Note to readers: WTFriday is a weekly feature where I find something stupid about video games and get you to laugh until it goes away. Please try to forget this is what I normally do every day of the week.
If you do something for long enough--no matter how trivial it is--you start to develop an unhealthy sense of entitlement and the inability to see the flaws in your labor of love. And if this "something" happens to be creating an entire game single-handedly over the course of five years, you can add syphilis-grade insanity to the list of unfortunate side effects. This information serves as a fitting introduction to Bob's Game, a Japanese style RPG named after its creator, who isn't exactly on speaking terms with Nintendo. You see, Bob (no relation) needs to be recognized as a Nintendo developer in order to publish his game on a Nintendo platform--never mind the fact that there are several other ways for indie developers to sell their games to the public. Nintendo has been awfully uncooperative--quite possibly because the guy is a total loon--so Bob has decided to lock himself in his room for 100 days of protest that will probably end with him dying of a blood clot.
Surely, his game must be amazing to cause so much drama, right?
Okay, it's not awful, but it doesn't look much different than something made with RPG Maker back in 1998. And I'd go as far to say that Nintendo may want to consider appeasing a psycho who wasted his life by letting the damn thing go up as WiiWare (though I think for Bob it's a DS release or nothing) and cutting off all Bob contact indefinitely. But the fact that Bob is now threatening to attack Nintendo with piracy tells me he's one tantrum away from showing up at Reggie Fils-Aimé's house in the middle of the night with a very sharp knife. When you're bargaining with an all-powerful corporate behemoth, you don't want to say things like this:
If I cannot legitimately publish my game, the only option left to fulfill this goal is to bundle a KILLER APP with a DSi enabled "homebrew device."There has never been a true KILLER APP released for this kind of device, especially as a launch title for a brand new console. "bob's game" is being translated into many languages, including Japanese, and will be released worldwide. Unfortunately, this has the potential to significantly cut into Nintendo's bottom line.
In other words- because of what may be the decision of a single NOA executive for a personal reason- Nintendo of Japan may now be at risk of some very serious consequences.
Bob's unwavering efforts to dig himself deeper and deeper probably means you'll never get to play Bob's Game, but at least you can watch the guy slowly kill himself. That's always mildly entertaining.
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