You know... Back in late October, I said if nothing happened by December 5th that we could probably unclench our buttcheeks and simply wait until mid January for news but these last two weeks, man... I just can't let it go that they have something planned for December:
-SKU dump two weeks ago. DOOM Eternal was on it.
-Online maintenance dump two weeks ago. Practically a copy and paste of the updates that happened before the March Mini and Steve's reveal.
-Firmware update out of nowhere. This one pisses me off especially because, not only are firmware updates strongly correlated with presentations as I showed yesterday but ESPECIALLY Spring and Fall Directs. Because of the Mario 35 icons, 11.0.0 was almost absolutely supposed to happen in September, especially backed up by the fact that the Mario Smash tournament and Tetris tournament were very clearly rescheduled from September... On this topic of Mario...
-I ranted about it on Star Road yesterday but they've made it a point to either release or announce something major every single month since March. June was the exception and the explanation is pretty clear cut; the Mario presentation was supposed to be in June, got bumped three months to September. These three months have been tacked on 2020 so that the 35th anniversary celebration is going to run until April 2021. This means, timeline wise, December is now "September", the actual month of the 35th anniversary, meaning whatever they were going to announce or release originally to celebrate it will likely be in this month. Either way, they've made it a point to announce something major every month, why would December be different?Ffff****...
-The Paper Mario and Octopath Traveler spirits getting added back without new spirits. I pointed out last week but the only times old spirits have been added back in with new spirits immediately was two weeks before Min Min's announcement and a few days before the Small Battlefield update in August. Again, yet another thing that strongly correlates to Smash news...
-Just weird little power moves that they typically only do before major announcements like how the E-shop is now open in Brazil and Nintendo approving DK games to be released in China a few weeks ago.
-NSO update still very blatantly missing, especially now that the November game update didn't happen. Did I mention that the VC/NSO has a perfect track record for major December updates since 2006? Ffffffff****...
Originally I was saying that it was probably fine to just flip the old Speculation sign to "closed" until January if nothing happened before the Game Awards but I'm genuinely wondering if they're going to do something the week before Christmas. Not unprecedented, just rare because the final Smash 4 presentation was on December 15th 2015. It also doesn't help that Nintendo has overwhelmingly preferred to make major announcements in the later half of the month even before the pandemic so them ultimately horking out something the week of 14th wouldn't exactly be shocking (they literally just did a news dump on the literal last day of the month FFS...). We'll find out either way but it feels like the equivalent of sitting at a restaurant, ordering a meal, and then the meal taking an excruciating amount of time to arrive.