This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: Psycho Shatter 1988 Is A Wack-Ass Mess, But I Love It
• Steins;Gate RE:BOOT is a Re;Make (The Terminology of Re-Whatevers Remains Inconsistent)
• Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete Overview Released (I Will Pay $500 For Dragalia Lost Complete, Nintendo…)
• Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition Announced (The Switch Consolidation Continues)
• Nintendo Music Streaming Service Announced (Why The Frick Do Zoomies Use Streaming Services?)
• Sony Closes Down Concord Developer Firewalk Studios (Hopefully The Final Concord Segment)
• The REAL Reason Nintendo is Suing Palworld (A Lawyer Explains Nintendo v. Palworld!)
• Natalie Rambles About How Sports Games Were Ruined (What’s an Accolade?)

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Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Psycho Shatter 1988 Is A Wack-Ass Mess, But I Love It

This past week, I wrapped up my ninth novel, Psycho Shatter 1988: Black Vice X Weiss Vice, which will be posted on Natalie.TF from November 5 to November 21. And now that it is done and dusted, I would like to take a moment to talk about the novel. What it was going to be, what happened during its development, and whether or not I found it to be among my better work. But before that, allow me to give a synopsis:

Psycho Shatter 1988 sees the world invaded by an otherworldly avatar of evil and oppression known as Weiss Vice. Using his transdimensional power, he ushers in the White Awakening, a cataclysmic event where a fifth of the human population is transformed into vicious monsters. With their Earth under threat, Black Vice and their divine companions must empower humanity to fight against these monsters and put an end to Weiss Vice and everything he represents.

That is just my attempt to describe the gist in a single paragraph, and generally describes the first six chapters. Black Vice and their companions combat Weiss Vice’s minions— the Whiterats, awakening powers in the remaining human population of this world. After two chapters of preamble and four chapters of awakenings, they go to battle Weiss Vice, but this is halfway throughout the novel, and they ultimately fail to defeat him, for he is too powerful. 

This leads Black Vice and friends to devise what I affectionately refer to as a harebrained scheme to defeat Weiss Vice by gathering people with unique properties across this world. …And staging an assault on Washington DC in an effort to de-power Weiss Vice. This then culminates in a big final battle, various revelations, before ending on an uplifting note. Because why the hell would I let Weiss win in a story like this?

Structurally, it’s basically the same damn thing as Psycho Bullet Festival 2222 (2022), as I pointed out in my 6/30/24 Rundown. It is a basic Hollywood style, three-act structure, Hero’s Journey esque progression that isolates every chapter to its own location, cluster of scenes, and events. It works, but it is also rather plain and is something that I have misgivings about being the best approach here. Because Psycho Shatter 1988 is a story with a lot of ideas behind it that has lingered in the back of my mind for years at this point. And even after writing a 115k word story and doing everything I planned… I still feel like it is missing something, that it is messy and not quite extreme enough. That the end result is too short, too long, or too simplistic. 

But before I can get into all that, I should detail the development history of this novel.

As I detailed in my 2020 version of The Saga of Dawn and Dusk timeline, I had no plans for PS1988 and intended to jump directly from Psycho Shatter 1985 to Psycho Shatter 2000: Black Vice Mania. Instead, I only added this story to THE LIST in response to my April 1, 2022 short story, Weiss Vice: Glory Unto Genocide. A story that I first conceptualized on August 21, 2021 but put on the back-burner after I finished up PBF2222. While I was working on GUG in late February and early March 2022, I conceptualized a crossover between Black Vice from Psycho Shatter 1985 and this new character, Weiss Vice. I did not have any definite plans for this crossover beyond vagaries. Still, that did not stop me from announcing it on April 3, 2022 as Psycho Shatter 1988 Gaiden: Black Vice X Weiss Vice. 

