This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: Swap Bodies and Have Sex While I Watch
• A Brief Aside About SwapHouse (A Face Swapping Harem RomCom?)
• ToHeart Is Back, Bay-Bee! (ToHeart Remake Announced)
• Europeans, Sign This Petition To Save Gaming! (Stop Killing Games Progress Update!)
• Natalie Rambles About CRT And Retro Gaming Displays (Respect The Pixels!)
• OpenCritic Has Been Acquired by Valnet (The Gaming Press Continues to Shrink…)
• ROMhacking.net Is Creasing Operations (20 Years of Progress Abruptly Stops)
• Game Informer Is Dead (GameStop Has Ended the Longest Running Games Publication in America)

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Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Swap Bodies and Have Sex While I Watch

Two weeks ago, I encountered two pieces of media that stirred a mini revelation in my mind. The first was the third OVA for To Love Ru Darkness. A shitty body swap side story, so ecchi that it may as well just be hentai. However, there is one line in this OVA that caused things to click into place for me. “Actually, the idea of a guy and a girl switching bodies sounds really juicy to me.”

This line was said by a character named Momo, who is not part of the body swap in that episode, and merely serves as an observer of these events. Watching and enjoying what the swapped characters— Rito and Haruna— get up to when they are forced into erotic situations. And seeing her behave this way, react this way, and state her preferences so directly… it really struck a chord with me.

Akumako: “What Natalie really means is that she looked at her and was all like ‘omg, she’s just like me fr!'”

…Yeah, pretty much. While I love body swapping as a concept, it is not something I personally want to indulge in or find desirable. However… I think it’s cool when two people swap bodies. I can, and do, talk about the narrative strength and possibilities of this. How body swapping and general transformation offer opportunities for characters to reassess their identities, genders,  and lives. How it broadens the characters’ understanding, and how it can be blended with a multitude of other genres to create unique and creative stories. …And I also think that body swapping and TSF is hot as hell.

However, even if body swapping was possible… I probably wouldn’t enjoy it that much. Sure, getting back extra years by swapping into a younger body would be nice, but needing to pretend to be someone else, deal with their shit, and having different proportions? No thanks, that sounds like it would be such a bother. And with transformation? If I could just morph myself to have different proportions and look completely different… I probably wouldn’t really mess around with it after making a few minor changes to my ‘standard form.’ Because I basically achieved everything I wanted with surgeries and HRT.

Now, for a TSF enthusiast… that is a really weird take to have, right? I love exploring TSF as an idea, love seeing other creators tackle it, but have low interest in experiencing it for myself. I don’t want to imagine it, I don’t want to role-play a scenario, and I don’t self-insert myself into anything like this. …Especially for masturbatory purposes

When I turn to TSF for more masturbatory purposes, I don’t insert myself into things. I don’t find stuff and think ‘god I wish that were me.’ I, ideally, think ‘god, these character dynamics are tight as fuck. The contrast! The reluctance! The dread! The euphoria!’ 

Sure, there was a time when I could just look at anything familiar and see it be turned into a girl and find that hot. But those days were when I was a teenager with a raging six-inch one-eyed monster in my pants. Most things in my old DeviantArt favorites got masturbated to one or thirteen times. But nowadays? I’m way harder and easier to please. 

I’ve tried using TG captions and AI generated writings, but if I just want to finish, be done with it, and go to bed, the best option is to just turn to my mind. Imagine some characters, a scenario, and let the hand I hold the mic with take control. Except that… represents a problem. Because I need to figure out which characters I want to use. Previously, this was a non-issue, as I was into all sorts of character-driven media properties with large casts. Like Dragalia Lost, a game with so many bloody characters you could make 108 body swap pairings. But if I’m not engaging with the source material… this does nothing for me. 

As such, I have been turning to my own characters for inspiration, as I know them by heart and engage with them a fair bit because… I’m a bootleg novelist. While I crafted the cast of Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 as a group of people and characters foremost, I also made a spiffy collection of 20-ish characters to throw into body swap and TSF scenarios. Across all the options, there are dozens of body swap pairings I can fantasize about!

Akumako: “…Hold on, you masturbate to your own characters swapping bodies?”

Yep!

Akumako: “…That’s just weird, yo.”

I know it’s weird, but it’s not that weird. I try to make the stories they get up to be hot yet narratively fulfilling.

Akumako: “…Why don’t you jerk off to imagined scenarios involving Press-Switch and Student Transfer characters?”

Because that’s for work, Sweet Pea. I take those games seriously as works of art, try to critically analyze them, and try to judge them based on the contents within them, so there’s no allure for me there.

Akumako: “Uh… so do you not take your own writing seriously as a work of art?”

Of course I do! But I’m not writing a review of it, and by masturbating to these scenarios, I’m—

Akumako: “—Getting inspiration that you can put into later stories?”

