The token trans sexual predator in Azure Striker Gunvolt

Inti Creates' Azure Striker Gunvolt contains a negative stereotype of a transgender person that serves no purpose other than a cheap giggle and the degradation of an already marginalized social minority. That's all that really needs to be said.

But maybe you played the game and you didn't see that. And that's fine. I miss this kind of thing all the time, probably because I don't have a personal stake in it. I'm a regular old male dude and I like being a regular old male dude. I want other people to like being regular old female dudes and regular old trans dudes and regular old agender dudes and whatever else they choose to be. I don't care what they want to be. And I even more don't care what anyone wants me to think of them. That's where portrayals like Azure Striker Gunvolt's Zonda overstep their bounds.

This is a pretty basic race/gender theory 101 subject, but let's remember what "tokenism" is. Tokenism is the use of a single contrasting character in an otherwise homogeneous group who, through isolation, becomes representative of their group of origin. Tokens are typically portrayed as bland and insignificant (simply present to fulfill a diversity obligation) or aggressively stereotypical (either as a subconscious perpetuation of stereotypes or to draw attention to the element of diversity). To grossly simplify things, tokenism is a problem because it subverts the perception of minority individuals as individuals. The one black or gay or female character is shown as representative of group, rather than personal, identity.

As with everything in theory, I'm sure there's probably some specific name for the portrayal of a trans person as lusty, sexually predatory, perverse, and ultimately evil. A "Dr. Frankenfurter" maybe, except that Frankenfurter was ultimately sympathetic. Whatever it is, that's strictly where Zonda falls. The only trans character in Azure Striker Gunvolt, Zonda is a sexually threatening, dehumanized embodiment of indulgence, constructed from lurid imagery, rape-tinged dialogue, and sadomasochistic delight in death.

As is typical of Inti Creates and Mega Man in general, each of Gunvolt's villains has a distinctive palette and visual design, from Viper's flaming red mane to Elise's serpentine curves. Zonda, described as "bigender", is distinguished by a giant pink phallus erupting from their crotch. While other characters are identified by animal traits, Zonda flaunts the classical symbol of male sexuality awash in the textbook color of femininity. The portrait is reduced to an in-your-face caricature of intrusive sexuality, aligned with the damaging stereotype that a transgender person is defined solely by their choice of genitalia.

Zonda's dialogue (approved for ages 10 and up by the ESRB) is carefully crafted to disturb, laced with the flagrant prurience and innuendo used to dehumanize trans characters. Upon encountering the player character, they open lasciviously, "Mmm, look at you. You're all boy, aren't you?". The dialogue immediately objectifies the avatar ("look at you") and goes even further to hint a pedophilic angle with the use of "boy". From there we launch into biological sexual fixation - "A plug for every socket, and a socket for every plug" and onto the conflation of physical and sexual aggression, "I should warn you - I'm carnal. I'm a carnivore.". Zonda finishes - and I'm not exaggerating that all I've quoted here is all the character says - with what, in context, is a threat of rape: "right now, you're a dangly little piece of meat. Taking you for a tug is going to be fun.". The relentless association of transgenderism with sexual assault feeds into the underlying societal perception that trans people are a threat to straight males and tolerance is equivalent to a sacrifice of male liberty.

The subsequent death scene makes a mockery of the character and suggests Zonda is ultimately unworthy of life. The character is the only villain not to be directly confronted by the player - they are defeated off-screen and the player arrives just in time to witness them on their knees salaciously begging for the pain of death. Zonda's final words transcend innuendo into prolonged grotesquerie; "So hot... inside me... aaah!" "This pain... exquisite... nngh!!!" "Kill me... just like that... aaahhh...". In case you weren't sure what the game was getting at, the player character adds "that was no cry for help!" and the killer calls Zonda "abomination". In a world where violence against trans people is epidemic to the point of being a daily reality, sexualizing, mocking, and glorifying the demise of a trans character carries disturbing implications with regard to both the victims and perpetrators of this violence.

A subtler subversion of trans acceptance comes in the terminology used to reference the character: "bigender" and the pronouns "xe" and "xem". By invoking what have become standards of the gender discourse - that is, variable gender identities and gender-neutral pronouns - the game juxtaposes genuine political correctness with its relentlessly negative portrayal of Zonda. The overt sexualization and dehumanization of the character through their conduct concurrently devalues these otherwise positive trends, dragging the entire gender conversation into mocking dismissal. For the record, I chose not to use "bigender" and the x-pronouns to refer to Zonda in this piece because the general ignorance inherent in the portrayal makes me skeptical that any terminology from the game is appropriately applied.

