Wherein I discuss my file hoarding tendencies, Tencent’s latest ambitions, predictable pandering, and… something having to do with a “Bagel Girl”.
Over these past few years I have become rather fond of my ability to take screenshots of any game I am playing with the press of a button or two, and the act of pawing through my assorted collection in order to find good, appropriate, and quality images to squeeze between every other paragraph in my inevitable review of said game. Because I have a use for these screenshots, I tend to overcompensate whenever I am playing a game, and in certain cases will wind up taking hundreds screenshots as I go through a given game. By doing this for several hundred games over the span of a few years, I wound up with a folder full of about 60 GB of lossless PNGs and crummy JPGs that I have on an external hard drive, and over 25 GB that are currently on my PC.
Why do I feel the need to save my screenshots once the review is done? The same reason I rarely use consumable items in games; because I might need them later. For example, last week I used a screenshot from a game I played and reviewed in 2017 as a header image. If I deleted my screenshots, then I could not do that. Meanwhile, there really is no reason for me to stop saving screenshots, as I already have an external HDD with plenty of free space, so why not use it for something? Also, I have this awful habit of saving copious amounts of pictures of things I may never care about or actively pursue again, as demonstrated with my “Arts” directory, a collection of folders of digital artwork that I have been adding to on a near daily basis since 2014.
On the subject of video games, Riot Games has not been in a very good position over the past year, not because of poor performance afflicting their games or anything, but rather the stories that have been painting the company in a bad light, a number of widely publicized walkouts, and widespread denouncements of the studio’s culture for being home to several shades of toxicity. However, people, and people of power, are upset over Activision Blizzard’s attempts at appeasing the Chinese government by acting rashly and alienating just about everyone they could in the process, all because somebody had the audacity to voice support for human rights. …So what I’m saying is that Riot Games and their owners Tencent possibly decided that now was a good time to announce the litany of projects that the studio is working on.
These include a League of Legends: Wild Rift, a version of the game designed for smartphones and consoles, in an effort to diversify the audience and introduce new promising revenue streams, which is due out in 2020. Project A is a tactical character-based FPS of sorts that appears to be centered around high consequence play, but lacks a captivating art design, and rather than talk about the game’s mythos or the like, the announcement was largely centered around the technical aspects of the game and the infrastructure Riot is developing for it… because I guess that’s how you make people excited for a game these days.
Project L is the League of Legends fighting game that just about everybody anticipated after Riot Games bought Radiant Entertainment, the people behind Rising Thunder. A promising fighting game with greatly simplified inputs that members of the Fighting Game Community thought would be the ticket to make their genre the next big thing in the world of multiplayer gaming. Yet only early footage was shown, so few details can be parsed from it. League of Runeterra is a collectible card game, no doubt inspired heavily by Activision Blizzard’s Hearthstone, and… that’s exactly what it looks like as far as I, a casual observer, can tell. They are internally developing an animated series by the name of Arcane, which is set in the League of Legends universe and features an art style that I am quite fond of. While Project F is supposedly a type of dungeon crawler, maybe.
I find this rapid announcement approach to be interesting, spreading about an intellectual property across a variety of genres, and even mediums, in an effort to retain a level of relevance in the cultural zeitgeist, encourage existing players to branch out into new genres, and of course draw in people who are not interested in the MOBAs. I am curious as to how successful these projects will be, how well Riot can maintain multiple projects like this, and whether or not this will fragment or divide their existing community. But I cannot say that I have any interest in these projects, given how niche my tastes are.
That’s right, I don’t care about your Chinese branded industry superpowers like League of Leggings or whatever, I only care about the obscure Japanese stuff, like Pokemon… which incidentally was home to several announcements these past few weeks, all of which are pretty minor, and center around Generation I Pokemon. Farfetch’d is presumably getting their own Galarian form, but before showing that off, they instead announced the evolution of the Galarian form, Sirfetched, a fighting type bird that will be exclusive to Pokemon Sword. Pokemon Shield will receive a psychic type Galarian Ponyta. While all versions will be able to receive Gigantamax forms of Charizard, Butterfree, Pikachu, Meowth, and Eevee, but not necessarily all of them. Gigantamax Pikachus is only available to players with save data from Pokemon Let’s Go Pikachu, the same for Eevee and Let’s Go Eevee, and the giant extra tall Meowth is only available to early adopters.
This somewhat tempered my anticipation for these titles, but I remain eager as ever for my annual Pokemon fix, not counting the two supplemental fixes I had shortly ago with Pokemon Masters, and Pokemon Platinum. I’m honestly expecting the animosity and fervor that was raised over early impressions of this game to dissipate once it is finally out, and people are able to see the game in its totality, enjoy it and the progress is represents, and remember that Pokemon is Pokemon and Pokemon is fun. Then, a month later, they will turn around and point out minor petulant complaints that always exist in these games, as they are an annualized series. Meanwhile, I’ll just keep asking for quality of life improvements because that’s pretty much all I care about in the end. What I wouldn’t give for full and free moveset customization…
That about covers it for this week, but I feel like things are pretty light on content, so I ought to ramble about something… Oh, right that League of Leggings reference. Yeah, long story short that’s a reference to a 2014 Korean TG manga that I doubt anybody but me remembers called When I Woke Up I Became A Bagel Girl. It centered around a good-for-nothing obese pervy otaku who finds up in the body of a busty woman with a youthful face, i.e. a bagel girl. Only the first chapter was ever translated into English, but I remember liking the story and regularly scouring for updates, which never happened. 
I did, at some point, manage to find the last chapter of the story, in Korean, which showed the protagonist months after their transformation, where his slovenly ways caused him to become obese yet again, effectively wasting the beauty he had been given and becoming the same thing he was before, somebody crippled by heinous habits that have made them physically undesireable. Or something. I dunno. This was like 4 years ago.
I would look over the final chapter again, but it’s now locked behind a paywall, and I could only look at the first 11 chapters in Korean. So I looked at those instead, because why not. Overall, it seems like a standard “turned into a girl” type of story, with chapters detailing the protagonist’s troubles with clothes, money, femininity, and draft avoidance, getting help from his sister, a shopping trip, being a pervert, the usual. Still, I wish it was translated so I could have appreciated it more, and seen the story to its conclusion with more context.