…Shit, I guess so. EXACTLY!

Akumako: “So, in conclusion, Natalie is some creep who likes writing about the adventures of a big polycule of characters and enjoys masturbating to the idea of them having body swapped sex?”

Basically, yeah.

Akumako: “Don’t basically me, you basic cunt! You’re the one writ—”

But the key element is that it is not ME in those scenarios, as I do not find there being any sexual allure in me doing something sexual as or with someone else. Imagining myself being in the body of a hot 20-something-year-old Black woman? Nah, that does nothing for me. Imagining some fictional jerkass doing the same exact thing after getting swapped into that body as part of… a body rental app that this girl signed up for in order to pay the bills? Swap class at his college to help White bastards gain a greater understanding of non-White people? Some creepy bastard who followed her from the train, approached her in her apartment hallway, became goop, went into her mouth, and is now masturbating to gain her memories? 

You can take it in a load of different directions, and most of ’em are worth jerking it to.

Akumako: “…You really read too many captions written by 40-something Crackers.”

Capital-C?

Akumako: “In my heart, I was spelling it with three K’s, because they deserve it.”

For context, Akumako is Persian!

Akumako: “The cops say I’m Black, so I guess that’s what my ‘actual race’ is.”

Gosh I wish I knew where to find some Black TSF creators. Their perspective would be invaluable. But I think they are buried deep within the gulags, buried by the algorithms. 

Akumako: “We’re a grand deep into this preamble, so would you lay off the self indulgences and get into the second thing you wanted to talk about?”

Oh, right…

I heard about a newly announced game called Date Everything, where you can date anthropomorphic (human) versions of 100 objects (or things) in a house. My immediate thought upon watching the trailer was: ‘Why do I need to date everything? Why can’t everything just date everything else in a 100 person polycule? Because that sounds hot and spicy as hell‘

As I thought that… I realized that my sexuality and preferences are just warped. I don’t want to be involved in anything romantic or sexual, I just want to be in the background, watching things unfold. I want to be the ornamental plant in the background— wait, no, you can definitely date the houseplant in this game, so that analogy doesn’t fly.

Point is, this revelation bugged me. I’m confident that I’m asexual and aromantic, yet I still get excited about the idea of other people doing hyper-specific sexual things. And in the world of the internet… there’s got to be a name or word for that. Now, names and words are not needed to make something ‘real’, but I find a certain comfort in labels.

I initially thought that this was a voyeurism, but that’s not quite right. Voyeurism is significantly driven by the thrill of being in a position where you could get caught.

I then found the term aegosexual, which seems like a good label, but something about the term reeks of ‘this was made up by a 17-year-old in 2012’. Which I wrote before I learned the term does, in fact, come from 2012. Looking at the queer wiki— queer looks better and is easier to say than LGBTQIA+— it seems to check out pretty well. It’s a subset of asexuality for people who enjoy sexual fantasies involving characters or other people, but don’t want to get involved in sexual activities themselves.

So I guess I could add this to my A list: Asexual, Aromantic, Autistic, Asshole, and Aegosexual. And I have to say that I like the name. A (not) ego (self) sexual. And if you read it real fast, it almost looks like ahegaosexual. And I just think that’s funny, because if you’re orgasming and having fun with it, you should make an ahegao.

Akumako: “…Natalie, I think you’re done telling the people about your personal life. Now help me move your desk to the other room. We’ve got guests coming over tomorrow.”

Oh, that reminds me! We won’t have room for you Akumako, so I’m going to need to TF you into some furniture for me and my friends.

Akumako: “What? Bitch, this is my house! I’m the one who pays the—”

*Poofs Akumako into a cushioned storage bench*

Now I can fill her up with ‘treats’ for my friends! Kukukuku!

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A Brief Aside About SwapHouse
(A Face Swapping Harem RomCom?)

A story I had on my reading list for a while is a Koikatsu comic called SwapHouse by deltorii110. Based on the name and tags, I figured it would be a body swap story about a guy living in an apartment-style dorm with a bunch of girls. Instead… I found a new type of TF! Or at least it’s new to me!

SwapHouse follows this guy named Yuta Ishikawa, who moves to the Hanazono Dorms per a request from his late grandmother, Yumi Adachi. Though, dorm is a bit of a misnomer. It’s really just a Japanese-style two-floor apartment complex, populated entirely by cute, quirky girls attending the nearby university.

Right out the gate the story shows it’s going to be on the wackier side of things. With an inventor girl setting the place on fire and Yuta’s grandmother reappearing as a ghost only he can see. But in chapter two, it befuddled me with the introduction of what it calls a ‘body swap.’ 

