This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: Akumu Kojou: Tax Tax Panic! – The Lost Levels
• Silent Hill 2 (2024) is… Actually Good? (Bloober Got It Right?)
• 343 Industries Is Now Halo Studios (Still Doesn’t Get Halo Out of Its Mess)
• Student Transfer FINALLY Got An Official YouTube Channel! (And Other Miscellaneous Tangents)
• Red Dead Re-Re-Re-Redemption! (Red Dead Redemption Is FINALLY Coming to PC)
• LittleBigDelisting (Sony is Delisting LittleBigPlanet 3)
• The Great Big Roblox Exposé! (Roblox Is an X-Rated Pedophile Hellscape)
• Raise the Alarmo! (Nintendo Reveals a Smart Clock to Watch You as You Sleep)

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Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Akumu Kojou: Tax Tax Panic! – The Lost Levels

It’s that time of year again! The heart of tax season! Also known as Crunch Time and Stress Time! All because my boss is a chronic procrastinator who thinks he shouldn’t work during the summer, so we need to suffer come October. So many bad things in life are caused by bad management, and I am genuinely floored at how SHIT my boss is at doing his job of talking to clients and getting information. There are so many things he could have gotten done, but he just didn’t want to. I get that my boss is an old man ready for the morgue, but every year he gets worse, more ridiculous, and copes harder by lying about the situation we’re in. It’s gotten o the point he just cannot be believed.

He tries to defend his position by claiming to be an introvert and not wanting to be a nag, but that’s a load of bullshit. He’s been doing this crap for years and he’s just a slacker, a waster, and is utterly disinterested in self-improvement or growth. I view him to be emblematic of the under-discussed concept of ‘male laziness’ that I have seen everywhere in my life. 

Late boomers and early Gen X dudes who say they are going to do shit, but take an extreme amount of time to actually do it and will not do it unless a woman bitches at them enough. That’s how my father always was, one of the big reasons my mother divorced him, and my boss has the same psychological deficiency. Back when I was working for a big office company… a good third of all the men there, most of the gray-haired ones, had this slacker trait and it just baffles me. If you’re old, decrepit, and just want to sleep and read books all day, why the fuck are you in charge of a company?

Now, I know there is some logic in his approach. He knows that the crypto libertarian crowd who chooses to forget what a K-1 and W-2 are every year are little bitches about paperwork and will avoid it like the plague. So he waits until the very end because then they have a fire under their asses. He tries to be ‘accommodating’ to our Jewish clients (he determines Jewishness based on vibes) during the early October holidays, but he doesn’t view that as a cause to be proactive. He just uses it as a reason to load more work to the ass-end of the season, which means more work for me. More staying up late making reports and working on returns, while I’m lucky if he’s able to crawl his lumbering ass out of his bed.

Why don’t I do it? Because that’s not my fucking job. I might have been bamboozled into buying 8% of the company, but it’s named after him. He’s in charge of all the bank accounts, and he’s the one who turned the office into his personal playhouse with his ‘ironic’ Mao and Nixon posters. I genuinely do not know what WORK he does when I’m not around.

I know I am making him out to seem like a ‘monster’, but he is a kind man and is generally accommodating to me. He is good when he tries… but he’s too tired, fat, old, and lazy to try half as much as he should. I rely on his expertise, on his guidance to deal with unique edge cases, and to spot the things I miss in preparing a return. But fuck almighty is he bad at management.

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Silent Hill 2 (2024) is… Actually Good?
(Bloober Got It Right?)

Well, this is unexpected. Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 remake has been contentious since it was first announced in 2002. A beloved horror classic, often touted as among the best experiences the genre has to offer, was being remade by the people behind… Layers of Fear (2016), Observer (2017), and The Medium (2021). Titles that have the nebulous mid-70s aggregate review scores that could indicate they are under-appreciated classics, but horror aficionados did not care for any of them, and have written off Bloober as a bad horror developer. As such, there was a lot of dread about this remake tarnishing the legacy of the original title, if not overwriting it entirely.

