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

nlab.itmedia.co.jp reports the most popular Nintendo franchises as decided by poll among Japanese fans, and RPG Fan has the English translation. The top three are Pokemon (6,610 votes), followed by The Legend of Zelda (5,005) and Kirby (4,561). There are some upsets on the list: Super Mario is at 7th!

Chris Moyse at Destructoid tells of changes Capcom has made to their previous, fairly draconian proposed rules for licensing Street Fighter to tournaments. While these are much improved, there are still potential issues for smaller tournaments.

Bryant Francis at Game Developer brings news that the programmer of Atari 2600 title Wabbit has finally been tracked down! She was Van Mai, a Vietnamese refugee now living in Texas! Wabbit is notable for being the first console game to have a female protagonist. This news made it out as far as Metafilter!

Ray Barnholt on Twitter warns us that the next game to come in the Arcade Archives is Namco’s infamous The Tower of Druaga, one of the most infamously and purposely obtuse games ever made!

Chris Carter, also at Destructoid, offers strategies for getting around the impending cessation of funds transfers into 3DS and Wii U eShops: you can get cash into the system using a Switch, or use prepaid cards!

Chris also tells us that the “cloud” versions of Kingdom Hearts made for the Switch will offer warnings at times when server congestion may make the game unplayable. This reporter wonders how well an action-RPG like Kingdom Hearts would work over the cloud, but then, the latency from our base out in deep dark space would be prohibitive anyway.

Over at Kotaku, Ethan Gach fills us in on a lawsuit accusing Wata Games, a grader of “collectable” games, of manipulating prices. A market full of hordes of uncritical participants being vulnerable to manipulation, who would have thought? Answer: a lot of people desperately pushing cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Maybe this will finally make it affordable to buy retro games again, but I’m not getting my hopes up, drebnar.

Steven Weber of mmorpg.com informs us of the top five most-downloaded MMORPGs on Google Play. In brief: Black Desert Mobile, Avabel Online, School of Chaos Online, Toram Online, and Sky Children Of The Light. In the titles of MMORPGs may be the last remaining places on the internet where the word “online” is used.

Multiple sources have reported that the podcast Fragments of Silicon (which doesn’t appear to be so much a podcast as a Twitch stream nowadays) talked with Tantalus, who are porting The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword to the Nintendo Switch, about the challenges they’re facing with that process. At press time there doesn’t seem to be a direct link to the content; the link supplied is to Nintendo Everything.

Jody MacGregor at PC Gamer: Many on the gaming web have been criticizing at Activison/Blizzard’s “diversity space tool,” enough so that the makers of Overwatch are stating plainly that they didn’t use it.

Some news about that most tone-deaf of current game publishers and that’s saying something: Konami. Rich Stanton at PC Gamer tells us that they’ve been doing the ol’ DMCA Shuffle regarding allegedly-leaked images from a new Silent Hill game, essentially proving they’re real. By the way, here’s your regular reminder that the DMCA is terrible law that has a whole host of problems.

And, finally, Ryan Dinsdale at IGN tells us that scientists looking to improve VR equipment are working on “mouth haptics” that will allow us to experience what it’s like to have, in our mouths, spiders.

SPIDERS

This is a part of Snow Crash I don’t quite remember. I believe they may have been misled as to the importance of simulated mouth arachnids due to the statistical influence of Spiders Georg. So far these actual scientists’ experiments have only gone as far as the Meta Quest, making this the first hilarious thing about Meta that doesn’t have Mark Zuckerberg to blame for it.

rodneylives