At this point… I had no clue what this story would be. It was just a vague idea that lacked any form and I would give it form by periodically updating a single Google Doc of ideas and concepts over the span of two years, starting on May 31, 2022. This is not an unusual way of going about things, but it is important to note how long I have been maintaining this idea doc. For two years before I actually started outlining this story, and because of that, this story went through multiple permutations, with ideas being jammed together and dropped. 

To eschew any guise of wisdom, I was just throwing around ideas around on a whim. Hell, the reason why I wanted to call the story Psycho Shatter 1988 is simply due to two factors. One, I like the idea of a story being set 3 years later. In my warped mind, stories should only be set 3, 5, 7, 10, 12, 15, 20, 25, or some increment of 5 years later. Unless you want to be a cheeky bastard who sets a story 97 years later, in which case I love ya and you’ve got a real big dick. But I also had a particular fondness for the idea of setting a story in 1988 due to a song lyric from Make Her Say (I Poke Her Face) by Kid Cudi. “Hold up, born in ’88? How old is that? Old enough.” It was the second track in Team Teamwork’s Dude Whatever It’s Summer 2009 mixtape, and I listened to that mixtape, no joke, no hyperbole, at least 88 times over the past 13 years.

Those are both very bad reasons for me to settle on a title, but that didn’t stop me! And luckily, 1988 just so happened to be very similar to the Nazi dog whistle number that is 1488. I loved this coincidence so much that I used an ambiguous 4 and 9 hybrid as part of this novel’s logo. (As a reminder, this is an anti-racist novel about killing a transdimensional Nazi.)

As for the story itself, I knew from an early point that I wanted the core tenants to be. I wanted it to be hyperbolically politically charged, to deal with concepts of racism, and to feature at least one anime-flavored battle between Weiss Vice and Black Vice. But everything else was more vague and hard to follow. When I picked up on new ideas or concepts, I added them to the pile, again and again. The end result was a document that was so frantic and so burdened with ideas it was hard for me to shape into something cohesive. 

A lot of things shifted and changed as months went on. Fascinations were reworked or dropped. And, because this was too simple, I decided to complicate everything with an interquel story, TSF Series #005-3: Ghost Milky in… The White Terror. Which I thought was a wild and dope story, but the lore and continuity got so messy that I had to write a 1,000 word lore document just to keep this malarky straight.

However, I think the biggest demonstration of my sheer inability to decide on a vision for this story was the excessive number of working titles I had for it.

• Psycho Shatter 1988 Gaiden: Black Vice X Weiss Vice
• Psycho Shatter 1988: Black Vice X Weiss Vice – Political Genocide
• Psycho Shatter 1988: Black Vice X Weiss Vice – Genocide for Justice
• Psycho Shatter 1988: Black Vice X Weiss Vice – Apolitical Genocide
• Psycho Shatter 1988: APOLITICALGENOCIDE
• Psycho Shatter 1988: Black Justice X White Genocide
• Psycho Shatter 1988: Black Power X White Genocide
• Psycho Shatter 1988: Black Justice Version and White Genocide Version
• Psycho Shatter 1988: Vice and the Black Righteous Forces of the Planet Earth X Weiss and the Whiterat Genociders of the Next Dimension
• Psycho Shatter 1988: Vice and the Black Righteous Forces of Earth X Weiss and the Genociders of The White Scourge
• Psycho Shatter 1988: Vice and the Black Righteous Forces of the Planet Earth X Weiss and the White Genociders of the Next Dimension
• Psycho Shatter 1988: Justice X Genocide (Justice Cross Genocide)
• Psycho Shatter 1988: Black Vice X Weiss Vice – Ultra Genocide
• Psycho Shatter 1988: Black Vice X Weiss Vice – Max Genocide
• Psycho Shatter 1988: Black Vice X Weiss Vice – Go Go Genocide

All before dropping the gaiden bit, because this evolved beyond a simple side story. Psycho Shatter 1988: Black Vice X Weiss Vice still feels like it is lacking a certain word to tie it together… but I tried and couldn’t think of a better, more punchy, yet accurate title after two years. Also, I ran into a linguistic hurdle with the term “White genocide.” I kept reading it as the genocide by the Whites, and not the genocide of the Whites. And I wasn’t going to call it “White’s Genocide,” because that looks stupid.