Invariably it must be remarked that the developers and localizers of Azure Striker Gunvolt probably didn't "mean anything" by their characterization of their sole transgender character. The concept probably evolved naturally in conceiving an embodiment of Lust (the game has a seven deadly sins motif). They probably didn't approach it any differently from their Pride character who spouts "thee"s and "thou"s and makes for the honorable fool. It must also be remarked that intention does not matter at all. The game propagates negative stereotypes to its audience, whether through ignorance or choice. Transgender people are very real and in choosing to present a transgender character, Inti Creates now owns the stereotype that a trans person is nothing more than a thrusting phallus of deviant sexual predation begging to be beaten to death.

Addendum on the subject of localization: As with most Japanese-developed games, Azure Striker Gunvolt was translated into English by an entity external (8-4 Ltd.) to the original development team. The exact parallel between the English and Japanese scripts remains nebulous; however, the blame almost certainly falls on both parties. The visual design of the character and their use in cut-scenes - half of the problem - would've been defined by Inti Creates. As for 8-4 - even if the dialogue was translated exactly as written in Japanese, they have the responsibility of appropriating that to fit the target culture - leaving in socially irresponsible content is an active choice to create a socially irresponsible game.

Shovel Knight: The Quentin Tarantino of video games

Shovel Knight is a retro game. Betcha never heard of one of those! It's true, Mega Man 9, La Mulana, Retro City Rampage, and Super Meat Boy simply don't exist. You made all of those up in your head. But there's nothing wrong with being the very first game to do what 127 other games have been doing for the past five years. I bought it, so clearly I don't care. And amongst retro throwbacks Shovel Knight has accumulated serious hype for so diligently recreating the presentation and gameplay of classic early-nineties games. Why people get hyped for a game that could've come out in 1990 instead of just looking up any readily available game that did come out in 1990... well, that's what we're here to ask. Because that's exactly how Shovel Knight works: it tricks you into thinking you've played the ultimate classic platformer if you've never played a classic platformer.

What is Shovel Knight? I mean, not just what kind of game is it, but what is its unique identity? How can you tell you're playing Shovel Knight and not Mutant Mudds or Bonk 64? Well, it's a game where the player controls a blue knight wielding a shovel against a world where every knight has an elementally associated X-Men-style unique trait: the one with a helicopter for a head, the one whose suit of armor is a diving suit, the engineering genius, etc. The world is split into platforming levels topped with boss battles which are selected from an overworld map. The player can seek out gold to upgrade their health and magic stores and special weapons to expand their arsenal. The special weapons don't override your main attack and share ammo and can be freely switched on the fly, often coming into play for level navigation.

Shovel Knight stands out against its classic would-be peers in that it has EVERYTHING an NES game might have. It doesn't hone in on the Mega Man boss battles or the Duck Tales collection or the Ninja Gaiden platforming or the Castlevania enemies or the Super Mario Bros. 3 world map or the Kid Icarus upgrading, it just has all of those things. Are we to believe Mega Man 2 was incomplete because it lacked a world map? That the designers left that out because they hadn't thought of it, not because they didn't want it? That Super Mario World didn't add a Metroid element of collection to its exploration because it wasn't a smart enough game? I don't think Shovel Knight is so pointed, but the juxtaposition of all of these elements does suggest such a thought process. Simply asking "why didn't anyone cross over Ninja Gaiden with Duck Tales?" requires misunderstanding that what makes Ninja Gaiden great is that it's Ninja Gaiden. You can't take the gameplay idea and stack ten things on top of it and expect it to still be as good as it was in Ninja Gaiden. The entire concept is born from the modern subtractive notion of evaluation - that every game starts as a 10 and then loses points for what it doesn't have; "no RPG elements - minus one", "no achievements - minus one", etc. It's not that Shovel Knight doesn't have a reason to exist or that its blender-experimentation isn't worth a shot, but the product - a stack of ideas - robs the game of identity and weakens the effect of the elements it does borrow to the point that they simply sit as a reminder that "THIS IS AN INSPIRED GAME".

