 Hey everyone, welcome back to VG News. We've got five big stories for you today, covering the breadth of the industry. We've got some stuff about emulators on Apple devices that we need to dive into. We have stories about the thousand year door. That's right, we have a brand new update with brand new features for that game to go over. Things with the Fallout series, which, man, the Fallout series is quite fascinating, and so much more. So let's go ahead and dive into this, starting with some small updates, although interesting ones for Paper Mario, the thousand year door. Now, we've been waiting a long time for Nintendo to actually give us information on their upcoming games. Well, there's Luigi's Badger 2 HD, Luminous Ocean, right? Like that's our ocean, our endless ocean. Luminous, my gosh, why did I butcher that one? And there was only three games coming from Nintendo, so I don't know how I'm messing it up. But whatever, we're actually focused on the thousand year door, which is maybe the most hyped release they have coming up at the end of June. And on the official Japanese website, and I discovered all of this thanks to a video by GameXplain, so credit them and link to their video down below, that there is two brand new screenshots featuring Twilight Town and Twilight Trail, which is pretty cool, and you can see some graphical differences and play a little bit of GameXplain's video to show that. But what I wanna actually focus on is the things you're seeing, the icons you're noticing here on the left side of the screenshot with ZL and L. That's because these were not in the original game. If you never played the original game, you might not know that that part of the UI did not exist. And this is in Japanese, so we're relying on GameXplain's translations here, but something that they do note are what these mean. ZL translates roughly to friend hint, which likely means you can get hints from your party members on what to do next in the game. And then the L button roughly translates to crew ring, which would naturally be a menu for selecting one of the members of your party, just a quick select menu, which would be a welcome addition. Also, it's notable that Nintendo sent out some surveys again to select players. And the funny thing about these surveys is in it, it really heavily indicates that, well, it doesn't really indicate, it just states it outright, that Paper Mario the Thousand-Year Door-On Switch is quite literally a remake. Now, if you guys remember, there was this big debate over whether or not this game's a remake or remaster, Nintendo is internally referring to it as a remake, so that's what we have to go with for right now. Obviously, this could change when the game comes out. This could just be a marketing thing, not related to the game directly, but that is what we have. The information from Nintendo is calling it a remake. So it's officially a remake. So between these two new features and learning that, hey, it is what many people thought it was in a full remake. We're pretty excited about this game coming out. Naturally, I'm more excited for brand new games. So you think Endless Ocean Luminous might make me more excited, but Paper Mario the Thousand-Year Door is more my kind of game versus Endless Ocean. Now there's nothing wrong with Endless Ocean. I know a lot of you guys have it pre-ordered and I'm even debating on checking it out myself just because it actually looks really good. Like a really peaceful kind of game and I love oceans. I'm a sucker. One point you guys might not know, I was gonna go to college to be a marine biologist. So that lets you know how interested I am actually in oceanography and the different animals. Now, do you need more persona in your life? Well, it might be a while before Persona 6 comes across our desk, but we have some new information here from Insider, Leaker, someone we've covered up the channel before, Midori. She is actually someone with almost as good of a reputation if not as good as Pioro. Pioro being the person who's really good with Nintendo. Direct leaks and all that stuff and has a really solid track record. And then Midori being really good with Sega and Atlas leaks. More Atlas leaks than Sega, though Midori sometimes gives us more information than just what's going on at Atlas. Now the interesting part is we have Persona 3 reload release earlier this year and it instantly became the fastest selling Atlas game of all time. We'll be named million units within this first week across all platforms being PlayStation, PC, and Xbox. Unfortunately not Switch, but hey, it is what it is. We can't have everything unfortunately on my preferred platform. But what is cool is what Midori had to say and that is that Persona 1 and 2 remakes are in the works. Now, Midori did clarify here because someone was like, are you confirming these are full on remakes? And Midori's like, okay, okay, let me back off that little bit. Let's just say that they will be in an updated form. So that's probably more correct to say because she doesn't want to guarantee that they're remakes even though Persona 3 reload is viewed as a remake. Some people might not view it as a remake so you don't want to get the whole remake remaster debate especially on a rumor. So Midori's just throwing out there that, hey, this is just, it's an updated form of these