Despite all of this planning, I did not, in earnest, begin production on Psycho Shatter 1988 until, coincidentally, the 12th anniversary of Natalie.TF, May 25, 2024. I intended to swiftly make my way through the outline, to take care of the groundwork and start production by halfway through June, but that was delayed after the stealth launches of Press-Switch V0.6b and Student Transfer V8. Two massive visual novels that devoured my free time and delayed the production of this novel. I did not finish the 30,000 word outline of this novel until June 27, 2024. That is dogwater progress for me, and I am not happy about that. However, in that same time period, I was also busy producing Rundowns and TSF Showcases, which, as detailed in my daily progress reports, routinely ate up many days of possible work.

In light of all these delays, I did not begin writing the first words for PS1988 until July 17. In that time, I made pretty good progress, writing the first five chapters of the story… and then I had to go on vacation with my best friend Cassandra Wright from August 5 to August 16. During the almost two weeks I spent with her, I wrote less than 2,750 words for PS1988. Then, from August 24 to August 31, I made no progress. From September 15 to September 19, no progress. From September 24 to September 28, no progress. The initial draft was finished on October 5, 2024. From October 6 to October 17, no progress. All because I was busy with other shit! From October 18 to October 24, I edited the entire 114k word draft. And from October 25 to October 30, I worked on the header images.

In total, that is 34 days for outlining and 82 days for drafting. But if you will kindly allow me to account for multi-day break periods caused by work, vacation, life, or other projects, I can carve those numbers down. 15 days spent outlining, 52 days spent writing, 7 days for editing, and 6 days for image asset creation. For a 115k word novel. That’s a total of 80 days spent making things. Is that a GOOD figure? Well, using NaNoWriMo’s 50k words in 30 days, that almost tracks if you cut the 6 days for image creation. It’s 115k/74, or 1,550 words per day.

However, how does it track based on MY standards? Well, my 2022 novel, The Dominance of Abigale Quinlan, had an expedient production process that I previously talked about prior to its release. The outline took me 8 days, 35 days to write the 88k word script, 9 days to edit, or 52 days in total. That is almost 1,700 words per day. 

Does this mean I am writing more slowly than I was before? …No. I am writing up a storm pretty regularly, but what I am doing on a daily basis is changing. Rundowns have gotten bigger, I started TSF Showcase in 2023 and it has ballooned into something huge throughout 2024. I am a seasonal worker, so production times are heavily affected by how busy I am at work. Summers and winters are lax and have few commitments, while March to April 15 and September to October 15 are busy for me. These two stories are fundamentally different beasts, with PS1988 requiring far more research and planning compared to Dominance. 

Which is my way of saying that I think I still do pretty damn well for someone who does this for a darn hobby. Hell, I wrote over 11,500 words on 7/26/2024, ya bitch-ass bitches! However, motivation is not always the most easy to find. I am unfortunately not a machine capable of churning out a steady amount of writing every day, and I am prone to distractions and sporadic goofing off. I want to say that I am a person who gets shit done, but there are always going to be people who can do things faster and better than me— like CaptainCaption! At least before their health went to shit, because Christ hates [REDACTED].

Okay, but that is just the days and hours of production of the novel. What about its actual contents? Well… that is where I start becoming less sure of how to really view PS1988. As a novelist, I have written a lot of weird novels, but PS1988 is easily the weirdest of them all. At least so far. And the reason for that… has to do with the underlying goals of the novel. Normally, I approach novels with a series of often unstated goals. Whether denoted by concept, plot, characters, or telling a broader and bigger multi-installment story.

