 Hey everyone, today we're going to be talking about that Zelda Skyward Sword Amiibo and why Nintendo is making a massive mistake with that Amiibo, even though it looks gorgeous and yeah, we'll be giving away one or two of those during E3, but man, feel like they're making a mistake here. And in addition to that, we have some news about how XCloud appears to be semi-confirmed as coming to Switch ahead of time, thanks to the Apple vs. Epic lawsuit. Alright folks, first off, you guys know about the Skyward Sword Amiibo that's been announced, right? It's pictured up there, you guys have seen it, I know that the picture is kind of cut off, it is what it is, camera angles and all that, I want to make sure you get a good look at me more so than this, but yeah, Skyward Sword Amiibo, it looks great, right? You guys have seen it, I'll throw up an image of it, we're going to read off what this Amiibo does for Skyward Sword HD, first off, it's a $25 Amiibo. I don't have a problem with the price, so I'm not here to criticize the price, we've seen other Amiibo release at way more expensive than the $12, the $15, we've seen Amiibo go for, so it being $25 featuring two characters doesn't really bother me that much, it's an optional item that you don't have to buy. I don't really care about the price, except for one aspect and that's what we have to get into is what the hell this Amiibo does, so there was Amiibo functionality teased for Skyward Sword HD in the past, but we didn't know what it meant and now we know what this Amiibo does anyways, we don't know if other Amiibo can do things as well, so let's talk about this was, in Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword HD, the adventure takes place, this is coming off Nintendo's official website by the way, I'm not paraphrasing other people, I'm taking this straight from the horse's mouth, okay, as official as it can get, I will link down to the description to Nintendo's official page talking about this Amiibo. The adventure takes place between the skies where Link and his friends reside and the vast world of the surface that lies beneath the clouds, normally you can only return from the surface to the sky by way of a designated save point, but using the Zelda and Loftwing Amiibo while on the surface in the game will allow you to return to the skies from anywhere on the surface, even inside dungeons, and that's a big one, inside dungeons, it's like a save point inside dungeon, what? Okay, if you then use the Zelda and Loftwing Amiibo again while in the sky you can return to the spot on the surface where you used it before, so if you run over items while exploring the surface for example you can quickly return to the Bazaar in Skyloft to replenish your supplies, once you're done shopping the Amiibo allows you to quickly zap back to the surface to pick up where you left out, now they have been items like this in Zelda before this isn't a new concept for an item, but the items have never been a lot behind Amiibo and that's the fundamental issue here Nintendo's charging you $60 for Skyward Sword HD and has a massive quality of life improvement because one of the most annoying things about Skyward Sword is that the sky and the surface are disconnected and because they're disconnected, which will limitation to the system at the time, having a large open world that massive sky and the massive surface all connected together really wasn't that possible back then, but here's the thing, the hard part is that there's only designated spots where you can go up when often times when you need to return to the sky are at inconvenient times running out of items maybe you need to make some more stamina potions maybe you need to make this maybe you need to make like there's all these things you want to do maybe you came to the surface just to do some bug hunting and you want to return but to return you might have to backtrack 20 minutes because the surface for those who don't know it's Skyward Sword the surface itself is like a mini dungeon into itself making it very inconvenient to need to backtrack to get to a place to fly out of there and obviously in dungeons by the time you get to the dungeons you might be so depleted you want to fly out of there anyways and sometimes you can't so it it's very frustrating and this is a massive quality of life improvement so my issue is they're taking this quality of life improvement which should be part of a $60 package of what's just an HD one I mean let's just call it this it's basically an emulated HD version of Skyward Sword that's running in 60 FPS and 1080p which rather 60 FPS is a quality of life improvement 1080p is a quality of life improvement so is the fact that it's adding traditional controls those are all quality of life improvements but there's no changes within the game until this and this is being locked behind a $25 action figure basically not even an action figure this is a $25 statue and no problem with the price of the statue on its own but I do have a problem when the biggest quality of life improvement I have seen to date for Skyward Sword HD is locked behind that that should not be allowed and Nintendo has been doing this with Amiibo from the very beginning locking to I mean guys remember there was a special mode in Metroid locked behind an Amiibo dumb remember when even in Twilight Princess HD doubling the damage done by enemies or doubling the damage taken whichever way it was by enemies in the game with the Ganondorf Amiibo dumb it was like an extra difficulty mode locked behind an Amiibo now you have this $25 to add a quality of life improvement to a $60 game I'm going to call Nintendo out for this I'm gonna end up buying the Amiibo because I want the Amiibo itself and obviously because I have the Amiibo I'll use it in the game I get it you can say that makes me a hypocrite we're giving away as many of these during E3 as we can get our hands on do it with pre-orders because I get it I get it it's expensive it's gonna be hard to get and that's another thing it's going to be hard to get it's gonna be sold out day one scalpers are going to take advantage of the fact that this mode's locked behind it and it's gonna lead to a problem where people are gonna spend 60 bucks a scourge story she not have the opportunity to get this they might not ever be able to get this for a year maybe two years and they're gonna have a major quality of life improvement locked away that to me is wrong on many many levels it's not new Nintendo has done this before I just kind of hope they were done not maybe not done with Amiibo but done locking major things behind it what they did with Breath of the Wild to me was fine the biggest thing locked behind Breath of the Wild Amiibo was what Epona and even Epona isn't necessarily the best horse in the game if you work at it you can get a horse that's slightly better than Epona so it's like it's more so a nostalgia thing than it is actually giving you an advantage so I well besides not having to get a horse at all I guess you argue that's an advantage but I mean the point is it doesn't really the