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End of an Era: Wii Shop Channel Shutting Down Within Days

November 4, 2023 News

The Wii Shop Channel has been live for nearly 12 years. Despite the smashing success of the Wii and the continued achievements of the Wii U, it is now the era of the Switch. With the Nintendo Switch having topped the hardware sales charts for 2018, it seems few fans are complaining. That being said, it’s still the end of an era. Now Nintendo fans are about to experience the brunt end of that loss. After nearly a solid dozen years of selling WiiWare and virtual console games, the Wii Shop Channel is now planning to shut down on Jan. 30, 2019. Many of the games offered within the service were never given a physical copy release or shifted to newer Nintendo consoles. Beyond that, Nintendo reportedly plans to eventually cease providing the ability to redownload previous purchases from the now fading channel. Consequently, many of these wonderful games will…

The Lost Art of Renting Games: Blockbuster

January 22, 2019 Editorials

I know it is irrelevant and it’s 2019, but I’m going to say it anyway; I miss Blockbuster. There was something magical about going into a Blockbuster as a kid, and I feel sorry that children of this day and age will have no idea what Blockbuster was or even the concept of how it worked for that matter. “What, you went into a store to find games or movies to rent, and if you couldn’t find it you had to settle for another?” Yep, that’s the way we had it back in the day. Simpler times. Nowadays, video game rentals are pretty much non-existant. If you want to test out a game you can download the trial version and play it on your system. If you like it you can go out to the store and buy the disk or even buy a downloadable version on the system itself.…

The Growing Disconnect Between Developers and Their Community

January 18, 2019 Editorials

“Do you guys not have phones?” A phrase that will live in infamy as the moment where people of the what I would define as more “hardcore” gaming audience realized that mobile games had worked their way into even the most “sacred” of gaming franchises. Mortal Kombat has one, Diablo is getting one and now the much-loved Alien: Isolation is getting a mobile sequel. But that is old news now and acts more as inspiration and example then the breaking of a story, so this one’s for you Alien: Blackout. What I am trying to say here is that there are basically two things that are examined when a game is put into development and that is money and popularity. The gaming community is at a crossroads where those two things are starting to butt heads which is ultimately hurting the people caught in the crossfire. No one can deny…

VPNs are Over Sponsored in Modern Media

November 12, 2022 Editorials

Several years after the below article was wrote, the VPN issue still hasn’t been resolved. They’re just now far more expensive than they were before. Everything online right now is sponsored by VPNs and I don’t really understand it. You basically are glad handing another company your complete and total internet traffic instead of your home ISP, who now gets instead of mostly encrypted traffic gets all encrypted traffic. Every single tech blogger out there and now even gaming sites are just spamming it with VPN deals from a variety of VPN companies, who I assume are carting over buckets of gold. Let’s talk about VPNs. So a “Virtual Private Network” is slang for “this thing that connects your PC to other PCs via encrypted tubes over the Internet protecting your privacy get one today.” Which is, really interesting to me. I mean, REALLY interesting to me. In a traditional…