In SwapHouse, various characters have the ability to swap their faces, hairstyles, and skin color with other people. A transformation it routinely describes as a ‘body swap.’ When it’s not. The visual language of this swap is most similar to a head swap, but it’s kind of the opposite. 

In a head swap, both parties retain their head and everything above their neck, yet the body beneath their head is exchanged for a different body. They operate on the idea that the mind, memories, and consciousness of a person all lie within the head, within the brain. While everything below it is interchangeable. Which… means the term head swap does not really make sense, as characters are not exchanging heads, they are exchanging everything but the head. 

However, in SwapHouse, everything below the head is static. The only thing that changes is the face, hair, voice, and skin tone. Making this more of a… face swap. Which is a TF genre that you rarely see outside of disguise stories or characters who undergo surgery to look like something else. The first two examples that spring to mind are Face/Off (1997) and Pretty Face (2002), and that’s all you’re getting from me.

Now, I am too old and wise to ever shitcan a TF just because I cannot see the narrative application for it. But if you are making a story dedicated to a TF concept… why this one? It’s not popular, it’s not well understood or tagged by image algorithms, and if the creator did any sort of research… they would know this is not how people use the term ‘body swapping’. Hell, the creator seems to be familiar with TSF, but ultimately delivered 400 pages of a TSF story with… no TSF to speak of thus far. Hell, the last 150 pages didn’t even contain any face swapping. Though it did contain a female-to-female possession by Yumi, who transforms people’s clothes when she possesses them.

I would say more about it, but it really feels like a typical romcom harem type story and nothing about the implementation of its transformation system has particularly interested me. Still, I wish deltorii110 the best with their work, and hope it becomes something more my speed with time. If not, that’s cool too.

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ToHeart Is Back, Bay-Bee!
(ToHeart Remake Announced)

Whoo boy, this warrants a history lesson. …But I already gave you people a history lesson back in December 2022, so let me just give a short version of that. Leaf was a pioneer of the Japanese adventure games in the mid to late 90s and is responsible for the name visual novel. They delivered many influential titles during their early years— White Album, ToHeart, Comic Party, Utawarerumono, and so forth. But as Japanese PC gaming started falling by the wayside in the early 2000s, they switched over to console game development and started working under the name of Aquaplus.

Under the banner of Aquaplus, they continued to push out console ports and sequels to their popular series— including To Heart 2, Tears to Tiara II, White Album 2, and Dungeon Travelers 2-2. However, their main focus over the past decade has been their Utawarerumono series of visual novel strategy RPGs. They made two sequels, remade the first game, and aimed to take the series in a bold new direction with Monochrome Mobius: Rights and Wrongs Forgotten. An expansive HD console RPG that was so far removed from the last game they released that I’m still amazed they managed to make something so ambitious.

Mind you, Monochrome Mobius was a pretty janky game, with a lot of strange presentational quirks, some technical issues, and disproportionately applied polish. Also, the game did not sell well. Only about 14,000 units were sold between both the PS4 and PS5 during its Japanese launch week. 

Then, a month after Monochrome Mobius launched in Japan, Aquaplus, and by extension Leaf, was acquired by a company called CREST. Who the hell is CREST? After popping around their website for five minutes… I still don’t know. They’re a multinational multimedia company with 19 offices in 15 countries who does game publishing, anime production, merchandising, music, and event production, and has its own VTuber subsidiary. They do everything— including a Transformers pop-up café and Neptunia stage show! How have I never heard of them aside from their acquisition of Aquaplus? I don’t know!

With Aquaplus now part of a bigger company and having not released a significant project in the past year and a half, they obviously had to be working on some major project. Something to justify CREST’s purchase of the company. …And that project is a remake of the legendary ToHeart! Hell yeah! 

While Tokimeki Memorial was the grandmother of all dating simulation adventure games, that’s not what most westerners stinky gaijins actually mean when they casually use the term dating sim. They mean a romance visual novel where every love interest has their own route, and one of the first examples of this, one of the most influential examples, is Leaf’s 1997 classic ToHeart! A game that… admittedly did not really take off until 1999, when the title was retooled and de-sexed into a PS1 game and TV anime series.

ToHeart continued to be a major IP for Leaf for years to come, same with its 2004 sequel, and… I think it could still resonate with a modern audience. Because while the series seems generic when described in the broad strokes, it had plenty of weirdness that made people flock to it. And if Aquaplus can stay true to what this series was, and so some slight updating for modern tastes, then I think the series can be a decently sized success. Mind you, it won’t be a mega-hit, as there are just too many high school romance stories out there nowadays. Though, with CREST’s connection, and assuming they do a well-balanced media blitz, I can imagine it appealing to new and old fans.

…And I am saying all of that based on absolutely nothing, as all that was revealed as a logo and some voice actress information. I seriously have no idea why they chose to announce it this way, but… it’s better than how the Never7 and Ever17 remakes were announced. …I bet you forgot about those! I know I almost did!

