OMG Nintendo

Worse still, if you look at the Japanese page you'll actually see Earthbound and Fire Emblem 3 among the demos. (the latter which will probably never see the light of day in the US.) Personally I don't really understand why Nintendo won't just put Earthbound on the Virtual Console.

I mean what exactly is the problem? Its fully translated, plus I thought one of the perks of the VC was supposed to be that risk was minimized due to the games being essentially roms, thus no need for extra expensives like producing cartridges, packaging, etc. So even if Earthbound doesn't set the world on fire, it won't be a huge loss like it was back in the Snes era.

Also does this mean the roms of the entire games are contained in Smash Bros Brawl? Sounds like this is just giving hackers an open invitation to try making a code to disable the time limit, though I'm not sure Nintendo is that stupid.

Hilarious! I can't believe that Earthbound was deleted from the U.S. page. There's absolutely no reason why it shouldn't be listed there or included in the game. The way that they lumped it in with Fire Emblem as an untranslated monstrosity is really kind of brilliant, from a standpoint of intentionally freaking out the fanbase.

The way I figure, Nintendo either 1) has simply forgotten that they ever released Earthbound over here, 2) knows full well that every minor omission of Earthbound at this point is going to cause the Earthbound internet cult to react with profound despair and terrible protest fanart, but continues to do so on a regular basis because it's really, really funny, or 3) is gearing up for a total rebranding and relaunch of the series Stateside.

There's also the possibility that Nintendo is intensely creeped out and reacting like a normal person would to all of starmen.net's constant phone calls and lovingly detailed artbook mailings. If Nintendo and starmen.net were people, Nintendo would've called the cops by now and starmen.net would be carving Earthbound love letters into its chest at the state hospital.

You know, I have one of those Starman.net art books, and know people who contributed to the art book drive. I wanted to write about it but couldn't sell the feature to anyone. They're actually really cool, they come with like four Earthbound media discs and a complete history of the franchise.

I should do a blog post about it sometime with pictures-- I think I got mine in the first print run of roughly sixteen (later runs omit two of the media discs), and the text portions of the book are quite well-written. (The two-hundred pages of fanart are where it gets a little weird, but it's mostly fun to look at.)

Earthbound was and is my favorite RPG, and is arguably my favorite game, yet I am not insane, so I never signed up for Starmen.net or their horrible forum (despite actually being recruited because one of them found my very first internet journal at xanga which had an Earthbound-related name). I think they're the creepiest fan site on the internet not so much for their mode of obsession (I have seen worse), but for their pent up rage and frustration at Nintendo.

I always thought it would be funny if Nintendo, upon releasing ANY sort of Earthbound iteration in the U.S., said something about Starmen's pathetic behavior (or maybe just something more subtle like "the internet"), to maybe shame them into realizing how horrible their obsession is. Then again, actually getting attention from anyone at Nintendo would make them even more riled up, but that's not so much of a problem because they seem to contain all this stuff within the confines of their own site.

I also think it would be funny if everyone that gets hired at Nintendo has it written into their contracts that they, in no way, involve themselves with Starmen.net or even acknowledge their existence.