"Nintendo NX NOT a Wii U Replacement?! #CUPodcast"

Watch on YouTube

Yeah, I have to agree... as far as saying that the Nintendo NX is not going to be a replacement of the Wii U, Nintendo is kind of sort of completely full of shit here.

But here is why: ever since the Wii (not just the Wii U, mind you, the original Wii), Nintendo has been trying to corner the market on so-called "casuals" (aka generally clueless, otherwise non-gamers). And for the most part, with the Wii at least, this strategy worked. However, these people, on the whole, seem to not understand the traditional console life cycle in the same way that long-time gamers do, i.e. "here's a new, better console five to ten years later, which will completely replace your current console entirely."[1] This is why, when the Wii U came out, a bunch of people who'd bought a Wii mistakenly thought that the Wii U was just yet another add-on for the Wii, rather than a new console entirely (especially since Nintendo gave it the asinine name of "Wii U" instead of calling it something completely different). These are the people Nintendo is trying to target with these bullshit statements about "not a replacement" or whatever. This is the problem Nintendo has, and this is why they're saying what traditional gamers think of as dumb bullshit like this now.

[1] - And, to be honest, even though that's been the de facto standard for decades, I can honestly not blame these people for not understanding why this is the way it is, because when you really stop and look at it, it truly is kind of dumb as hell. Computers, to a point, can be upgraded quite a bit, usually piecemeal, but consoles as a rule are merely replaced entirely.

"Trans-Pacific Partnership Supporters Pin Hopes on Lame-Duck Vote"

Basically, those currently in power are trying to ramrod the TPP through Congress and into law as quickly and as secretly and as scuzzily as they can manage to do it, without proper oversight from public hearings. It's kind of funny/scary because apparently it's directly because opposition to the TPP is one of the very few things that Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders can agree on that is causing current supporters to want to try to fast track it through, before any of them become President.

The fact that he supports this is one of the reasons that Obama truly isn't the so-called "messiah" that both supporters and detractors have called him in the past (though the detractors did it derisively, of course). This, to me, will be one of Obama's biggest, most disappointing fuck ups, if it goes through (even though it was apparently started during the George W. Bush administration).

GOG Connect

On GOG, they're doing this thing called GOG Connect. Basically, if you have Steam and eligible games in your Steam account, you can use GOG Connect to add those same games to your GOG account. It's only for a certain small number of games at the moment, as far as I can tell, but I still think that's pretty cool, and they say they'll be adding more later. I just added 10 new games to my GOG account for free, simply because I already had them on Steam.

It's actually amazing that they would even allow this, if you stop to think about it, because really, why the hell would they even want to let people add games bought on a competing service to their own platform for free? I think it's cool that they're doing it, but I don't get the why of it, outside of "hey this is a cool thing we want to do" or whatever.

I would have been happy just to be able to mark a game as "already owned" on GOG (and on Steam for that matter), just so they'd quit showing up in recommendations and such (which is more an issue with Steam than GOG, but still... and no, before anyone suggests it, I don't feel comfortable marking games on Steam as "Not Interested" as a workaround for a non-existent "Already Owned" option).

Just make sure to at least temporarily set your Steam profile to public before you try to do it, or else the GOG Connect thing won't be able to find anything, which I found out when I forgot that I had my Steam profile set to "Friends Only."