As a "retro" game I guess you could see it as a triumph that Shovel Knight so successfully mimics the design of the aforementioned classics, as the game could be understood as a meta-commentary on genre the same way Quentin Tarantino movies work without having any identity unique from the history of western/samurai/exploitation film*. It works as a statement that a platformer can no longer have identity because platformers are inherently bound to a time and place and thus the platformer-identity overtakes any unique aspect of the game - that there's no point in attempting a 'fresh' platformer because any such game, without contemporary context, instantly becomes a "new platformer" and is thus relegated to infinite subjugation to a notion of classics, such that the only way for a "new platformer" to succeed is to simply evoke the classics as thoroughly and uniformly as possible, burying itself in the camouflage of homage. Put another way, it's the notion that players and designers are concerned only with stamping ideas, not whether they own them by virtue of creation - "now we have our own platformer". Putting all of the genre classics into a single game relieves the need for experience with the breadth of the field and allows the player, in a single stroke, to think of themselves as a platforming expert. Of course, this is inherently paradoxical in that the triumph of the new game necessitates the supplanting of the old genre, presuming a new farther removed baseline in which the platformer has lost its meaning and function as a stylistic tool and has been reduced to a simple pastiche with genre itself as the ideal - where there exists no platformer whose purpose is anything but to be THE platformer. It's in some sense an encapsulation of genrefication as a whole, particularly through the lens of a mainstream removed from the time in which the original explosion was relevant. 

Of course, the premise of Shovel Knight viewed thusly marginalizes genre fans - it is a platformer for those uninterested in platformers, existing solely as a reductionist novelty. 

* I realize not everyone shares my take on Mr. QT but it's a catchier premise this way.

Indies on Handhelds: A nice interview w/ Brjann Sigurgeirsson

Here's a recent NintendoLife interview with Brjann Sigurgeirsson, co-founder of Image and Form, Swedish development team behind the acclaimed SteamWorld Dig for 3DS eShop. I've yet to play Dig (it's on the list), but that's not really what the interview is about - Sigurgeirsson talks about being an indie working in the current handheld climate. He makes some excellent points about the mobile marketplace (I particularly like what he has to say about the iOS App Store) and has some charming (if not terribly original) remarks about discovering one's work is an unexpected hit. It's nice to see an indie developer who strikes a balance between humility and confidence rather than being a quippy know-it-all. Reading between the lines, Sigurgeirsson seems to be saying that Dig has yet to become a financial success, but it's interesting how confident he is in the 3DS as a platform and in Nintendo's relationship with independent developers. I realize the interviewer probably didn't want to put him on the spot, but I kinda wanted to hear which particular indie games he was so hotly anticipating. I'll also be interested to see how much of a tail Dig (and the SteamWorld franchise as a whole) ends up having.

He does talk about SteamWorld Dig for the first two minutes, so if you haven't played that, you might want to skip ahead. But the majority of the interview isn't specific to the game. 

Be a dear and give interviewers NintendoLife a hit rather than watching the embed below.

http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2013/10/interview_image_and_form_ceo_brjann_sigurgeirsson_talks_steamworld_dig_and_working_on_the_eshop

3DS eShop: It's forreal

Woweee folks, I just downloaded Mighty Switch Force, Mega Man 2, VVVVV, and Sakura Samurai on my 3DS! The moral of this story is don't stay away from gaming for too long because then you'll binge and kick your dog when he doesn't respond to your drunken mutterings!

These 4 games cost just over 20 bucks total, which for me begs all sorts of questions about how anyone can stand to spend 35, 40, or 50 bucks on an 'actual' 3DS title. I barely bought Resident Evil: Revelations, and that dropped to 20.

The quality of Eshop offerings is surprising considering what I see as a general lack of enthusiasm by anyone for the 3DS as a console. With the advent of smartphone gaming, the 3DS fills this weird gap somewhere in the nexus of small children entertainment, gamers who will buy every console, and weirdo Nintendo enthusiasts (myself). But in actuality the 3DS wasn't designed with any specific US market in mind, it was designed for...you guessed it! That island nation we nuked!

I didn't know this because I'm a xenophobe but apparently all the Japanese do is sit on trains going places. We're talking 8 hour commutes on the reg. That's actually how Sir Shigeru Miyamoto San came up with Mario: he worked for an Italian plumber who specialized in train-plumbing and would sit on his ass tracing the mountains as they went by instead of helping unclog the commuter-shit from the train-toilets.

