“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Quite a bit to get through today! Pull up a florb and moop for a bit!

Luke Plunkett at Kotaku informs us of Nintendo pulling support from the third-party tournament Smash World Tour, leaving them in a gigantic financial hole. This will severely harm tournaments’ willingness to trust Nintendo in the future, and the esports scene around future Nintendo products. Nintendo’s response at the end is especially frustrating, claiming they did not request any events be cancelled while still denying SWT a license, forcing them to cancel anyway.

Benj Edwards at Ars Technica: an AI from Nvidia can play Minecraft now, performing tasks based on text prompts. Congrats, you’ve invented a 10-year-old!

After our initial post, I’ve purposely been trying not to talk up the Super Mario Bros. movie, but I do think this post from Ryan Leson at IGN is of interest, about Shigeru Miyamoto noting that Donkey Kong’s been a bit redesigned for the movie, still recognizably the Rare-made version of the character, but with some adjustments to more resemble the original version.

Here’s Rich Stanton at PC Gamer on the effort to preserve a Ridge Racer Full Scale, a version of the arcade game that featured an actual car chassis the player would sit it, had triple ultra-wide display, and cost operators $250,000. Very few were sold, and it’s possible only one survives, which was in Blackpool. After an arcade museum sought to purchase it, but refused when they learned of damage to the frame, it was thought lost, but although the physical structure of the unit has not been salvageable, the car portion and the hardware have been saved, and its code dumped. More can be read at Arcade Blogger.

Richael Watts at Rock Paper Shotgun has a piece up on Dabloontok, an RPG-ish thing a bunch of people are doing on TikTok, involving cat videos trading an imaginary currency called “dabloons.” This isn’t imaginary in the sense of crptocurrency, or indeed all money when you think about it; this is really imaginary. How many you have is completely on the honor system. Participants use it to “trade” with these cats, and they can also be “stolen” by them. The whole thing seems pretty silly overall, but it’s entertaining to learn about!

And at Engadget, I. Bonifacic remarks upon Pong turning 50 years old. Yeah, that number isn’t getting any smaller. It’s a useful retrospective, although I take issue with them saying that without Pong Nintendo would not exist. Nintendo is over a century old, originally making playing cards. What is more likely is they wouldn’t exist as we know them today-they may not have gotten into video games at all. (By the way, they make traditional Japanese game playing equipment too, like go boards!)

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“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Greetings, humans! Here is the gaming news I could glean from decrypting your internet broadcasts from my flying saucer floating above your atmosphere!

Jordan Devore, Destructoid: Rogue Legacy 2 Drops Vertigo From Its Traits List. You see, each character you play in that game is part of a lineage of characters, and they have semi-random traits. One of those traits flipped the screen upside-down during play. Or it did. Now it’s not in the game anymore!

Oisin Kunhke, Gamebyte tells us about a word-in-progress Breath of the Wild Randomizer mod!

Brad Linder of Liliputing notes of a new version of a three-key keyboard made by Stack Overflow.

Wololo (?) of Wololo (??) tells us that homebrew fans are reviving Playstation Home!

Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica lets us know that Nvidia is facing scrutiny from the FCC for inaccurately representing how cryptocurrency mining boosted the sales of their graphics hardware.

Sam Medley of NotebookCheck tells of AltStore, a sneaky way around Apple’s App Store for distributing software they’d rather you not use. I hesitate to speculate on how long this loophole will last, but I’m no fan of hardware lockouts and use limitations, so it’s nice while it lasts!

More news from the orchard. MacRumors talks with Feral about porting games to Apple’s new M1 hardware and the difficulties it has faced with their graphics.

Always awesome Kyle Orland at Ars Technica has an article with a headline too fun to paraphrase: Eve Online fans literally cheer Microsoft Excel features at annual Fanfest.

Ian Evenden at Tom’s Hardware talks about HoloISO, a port of SteamOS 3 that fans have gotten to run on devices other than the Steam Deck. Valve hasn’t released it officially for other hardware yet!

Jay Fingas at Engadget tells us about an auction for a gold-played Wii originally intended for the Queen of England. Seems she was denied the shiny unit due to rules against gifts.

Trent Cannon of Nintendo Life reviews Prinny Presents: NIS Classics Volume 2 for Switch.

Alex Donaldson at VG247 warns us that Sonic Origins probably won’t have Sonic 3‘s original soundtrack, due to rights issues related to Michael Jackson’s involvement with the project. Sega has been hampered with music rights across several games, including the soundtrack for some ports of Crazy Taxi.

More from Ars Technica, Sam Machkovech tells us about Rifftrax: The Game!

Zoey Handley at Destructoid on Famicom Wars, the game of which the upcoming Advance Wars Reboot Camp is a distant sequel!

Rebecca Stone at Twinfinite tells us about the 10 highest-priced used Gamecube games going! Sadly none of those I still own are up there, drebnar, not even Kirby Air Ride!

Mike Wilson writing at Bloody Disgusting celebrates the 30th anniversary of Wolfenstein 3D!

Back around to Engadget, J. Trew tells us about the lengths to which players are pushing NES Tetris.

And Zoe Sottile at CNN (swanky!) notes that Ms. Pac-Man and The Legend of Zelda are being inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame.

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