Peekystar

The Nintendo Network service, that handled online play for the vast majority of 3DS and Wii U games, Splatoon included, was shut down on the 8th of April. So yes, the official servers for Splatoon are dead.

Yesterday, the developers of Garry’s Mod, the 2006 Source engine sandbox game, announced on Steam that due to a takedown request from Nintendo, they were removing all the Steam Workshop (i.e; user-generated) content that used Nintendo’s IP. Some originally believed that this was a troll of some sort posing as Nintendo, but this screenshot tweet from Garry Newman, the titular developer of Garry’s Mod, indicates that he’s certain the takedown request is legitimate, and the probably-still-ongoing removal of Nintendo content on the workshop will continue.

In light of the imminent shutdown of the 3DS and Wii U’s online services, I’ve been revisiting Kirby Battle Royale and Mario Tennis Open over the last few days - as relatively obscure spinoffs with regional matchmaking on a decade-old system, it’s been nigh impossible to find an online match in them for years, but with the shutdown causing people to revisit these old titles one last time, it’s actually been possible to find matches again, and it’s been pretty darn fun.

Been revisiting an old favourite of mine from the Wii lately, Boom Blox Bash Party, a chaotic physics-based puzzle game that I reckon still holds up really well. Since the game has several hundred levels in groups you’re free to tackle in any order*, I simply resumed one of my old save files and took on levels in the sets I didn’t finish in that old save file, which if the file select completion percentage is to be believed, is still around half the game. I’ve even been dual-wielding Wii Remotes to take on some of the co-op levels.

There isn’t a consistent answer here, since it varies wildly from game to game. Most games with online play will have some way to interact with friends, most often with private lobbies that only your friends can join or the ability to join a friend in an existing public lobby, but one thing that’s consistent throughout almost all games is that you can’t send out a call to friends to join you; If you want to deliberately organise some gameplay with your friends, you’ll almost certainly need some alternate communication method, since Nintendo doesn’t offer any.

I doubt there’s any technical reason for it, especially given that you can change your username at any time and other online services allow for longer usernames. I guess Nintendo just think that 10 characters is a reasonable cap for usernames.

I’d say the most interested I am in any upcoming game right now is probably Antonblast, a Wario Land-inspired platformer slated to release at some point this year. Was first introduced to its earliest demo by someone building a Smash Ultimate custom stage inspired by said demo, and have kept the game on my radar since then.

I seem to have reverted to my historic default of games I regularly play; Smash Ultimate, Mario Kart 8, and a rougelike. In the past, said rougelike was always Dead Cells, since it was essentially the only one in my library, but since mid-2023, I’ve started seriously using Steam, and through it started playing other rougelikes. Right now, my rougelike of choice is Spiritfall, which mixes platform fighter gameplay with the rougelike structure, which given my historic attachment to Smash and other rougelikes, makes it a game I was pretty much guaranteed to enjoy.

Nope; pretty sure that the Nintendo Selects are just discounted physical releases with a fancy border on their front-facing box art, historically done for some of the best-selling titles on the given console (thus far seen on the Wii, 3DS and Wii U).

I've started encountering the ad-blocker blocker myself over the past few days, but fortunately it proves to be terrible at its job in my experience, as a small X allows it to be dismissed after 3 or 5 seconds, which is outright better than waiting for the 5 seconds plus load time of a skippable ad, or the many more seconds of an unskippable ad or two. This might be useful for me if they ever decide to remove the ability to dismiss the ad-blocker blocker, though.