Peekystar

The Nintendo Network service, that handled online play for the vast majority of 3DS and Wii U games, Splatoon included, was shut down on the 8th of April. So yes, the official servers for Splatoon are dead.

Yesterday, the developers of Garry’s Mod, the 2006 Source engine sandbox game, announced on Steam that due to a takedown request from Nintendo, they were removing all the Steam Workshop (i.e; user-generated) content that used Nintendo’s IP. Some originally believed that this was a troll of some sort posing as Nintendo, but this screenshot tweet from Garry Newman, the titular developer of Garry’s Mod, indicates that he’s certain the takedown request is legitimate, and the probably-still-ongoing removal of Nintendo content on the workshop will continue.

In light of the imminent shutdown of the 3DS and Wii U’s online services, I’ve been revisiting Kirby Battle Royale and Mario Tennis Open over the last few days - as relatively obscure spinoffs with regional matchmaking on a decade-old system, it’s been nigh impossible to find an online match in them for years, but with the shutdown causing people to revisit these old titles one last time, it’s actually been possible to find matches again, and it’s been pretty darn fun.

Been revisiting an old favourite of mine from the Wii lately, Boom Blox Bash Party, a chaotic physics-based puzzle game that I reckon still holds up really well. Since the game has several hundred levels in groups you’re free to tackle in any order*, I simply resumed one of my old save files and took on levels in the sets I didn’t finish in that old save file, which if the file select completion percentage is to be believed, is still around half the game. I’ve even been dual-wielding Wii Remotes to take on some of the co-op levels.

It’s an ad blocker blocker they’ve been implementing as of late. I don’t think you’ll be banned if you continue disregarding it, but they do eventually entirely block the video player unless you disable the ad blocker. However, in my experience, uBlock can block that message to resume normal watching. (Double Edit: This method did stop working on the 15/10/23, but started working again a day later. I guess it’s a question of if the filters have been updated to counter YouTube’s updates, though I did notice that viewing in a private tab worked when regular browsing didn’t.) Go to the extension’s settings/dashboard (on Firefox, do this by clicking on its icon in the top right, then the settings icon in the subsequent pop-up), then the Filter Lists, click “Purge all caches”, then “Update now”. Open an entirely new YouTube tab (or hard reload your current one by pressing Control + Shift + R), and the message should stop appearing, at least for the time being.

I’ve started encountering the ad-blocker blocker myself over the past few days, but fortunately it proves to be terrible at its job in my experience, as a small X allows it to be dismissed after 3 or 5 seconds, which is outright better than waiting for the 5 seconds plus load time of a skippable ad, or the many more seconds of an unskippable ad or two. This might be useful for me if they ever decide to remove the ability to dismiss the ad-blocker blocker, though.