Now, this could be avoided by re-releasing the original sometime before or after the remake. But Konami has infamously lost the source code, more infamously shoved out the egregious HD Collection in 2012, and is reluctant to re-release the original PC port. They released Silent Hill 4: The Room (2004) on GOG, which was the bad one during the PS2 era, but not Silent Hill 2 or 3 for reasons only comprehended by the ants. Now, the originals should be re-released and Konami should try again with a developer more experienced than Hijinx Studios was, but that’s a topic for another time.

…Getting to the point, the general consensus is that the remake did pretty much what everybody hoped it would do. Deliver something that retains the spirit, characters, and core story of the original, while building upon everything and making a handful of smart changes. It expands upon the world, turns combat from something easily exploitable into something more tense, and rebuilds the original’s greatest moments with modern technology. I, of course, have not played it myself, I’m just basing this off of reviews, but it definitely seems like one of the good remakes.

Which is super surprising after how terribly Konami’s recent Silent Hill offerings have been. Silent Hill: The Short Message (2024) was a free demo designed to show what Konami’s internal teams were planning for the series. But its attempts at exploring harassment and bullying were bereft of subtlety and bad chase sequences. While Silent Hill: Ascension (2023) by Bad Robot and Behavior was just… misguided. It wasn’t really a game as much as a series of prolonged in-engine cutscenes where the global playerbase could make choices to shift the story. Interesting idea… but I have only heard bad things about it. And with the fall of Annapurna Interactive a few weeks back, who knows how Silent Hill: Townfall will turn out.

Then there is Silent Hill f, written by Ryukishi07 of Higurashi and Umineko fame, which is set in 1960s rural Japan. It should be great, but we haven’t seen much of it after two years, because games take half a decade to make these days. I mean, they don’t need to, they just need to to stand out in the modern market and avoid 2000s style crunch.

…So yeah, good job Bloober Team! I’d say sorry for doubting your ability, but you need to make this an actual turning point. Show the world this isn’t a fluke! 

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343 Industries Is Now Halo Studios
(Still Doesn’t Get Halo Out of Its Mess)

Halo in a weird spot in early 2023. Halo Infinite (2021) was positioned as the series’ return to grace and prominence. Halo 4 (2012) was more iterative while Halo 5: Guardians (2015) was… unremarkable and forgettable. I seriously cannot remember a thing about it other than how it had a dual protagonist system with its campaign and never came out on PC, which is just weird.

There were so many rumors about how the series was going to expand with a battle royale title, switch over to a new engine, and was just DOOMED in general. All of which only got worse when the series developer, 343 Industries, underwent massive layoffs. Since then, Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard, laid off over 2,500 people, and has basically lost all brand identity as too many people were thrown into the tumble dryer. Also, the series’ attempts to launch into a big budget TV show were wildly unsuccessful.

With the series looking directionless, Microsoft opted to revitalize it with some hopeful announcements, but not a proper game reveal, as games take half a decade to make. Instead, they announced a rebrand of 343 Industries into Halo Studios, that future games would be built in Unreal Engine 5, and that multiple Halo games are in development. All of which was accompanied with some B-roll for video editors to use when talking about Halo for the next few years. Footage that, despite what one might assume, does not represent what Halo VII Re;Birth will look like.

This whole situation was just a bit of brand management on Microsoft’s behalf. A way to address suspicions of future Halo games in development, and make it easier for Microsoft to recruit for new jobs at Halo Studios. The game(s) are still years away, and who knows what form they will take. Maybe they will be remakes of the Bungie games as some rumors have speculated, or maybe they will feature “new stories” as the video emphasized.

Right, those remake rumors… I personally think that remaking the original Halo quadrilogy is a bit silly, as the games all hold up well and their dated elements are part of their aesthetic. I say give Halo: Combat Evolved (2001) a fresh remaster— since Saber didn’t know what they were doing with Halo Anniversary— but just re-release the rest of the trilogy. The PC ports were all good, and I think they’d do well on PS5 and Switch 2. Sure, it’d take work, but only like 15% of the work of a remake.