However, most of these tend to be relatively restrained and limited in their scope. The Dominance of Abigale Quinlan was to be a Girl in My Dream style week-long transformation story that ties up the loose ends of Verde’s Doohickey and The Malice of Abigale Quinlan. It was to have the protagonist, Jade, finally come to terms with her insecurity, wrap up her story of personal growth, while setting the stage for additional exploration. And I’d say it did all of those things pretty well. Or at least as well as I could, considering the sorta shaky foundation of the predecessors. (I wrote them when I was 20 to 21, they’re not the best.) It was basically… a TSF story, a story meant to expand on its protagonist as they deal with the latent trauma they went through, and a conclusive story with an open ending. (Side note, but I really should have had a section where Jade goes to school as a final chapter. Ah well.)

Dominance had pretty modest goals… while PS1988 is trying to be a lot of things.

• It wants to be an anti-racist action story where every White person in the world becomes a monster and all remaining humans become powerful warriors who reclaim humanity and kill the leaders of White Supremacy. 
• It wants to be a story informed by facts and harsh truths about the way the world works. The ways powerful systems are used to oppress people, either it be apartheid, capitalism, or the police. The racist policies of politicians of its era, many of which continue to this day. The fact that national decision makers are often flagrantly evil.
• It wants to be harsh, vulgar, and edgy, viewing little as being off-limits, yet its stated morals operate under a simplistic binary of Colored = Good and White = Bad.
• It wants to be a sequel to Psycho Shatter 1985, exploring who these characters became and where they are after going on several hundred years of adventuring. 
• It wants to be a sequel to both Weiss Vice: Glory Unto Genocide and TSF Series #005-3: Ghost Milky in… White Terror, concluding the story of Weiss Vice.
• It wants to be a prequel to Psycho Shatter 2000: Black Vice Mania and dedicates an entire chapter and section of the epilogue to establishing this.
• It wants to be a prequel to Psycho Shatter Alternative: Kaede ♥ Senpai Kiwami, and dedicates basically two chapters to introducing the parents and legacy of a character who will be important at a later time.
• A chapter where the Catholic pope stages a ritualistic execution of children in the Vatican and then uses his minions across the world to execute six million children in a single minute.
• A chapter where Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are both resurrected, forced to speak to each other, and then forced to have sex in order to give birth to the Christ figure savior of this work. A woman named King X Treme. First name X, middle name Treme, last name King. How were these two men going to give birth to a little girl? By dick voring each other. Thank GOD I did not go with this idea.

…In fact, above all else, I would say that PS1988 evolved into being what I call a continuity story. A story where much of the plot, its eb, flow, revelations, and shifts are largely based around continuity. You see this a lot with superhero crossovers— particularly DC’s many attempts to fix their busted-ass continuity. And while this was also the case for PBF2222, there it felt more excusable, because it was a crossover above all else. It was a continuity story that wrapped up loose ends and concluded things while setting the stage for a new era of The Saga of Dawn and Dusk. 

With PS1988, in trying to devise a workable story with these concepts, I devoted a lot of time to establishing things. There’s a chapter fully devoted to filling in the gaps between what happened in PS1985 and what the main characters have been doing in the interim. Another chapter is devoted to just explaining how the characters will defeat Weiss. Half of a chapter is devoted to explaining the background of two characters who are (re)introduced halfway through and don’t really do much of value beyond birth a baby and become magical trinkets. 

About a quarter of the novel is devoted to establishing and introducing characters who, in the context of this novel, are just odd inclusions, but will play major roles in later installments. Hell, the ending— which I am not spoiling— establishes a seismic shift that changes this world and the roles of the main characters, while introducing another new character. All because I have specific plans for the world I want to depict in later installments.

Now, there is definitely enough time spent on the conflict between Weiss Vice and his Whiterat army. I made many efforts to capture the global magnitude of this destruction, and while Weiss Vice is only present in four chapters, he is plenty developed. I mean, he got his own prequel novella.