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Europeans, Sign This Petition To Save Gaming!
(Stop Killing Games Progress Update!)

Something I talk about semi-regularly is how online-only server-dependant games are steadily eroding the medium and destroying history. The overwhelming majority of these titles do not have end-of-life plans, are rendered unplayable, and outside of the efforts of dedicated programmers, cannot be played again. It is an anti-art, anti-consumer, anti-preservation, practice that should not be happening, but there are no legal protections to prevent game publishers from doing this.

However, Ross Scott of Freeman’s Mind and Ross’s Game Dungeon fame has launched a campaign against this practice, aptly dubbed Stop Killing Games. I mentioned them a few months ago, and hopefully you all heeded my words and sent in some signatures. It’s a slow process, like all legal processes are, but this past week a new stage in this movement was launched with the “Stop Destroying Videogames” initiative.

Any European Union citizen who is of voting age can submit their signature for the application, and the more who sign it, the better. There needs to be a total of 1 million signatures from 27 countries in the EU for this initiative to go through, and represents what’s pretty much the best chance to save mainstream gaming from being an anti-consumer live service hellhole.

If you are a citizen of the European Union and are of voting age, then I implore you to sign this petition and spread the word. If you have friends or family members who are EU citizens, then I implore you to tell them about this. Because while this initiative is not a guarantee to work, it truly is among the best options that consumers have to save gaming. Otherwise, so many games will die, so many games will risk becoming lost, and if this gets through… then these games can be forever.

The petition is very focused in its scope, only requiring that games be put in a reasonably working state at end of service and that they are playable offline. And that’s… basically all you need. It clarifies it will protect the IP and not require anything but the bare minimum from the publishers. 

Now, I could talk about this topic some more— I am a bottomless barrel of chatter— but I have made my point. Please, if you care about the future of video games, 

SIGN THE DAMN PETITION!

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Natalie Rambles About CRT And Retro Gaming Displays
(Respect The Pixels!)

So, the past week I caught wind of some discourse about how retro games should be displayed. About how the correct display method is to replicate the way games looked in their original era. Whether that be with a lower resolution down-sampled without any alteration for 3D games. An unscaled blow out of an analog signal. Or, the common unifier, and key visual identifier, for these things, the scan-line CRT filter that emulates the look of a pre-HD TV. I have previously discussed my thoughts on people praising the use of CRT filters for retro games— I actually did it less than a year ago, looking back. But time is cyclical, and I will keep talking about the same rubbish until I die. So let me try to tackle this topic again.

I have a couple points I can make against this aesthetic, but what I am effectively doing here is arguing against a straw-person. I am not really responding to any single individual, just a perceived amalgam of a genre of retro game liker, manifested from snippets of digital ghosts.

One, when playing an old 2D game at an upscaled original resolution, or nearest neighbor, you are viewing the game based on its raw data. In its original form, with no filters, on a neutral display. And when you defend CRT filters as being the intended way these games were meant to be played or screen, you run into problems. Not every game was designed for the same display and you have no way of knowing how over 90% of them were ‘meant to look.’ Nearly every display of that era looked different. Some 2D assets of that era were meticulously designed pixel by pixel and designed as pixel art and by filtering it, you are not seeing the detail and work that went into it. You are just seeing a compressed version of the same image, making it harder to appreciate how it was made, how the developers crafted the sprites.

Yes, there are examples of effects that only work because of the interpolation effects of things like fire and water, but again, those only worked on certain displays. And just because one section looks ‘better’ with a certain effect, that does not make it the ‘best’ or ‘correct’ way to play these games. 

Two, the CRT defense battalion does not apply the same rule of ‘artistic intent’ to any other piece of media that was ‘made’ for a CRT display. (With the possible exception of old horror media.) If you were to tell someone that they are watching a film or TV show incorrectly because they bought a Blu-Ray or are streaming it onto their HD phone, they’d treat you like you were daft. Yes, the show or film, animated or live action, might have been made for a lower resolution, filtered display. However, it was remastered and presented in a higher resolution for a reason. Because the image looks better, has more detail, and if it were possible to release a higher resolution version back in the… 1940s to mid-2000s, then they would have done so.

Three, this is an argument that is being made primarily by old people who are highly nostalgic for the way games looked in their memories. Basically every justification I have seen them make in favor of CRT can be seen as a way to justify the bygone conclusion that they liked the way things looked when they were 6 to 14. …And want to go back to that time. They don’t want to see things be cleaned up or polished and have the shortcomings of the original design exposed. They want these games to feel like time portals. Back to a halcyon era where things were ‘better.’ Even though… we can do better. But these people are old, things got worse for them as they got older, and don’t want better. They want the same thing they’ve always had. Yes, there is some preservationist appreciation argument here… but I’m inclined to write off 90% of that off as coward shit. These people aren’t too different from those grandmas who didn’t want to switch over to an HD TV because that’s not what TVs looked like for all their life.

