could maybe get approved for a loan, but I'm not so sure that Nintendo wants to do that. Nintendo prides itself in not needing loans that it could just live on its own money. Yeah, this is obviously a very weird state of the industry. We're in an industry where all the big players are moving. I mean, what's next? Take two gonna be for sale? You know, is take two gonna go out there and wanna be bought out by somebody? I'm also curious why so many studios are trying to be bought out. Like EA is still massively profitable. Ubisoft is still pretty profitable. So why do these companies suddenly wanna be bought out? Now, in terms of Ubisoft, maybe Ysgemon's looking to wash his hands of it and get away. EA doesn't have any major controversies going on at the moment. And it sounds like any buyout deal would keep, you know, Andrew as the CEO and leading the company anyway. So I guess maybe it's just a way to get a payday and no longer be a publicly traded company. I don't really know. I'm trying to understand if this is like a positive or negative for the industry. I just don't know. It's just kind of a thing that's happening. Activision Blizzard needed to happen because it was so corrupt. It needed new leadership and the only way it was gonna be through a sale. So that's one thing, but like Ubisoft seems to have been navigating their controversy just fine. EA hasn't had a major employee controversy. So I don't know, man. This to me is just weird. Anyone else feel weird about this? We live in an era where pretty much every major gaming studio is gonna be owned by somebody different within the next two years. And that's just these independent companies that are like these behemoths and megaliths of the entire video game industry suddenly being bought up by companies that are even bigger than them. I just don't know. I don't know if that's good or bad. You guys don't know what you think. I'm really unsure what to think about all of this right now, but at least it looks like these companies we bought up by people are gonna maintain them being multi-platform. I just worry that they might be concerned even more with profits than these companies already are. Next thing you know, you can't even get past level one without paying extra money because a lot of these companies just want the money, want the dollar bills. So anyways guys, thank you so much for tuning in. I am Thunder RoboJance from Thunder Prime. It's been a lot of fun doing this episode of Prime News and I'll catch you guys in the next video.