Anyway the Japanese often lack friends because it's a very insular society (insular coming from the latin: island-like). They can't text or snapchat the few friends they have because pillows shaped like anime girls can't text back...yet...so they have to game and the 3DS is their go-to. Every Japanese person buys 2 to 5 3DS's, so it makes sense Nintendo doesn't give a shit about the American market. How could they when it takes every ounce of their creativity name the colors for the upcoming DS re-release?

(http://nintendo3ds.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_3DS_colors)

While the 3DS lacks the major selling point of game development for, say, the iphone, in that everyone has it with them constantly and society no longer considers it rude to be on your phone literally all the damn time, the Nintendo handheld has obviously done some things right in attracting developers for small-scale niche and retro gaming. After I get through these latest purchases I still have Mutant Mudds, Pushmo and Crashmo, Nightsky, Mighty Switch Force 2, and a few other to go! With so much quality gaming at such reasonable prices it gets hard to care about anything else in life at all. Wait since I know Yourself is reading this I'll interrupt this irregularly scheduled blog post to ask him if he has anything fun on his 3DS sd card that I can borrow. Well? Do you?

Ok well I'll quit while I'm ahead. Here's this video:

Awakening the potential with Fire Emblem

The collective Fire Emblem is a great experience. I've said it before - it made my top 10 SRPGs of all time. The problem is that it's composed of something like a dozen individual games spanning 20+ years. That's a whole hell of a lot to simplify into just one generalized playthrough memory, but it does so with no problem. They're all the exact same. And I'm not talking like "all [insert-genre]s are the same!", I'm talking like exact same characters, exact same classes, exact same combat rules, exact same environments, exact same subject matter, exact same story, exact same graphics, exact same music, exact same everything. Okay, maybe they change the main character's hair color from time to time. Seriously. It's not even like iterations of a fighting game where they at least throw in a handful of new characters and arenas. I would honesty say, mean, and fight to the death over the claim that there is more variety in the Street Fighter II subseries (i.e. Turbo, Super, Champ. Ed., etc.) than there is in Fire Emblem's entire discography.

Then there's that "trademark" element, permanent character death. I'm going to move my diatribe against perma-death* to the end of the post, because it's going to be lost on anyone who isn't a series fan.

Fire Emblem: Awakening wants to finally take a step forward with the series. It'll blow classicists minds right off the bat by providing the option to turn off perma-death. While I'm a bit insulted by the fact that this mode is called "Casual" - fuck you Nintendo, I'm playing a goddamn Fire Emblem game - it's an addition that totally opens up the strategic playing field to a degree never available before. Think of how your tactics will change, now that units are disposable. If all you can see is an easier, "casualer" game, you aren't being creative enough. 

Allowing units to perma-live is a natural decision considering the focus of the game's evolution: role-playing. Where warriors' growth was once rigidly predestined (except in Sacred Stones where you could choose-your-evolution), Awakening introduces that role-playingist of role-playing elements: customization. As a matter of fact, someone might argue that a game cannot be an RPG without character/world customixation. The degree to which that's true can be sidelined for this discussion, because directly compared, Awakening is much more an RPG than its predecessors. The first thing the game has you do is create an avatar - his (or her!) appearance, name, and statistical preference. The demo suggests that this may be an Ishmael character - one of my preferred tacks to video game storytelling. Other characters promise to have flexible classes and skill sets, deepening their individual roles and allowing the player to create a personalized army.

The game's newborn visual style emphasizes this further. Equipment is displayed in true paper-doll fashion and battles are viewed from an (optional) first-person perspective. Synergizing teammates are shown entering battle side-by-side, rather than as a hidden statistical bonus. The game wants to draw you deeper into the emotional level of the combat.

Boringer players might object and lament that "hey, you got your micro-managing Tactics in my pure chess-like board-game strategy", but, who gives a fuck. For better or worse, it is indeed time for a change, and Awakening seems to bring a bit of that spirit. Maybe it's not the utter revolution the series needs, but it's the minor uprising it deserves (TM (Batman (TM))). 

I am gonna call bullshit on the hero being called Crom though. I mean, fuck that. Or I guess I should say "then the hell with you!"