game itself is fine without it it's complete without it you don't need Epona right so I did this is oh it's frustrating that Nintendo's continuing to do this but we're gonna move on because we have a really positive story because of this Apple versus Epic lawsuit a lot's been going on I'm not gonna summarize the entire lawsuit the brux of it basically is Apple or I should say Epic wanted to charge virtual currency within their game and they wanted to avoid the 30% Apple tax and make those charges go through the game itself and through their own servers rather than run those charges through the Apple store because of that Apple banned Fortnite off of their platform because they say that Fortnite is not allowed to circumvent Apple's you know wallet system and all that stuff in order to sell currency and avoid that 30% charge which by the way that 30% charge was being passed on to consumers with virtual currency being more expensive because of it so really consumers were getting a better deal going through Epic and Epic's Bruxity argument back then was that Apple does allow other non video game applications to charge you money for parts of those applications outside of the Apple ecosystem that's one of the strongest I'm sorry Epic has is that Apple lets other apps that aren't games do what Apple or do what Epic wants to do anyways this lawsuit's been crazy there's a lot of dumb stuff coming up because the court system doesn't understand gaming and Microsoft themselves is heavily involved in this lawsuit because Microsoft has xCloud that they want to run on Apple devices the problem is Apple won't let them run a native app they won't let them run a native app because all the games are delivered through the app instead of through Apple's stores even though those games are part of a subscription service Microsoft can't put an app you know that you can even subscribe to through Apple store on an iPhone because the games delivered in it are not delivered through Apple store to deliver through xCloud and Game Pass and they have a massive problem with this and I understand why androids obviously an open platform and lets you do it so it's a very frustrating situation for Microsoft who isn't trying to sell you games so what's the problem Apple all right Apple has their own video game service in Apple Arcade that's a problem now moving beyond all that what came out during this lawsuit has been completely redacted and I can't find the information anywhere because it was redacted before it went public it was redacted by Nintendo there was a casual conversation going on in the courtroom between a representative from Microsoft and people from the Apple side of things and they were talking about xCloud specifically and parts of it were redacted by Nintendo because in this conversation came up things that Nintendo deemed as not fit for the public because they're part of active negotiations between Nintendo and Microsoft and the entire thing was about xCloud so Stefan Totillo former editor in chief of Kotaku now he works at a different level that I do apologize Stefan that I didn't look it up while recording this but he put up a basically a tweet showing two documents from the recent court case that's still ongoing and probably will be ongoing for months and months and months these court cases always get dragged down for a long time before any resolution is met and the thing is in these documents was a representative from Microsoft talking specifically about xCloud on iOS and xCloud obviously on Android and other platforms and consoles came up during this conversation kind of casually more as an aside not necessarily as a main brux of the conversation but one entire sheet and then part of another sheet so this stuff is actually quite common where things get redacted before certain things become public because it contains trade secrets or some other contractual thing that isn't that that might be relevant to the court case but isn't relevant to public knowledge and so sometimes you don't always get everything from a court case and in this case this stuff is important that it was redacted because while I was just talking about xCloud on consoles it mentioned supposedly xCloud on Nintendo switch now the interesting thing about that mention is the redaction wasn't by Microsoft it wasn't by Epic or Apple it was by Nintendo the reason because every time something is redacted or reason must be stated a reason that Nintendo redacted these statements from Microsoft from the public release of the documents is because Nintendo states that Microsoft and Nintendo are an active negotiations and information about those negotiations were contained in the redacted information and we know the redacted information next to Stefan Tatillo and obviously all the conversation around that redacted information was about xCloud coming to consoles so remember how we've been speculating about how you know Jeff Grubb mentioned that the console in the background was Phil Spencer the switch means something you didn't know what then the switch appeared in the background of another Microsoft event quite prominently alongside the series X and series S and we speculated xCloud this xCloud that I even made a prediction a bold prediction that xCloud would be announced for Nintendo switch at E3 now I don't know that xCloud is actually going to get announced that by Microsoft or Nintendo at E3 but what I do know is sounds like there's active negotiations this is like official legal mumbo jumbo redacted by Nintendo because of active negotiations between Nintendo and Microsoft and these the stuff that was redacted was what xCloud so xCloud sounds like it's probably coming to switch it's probably coming to Nintendo switch so that's exciting don't know what that means we're getting Game Pass what it does mean that we're liking xCloud that is oh that's exciting stuff it'll be nice to see just unifying the streaming games having a reliable streaming service also the potential that Game Pass could be part of that is very enticing and I could do some comparisons for you guys if Game Pass is because I have an Xbox Series X with with Game Pass I would say the game PC and then I have a switch and so what I could do is like streaming over switch versus you know native on Xbox versus like I don't know native on PC or streaming on PC however we want to do those comparisons that'll be fun imagine Halo Infinite is playable on Nintendo switch this holiday talk about a value proposition also guys that's gonna wrap up this video but be sure to join us tonight at 8 p.m. Central Time for our podcast if you're watching this later go back and watch it I think it's episode 9 of the Nintendo Prime podcast got lots of special guests good stuff happening also join us for our E3 coverage on June 12th although now Summer Game Fest is happening in June 10th and I'll have to stream that but we're not making a big special event on that that's just gonna be a standard live reaction video or live reaction stream and other folks thank you so much for tuning in and I'll catch you all in the next video