What’s up, guys? Welcome back to Newsweave. So, as we head into the to start today with Square Enix who continues to tease feels like that Final Fantasy 9 remake. We can see in their most recent message this over on their official Twitter X account saying, “If you know, you know.” And a little screenshot there. My memories will be part of the sky. This of course referencing without any real spoilers reference. It’s a reference to Final Fantasy 9. Now, we do know that their anniversary website is open. So, naturally, they are going to be putting out different messages and and just things referencing Final Fantasy 9 as in July, they’ll be celebrating the 25th anniversary for the game’s original release back on the PS1 in Japan. And this makes a ton of sense for them to announce the Final Fantasy 9 remake that’s been rumored for what feels like years now. Seems like maybe around summer GameFest maybe they’ll do their own little Square Enix show and oh look there’s Final Fantasy 9 remake to close out the show and hopefully it’s what fans are looking for. It seems like they’re not going to do the Final Fantasy 7 remake trilogy reimagining thing. Sounds like it’s going to be more of a onetoone adaptation just just like better visuals and presentation. And I feel like for something like Final Fantasy 9, I think that would be the best case scenario there. And in fact, it sounds like that’s what they’re doing. So, here’s hoping they do have that prepared as a big thing to show because it would be a real shame if they do the whole anniversary, all this teasing and it was just like merchandise or something. Also, if you’re someone who’s ever tasted your Switch cartridge, you know, it’s not a good idea because they’re designed so that you don’t actually swallow them and you’ll usually spit it out before uh any of that happens. And a lot of that has to do with a coating that just tastes bad that they’ve put on the Switch cart. And it also looks like they’re doing the same thing with the Switch, too. This was posted up. This is over on GameSpot. This is with Nintendo’s uh Taki Takihiro Dota says, “We don’t want anybody to be at risk of any unwanted consumption. We have indeed made it so that if it enters your mouth, you’ll spit it out. Not that it’s going to like poison you or something. Uh but it’s just it’s going to taste bad, right?” Like usually it with the current like the current Switch Switch One has like a real a real bitter taste to it. Specifically on the label, that’s where it seems to come through the most. So, when the Switch first came out, there were videos and posts and stuff of people just licking their Switch cartridges and then their reaction after that. It it’s it’s not a pleasant experience, so I wouldn’t advise it. And then looking at the Switch through cartridge, it’s red. Maybe they’ll make it spicy or something. I But yeah, it’s small enough to where a a child could eat it, a pet maybe. So, it makes sense for them to at least put some sort of coating on it. So, yeah, don’t put the Switch to cartridge in your mouth unless you want to find out what it tastes like. And uh well, you’ll find out for yourself then. Oh, and just a real quick update on Hades 2. As we can see, this was posted up. This was by Super Giant says, “As a correction, we have confirmed that Hades 2 version 1.0 will be launching on the original Nintendo Switch as well as Switch 2 in addition to Steam and Epic Game Store where it’s now in early access. It won’t just be on Switch 2.” I think there are some concerns kind of like what happened with Silkong where people were wondering, is it still going to Switch 2? It is. Same with Hades 2. Now, it does appear to be a console timed exclusive for the Switch and Switch 2. And that’s what happened with just Hades, the first one. It was a timed exclusive for consoles anyway on the Switch and just seems like a deal between Super Giant and Nintendo, which Nintendo knows that in terms of indie games, I mean, Hades being a big one there, sure, but like Hades 2 pulls a large audience, so they’re mind. Yeah, why not go ahead and continue that partnership for Hades 2? That tells me that I don’t know in like a year or so. It’ll probably show up on the PlayStation and the Xbox following what happened with the first game when all of that went down. And guys, with some of the quick news out of the way, let’s get into the bigger stuff. Let’s start right away with the Switch 2, those larger Joy-Cons, and Stick Drift, which Joy-Con Drift was an entire thing that’s been covered over the course of the Switch generation to the point where he had class action lawsuits and Nintendo outright trying to dodge any kind of references to Joy-Con Drift, probably because their lawyers were sitting 20 feet away off camera and like doing these as they were talking about it. So, in