games in some way. Might be a remake, might not be. What's obviously fascinating of course is that we have to remember this is a rumor. And rumors are obviously meant to have the proper amount of skepticism and doubt rumors are not facts. So this isn't an announcement. This isn't a confirmation that something's coming. This is just a rumor. So take that for what you will but Midori has a very good track record and I personally don't think we'd even be covering this especially for Persona if we didn't have some faith that this could potentially be true. But again, rumors are what they are. Now, what's fascinating as well is that we really want to see these games end up on Nintendo Switch. I think that's really what we want to see or if not switch, if these games are years off, maybe switch too. Look, the Persona franchise has slowly been making its way over. We have Persona 4 Golden, the original Persona 3 Portable. We have obviously Persona 5 related stuff. So I would just like to see the Persona franchise fully be on Nintendo Switch too. That might be in the plans at Sega and Atlas but we'll have to wait and see. But you know what's in the plans? Emulators coming to Apple devices. We talked about this before and how there's actually a lot of restrictions around emulators coming to devices such as you're supposed to offer things to download. It wasn't clear if they would actually allow you to sideload apps through a web browser and that would obviously be how emulators have to work because you can't provide any applications in your emulator or any software in your emulator that you don't own the copyrights to. So there was that, which allowed Apple to skirt around not having responsibility for ROMs although they weren't clear if you could sideload and on top of that, there were some language in there that indicated that the app had to make money in some way so Apple could also get a cut whether it sold things or ran ads. Ads being the most popular way, free applications end up making money. Well, we're talking about all of this because an emulator for the Game Boy Advance slash Game Boy Color and actually the original Game Boy as well. It's an all-encompassing emulator ended up hitting the official app store in select countries. And I'm saying this because I went to try to verify all of this and then realized I'm in the United States it's not available here but I did get confirmation through other people in other countries that the app was available over the weekend in other countries and instantly rose to the top five most downloaded and popular applications in the moment. Now, nothing wrong with this inherently. Look, we're not gonna sit here and tell you about the morality of emulators or not. That's all personal choice. Legally they can exist in some forms especially in very specific countries. And these were obviously for a classic system that doesn't require encryption keys. So this isn't a Nintendo Switch emulator situation where you need access to literally encrypted keys that are copyright protected. This is just emulators that were all custom coded. Now, the funny thing about this one called the IGBA emulator is that it isn't necessarily legal either. Why can we say this? Well, this emulator turns out was stolen from somebody else and that is wild that it made it on the official Apple app store while being a stolen piece of software. Apple is literally supposed to be checking all of this stuff before they approve applications to go up. Apparently they couldn't do a basic check for just Apple related emulators to notice that there was another one with the exact same code base that's existed for even longer. How did we find this out? Well, Riley test at a user over on threads decided to chime in after watching this thing sort of the top of the charts, same. So apparently Apple approved a knockoff of GBA for iOS. The predecessor to Delta I made in high school in the app store. I did not give anyone permission to do this yet it's now sitting at the top of the charts. Despite being filled with ads and tracking which that tracking one is, that's what ads might be required but the tracking part, we'll get to that in a moment. I've bit my tongue a bunch in the past month but this really frustrates me. So glad that app review exists to protect consumers from scams and ripoffs like this. It does a face palm emoji. To be clear, I'm not pissed at the developer. I'm pissed that Apple took the time to change the app store rules to allow emulators and then approved a knockoff of my own app even though I've been ready to launch in the alt store IO with Delta since March 5th. Now the alt store is a alternative app store that you can now install on Apple devices in some European countries thanks to legislation that found that them locking down their platform to just their own app store is against the law and there's actually some similar suits happening right now in the United States that might force Apple to be a more open platform as well here in the U.S. Maybe not to the levels of Android, Apple will do everything it can to not be as open as that platform but it is what it is. Now the thing about this accusation is that's all it was was an accusation but apparently Apple agrees after these accusations went online according to MacRumors.com who went ahead and confirmed this with an Apple