Pretty Sneaky, Sony

Remember when Sony planned to shutter its digital storefronts for the PS3 and Vita, leaving owners of those systems without a quick and convenient way to buy games for those machines? Luckily, consumers called Sony on its crap, and the company retreated from its original plan of... uh, planned obsolescence. The stores for both systems remained open (at least on those systems... they've been purged from the web store accessible from your computer), and fans breathed a sigh of relief.

Don't get too comfortable, though. Sony still wants to wean gamers from their legacy systems... they're just being craftier about it. Video Games Chronicle reports that starting on October 27th, if you want games for the Playstation 3 and Vita, your payment options will be drastically limited. You won't be able to buy them with PayPal or credit cards... just whatever credit happens to be in your Playstation account's wallet. Sure, you can buy credit online or from brick and mortar stores, but it will make future legacy purchases more inconvenient... and might give Sony an excuse to retire the PS3 and Vita's respective digital stores for good. And people wonder why I've shifted my allegiance to the Xbox. 

(Note: People actually don't give a damn about that, but if they actually were wondering, that's the reason.)

In non-Sony-is-full-of-douchebags news, the final fighter has been announced for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and it's...

That looks like a gas station logo.
(image from Smashpedia)

Er, no. That's the company that makes Super Smash Bros. Let me try that again...

image from Amazon

Yeah, the little dork from Kingdom Hearts, with the key-shaped sword and shoes Bozo might wear while going out for a morning jog. Any connections Sora has to Disney properties will be cut loose in his Smash Bros. appearance, which is odd as that's his whole raison d'etre. Without Mickey, Goofy, and Donald at his side, what's he got going for him? It sure ain't his fashion sense, or his Gordion-knotted storylines.

Speaking of confusion, the three mainline games in the Kingdom Hearts series will be coming to the Switch... except they'll be cloud-based and won't play on the system without an online connection. Look, I get that the Switch is a little underpowered, but it's also a handheld game system, and thus not always near an adequate wi-fi signal. Maybe Square-Enix should have made the visual compromises expected of Switch ports, rather than having the system dial out for an experience that's likely to be even less satisfying to players without Gigabit internet access.

One other thing. Nickelodeon's own platform fighter, All-Star Brawl, has just been released. So far, it's got just twenty fighters, a small fraction of what's available in Smash Bros. However, hackers have been nosing through the code, and discovered clues that strongly suggest there will be DLC characters in the future. Shredder's a candidate for inclusion, along with Garfield, but the most promising addition would have to be XJ-9, aka Jenny Wakeman from My Life as a Teenage Robot. If you've never seen that show, imagine all three Powerpuff Girls aged up a decade and welded into a tin can in a skirt, and you've got the right idea.