this case, were they able to figure something out for these newer Joy-Con controllers? Now, they spent a lot of time talking about the sticks themselves, uh, the larger form factor for them, the the larger buttons at the top, but naturally, people want to know, did you guys solve the issue with Joy-Con Drift? The thing I’ve noticed in all these interviews is none of them want to talk about Drift at all. They don’t want to mention it. They are just talking about the new controllers and they’re like, uh, we rebuilt it from the ground up. That’s pretty good, right? So, in this case, Nintendo Life did have an interview which we can see here, and this was with Nate Bildorf, a senior vice president of product development and publishing at Nintendo of America. They asked, “Let’s jump off the sensitivity stuff then and talk about the stick of the Switch 2 Joy-Con because it feels so different to the original Switch’s analog stick. So, is it a Hall effect stick? Were you inspired by the Hall effect stick?” Well, the Joy-Con 2’s controllers have been designed from the ground up. They’re not whole effect sticks, but they feel really good. Did you experience both the Joy-Con and the Pro Constru Okay, so after this really we’re just we just care about the answer. Is this using a whole effect sensor in the sticks or No, it’s not. It goes on to talk about how quiet the sticks are, which we’ve already gone over that before. And it seems like they’re really proud of that. By the way, mentioning Smash Brothers where if you’re in a room and everything’s quiet and you have four people playing it, it’s just a lot of clicking and clacking all over the place. The joystick’s hitting the sides and yeah, you know, I’m you know what I’m talking about there. But they seem really proud of the idea that the joystick is quiet now. I I guess technically if you’re playing the Switch to I don’t know, on a plane or just somewhere in a very I’m trying to think of a very quiet environment, maybe in bed even, you won’t hear the clicking and and moving of the sticks and stuff. I I guess we’ll see when it comes out. But Hall effect sensors specifically, the idea here is it uses magnets and no real contact points that can wear down over time, which was a major issue with the Joy-Con on the current Switch. That’s really what the big thing was with Joy-Con Drift. The dead zone area would continue to expand and you’d get to a point where it was extremely sensitive and it would start having false readings. So really the the idea here is you should be able to customize the dead zone and play around with it to where it is set up so that even if it’s very sensitive within like a small margin, you could technically grow the dead zone sensitivity so that it won’t pick up every little thing that are false readings. And a lot of that was just from we we looked at it in several videos that many places have where we have these little teeth that are running back and forth on pads that are detecting it. But over time, it would kind of scrape down that pad and it would just say, “Oh yeah, you’re moving up left just a little bit.” So now your character is going to walk very slowly in that direction. And it was experienced all over the place. So not using Hall effect joysticks is something that of course has become a major concern at this point. How can you not have concerns coming off of the current JoyCons? They have a lot to prove. And that’s the thing at this point now knowing it’s not hall effect sensors or sticks a stick that they’re using. I want to know what it is. So I I’d like to open it up and check it out. And I’m sure many people will now. Do they have to use Hall effect sensors to mitigate Joy-Con drift? Not really. They can redesign it, as I say, from the ground up and do some things that they’ve learned from that Joy-Con to make a higher quality stick in general when it comes to the contact points or just the way that it’s tracking movement. And there are different kinds of sticks you can use for that. And maybe they decided to go back, re-engineer everything, and now they have one that is much less prone to stick drift. The thing is, you’re really never going to solve it. Even Hall effect like sensors can have issues with that. I mean, the PS5, the Xbox controllers, they all have issues with stick drift as well. It really just comes down to getting it to a much smaller amount because it felt like Joy-Con drift was very widespread, like way more than it should be. In fact, I actually have a poll later on in the show where I asked everyone, hey, have you experienced it? So, we’ll get an idea as to our own split of who did and who didn’t later on. But for now, we’ll just know that still nothing can touch the Dreamcast because that controller did indeed use Hall effect sticks. I have a video taking it apart