*Perma-death, as it's so fondly called by fans, is fucking stupid. The idea of perma-death is that if a unit dies, you now need to fill that gap with a weaker unit that is going to need to catch up. Since Fire Emblem rigidly dictates what back-up units you have (and provides them in finite supply), it's easy to get into a situation where there is no replacement. Also consider that letting even a single unit die permanently weakens your entire army, as there is no training/practice/grinding to make up for the lost experience. This means that losing units is not only a temporary inconvenience, but a permanent difficulty spike. Considering the difficulty already increases over the course of the game, and the added consequence that a lost unit may have been the key to unlocking further allies or items (thus making one death equal to multiple lost units), it becomes apparent to even the most casual player that letting a character perish is simply not an option. So instead of a system where mistakes have game-changing consequences, you have a system where the player must win without mistakes every time. Which just makes for a lot of restarting missions.

Resident Evil Revelations - Early revelations

Ah, Resident Evil, what a popular series to hate. Ever since regaining its steam with RE4, the series seems to have run out of steam. RE5 conservatively repeated the approach of its predecessor while introducing a few superficial interface experiments, all of which miserably failed. If you don't believe a game can be utterly ruined by superficial interface experimentation (a la inventory management), you haven't played Resident Evil 5. Worse yet (per fans), the series was beginning to have completely drifted away from its survival horror roots! Being the not really a fan of the series as I am, THAT I couldn't care less about. So what if it used to be survival horror? It clearly isn't trying to be anymore, so how can you evaluate it on that basis? I guess by being the type of gamer/reviewer who prefers evaluating a work in terms of personal expectations rather than what the creators set out to achieve. 

Anyway, I'm still optimistic about 6, which had a great demo but hasn't yet found its way to my Xbox, so until then I'm occupied with Revelations (which came out on 3DS during the long pause between 5 and 6). I have to be honest - I was not optimistic about Revelations, having been relatively disappointed by the demo and discouraged by reviews that wanted to talk more about context than content (e.g. "this is the best Mature title on 3DS", "makes good use of 3D", "production values"). Also, I don't really like handheld games. Oops. Anyway, I'm glad I gave ResiRev a chance (thanks Golem!), because it's had me locked onto the handheld far more than any other game thus far.

Remember back in RE1 when just ONE zombie was scary?

In direct contrast to series fans, my immediate fear in the first few minutes of ResiRev was that it wasn't going to be a shooter. Or, more appropriately, that it was going to be a poor shooter. Taking RE4/5 expectations into Rev, I was startled by the lumbering enemies that chew up and spit out handgun bullets with barely a shudder. That the enemy count would be lower was predictable - I didn't imagine the 3DS could (or Capcom would dare push it to) handle RE5 mobs of dozens of villagers - but I wasn't ready to have to turn and run from the very first foe. At first I was thinking, what the fuck, this is just plain unfun. Needing to unload two full clips to take down what was apparently the most basic foe didn't bode well for the pacing. Gradually, however, I came to realize that this was a return to the mechanics of the very first Resident Evil. These claustrophobic rooms where just one or two enemies give chase and are bounded by doors are exactly what made up the environment in RE1.

The callback jumps from subtle to overt in the second chapter (about forty-five minutes in) when Jill wakes up in a locked room without a weapon. The subsequent fifteen minutes should be bliss for survival horror purists - a defenseless avatar, monsters bursting from closets to give chase down narrow hallways, racing against time to find that right key or door before they catch you. I call it an overt reference because until that point the game had been set in the dim, steely blue, swaying corridors of an ocean liner - then, just as the gameplay becomes really RE1y, you're transported to opalescent, warmly lit living quarters that, not knowing any better, one might assume comprised an old-world New England mansion (which, for the uninitiated, is where RE1 was set). Frankly, I found this decision downright cool. At this point the series is so far removed from its origins that it was the last thing I was expecting, and it completely recolored the game I'd been playing up til that point. All of a sudden I understood why I had a dodge move to escape monsters at arm's length, why I'd been circling past so many locked doors, and why I could only carry a limited amount of ammo.

ResiRev welcomes you back to the mansion

I'll tell you later (when I get there) how well ResiRev holds to this revelation, but it's a truly exciting prospect. With a modern streamlined inventory (far simpler than RE4's and light beers better than 5's), friendly auto-saving, no ammo-scares, and surprisingly pretty visual presentation (nearly on par with RE5 but for the low resolution and lesser effects), this could be the best traditional Resident Evil out there. Oh right, a major interface advancement I should mention, since it solves one of RE1's worst problems, is a Metroid Prime style universal environment scanner. At first I was all, "ru4srs?", worried that it was dragging down the pace even further, but this tool proves a major boon to the scavenging nature of the Resident Evil quest. There's no longer any excuse to walk straight by a key that you could barely see or a statue that you didn't realize you could interact with - this provides immediate identification of all interactables without resorting to glowy outlines or sparkles.