Four, I think the hyper specificity of this niche is… bizarre. People who praise CRT displays only really fixate on games released from 1977 to 2007. That might sound like a long stretch of time… but it’s also all retro shit at this point. And it’s not every game either. PC games were made for monitors, which were clearer than TVs— what most games were probably made on— and many had customizable resolutions that made the artistic intent clear. It’s supposed to look like pixels, because computers display pixels. Why do these games get an exception? I dunno.

Similarly, there’s the handheld scene, which… really is not a common target for CRT defenders, because the games were never really made for a CRT. However, they were designed with the same sprite creating techniques. The GameBoy screen was a series of inky dot-matrix dots, and while most displays are blurry nowadays, that is due to the ravages of time. The screens are melting and the hardware no longer represents an ‘authentic 1992 experience,’ Steve! But with the GameBoy Color and Advance? They switched to an LCD screen, which went on to be the standard for handheld games going forward. Meaning that rather than just be all games, they narrowly target console games of a certain era?

Why should only games belonging to certain consoles be displayed in a certain way, unlike the majority of other video games? Should GBA versions of SNES games be played with a CRT filter because that’s what the original version was played at? Should GameBoy Advance games be thrown through a puddle to make it look like you are playing them on the GameBoy Player for the GameCube? 

Five, fixating on the original display and filtering the image to match it goes against the trajectory that displays, that images, that visual quality, has been building toward for decades. As technology gets better, images are supposed to get clearer, and are supposed to get more crisp. Now, if media was designed for a specific resolution and saved as a digital file… you cannot do much to make it look better. You cannot get a 1080p film out of a 480p MP4 file, even with the most illmatic AI on the market. With video games, however, you can use software to directly increase the display resolution they are rendered at. It’s why early 3D games for PC are not locked at… 600 by 800. It’s why you can play a game ‘designed for’ 1080p at 4K.

Yes, there is something that could be learned by looking at games on a historically accurate display relative to the majority of consumers of the era. But is that actually preferable? Is that a better way to appreciate the artistry the developers put into them? Does it make them easier or better to play? And is it worth any drawbacks? I’m going to say no.

Six, I just view the insistence on replicating the deficiencies of earlier display technology to be counter-intuitive to the artistry of sprite art and pixel art. The CRT defense is based largely on the idea that sprite art was born from limitations and, if it was possible, developers would not have used it. They would have used 2D animation, illustrations, and effectively make most games playable, interactive cartoons. 

Frankly, I find this assertion to be insulting and to ignore the artistry that goes into designing sprites, into creating sprite animations. Ever since I was 10-years-old, I have loved looking at sprite art. I loved finding sprite sheets and seeing how creators managed to breathe so much life and character into an object a few pixels tall. There is intent and effort that goes into making even the simplest and earliest sprites. I still look at games that are 30, 40 years old as works of art because I can see the individual components that were used to make up their visual composition.

I loved and still love the effort and care that goes into sprite-based animations, and would spend days looking at them, not enjoying them because they were animation, but because they used sprites. I loved and still love the care and craft that goes into sprite comics, resourceful kit bashing of existing and edited assets in order to create something new and timeless. Works that allowed those without the resources or ability to draw to edit and create something pixel-by-pixel, in order to tell their own stories.

In addition to being an enjoyer of sprite art, I am also a sprite artist and have created hundreds of little ‘sprite art dioramas’ over the years. I adore how much life and personality can be added by making things using pixels, and how much detail I can fit into a small 160 by 90 pixel canvas. To me, the fine details of spriting, the pixel-by-pixel detail, is what makes sprite art what it is. And insisting that detail should be dragged through the mud in the name of ‘historical accuracy’… just pisses me right the fuck off.

Oh, but that is just discussing 2D games. And those are just one end of this debate. The other end is 3D games, and 3D games are a bloody nightmare!

I don’t want to get too deep into this, as early 3D consoles have their own quirks. PS1 games had terrible texture warping and things look kinda terrible when blown up to higher resolutions without stabilizing this warping. N64 games came with anti-aliasing built into the hardware, giving everything this soft blurry look that, as someone whose first game console was an N64, I just hate. 

Working around PS1 emulation is easy enough with the advances of DuckStation, N64 decompilations, and recompilations are rapidly changing the landscape and I have not spent the time to see what advancements have been made. Saturn emulation is getting better, but I have never really tried getting it to work well.

Generally, I tend to be pretty simple with what I think looks good in a 2D game. An upscaled and downsampled visual output, a few layers of the best anti-aliasing I can manage, and absolutely no texture filtering, no matter the console. Textures are art as much as anything else, and I would rather have blocky textures than have blurry ones.