representative. It turns out that yes, the application has now been removed from the app store. You can't find it anymore and Apple's officially reasoning for this was on the grounds of copyright infringement. So Apple did realize after this being drawn to their attention that the application did indeed steal code from another application. So that is obviously something that the Apple app store doesn't want to happen. Now through all this whole mess obviously the big news is that emulators are going to be allowed. We just need to actually have the original code base and the original coders releasing it and I think this developer realizing that this application got approved from the app store means that his version, his new version Delta should likely get approved for the Apple app store as well not just the alternative store. There might be specific reasons he doesn't want to be on the Apple app store by the way to be on the official app store does require some form of monetization and hence the ads and he might not want to inject a bunch of ads into his emulator. That could be one reason to avoid the Apple app store but just throwing that out there. Also the fact that this application that was approved by Apple had tracking stuff in there was tracking users locations and other data. There's purposes for certain applications to have tracking data. I'll give you an example. If you guys ever use DoorDash or Eat Street or Uber Eats or any of these food delivery services even like pizza delivery services like Domino's or something like that it's understandable why they would need some tracking data to know your location so they can actually bring the food that you're ordering to you in a more accurate manner especially when some of these things have literal GPS trackers letting you see where your driver is at and your delivery driver. So that makes a lot of sense to have some tracking data. An application about playing emulators that is legally available to download from an app store in a given country shouldn't need tracking data in the actual emulator when the app store is already gonna track to make sure that you're in that country when you downloaded the app. I think that that was pretty nefarious. We have no idea what all the people that downloaded the simulator excited over the weekend. I mean it rolls up the chart so a lot of people downloaded it. What kind of data is tracking and what it's gonna do with that data? I would highly suggest if you have this application that you remove it and you wait for Delta to launch on that alternative app store go add that to your phone or wait for another more legit one to land on the app store. And the other thing is we can't just let Apple off the hook here just because they made it right in the end. Apple does have a very strict app review and has rejected other applications based on grounds way lighter than literally stealing code. It is very disappointing that Apple couldn't do basic legwork on allowing emulators on their platform by just Google searching current emulators that are made for Apple devices and noticing that the code bases line up. Apple is supposed to be reviewing all these applications before they go up to make sure they're safe for users. The fact that they let this go through with all that tracking data stuff on an application that doesn't need it and then it's stolen code on top. Look, Apple, you need to do better. This also shows that Apple does not fundamentally understand emulators and because of that, at least video game emulators that there could be more instances like this in the future and maybe other nefarious things that come through with some of these emulators that end up getting approved. Normally if some of the proof of the app store you can feel pretty confident in downloading that but now you have to start to wonder are there other applications they've approved that they maybe shouldn't have? Now, beyond that, some people want to know just how did this emulator work? You did not need to sideload games through a web browser. Actually, what you did was you would go on a computer and you would upload your ROMs through iCloud to your files folder and what the emulator did was access your files folder on your phone where you can then have all those emulators in a specific folder or whatever and access them in that way. Very clever workaround that didn't require sideloading off of your device through a website. You actually could just load it all in through the file system on your Apple device. I think that was actually a pretty clever way to make this work. Look, you guys know that I've never been a big proponent of using emulators and I know Nintendo's anti-emulator stance but for classic systems like this I've never really had a problem. These games aren't commercially available anymore so to me this doesn't really matter and I just don't want to see developers actually have their code stolen like this so credit to Apple for correcting a mistake after the fact but maybe don't make the mistake in the first place and do a better job reviewing actual applications because your app review program that's where it exists for to stop this very thing. Now we got to get into our next story here and we got to talk about a franchise that I don't know if I've ever talked about here at Nintendo Prime or at least if I have it's