Over the weekend of PAX West, Nintendo was in attendance, inviting all gamers to visit their booth. Unfortunately, the response was a bit contradictory. People were equally ready to line up to try the demos and equally ready to express hostility over the pricing and performance issues over the internet. Twitter, which Nintendo’s official account tweeted from, became a battleground for spam and arguments.
Picture this: Nintendo is trying to engage the community. The company tweets a casual “hey we’re at PAX West come say hi” and even adds a wave emoji to light things up a bit. Of course, the gamers had to take the comments in, well, every direction. The immaturely loud crowd hyped about Kirby’s Air Riders is shouting, some hopeless Silksong update seekers are pleading, and then the rage crowd is throwing a tantrum.
Back to the point–the mixed reactions. It’s kind of unbelievable in a certain sense how a single tweet seems to capture every feeling about Nintendo. There’s the over-excited hyper Nintendo fan going “Nintendo is my life,” and then on the other end, there are the “Scumtendo” crowd, which is a very uncreative and overused way of addressing the company, cursing out their absurd pricing. The dystopian novel version of reality is here, folks.
Some of the replies didn’t even seem to make much sense. For example, the reply, “MP4 has no release month or day and we got a lot of info about it,” doesn’t even seem to be constructed properly. Metroid Prime 4? Information? At PAX? Did I miss something? I guess it’s just some person’s weak attempt to hold on to some news that they hoped for.
Also, there’s this other drama in the replies with some people calling each other “brokey” and telling each other to “cry to mama,” which feels like we wandered into a middle school cafeteria instead of a gaming convention. The vibes are all strange.
The context for the rest of it seems to be arising from people wanting to try out some exciting games themselves, or at least wanting some big game announcements. Several of the people participating in the conversation mentioned “Silksong” and “Kirby’s Air Riders,” which are the reason why people genuinely get excited to stand in those long convention lines.
One nurse replied stating that they “nurses aren’t allowed to just step away from our jobs just to reserve a spot to play a game,” which, like… fair enough, honestly. Convention lines are brutal, and not everyone can “just” drop everything to wait for a demo.
A few critical technical issues were discussed as well, such as someone calling the Switch operating system “so shitty it can’t even handle 2013 games without memory overflow issues,” which, as I say, is a pretty horrible insult to the OS. Yet another person made an unremarkable joke about “showing Elden Ring running at 12 fps,” which, while possibly untrue, remains a minor good joke.
Amid all the craziness, there were still those who were genuinely glad to be there. The people who said “see you at Nintendo the next day” or “who else is going” suggest that despite all the bickering on the internet, people actually enjoy physically visiting such events where they can immerse themselves in the games.
What I find most interesting is how PAX became the unique event where companies like Nintendo get the chance to acknowledge the most of their enthusiasts, the happy and the “not so happy” ones. The replies, whether of excitement or frustration, resemble how the people are so fixated on the matter.
PAX West, as an event, has always shown the peculiar mix of corporate marketing and genuine fan enthusiasm. In Nintendo’s case, the fans get to enjoy the advanced gameplay and at the same time are filled with dreams and complaints to unload. It’s fascinating how a simple invitation to “come say hi” turns into a miniature carnival of mixed emotions from the gaming community for one of the world’s biggest corporations.
Amid the many replies and the few celebrated virtually, everyone is there to enjoy games. That is the core essence of events like this–people gather and bond over their shared interests, which, in this case, happens to come with the added Twitter fervor surrounding the memory overflow issues.
Irrespective of the frustration or the love, with PAX West being presently active, people are clearly having a good time gaming, and isn’t that a ‘good part?’ People are getting their hands on the new games way before the official release. At the moment, with everyone sharing the excitement, the ‘good buzz’ seems real.
As I mentioned earlier, if you are attending PAX West this weekend, make sure you visit the Nintendo booth. There’s a lot of fuss for a reason. A small tip: Don’t read the Twitter replies before visiting. The atmosphere gets out of hand.