Yes, this can be a divide between the 3D and 2D elements… but you should see that. If you are playing a game, you want to analyze it, you want to gain some understanding in how it is made. And if you choose to filter it, to blur everything to make it look more like it did back in the day, it becomes so much harder to focus on any singular visual element. Because they all mesh together into one blob. If you actually want to appreciate these games as data, as feats of software design, as feats of the visual arts, they should not be filtered. 

…At least that’s my opinion on the matter. I don’t like it when people project their opinions, because I don’t like them and don’t want the impressionable youth to be swayed into ‘retro fetishism.’ However, if you are some old bastard with a beard that makes you look 6 years older, you can do whatever you want in your basement/condo with your CRTs. Saying whatever you want, despite knowing from your gaming magazines and press kits that games, in fact, did not always look like that back in the halcyon era of 1996.

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OpenCritic Has Been Acquired by Valnet
(The Gaming Press Continues to Shrink…)

Goldarn it! Despite companies doing constant layoffs, there is apparently still enough money in the games industry for people to actively pursue and purchase major game sites. OpenCritic is a Metacritic alternative that aims to assign ‘better’ cumulative numerical values to games. I have seen people talk about it on ResetEra, I see it when checking Wikipedia pages as step one of research, but I do not see people reference it anywhere else. Especially not on YouTube, where Metacritic is the de facto aggregator. You put an OpenCritic icon in a thumbnail and nobody will know what that is/ But a yellow square with a 58? Everybody knows what that means. 

Now, that sounds bitter, but I do ultimately see value in any aggregate site that collects published reviews on games and assigns them numerical values, and Metacritic should not be the only one. I actually think that there should be multiple values that games of varying genres are given a score for, but after the CRT rant above, I wanted to avoid opening that canister of worms until next week.

Regardless of my thoughts on it however, I’m sad to see OpenCritic fall into the hands of one of the top three evils of the modern capitalist hellscape we call Earth. PRIVATE EQUITY! 

OpenCritic has been acquired by Valnet Inc., a media sucking conglomerate who owns Game Rant, The Gamer, DualShockers, Hardcore Gamer, Comic Book Resources, Screen Rant, and 17 other “brands.” Also, side note, but all these websites look exactly the same. Why even bother having multiple websites at this point— just merge them together and call it Valnet news. It’d be more honest than this bullshit.

Companies like Valnet are a scourge on the world of journalism, enthusiast reporting, and freelance online writing. They do not exist to secure or assist in the reach of what otherwise may be struggling publications. Entities like Valnet, Gamurs Group, Ziff Davis, and Fandom work to eliminate competition. They control what stories get the most eyes by gobbling up the ‘traditional’ press. They siphon value made by aspiring and skilled writers, exploit the user base, and try to pay their main asset, their writers, as little as possible.

The media landscape of the western world is too damn consolidated and direly needs dissolution. Websites are really not that expensive to host, and if a group is very dedicated with their coverage and focuses on a niche. But with the gradual decay of Google Search and the ad economy, also created by Google, it is becoming increasingly hard to just run a website and make a decent living off it.

I do not blame anybody for selling their website when in need of money. If you spend years building something up, it might seem better to sell it, get a salary for an extra few years, and watch it crumble than to… just shut it down because you cannot pay the monthly bills. I do not blame the folks who own OpenCritic. I blame this screwed up economic system that could be changed, but that would require the rich people to do something that is bad for them and good for the common folks. Which, if you know a lick of history, you’ll know is how things always work unless the people make their demands more than mere suggestions. …But with the police becoming soldiers without the liability or training, it’s gonna get harder to make demands respected.

Anyway, this announcement was paired with a description of planned changes to turn OpenCritic into a gaming social network, which immediately made me roll my eyes until my irises disappeared. A gaming social network is a gaming forum, and we already have ResetEra for that. If people want to maintain their collection, they have sites like Backloggd. Open Critic is a place where reviews are listed and compiled. That is all it needs to be, and all it should be. But these tech obsessed dumbasses do not see it like that. They are too devoted to idea growth by any means necessary to see that they are tearing down a forest to build new retail space, in a town with a 20% retail vacancy. They are destroying something of value in order to make something that nobody wants, but the blokes in charge of this will get a fat bonus, so it’s worth it in the end! 

To hell with this broken system!

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ROMhacking.net Is Creasing Operations
(20 Years of Progress Abruptly Stops)

ROM hacking is one of the greatest innovations to happen in the world of gaming in the past 20 to 30 years, and it is something that I will praise and triumph as much as one reasonably can. It allows individuals to translate games, to enhance games, to expand games, to foster their own communities dedicated to how much they adore specific games. The sheer amount of effort and creativity that has gone into the field is surreal, and it is a field that is only improving with time as people decompile and rebuild games for entirely new hardware. 