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Student Transfer FINALLY Got An Official YouTube Channel!
(And Other Miscellaneous Tangents)

Here’s a story that I never thought I’d see, but Student Transfer has finally gotten an official YouTube channel thanks to the diligent efforts of Sitcom route writer tgencounters. This is something I previously requested as part of my unfortunately negative Student Transfer V8 review. Tgencounters also spoke to me directly, saying this channel will feature playthroughs of completed routes, some scenario showcases, and more. Which… is exactly what I want to see!

Now, is this happening because I pointed it out and requested it? …Nah. I might have accelerated the process with my pointed criticism, but from what CobaltCore told me in the V8 review comments, this was discussed for a while. I just wanted to let Natalie.TF readers know that this channel is a thing, and to subscribe to it for algorithmic purposes. But there are also some going-ons that I should talk about. Namely, route cuts! 

With a game as big and expansive as Student Transfer, certain routes are odd stubs and do not always fit the increasing standards and evolving vision the team has for the game. The best example being the original Murder Mystery route, which I reviewed this past summer after the dev team finally made it a scenario after waiting for five years. 

On October 2nd, the dev team cut another route, the Maria Mania route introduced in Version 4.0, turning it into a legacy scenario to be bundled in future Student Transfer releases. I didn’t bring it up last week, as I felt it was a pretty open and shut case. The route was not very substantial, locked behind an obscure offshoot, and while it had some good ideas for it, the route apparently ran into some canon issues. Presumably the very premise of a widespread mental transformation that affected every girl at Tina Koya, when the dev team wants to keep the alien device’s power more limited. I say presumably because there was no formal announcement of this decision. Just CobaltCore’s “RIP 🪦” and some Discord messages in the spoilers channel. I think this is a sloppy way to break the news, but what do I know!

However, this news got me thinking about the next route that they are probably going to cut sooner than later. This is a bit of ST drama that I have not brought up before, but CaptainCaption’s Connie route has been on the radar of the ST dev team for some time. Particularly due to some characterization issues involving the yandere stalker character Carrie… acting like a yandere. Some dubious consent with the ending involving John being mind controlled. And probably some grudge against CaptainCaption. (If that’s not the full story, they should put out a statement on The Official Student Transfer Blog.) I’d recommend editing the existing story, removing parts that don’t work, and preserving the original version as a scenario. …While maybe bundle it with kinuyasha2’s excellent Connie Offshoot scenario, as Cap basically handed off the route to her. Just fix that one variable check bug. …And maybe do something to address the legs.

(I didn’t actually have any good screenshots of the legs, so I had to replay it. Just for that screenshot. THANKS PAST NATALIE! THANKS MOM!)

…Oh gosh, and I just remembered they never did anything with the Yui Spellbook continuation by Applemelon, which was also really good. Like all of Applemlon’s scenarios! Sure, offshoots like that mess with continuity and consistency, but this whole game can’t decide what damn year it is, so everything’s in a time warp! And you know what time warps are? Not consistent! 

However, the dev team is not in a rush to cut the Connie route, with Regretti saying that they are “probably going to wait until [they] have a suitable replacement before we [they] it.” Which is better than just cutting it. …But part of me thinks that the dev team is just waiting until CaptainCaption dies so they can remove the route, like, a month later and hope nobody notices. That’s what I would do if I were a petty bitch.

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Red Dead Re-Re-Re-Redemption!
(Red Dead Redemption Is FINALLY Coming to PC)

Last year, Rockstar announced that they were bringing back the beloved Red Dead Redemption (2010) to PS4 and Switch. Not with a remaster or an enhanced version of the game, just a fairly straightforward, HD-er, port with an egregious $50 price tag. The port itself was fine, far better than their butchering of the PS2 GTA Trilogy, but just about everybody was asking why this wasn’t being paired with a PC release. You know, a platform where Rockstar’s games have always excelled. Often despite Rockstar’s technical proficiency. (Stares at launch GTA IV.)

Well, Rockstar (or to be more accurate, Double Eleven, the studio doing this port) has remedied this by re-releasing the game again, this time for PC. It is described as being pretty much all one could reasonably expect. It’s just RDR with 4K support, 144hz support, super ultrawide support, and DLSS support. This is not a remaster, not anything more than a port, but it’s bringing one of the most beloved games of Gen 7 to PC, and that is a good thing. Red Dead Redemption (2010) will be released for PC on October 29, 2024.