been a long time we're talking about Fallout. Now, yes, the biggest reason we're talking about Fallout is because of the TV show but it's actually how the TV show has impacted the video games and one thing to remember when talking about this is that the Fallout TV show is being reviewed very well four and a half stars on Amazon, 8.7 on IMDB and I don't even rotten tomatoes it has a 94% with an 88% user approval rating which let's just say everyone who's watching the show or a majority of people are absolutely loving it and that's both fans of Fallout and people who didn't even know what Fallout was this is creating that critical mass appeal that I hope the Zelda movie and other things like it do for Nintendo where you can get people who don't even play your games to come watch just because it's a really damn good movie that's what the Fallout TV series is doing over on Amazon Prime Video eight episodes long, season two's already been approved that's great so how is this impacting the video games because this is the dream for all of these game companies is when you have your licensed shows and movies do really, really well we wanna see this trickle down and affect games so we can get more sales on games and make those more popular well, according to SteamDB over on X oh boy is it ever impacting we're actually getting all this data off of a video game Chronicles article because they had some additional details and what's fascinating here is the amount of players that are playing the games Fallout 4 had the biggest rise in average players per day over the weekend it was averaging around 20,000 active players most weekends and this past weekend they were averaging over 84,000 users on Fallout 4 every day which is pretty crazy and then when you look at Fallout 76 they're always online game that was much maligned when it came out it went from 13,000 average players to actually peaking yesterday at 39,455 which is a notable number because that's the largest peak player base ever for Fallout 76 pretty crazy and then the player base also increased for older games like New Vegas which jumped from 5,000 users to 19,000 and Fallout 3 from 1,000 to 6,700 now that's obviously just dealing with Steam we have no idea what happened on PlayStation and Xbox stuff like that we're just dealing with an individual set of data that's publicly available we obviously can't just make we can make guesses I suppose but guesses aren't really going to help I would venture to say Bethesda might be bragging about some of this stuff once the hype of the series has come down to kind of note, hey, Fallout's back baby and so with that happening I think that we're going to just see that this series is going to end up getting a new game obviously which I probably was going to get anyways because it's a fairly major IP but that new game might actually have a significant boost at launch especially if it could tie itself loosely to the TV series I liked that the TV series went in a more original direction it is on my much-watched list by the way I haven't watched the whole thing but some people are doing some crazy things trying to figure out the level of characters if they were a video game and look in the end I'm actually excited to tune in this week and check out this show and I'm someone who's enjoyed some Fallout in the past I'm not like the biggest player but I did play New Vegas played the hell out of New Vegas actually and I even played that little mobile phone game they have where you're making your Fallout shelter stuff so I don't know I'm pretty excited about this but what I'm also excited about is this next story and it's exciting because of just the information that's surrounding the story rather than the story itself because it deals with the Pokemon company we know how stingy the Pokemon company can be and many aspects especially with fan games, fan projects shutting things down, etc they've done that a lot but there's some cool stuff here starting with the fact that well another person got shut down if this person is going to jail at least he's in jail right now whether or not he stays in jail, we'll see but a man was arrested in Japan for selling modified Pokemon now you might go that's a weird thing to go to jail for gosh, if you sold modified Pokemon here you might just slap on the wrist on a small little fine or they would just leave you alone because it may be it's not illegal well in Japan it is because of their unfair competition protection act of 2019 which forbids you from modifying digital data and then selling it to people this is obviously more of a copyright protection thing because they obviously feel like you shouldn't be profiting off of that well the fun thing about this story is that this person ended up according to police selling a bunch of modified Pokemon for Pokemon Scotland Violet between the dates of December 22nd through March of 2023 well he made millions of yen which is roughly tens of thousands of dollars now he was selling them for upwards of $85 USD for like the top ones he also did some cheaper packs of selling like six modified Pokemon for $25 so look it was kind of all over the place and obviously once you have all the modifications inside and you have the game hacked and it's pretty easy to modify Pokemon it's not something that is hard to do it's something that's been happening