I might not play too many, but I think it is a wonderful thing, and one of the best things about ROM hacking is the fact that so much of it is stored in a centralized location. ROMhacking.net. For over 20 years, it has been a wonderful resource, a place for people to share their creations, share knowledge, and keep games that have long since been forgotten by their rights holders alive and flourishing. …So imagine how I felt when I heard they were stopping operations, effective immediately.

At first, I thought this was some widespread DMCA claim by Nintendo or some repugnant dastard. However… it’s not. In a news post that I saw right after I scheduled this Rundown, Nightcrawler, the founder of ROMhacking.net, described how they tried to hand over the site to another group, only to be severely burned in the process. Details were not given, but I can only imagine that the prospective owners were planning on effectively destroying what Nightcrawler and thousands of people have created over the years. This burn was so severe that Nightcrawler is locking the site into archive mode. 

Everything has been backed up on the Internet Archive, all submissions have been closed, all sections are read only, the social media accounts will no longer be used, and the forum will remain up. Nightcrawler suggests that an open source site similar to ROMhacking.net might be in the works, and while that would be great… I have to ask what the hell people are going to do in the interim?

You see, the internet has been abuzz with fan projects like ROM hacks, especially with decompilations and recompilations. However, threats of legal action have prevented an organized source a la ROMhacking.net from coming into prominence. A lot of projects are hidden among obscure Discord servers— which is like writing a book and only distributing it to a small town in Estonia. And while GitHubs are great and usually go under the radar, not every programmer maintains a clean GitHub.

I’m glad that everything has been archived and that the site is available so people can effectively back it up along with all of its contents. However… this is still a massive blow to the retro gaming scene, game preservation, game accessibility, game history, game development, and gaming as a whole. You might think that I am overstating things, but… who do you think people consult when re-releasing classic games? ROM hackers. They are some of the most knowledgeable people on the planet when it comes to older games. Hell, they know the inner workings of some of these games better than the people who made them. 

I don’t know what else to say to cap this off other than… damn. The internet really is not forever, and if you like something, make sure you save it locally. Especially if it’s a download link, especially if it’s a website. I plugged it before, but software like HTTrack Website Copier is a goldarn miracle worker. It’s slow, it’s clunky, but it preserves history like nobody’s business.

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Game Informer Is Dead
(GameStop Has Ended the Longest Running Games Publication in America)

I already had to append a note about ROMhacking.net closing, but less than 16 hours later, I got this terrible news! Game Informer is shutting down, effective immediately.

Game Informer has been running for 33 years, since its first issue back in August 1991, and since then it has become a reliable pillar of the gaming press. Publications like Electronic Gaming Monthly and Edge died out in the 2010s as people stopped buying magazines, and the three console manufacturers all ceased their publications around the same time. From the ages of 10 to 18, gaming magazines were something I subscribed to and enjoyed. They allowed me to learn more about games in an era where my ability to use the internet was still developing. They were some of the only recreational reading I was doing outside of school. They were a vessel for so much unique information. And their graphic design is something that I admire and believe modern web design can learn a lot of. …I say while running a basic-ass WordPress blog.

I would not say I wouldn’t be doing this without gaming magazines— I got big into gaming websites as a teenager, and magazines lost their luster beyond something to flip through. But I have an immense respect for the art of a magazine.

However, Game Informer also grew into a major online presence as well, with their own articles, reporting, and receives that made them just as respectable of a source as any other. They kept the public informed, kept more people in the unstable world of gaming press, and avoided the listicles and engagement farming that I’ve seen on other sites. Just look at the above section on Valnet. Game Informer was a good publication with an immense legacy behind it… and their owners, GameStop, have announced they are shutting down the publication, effective immediately.

This came out of nowhere, was not foretold to the people who were working there. They just up and lost their jobs at the start of August and are now being sent out into a hostile job market. With AI generated slop filling up news feeds to make micro-pennies from each click, being an online writer is only getting harder. And with the games industry shifting, consolidating, and trying to eliminate as many jobs as possible, the market for professional coverage is getting a lot smaller.

I have little more to say other than blind hope and righteous rage as the callous corporate cretins who dared to deny these people a job. GameStop has had all the opportunity in the world to become a better company. The meme stock run was enough to revitalize the company, they could have capitalized on the recent retro boom by reshaping their stores to be like basically any actual retro game shop. But noooo! These bastards have a monopoly, and have squandered so much, ruined so much, and would have probably gone bankrupt by now if not for the meme stock debacle.  

Shit, I need to find an optimistic bend here, um… Support independent gaming journalism sites! Pay for whatever their subscription is, back them on Patreon, because when a corporate master is involved, they can be shut down for any reason and with zero warning.