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LittleBigDelisting
(Sony is Delisting LittleBigPlanet 3)

Aw dang, it’s time like this that I wish I could call on my growing number of Discord friends and ask them to write segments they have more expertise on. Because this is something semi-regular commenter Rain could use as a jumping off board to describe the sad end of a robust and dedicated community that has persisted for 15 years.

Edit 10/14/2024: Hey guess who made a comment that offers far more information about the situation of the shutdown and how it affected the community. Rain!

LittleBigPlanet (2008) served many roles when it was first brought to the market. It was a family friendly title for a system that was notably lacking in that regard. It was a showcase for the PS3’s technical prowess, featuring extremely detailed textures for the time and for the time robust online features. It was a key exclusive Sony published game during the years when the PS3 was struggling. And it was the first big console ‘game creation platform’, being a platformer where players could create their own stages. How novel.

The title was successful enough for LBP to become Sony’s de facto platformer series for the following generation. It saw a sea of DLC packs, two numbered sequels, two handheld ventures to bolster PSP and Vita adoption, and a kart racing spin-off that I remember being a sorta-sequel to ModNation Racers (2010). It wasn’t annualized… but it sure felt like it at times. 

However, the series came to a screeching halt after LittleBigPlanet 3 (2014). A title that aimed to evolve on the original series by introducing new playable characters and more unique gimmicks. However, as a single-player offering, it was seen as a slight step back, a game with ample ideas that were not thoroughly explored. But it did have three LittleBig things going for it. The game was released on both PS3 and PS4, giving it a far longer life than it would as a 2014 PS3 game. It had access to millions of creations made using LBP 1 and LBP 2, effectively preserving those games’ user created content. And it had the best creation tools in the entire series, letting creators create more varied and unique things.

This allowed the LBP community to subsist in the background, filled with young aspiring game developers making their own scattering of levels, all while the original developer Media Molecule was working away at Dreams (2020). A highly ambitious title meant to represent a new era in game creation tools, with an incredibly long development schedule with numerous roadblocks. …It also probably did not do so great based on some leaked sales data I discussed earlier this year, but I’m getting off topic.

Sony basically retired the series for six years until they brought it back as a PS5 launch title, Sackboy: A LittleBig Adventure (2020). It was only really a LittleBigPlanet game in terms of technicalities, character, and aesthetics, being a 3D platformer and lacking the user generated content on the originals. Hell, even the PSP game had a level creator. It was still a good, colorful 3D platformer, and we cannot have too many of those. (People thought they were saturated in the 90s, but there were only, like, 40 of them and manufactured a collective hallucination.) Unfortunately, it only sold a bit over 1.5 million units and only 62,900 during its first four months on PC. So don’t expect Tencent’s Sumo Digital to make Sackboy 2 anytime soon.

This was already an odd situation for the series… but then things got bad in March 2021, when hackers used the game to spread transphobic hate speech. They eventually came back some time later, but when different hackers were abusing the game’s online features in April 2024, Sony shut down the online features indefinitely… and indefinitely looks like it is going to be forever. Meaning over 10 million user generated levels were gone.

This was downright terrible, and to make the matter all the worse, Sony is delisting LittleBigPlanet 3 from PSN on October 31, 2024. Sony encountered a problem they chose not to fix as it applied to a decade old game… so they are just burying it under the rug. Fortunately, owners will still be able to play and download the game, but LBP without the user created levels is barely LBP. 

On one hand, I get it. On the other hand, this is basically just killing off a game and leaving its small but passionate fanbase to rot, with their precious creations either locked away on a server or just outright deleted. There are too many levels for them to make them available via a standard download, and with infrastructure this old, it only gets harder to maintain it as time goes on. The game is not making money for Sony, so they cannot really justify, as a legally capitalist entity, devoting resources to keeping this game around.