for decades with the Pokemon franchise it's just rare we hear someone get arrested for actually doing it because look it's not illegal to modify it it's illegal to then make money off it now the funny thing here is what the penalty could be the penalty could be up to five years in prison or fines that equal out to about you know $32,000 USD or both you could actually get both and these are obviously maximum penalties we have no idea if he'll get any actual prison time but what is fascinating of course is the additional context surrounding this story and that's because of an interview that was done with the literal former head of legal Don McGowan at Aftermath and he noted Pokemon's approach to fan projects and modifications and all of this stuff because they might not like it they might shut certain things down but they're not gonna press legal action most of the time and he said that it's not just about websites gaining attention for these things people have always feared that if Kotaku or IGN or us YouTubers give attention to something like Pokemon Uranium that it's gonna get it shut down because it's bringing attention to the Pokemon company but it turns out that just getting attention isn't enough for the Pokemon company to do anything about it it has to actually make money so notably what he said in the interview is this once a game garners attention or whatever is that game making money on Patreon or Kickstarter or something like that if that's the case then they would shut it down this would explain why the aforementioned Pokemon Uranium is still online so are things like Pokemon Umbam which existed as 2016 as a ROM hack that for Pokemon FireRed that acts as a massive expansion for the game or other popular ROM acts like Pokemon Garbage Green which is for Leaf Green it just adds like a whole new difficulty mode to the game well the Pokemon company's not into a lot of this stuff they aren't going to shut it down and he did note that believe it or not the Pokemon company doesn't actually like going after fans they would prefer to just kinda leave fans alone but obviously when money's involved there's legal things and legal reasons they need to do stuff about it and so that's really okay so if you're gonna make a Pokemon fan project your own Pokedex, your own this, your own that, your own modification, your own Unreal Engine version of Pokemon just don't have a Kickstarter or a Patreon or any way to fund it just do it out of love for the game not love for the game that also happens to profit you now I'm not saying you can't have a YouTube channel they don't seem to be going after YouTube channels and shutting down all the YouTube videos of this stuff Nintendo sometimes does that but what they are doing is just saying hey as long as you're not making money you're probably legally saved at least that was the case when McGowan was the head of legal for Pokemon he recently left the company late last year now that all being said obviously this has nothing to do with the way Nintendo handles things Nintendo is different and handles it separately from the Pokemon company so the Pokemon company being okay with fan projects without money doesn't mean Nintendo is we've seen Nintendo shut down a number of fan projects that weren't making money but they've also let some go think about all the Zelda Unreal Engine ones out there Nintendo doesn't seem to touch that so it makes me wonder if the Nintendo's actions on certain IPs and certain fan projects is actually based on the individual IP like if Aji Aonuma doesn't care that Unreal Engine versions of Ocarina of Time and others are floating out there even if it's not the entire game if he doesn't care then maybe Nintendo doesn't care, right? But maybe like Tezuka cares when a Mario something happens so they shut that down or maybe Mario's just considered a more valuable IP than Zelda which it probably is overall as much as all the fans might not want to hear that so I do think that it's kind of interesting how Nintendo handles things versus the Pokemon company now the Pokemon company has been very stingy in some regards but almost all of it's when money's involved I mean they even shut down a bar at one point that was doing a fan gathering and the reason apparently is it because the fan gathering for this Pokemon club thing was happening it's because there was gonna be raffles which involve money again money money money the Pokemon company doesn't want any money be in exchange with fan stuff related to Pokemon so take that for what you will Nintendo's even stingier think about like tournaments you can't even have like Nintendo characters posters at a tournament in fact I kind of wondered like if I just ran a four fun gallery in my house because I have Nintendo merch and stuff around would I actually be in trouble for that? I don't know maybe we got to call it a bake off that just happens to have smashed the drinking game in the background I don't know guys we'll have to not mess with that I don't want to get in trouble with Nintendo you can still obviously play games with your friends I'm just talking about having a larger gathering of friends alright guys you guys are amazing and awesome thank you so much for tuning in I am Nathaniel Robojans from Nintendo Prime you guys are epic awesome and amazing and I want to catch you in the next video