…And when I wrote this, the site was still up and you could still read it. But hours after this announcement was made, they blocked off the entire website. They gave people zero warning that this was happening, even internally, and just removed everything from the public internet. …This is downright malicious.

I do not have words to describe how ravenously evil this action is. This is not just GameStop being disrespectful of the staff, of art, and of history. This is a willful intention to destroy. I tried running a backup tool after this happened… and it doesn’t work.

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Progress Report 2024-08-04

On Thursday I got distracted and decided to briefly check out a live service strategy RPG by the name of Sword of Convallaria. And touching another gacha so soon after playing Zenless Zone Zero really demonstrates how homogenized and annoying the design of so many of these games are. The menu structure, the sheer number of boxes to tick, the artificially complex structure for the progression system, the number of upgrades for units— it just feels so trite and blasé. 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If this is what gaming is to someone, no shit they would view it as a boring waste of time after devoting so many years into this engagement cycle. And it’s a shame, as I think there is a rock solid turn-based RPG inside here, and I think that is a genre you cannot have enough of. …Strike that. We had enough of the genre for the PSP and PS2 when every two-bit RPG series got an entry and some publishers cranked them out at a rate of 1.5 a year. However, the genre faded with the shift to mobile in the early 2010s and it’s sad that there are not more bigger budget entries with more robust stories. Sword of Convallaria could have been that, but it chose to be a gacha instead. Because the greater Asian games market fucked itself 20 years ago by shifting away from packaged games. This is just what a video game is to an entire generation of people. 

2024-07-28: Wrote 5,200 words, finishing up the draft of the two-part TSF Showcase 2024-33 and 34. Started editing it a bit, but ProWritingAid did a complete redesign when I wasn’t looking, and it frazzled me big time. I cannot figure out how to spot my overly long sentences anymore, when that was one of my primary uses for it!

2024-07-29: Wrote a 1,600 word… thing for this week’s preamble. I thought about turning myself into the chest but… then I’d have to impersonate Akumako on camera next week. And that sounded like hard work! Then I went back to editing the next two TSF Showcases and grabbing the images. Across these two, there were 76 fooking images I needed to choose, crop, combine, and name. That shit takes so damn long. It’s why I’ll never be a video editor, because that would take EVEN LONGER!

2024-07-30: Bad productivity day. I was busy with work for most of it, then played PokéRogue, then realized that I needed to figure out the NEXT TSF Showcase, and spent too long sifting through my ongoing manga collection. Also, I got a long email from a reader and talked to ’em via Discord for a bit. That is technically Natalie.TF work, alright? Wrote 650 word ToHeart bit. 

2024-07-31: Wrote the 1,800 anti-CRT thing, the 400 word petition thing, and edited the header image together. Lots of dumb bullshit with getting emulators to work right, downloading RetroArch, and trying to find the right subtitle files for the To Love Ru Darkness OVA, only to not use the damn subtitle files. Wrote a bitter 650 word thing about OpenCritic. Finished reading the material for TSF Showcase 2024-35.

2024-08-01: I was bad and tried a gacha for a day. Wrote 4,000 words for TSF Showcase 2024-35. Edited the Rundown. Edited TSF Showcase 2024-35 and grabbed the snapshots for the post. Added the 600 word section on ROMHacking.net, written in like 25 minutes. Also, ProWritingAid is working again. I have mixed feelings about the changes, and the software still cannot tell what a sentence is. If a sentence ends with a number, it does not treat it as a completed sentence, and I cannot teach it this basic fact.

2024-08-02: Drats! More bad focus days! WTF is wrong with me? Ugh. Added the 600 word Game Informer piece and 2,000 words for PS 1988 Ch 5. Had to review the outline I wrote in a day, do some more lite research to get the history right, and kept getting pulled away by friends and stray thoughts. I wanna get this done before Cassie comes, darn it!

2024-08-03: Wanted to get PS 1988 Ch 5 done today, but so much for that! I kept getting distracted by stray research and fact checking, especially because I know very little about the nation this part of the story takes place in. One minute I’m double checking what Kamen Rider Black looks like. The next I’m trying to figure out what the hell Papua New Guinea is and why it’s not part of Indonesia and Southeast Asia, because it’s part of the same damn archipelago! The third I’m learning that tree-kangaroos are a thing, and these things OWN! Got 3,100 words before I gave myself the okay to stop and sleep.

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Psycho Shatter 1988: Black Vice X Weiss Vice
Progress Report:

Current Word Count: 23,894

Estimated Word Count: 88,000

Words Edited: 0

Total Chapters: 16

Chapters Outlined: 16

Chapters Drafted: 4

Chapters Edited: 0

Header Images Made: 

Days Until Deadline: 93