I want to get angry at this, voice how this is the destruction of a bounty of art, the early work of many working game designers around the world, and a way that millions expressed themselves. Because it is. But this is precisely the sort of problem with having a massive online project that relies on central servers. This is the problem with these big online games. They simply cannot exist forever unless they are constantly being updated and remain consistently profitable. The ability for users to retain and spread their data is mandatory for a modding or creation scene to last decades, and when you centralize, you have a central point of failure. 

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The Great Big Roblox Exposé!
(Roblox Is an X-Rated Pedophile Hellscape)

OH SNAP! Hindenburg Research is a research firm that has a history of looking into massive corporations, finding whistleblowers, and posting elaborate exposés on them. They expose liars profiting billions from misleading investors and there needs to be people like them, as so many corporations flat out LIE to their investors and owners. 

This past week, they just went after Roblox Corporation, and their findings are DENSE, spread across a 16,000 word paper. People actually paid to report things will do a better job of summarizing things than me, and reading the whole thing took a while, so I’ll try to be brief here, boiling things down to five points.

Point One: Roblox Corp has been knowingly and willfully lying about the reach of their platform. One of the biggest points of pride for Roblox is the number of “people” who play the game every day, but ‘people’ is not an accurate descriptor. Through detailed investigations, Hindenburg has determined that what Roblox calls “people” is really their daily active users, which includes people with alt accounts or bots. Depending on the game, this may be a minor distinction, but Roblox is a game where users routinely fear being banned and where AFK farming is common. Per their analysis, they are estimating that anywhere from 25% to 42% of the DAU are either bots or alt accounts, and while that is a wide range… both of those numbers are still massive. It would be one thing if Roblox lacked the means of determining this, but they allegedly have internal books that make this distinction, meaning they absolutely can track this.

Point Two: Roblox Corp has been lying about their engagement. They have said that the average DAU spends 2.4 hours in-game, meaning the platform would be more popular than YouTube. Per their analysis, Hindenburg believes this figure is heavily inflated by bot accounts that play the game 24/7. And given how prevalent these bots are, the actual amount of engagement time per day is probably closer to 1 to 1.2 hours per day. About what the average child spends on mobile games in a given day.

Point Three: The executives running Roblox are raising all sorts of red flags. In 2023, insiders made over $150 million by trading their shares, with the CEO seeing proceeds of $114,586,000. Something you typically do not do while promising record-breaking growth every year. Senior executives have been leaving the company over the past year, presumably wanting to get out before things get bad. In 2023, the company saw a dramatic net loss of $1.159 BILLION, while giving $963 million in compensation to employees who own stock. …But mostly the executives. Also, despite racking in copious amounts of money, Roblox has never been a profitable company. …Largely because they focus on paying out the executives.

Point Four: Roblox is a X-rated pedophile hellscape, and the embedded video at the top of this segment should give you a good idea of what this game has to offer. The platform is thriving with pedophiles who do not even attempt to hide their desires to elicit sex, nudes, or erotic role-play out of children. And people are constantly streaming pornography in public servers. 

It does not block swear words or slurs by default, regardless of the user’s age, so a child can just walk into a school simulator and see someone writing “rape all n***er bitches” on a chalkboard. There has been a bounty of articles written about this over the years, but Roblox has done jack shit about it. They have turned blind eyes to countless child pornography trading groups, even after they amassed over 103,000 members. And the game is so overwhelmingly toxic that interviewed former moderators won’t let their family members play Roblox. 

It is all trivially easy to find and there are no age-based content filters to protect children from this. Sure, there are opt-in parental controls, but those will not stop kids from shooting pregnant women outside of a Walmart. Those are considered all-ages experiences. Same with the public pool fuck zones.

Point Five: Roblox Corp is desperately chasing the illusion of perpetual growth and selling baseless hype on how big the game can possibly be while running out of markets to expand into. It is a Silicon Valley tech company down to its core and has gotten where it is by lying to its investors and owners. Saying insane things like how they expect Roblox to eventually amass a billion players. I personally view these claims as so devoid from reality that they should be classified as lies

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Every time I learn more about Roblox as an entity… the more I become convinced that it should not exist. Its problems are so deep and its scope is so gigantic that I view it as a problem that cannot be fixed, fueled by a greedy culture set by the capitalists running the company. They do not care about children, about teaching people how to make games, and certainly not about creating a fun hang-out place for a group that has been routinely denied such things online.