I've strategically (or just regularly) avoided thus far mentioning that there are intermittent chapters that play completely differently from this main haunted house/boat adventure. The two thus far have been balls to walls shooting action (even arcadier than RE4). These create an excellent pace for the game, allowing it to have its cake, and eat its cake too. Hmm when you read "have your cake" there in the uh Biblical sense, it's a pretty frightening expression.

Is 3DS being marketed poorly?

Here's a quiz for you. Is the 3DS:
A. An entirely new software platform or
B. A DS that can play games in 3D

I only bring this up because this weekend I for the third time got into a conversation with someone who misunderstood what is a 3DS. The individuals in question were casual gamers and parents, who of course make up the largest consumer base for the device, so it's extremely important to Nintendo that they get it. But I've heard this enough times now that I'm going to refrain from calling my friends and coworkers idiots and pin this one on the N of America marketing department.

Is this a 3DS?...

In this 21st century and age, electronics consumers have gleefully fallen victim to incessant insignificant tech upgrades, with a new letter and number being added to every product name every year. This has impacted brand loyalty - maybe it's just because I'm an adult now, but doesn't it seem like people are less virulently Apple vs. Microsoft/Google/The World? - and mixed in compulsive dedication to owning the newest devices. Because god forbid that that phone you treated like a precious diamond in March actually be worth keeping for a year. 

Getting off topic.

"GET OVER HERE!" - Topic, 1 second ago

The point is that Nintendo has been edging toward this trend with its handheld devices - understandable, as they share market space with iPhOnEs and Droidbots and tablets. They've kinda been doing it for years - look at Game Boy Color and Color Game Boy (not a joke, they are very different). More recently, the DS had four revisions: 

the DS in 2004, 

the DS Lite in 2006, renewing the form factor,

the DSi in 2008, adding... I dunno something,

the DSi XL in 2010, increasing the screen area.

Shortly after the last of those, 

the 3DS came out in 2011 adding 3D (and also a whole new software library)

the 3DS XL in 2012 seems largely (EXTRA largely (sigh)) to have replaced it in stores..

...or is this one?

I listed them like that for a reason. Look how, were I Biff "Average" Consumer, I might not be able to tell the difference between the Lite to DSi gap, and the DSi to 3DS gap? As of 2010, four DS models existed and they all played the same games. [the following is the misunderstanding I've heard repeatedly]: Why do I need to upgrade again now in 2012? Oh, the new one has 3D and can play some of the old DS games in 3D, which the old DS can't. But... I don't really give a shit about 3D. I think I'll pass.

Then two years from now, these same people are going to be baffled why there aren't any new games for their DS, and how come Best Buy and Target don't sell any non-3D games? They don't realize that this was a generational leap, the same as PS2 to PS3, because Nintendo is spending so much time explaining "it can still play your old games!" Regular DS games are no longer being made, and the old device will soon be obsolete. 3DS has been marketed as "DS with 3D! and also a whole new software library", rather than what it should be, "DS with a whole new software library! and also 3D". Because whether you're looking at the incremental life-cycle of obsessive geek-turd phonelets or the stable as-of-six-years-ago console race, the idea of needing to buy a new platform for an entirely new generation of software is vanishing.

I expect the Wii U is going to encounter this issue as well, and hopefully Nintendo does a better job of distinguishing it as a complete hardware overhaul with its own brand new software library. Um, I say I hope, but they haven't, and it's going to be out in a few weeks. It's already going to be a hell of a time getting consumers who feel like they got burned on Wii ("it was fun for two weeks", "collecting dust") to come back for another round, without even touching the fact that the mainstream gaming press has seemingly already determined the platform's damnation. The 3DS may have bounced back, but the DS brand was in better standing than the Wii is now.

Oh well. Nintendo are morons at business. And I say that knowing full well that the company is run by people with more money in their pockets than I will ever see in my life. They just aren't gonna be in it for the long haul if they keep making stupid decisions; when your only strength is as a software company, how do you keep hardware afloat?