However, with this finished work before me, I do wonder how this story would look if I focused solely on the humans fighting against the Whiterats. This was one of the initial cruxes of this story, yet I felt I had to limit this idea to only a few chapters, and I eventually settled on 7 or 17. This fact, combined with how some chapters had to focus on characters in specific locations, meant that I had to cut away a lot of these Whiterat encounters and only keep what I considered the bare minimum. Because, otherwise, the story would just get bogged down. Hell, it arguably already is.

As a result of these outline-level cuts, there were a lot of vague concepts that I thought of, but never actually developed beyond a brief fascination. 

• A chapter to be set in Germany where a group of Black, Middle Eastern, or Asian people need to fend off Whiterat Nazis.
• A chapter set in South America, exploring the complex matter of race and colorism in that continent and how White Supremacy can foster even in non-White spaces. Which was directly inspired by my former friend Clavietika. 
• A chapter that explores colorism in Southeast Asia and how Whiteness can be perpetuated through a state of mind, featuring non-White people becoming Whiterats. 
• A chapter set in the Middle East where military Whiterat cyborgs are defeated by the indigenous populations. 

However, these were all omitted very early on. They would take a good bit of research, risk feeling disingenuous, or felt a bit more complex than what I wanted to be a simplistic black and white narrative.

Though, the one idea that got the furthest before being cut was The White Faggot Lynching Chapter, which was just a bad idea from the outset. Which is why I am sharing it with you, because I want to show my whole ass.

The chapter would follow recurring self-insert self-harm character— Nate Neumann— being brought forth before a small town and tortured for being ‘queer’ before a town of lynch-happy Southerners. However, rather than just hang and burn them, the town treated their lynch-based execution as a festival, hosted by a Black emcee with no arms or legs, who is an absolute coon. After riling up the crowd for ‘jolly old faggot lynching’, the emcee would summon a… character tentatively named Ben. 

Ben was to be a giant, physically abused Black man with severe brain damage who was actually two Black men Frankensteined together, except for his dick, which was four dicks sewn together into a ‘weapon of ass destruction’. Ben would then brutally rape Nate to near death before the crowd of Caucasians, who would jerk off to this display while turning into Whiterats in a vaguely Cabin in the Woods by Ariana esque display. Ben would succeed in destroying Nate’s asshole, rupturing their organs and leaving them bleeding from their dick. However, while suffering, Nate would then transform into a Whiterat and, simultaneously, both Ben and the emcee would become super-powered warriors who then kill all the Whiterats before them, especially Nate, who would be justly murdered.

The intention of this chapter was to establish that race is more important than sexuality and gender, and that just because a White person is queer, they are still White and just as capable of White Supremacy. Which was directly inspired by transgender ‘diet Nazis’ I have encountered in the past, and every queer Trump voter out there. However, this chapter was way too fucking much, and I do not believe any further elaboration is necessary. This was basically an unworkable concept, and I made the right call not sharing it with the world.

…Wait.

That covers most of what I wanted to talk about regarding this novel— this novel that nobody has had the opportunity to read yet. However, I do want to end with one final thought.

When a project has a production like this, staggered over the course of years of pre-production without a definitive vision, it is likely that the story is going to be messy. Especially if someone goes through several life changes during that time. Since March 2022, I got a vagina, became an enrolled agent, my parents got a divorce, I bought a house, and I released something like 650k words of fiction. I changed a bunch since then, learned a bunch since then, and this story evolved with me before becoming a crystalized representation of who I am at this moment.

That being said… PS1988 is a messy story. It is trying to tackle a lot of things, the execution is definitely a bit slapdash and janky, but it ultimately functions and I think it does a good job of remaining interesting and entertaining throughout. It’s not as good as the more cohesive PS1985, and I am sure I will develop misgivings about certain bad takes or simplifications I made in writing it, but right now, I am happy to call it my own. 