The SEC should view this as a wake-up call to investigate Roblox, dig for their secret books, and force them to clean up their act… or get fined to oblivion and go bankrupt. This article does not even get into the unregulated irrational digital asset trading market. And I think the sheer volume of pedophilia that has been committed on this platform should put it on the radar of every parents group in the country. I normally hate those bastards, but this is one point where I think we can cross the aisle.

Publicly traded companies, no matter how sophisticated their dealings may be, cannot be allowed to lie on this scale or run such a dangerous operation. They are abusing children given the volume of pedophilia on their platform. And while their lies are not strictly ‘income statement and balance sheet’ items, they are arguably more important.

Something needs to be done about public companies… and something greater needs to be done to make the internet safer for children. Because the amount of pedophilia on display here is truly sickening, and I know that this is not just a Roblox problem. Something needs to be done to protect kids from this garbage. The solution is not to sanitize or censor the internet, but to make maintained and curated kids places they can freely access. 

These places used to be fairly common back in the 2000s, with platforms that had more moderation, less interaction, or cultural barriers that kept out non-children. Dedicated kids forums, NeoPets, Club Penguin, games and activities on websites for networks like Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and Disney Channel. But as websites gave way to platforms, these places either shut down or removed all social or gamey features. 

Now kids are funneled into the same platforms as everyone else, where they are, at best, one aged up account away from being subjected to all the worst behaviors of the world, presented without context. Intense sexual content, hate speech, graphic violence against children performed by White Nationalists (specifically the Israeli Defense Force), and all sorts of Nazi shit. If kids step out of their barely partitioned safety pens, they’ll find shit that might just break them.

As a child of 1994, my online experience was completely different from what kids these days are going through. I was given mostly unrestricted internet access, but I was a chaste child who didn’t like no-no words and never liked talking to people. So the worst thing I did was watch Newgrounds animations and classic ScrewAttack. (You know, Life in a Game, Video Game Vault, AVGN, Top 10s, Captain S, Nametags.) I didn’t even start hitting up Paheal Rule 63 until I was 13— legally not a kid. But in this social age, where my brand of looking and staying quiet is seen as increasingly wrong… being a kid on the internet has to be like dodging hail chunks the size of golf balls. If you don’t pack an iron umbrella, you’ll get a concussion so bad it’ll fuck you for life.

Despite living in an overly corporatist and sanitized bad future, we very well may be living in The Greatest Age of Pedophilia. There is so little stopping kids from snapping photos of their genitals and sending them to deranged fucks. People who bribe them with goodies in games, like Roblox and befriend them only to exploit their innocence so they can either real-fuck them or pretend-fuck them. 

I say now is specifically the best time for pedophiles because… they have AI. They now have infinite photorealistic child pornography derived from actual images of children in sexual duress. What, you thought all AI was as clean as ChatGPT? NOPE! You can find this shit, even if you’re not looking for it.

…There needs to be so much regulation for so many things.

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Raise the Alarmo!
(Nintendo Reveals a Smart Clock to Watch You as You Sleep)

Leading up to the reveal of the Switch 2, there was some buzz about Nintendo rolling out a smaller electronic doodad that was not a games console. And, with no preamble, they dropped a 4.5 minute trailer introducing Nintendo Alarmo. A $100 Nintendo alarm clock toy that wakes users up with songs from various Nintendo games and plays sound effects based on their movement in bed. An idea that I hate on a purely conceptual level,.

I am a deep sleeper who likes to stay up until around 2:00 in the morning and wake up at 8:30, so I have a rather uncomfortable relationship with waking up. This has been the case since I was a grade schooler trying to get up at 6:00 AM to get to school. It continued when I was a teenager who had 20 minutes to wake up, get dressed, eat breakfast, get out the door, and catch the bus. And it got worse when I had to leave for my downtown job at 6:45 and slept in the car/train for an hour. I have always allowed myself very little sleep, preferably only six hours, and the worst thing to wake me up is the sound of something I love. For over a decade, I got shivers whenever I heard the Main Riff track from Sonic Adventure 2 (2001) and the opening notes of the eponymous theme of Sonic Heroes (2003). Because they were the sounds that signaled waking up, getting out of bed, and going to school. I eventually realized this, and replaced it with frustrating static caused by setting my radio to an in-between station. 

