Jonah goes off on a virulent rant about NBA 2K20 and the decline of the series as a whole, while offering milder criticism of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. There’s no Gaming Flashbacks, but plenty of news.
The news items include:
Let us know what you think.
One of the greatest things Nintendo has done was allowing the DS to be unlocked for regions. This allowed gamers around the world to share their favorite games from all cultures and countries with just a click of the “buy” button at an online store.
The DSi loses this great freedom by locking it down to a region. “Nintendo DS software is region free so you can play any DS software on DSi from any region. You can also browse the internet on your DSi wherever you are in the world and exchange your photos with friends from around the world,” says Nintendo (CVG).
Much like the US Entertainment Industries need to lock down everything and contribute to global piracy, Nintendo follows suit with their hand-helds, tis a sad day indeed. Of course Nintendo reasons it all away by yelling parental controls and making it easier for regions to access their own content.
“DSi is region locked because DSi embeds net communication functionality within itself and we are intending to provide net services specifically tailored for each region. Also because we are including parental control functionality for Nintendo DSi and each region has its unique age limit.”
Specifically tailored for each region is a nice way of saying that each region has to pay the penalty of not being “first” (second, or third) to get some cool new features. Although Nintendo could put emphasis on the region the gamer lives in with complete access out of those bounds if they wanted, they’ve chosen to use this as a crutch to lock users out of content.
Users will get their content, of course. It just means more home brews, software hacks, hardware hacks and workarounds for the system. If that’s what Nintendo is trying to inspire, then they’ve done their job right.
However, wouldn’t it be great if they could just come out and say “we don’t want certain people accessing specific content until we say you can.”
This week, Jonah Falcon rants about the bosses in Deus Ex: Human Revolution while Jordan Lund expresses a desire for cold, rainy weather. This week’s Gaming Flashback is The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, with the following news items:
The guys also read more reader mail, and pose this week’s Question of the Week: What was the worst game mechanic you ever dealt with in a game you liked?
The videogame world has been stunned by the news that GameSpy, 1UP and UGO are all being shuttered. GameSpy had been around since 1999 (back when it was a mere online match service – game-spy, geddit?) UGO was a site that I wrote for both indirectly as an editor of GamePen and directly when I wrote DVD and game reviews for UGO.
UGO’s Chris Radtke bid farewell stating:
I’ve spent many years of my life trying to turn UGO.com into something entertaining for you guys. Hopefully you stopped by recently to watch one our funny videos. Or you found yourself debating one of our nerd culture lists, read a movie review or pondered the age old question “Who would win in a fight, a minotaur armed with a trident or a centaur armed with a crossbow.” Could be you tried to win something off our homepage or you Googled “Hot Girls” and found a couple of pics you liked. I don’t really care how you got here, just as long as you were entertained when you did.