and checking it out. So, Sega way ahead of its time, even in places you didn’t realize with the joystick on that Dreamcast controller. Next up, let’s talk about Sony, the PlayStation 5 store, and the amount of AI and spam games that seem to be taking over there. It’s it’s so noticeable now that it’s actually even having some of the games chart on like the top downloads that get posted on PlayStation blog. People started to notice that one in particular was there. And after connecting the dots, starting to realize that maybe it is time for Sony to revise their refund policy as it could potentially have some of these games not even attempt it because it’s easy enough to to just refund and get your money back, which we can see. Here’s a Reddit post, for example, where it says Sony’s lack of any meaningful refund policy is fueling these constant shovelware scam games on the PlayStation store. Now, they do reference this PlayStation blog where for PSVR 2 games, there’s a certain title on here that uh the listing was up for longer than it should have been, I’ll say, and it was Flight Simulator Delivery 2025 VR. Now, it placed fourth the month of its release, which really was only up for like two weeks or so, I think, not even. Uh, but in the US, Canada, fourth spot in the EU, it was number one for the PSVR 2 games, Flight Simulator Delivery 2025 VR. I’ll let you think about what game it was trying to emulate and maybe where it got some of its marketing materials, quote unquote, we’ll say, but uh yeah, this is also from a company that is known to put these sorts of games out there, 404 games, where they make kind of carbon copy or AI type games that are just ripping assets and putting together a very cheap build of a title that is not at all representative of what they market and display on their store page. And what they do here then is take advantage of the idea that if you buy that game, you can’t get your money back. Like Sony’s refund, I mean, really all of them for the most part. I mean, I Microsoft is the one maybe the most lenient, I think. But it’s none of them are like Steam where you have a two-hour window. You play the game for less than two hours and you don’t like it or there’s something wrong with it. You hit refund, no questions asked. Boom. That’s it. It’s done. You get your money back. You return the digital game, right? You don’t have access to anymore. So, the idea here is if that existed on PlayStation, on Nintendo, on Xbox, just a quick menu, couple of button presses, and boom, you’re done. Then you wouldn’t have these games showing up because everyone would just return them after realizing, oh, I got kind of scammed or duped by this listing to buy Flight Simulator VR 2025. And the thing is, you’re going to see these pop up in more clever ways like this because things like Flight Simulator has been rumored to be going to PlayStation for quite some time. So, why not make a false listing and collect 15 or 20 bucks and that’s it? Like, you’re kind of locked in at that point. You can’t get your money back. What you end up with with is just this really junk looking title that is in no way Flight Simulator 2025 VR. So, I I’m not sure if this is something that Sony will continue to consider going forward because the thing with this that you really have to think about is if there’s no option for physical and it’s all digital and with Sony, it all goes through this particular storefront, you kind of need a refund policy like a a one that’s more automatic similar to Steam. Otherwise, that is going to have an incredible amount of power on the side of publishers in this in this case some like four or four games that just show up out of nowhere and put these AI made games on the storefront and of course Sony. So, at that point, yeah, you might actually see regulators show up. So, it might not be a bad idea for Sony to get out in front of that, come up with a better refund policy here in the coming years as we head towards what we all figure is that all digital future that at this point looking around might be starting as soon as the PlayStation 6. We’ll see. Next up, let’s talk about some classic Call of Duty games that seem like they’re getting ratings for a re-release. This we can see posted up and this is this one was from PlayStation Countdown as people started to notice that ratings in Australia were going live for Modern Warfare 2 and Modern Warfare 3. That being of course from the Call of Duty franchise and these would have been the ones that released say back on the Xbox 360 and the PS3. And we have seen Modern Warfare 2 have its campaign released on the PS4, but no multiplayer. And it seemed like it would make sense for them to then move to Modern Warfare 3. However, the interesting part is this does appear to be a PS5 crossgen edition as described by this classification in Australia. The date for it was April 3rd and it is technically listed for 2025 at this time from of course Activision Blizzard. And this seems like something where I I guess we’re going to have Modern Warfare 2 campaign moved over as well as Modern Warfare 3 campaign. That’s kind of where my baseline would be for this. I thought about the multiplayer. And I know a lot of people are like, “This could be it. Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer remaster, maybe even Modern Warfare 3 getting its multiplayer brought up.” The only thing with that is it would be awesome because I I wouldn’t mind going back and and playing that with a more remastered version of it. Yes, you have backwards compatibility right now on the Xbox Series, but I like the idea of them remastering it, bringing it up, and having the multiplayer lobbies open and ready to go with a newer version. I think that’d be a lot of fun. Um, the only thing is I feel like right now what we see from Activision and Microsoft is trying to funnel everyone into one Call of Duty game basically, which is their launcher that they have. Maybe it’s possible this could also be part of that launcher. That that’s just how they want it. Call of Duty, one thing on your dashboard, that’s it. So, it’s possible that they go that route and they still have multiplayer setup for it. Sure. I mean, they have a lot of the maps, I think, like redone for for Modern Warfare 2. Modern Warfare 3 is the interesting one. I I it made sense to do that for its campaign and then move that over after what they did with Modern Warfare 2. But the multiplayer is the big thing, and I’m hoping they have that ready to go, especially for Xbox, PlayStation 5, and maybe Switch 2. Seems like we’re still waiting for Microsoft to get their own Switch to uh train going here with all kinds of games going over like they did with PlayStation. So, I guess whenever that starts up, we can probably expect some Call of Duty stuff like this to make the jump as well. Who knows when they’re going to announce it, but at this rate, people think they’re going to start shadow dropping stuff like Oblivion remake. So, hey, at this point, they can just drop this whenever they want. Might be an announcement on Twitter out of nowhere. And oh yeah, oh yeah, we’re going to have new Call of Duty or older new Call of Duty games available in a week or two. So I wouldn’t put that past Microsoft. They seem like they’re ready to start dropping stuff consistently throughout 2025. And in our last bit of news, let’s talk about the new eShop for the Switch 2. The eShop right now for the Switch is a painful experience that’s basically impossible to use. It lags constantly. It’s difficult to browse, even picking something. You’re basically sitting there and waiting. It’s kind of like shopping on a dialup connection, but you’re using like 5 GHz wireless through a high-speed broadband connection. But hey, that’s Nintendo. That’s the Switch. However, it looks like the Switch 2 has fixed basically all of that, which is great. In fact, we’re only really missing one thing from it, and we could see this posted up. This is in an interview with Polygon where they say, “Unlike back then, the eShop now has lots of videos that are showcasing the games.” This is from Nintendo Switch 2 producer Kochi Ka Kawamoto says, “We didn’t want to intrude on that, so we don’t have music there.” Yeah, unfortunate. No music. Now, when I think of the Nintendo and their shop in their shop channel, really, it’s it comes down to me to the Wii. That’s the music everyone remembers, but it’s so classic and so timeless that we basically want music all the time for these Nintendo uh these Nintendo eShops. Now, that’s not a bad point though to make that, hey, there are trailers that just play and we’ve kind of integrated into the eShop. In fact, they said they wanted to make sure there was a smooth experience that the scrolling of the list doesn’t stall that it’s very smooth. Pages load fast. Like the eShop seems like it did have a nice overhaul to the point where it actually functions. I still think you could have had music though in the background and when you pick a trailer or one just kind of pops up if you’re hovering over it, it just mutes the music like the like the elevator music really, right? the background music and then it moves right into the trailer. I mean, the the thing with the music and other parts of it too, like the UI, it still looks very basic, plain, sterile. People do look to Nintendo to have some of the quirkiness to them, like the weird and wacky stuff, right? So, it still makes it very Nintendo. And unfortunately, the Switch OS, while it is fast, it it just doesn’t feel that much like Nintendo. And maybe it’s because they are looking to more of a mature audience now. They’re