I associate any sound with getting up to be a bad sound. So the idea of using a themed alarm clock of noises from a game I love… is a bad one. I tried it, it did not work, it just made me angry, and I cannot imagine people having a significantly different reaction. Hell, it’s been a long standing bit of advice to not wake up to your favorite song, and not only is that the entire identity of this nasty little thing, it plays motion-based sound effects too! …Just fuck right the fuck off you presumptuous bitchy machine, thinking you have the right to tell me what to do! You are a toy! You are property, and I will END YOU if you dare defy me or forget your place! I keep a hammer in my drawer for a reason, and I’m not afraid to use it!

…However, that is not the only reason I hate this thing, just as a mere concept. The Alarmo is Nintendo’s latest attempt at creating a wellness product, a fascination they developed dating back to the Wii Fit (2007) days, if not earlier. Conceptually, products like this make a lot of sense, as ways to improve people’s quality of life… but that is not their purpose. Their purpose is to monitor people and harvest data from them.

‘Wellness’ companies are judging people on the way they sleep to sell them all sorts of bullshit and tat in order to monetize their slumber and ensure they are providing economic value while resting. Are you tossing and turning a lot in your sleep? Are you not having the good sleep? Well, there is a wide variety of sleep masks, white noise machines, and health products you can take to make sure you sleep soundly and are able to act as a productive member of Society™. Oh, and we are collecting all this data in order to sell it to… anybody who wants it. You signed up for that already.

However… it is not just sleep. It is everything!

‘Smart exercise devices’ are just tools to collect people’s biometric data so that it can be sold back to corporations with a vested interest in ‘health,’ such as insurance companies. It gives them more data, more tools, that they can use to discriminate against people with ‘bad behaviors.’

Hereditary companies are collecting DNA so they can deny healthcare and facilitate biological caste systems, granting corporations the freedom to discriminate against ‘human liabilities’ with ‘bad genes’. 

Auto insurance companies are infesting people’s cars with monitors and trackers to justify higher insurance rates, deny them coverage, and refuse to do their one fucking job. 

They’re trying to present an unattainable ideal of humanity as a standard in order to fuel fear that people will desperately try to combat with capitalistic consumption. 

They’re using metrics to gatekeep and restrict what it means to be human in order to deny the iconoclasts the right to be treated as true humans. 

Now, that is some hyperbolic and extreme rhetoric that reflects a future situation rather than the current day. …But am I wrong? I don’t think so. I’m just cutting back on the ifs ands or buts and presenting the worst case scenario as the future. 

So Nintendo, fuck off with this shit, and Nintendosrks, don’t you dare buy this for your collection— ah shit, you’ve already started scalping it, haven’t you? I really can’t trust you to do anything…

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Tomb Raider IV-V-VI Remastered Announced
(The Second Tomb Raider Collection!)

Tomb Raider I-II-III Remastered Starring Lara Croft (2024) was a quality conversion and update of the beloved first three Tomb Raider games originally released in 1996, 1997, and 1998. They took the original games, made a few smart quality of life upgrades, and gave them a toggleable new coat of paint to make them look less dated. The games sold well for what they were, were well received, and opened the door for further remasters. I assumed that there just wasn’t enough interest in the latter half of Core Design’s work to do remasters of their later games. The Last Revelation was seen as a step down and was meant to be the end this era of the series, Chronicles was a last gasp desperate attempt to capitalize on the continued popularity and it sold far worse than other titles. And Angel of Darkness was so bad it nearly killed the series and basically killed Core design (mostly due to Eidos’s deadlines).