like, “Oh, people don’t want to have all the weird and wacky Nintendo stuff.” And I I mean, I think people still kind of like it. It feels very nostalgic when you have the the music pop up when you go to say the the the shop channel or you have random buttons you can press for no reason to get you into the Switch and they make different noises based on like clicking in the stick to unlock. It for some reason makes a different sound effect. doesn’t do anything other than that, but it’s Nintendo and it’s fun and it’s interesting. So, that’s I think the part people look at this and go, “Ah, that’s too bad. It would have been fun to have music, right? Would have been fun to have some different, I don’t know, more wackier or weirder looking OS.” But I guess at the end of the day for this, at least the eShop works and that’s technically a step in the right direction. And before we go to the comment of the day, we’ll take a look at the poll that I posted up yesterday where I asked, “Have you experienced Joy-Con drift during the current Switch generation?” 69% which I feel like it was like 75 I think people did this on purpose. Anyway, uh 69% say yes. 31% say no. So yes, the majority of people have experienced Joy-Con drift at some point during the generation. And I feel like many people what they ended up doing was just buying another pair of of Joy-Con controls or at least the left one or the right one. I know you can send it away. I’ve worked in retail long enough to know that if someone hears that it’s going to be a couple of weeks, they go, I’m just going to buy another one. Especially if it’s a controller. If it’s a system, it’s like, oh, okay, hold on. Let’s let’s figure out how long it’s going to take. What’s the postage? That kind of stuff. If it’s a $50 controller, they go, I’ll just take another one off the shelf. And in some cases, that did work in Nintendo’s favor. Even though they did also replace, I’m sure, many, many Joy-Cons out there. There’s still a lot of people that they technically sold two controllers to that only really needed one. So, hey, I I see that theory getting floated around a lot. That’s, oh, maybe it makes sense for there to not be Hall effect sticks in these new JoyCons or any controllers at all from these platform motors because then they might sell you multiple controllers over the course of a generation. I mean, if your controller goes out after 3 years, you’re out of warranty and you’re probably just like, I’m going to buy another one because I kind of need it. So, yeah, I guess that’s another way you can look at it. technically no hall effect sticks benefits them in the long run throughout an entire seven or eight year generation. And we’ll finish up with the comment of the day as you’re seeing here. This is from Cheap who says, “Nintendo’s pricing, the worst of it is they rarely have sales, especially for games.” So, day one price is likely the price until they stop selling it. Yeah, it’s kind of how they got Breath of the Wild to $70 because it never dropped in price. And here comes a $10 upgrade patch and it’s it makes it 70 cuz it’s still 60 for Breath of the Wild. So, it like I I’ve been talking about the entire generation and many other people have. Nintendo selects really need to make a comeback here, but if Breath of the Wild was a Nintendo Select, it wouldn’t work for Nintendo strategy now because it would just be a $30 game then. It’s like it’s normally the selects would show up 20 bucks and it it was nice selection, too. I mean, it was like Ocarina of Time was in there for I remember. you had like Star Fox, like good first party titles, and they were 20 bucks for the 3DS. I think they were also 20 for the Wii U, although 3DS is I remember taking advantage of a lot. And then we had like players choice and other things. It basically this has been a a common occurrence for Nintendo up until the Switch generation where they just stopped doing that. It would have been nice to have it just to just to see really even the box art they would have come up with for it, but also clearly now because of the enhancements and also just having that more affordable price point, especially for a system that has aged quite like quite a bit now. I mean, it seems like this is when you would have those selects, but we haven’t seen them at all, which is quite unfortunate just to have that selection of titles at $20 a piece for some really good stuff that’s like four or five years technically out of date now or old. Uh, unfortunate Nintendo has decided to get away from that and instead they’ve gone the opposite direction. The Nintendo Selects have become the Nintendo Switch 2 enhancements. So, it’s just it’s $10 more now instead of just making the whole thing 20. And ladies and gentlemen, that’s going to do it here for Newsweave. If you enjoyed this