Combined with how Aspyr is currently working on the Soul Reaver remasters announced a few weeks ago, I did not expect any more Tomb Raider remasters. …But then I woke up on Friday to find that Tomb Raider IV-V-VI Remastered was announced and it will be released on February 14, 2025 for all major platforms.

This is a far more interesting package than the first one, as these are games with more need for lateral improvements if not changes. Parts IV and V should be able to carry forward many of the QoL changes from the prior collection, as they use the same foundation as the first three. But Angel of Darkness was a PS2 era game, and has so many problems I have to wonder how any re-release will fare. 

AoD game had loads of cut content, a lot of contentious mechanics, and was loaded with technical issues, as it was rushed in an era where games couldn’t be patched. Any AoD re-release requires significant retooling and revision of things the team at Core lacked the time or expertise to get right, and I hope Aspyr can address at least some of them. I mean, they are the folks who (officially) restored the infamous cut content from Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (2004). But did Embracer give them the budget to make these changes? We’ll have to wait and see!

 …Also, I don’t understand how Aspyr is both putting out quality remasters of classic games, but also releasing messes like Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection (2024). A collection that should have been a slam dunk, but I guess Disney didn’t give them the money for TLC or continued updates to a game shipped X months too early.

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Progress Report 2024-10-13

Mood. 

Also, FF VII Rebirth seriously seems like a platonically ideal RPG the more I learn about it. They should have released it on PC at launch. It would’ve sold 500,000 more copies in month 1.

2024-10-06: Wrote the preamble and Silent Hill 2 (2024) bit, for 1,100 words. Then I was a bit listless, unsure of what to do or what to focus on given how I just reached a major milestone and was stressed over work. I wound up watching It’s What’s Inside (2024), a recently released body swap film to see how well it held up after seeing positive buzz in the Press-Switch Discord. It was not what I was expecting, and I do have my issues with it, but probably the best feature length body swap movie that is trying to be a body swap movie. (Your Name (2016) is a complicated subject and I’d need to give it a rewatch to gauge it). I’m gonna push around the TSF Showcase schedule so I can show it off this upcoming week. Get fuk’d Lovecraft! Then added another 1,000 words for the Halo and Student Transfer bits. Then I stayed up late to crank out 1,000 words for the IWI Showcase.

2024-10-07: Busy work day, still managed to get 3,100 words in for the IWI showcase. The reason why my showcases tend to be more synopsis driven is because, as a writer, I have always struggled with structure. I tend to do my best when I have a linear path I can follow with my work and know where things are supposed to go. This is why I am an outline evangelist, and why every one of my non-TSF-VN reviews are structured like a GameTrailers review from 2009. It took me a while to find the structure, so I did a lot of rewording and rewriting, but it finally is getting a form… 4,000 words in.

2024-10-08: My sister got married today, I had big OneDrive issues because Microsoft decided to give Chrome big grief, and I ate too much pizza and got a headache. Only wrote 1,000 words for this Rundown.

2024-10-09: Wrote 2,100 words for the Nintendo clock and Roblox.

2024-10-10: Busy day from start to finish. Just edited the Rundown, made the header image, and didn’t reach the end until 23:30. FUCKZ! It’s What’s Inside showcase has been delayed to October 22nd.

2024-10-11: I did some rewriting for the It’s What’s Inside showcase and pulled some parts together, finishing it aside from an intro section. I carved out a bunch and rewrote maybe 1,500 words with a net increase of only 300 words. Sometimes word count is a shitty way of measuring things. Was too mentally exhausted from work to finish it. You kids are lucky I’m doing stuff during tax season! :P

2024-10-12: Today was another high pressure day, primarily due to a call with a client that lasted FOUR HOURS and a lot of little organizational work and finishing touched to apply afterwards. Combined with my morning chores and a bad night of sleep, I was just kind of beat today. But I forced myself to do something, so I wrote 400 words to wrap up the initial draft of the IWI Showcase. Also, I tried catching up on some TSF comics and did that before flopping to bed.

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

Current Word Count: 115,048

Words Edited: 0

Total Chapters: 16

Chapters Drafted: 16

Chapters Edited: 0

Header Images Made: 0

Days Until Deadline: 24

No progress! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!