Also, I doubt any of you will actually read it because nobody reads my novels, especially the longer ones and the ones without TSF. I mean, this one does have a sick and ill TSF sequence, but it is spiritually not TSF. Because despite loving TSF, I do not want to include it in everything I do. I’d say that 80% is sufficient, thank you very much.

Oh, and here’s the WIP novel cover I spent way too long developing before settling on a design that better captures the white X black theming. 

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Steins;Gate RE:BOOT is a Re;Make
(The Terminology of Re-Whatevers Remains Inconsistent)

Well, this was an odd thing to wake up to. An announcement that the next Steins;Gate project is a remake of the first game in the series, dubbed Steins;Gate RE:BOOT and slated to come out in 2025. …Which I have mixed thoughts on, but before I can get to those, I think I should recap my thoughts of this time traveling sci-fi VN series. 

The original Steins;Gate (2009) was a landmark adventure game in its day, thrived as it was spread across more and more platforms, and became one of the go-to visual novels and anime to ‘get people into that stuff’. I played it six years ago, enjoyed it quite a bit, finding the characters delightful, the time travel structure compelling, the art splendid, and the navigation just kinda stupid. I even enjoyed many of the more dated elements, allowing the story to feel like a 2009 period piece.

I also checked out the sequel, Steins;Gate 0 almost five years ago, and it simply lacked the same vision or direction. It had a lot of great ideas and concepts, but it failed to deliver a singular cohesive narrative, with each route feeling like a disparate alternate universe written by a different writer. Because they sort of were. Its fan service and ‘eccentricities’ were taken to a new extreme, and the story simply lacked the same quality or intent. I’d actually go so far to say that I would prefer the game if it were just a bunch of side stories. As I said in my review, “Steins;Gate 0 is a title that I enjoyed my time with while playing, but also one that I like increasingly less the more I think back on it.” And now I think it’s ‘just okay’. 

I still liked the game, enough that it inspired me to write a TSF Steins;Gate fan fic of it as part of a failed experimental segment, but it put me off from other supplemental media for the series. Namely the side story collection and the romance VN elseworld game. I especially was not interested in the ‘remasters’ of the two main games, Steins;Gate Elite and Steins;Gate 0 Elite. Which both trade the stylish and sharp art of the original VNs for dark, dreary stills from the anime with less detail and less color. A worst of both worlds between playing the original and watching the anime.

It has been 15 years since the original release, and if the original creative team wanted to write a new sequel, I’d still say they should go for it and evolve on the foundation they set forth. But this being a remake, I am of two minds. One, I do not think that is a particularly good use of resources given how the game has already been re-whatevered, and it was a downgrade. You got one shot, and you blew it, bae! Two… I think Steins;Gate is a title that will clash with more and more modern sensibilities given the era it was created in and the culture that informed it. 

There’s a fair bit of runoff from late 2000s otaku and 2chan culture in the story. Daru is a character that has only gotten more… uneasy as time has gone on and dudes like him have done awful things. While the first game is not as bad as 0, it is still pretty horny in ways that can be seen as lecherous. And while I think Luka’s portrayal in the original game is ‘okay for its time’, subsequent media seems weirdly against the idea that they are transgender. When… them being a trans girl is not even paratext, it is just text. So a remake that doubles down and recontextualizes Luka as trans would be appreciated. I mean, trans rights have made some strides in Japan since 2009.

I certainly cannot say that writers should not revisit previous stories and remake them— I did that already with Psycho Shatter (95YcH0_Sh4πeR) (2014) and Psycho Shatter 1985: Black Vice;ReBirth (2019). But I do not think these issues warrant redoing the artwork, likely redoing the VA, and pouring more money into a story that has been told, retold, and retold again. I would rather they just work on the 2020 announced Steins;???, which may or may not be canceled considering all the shake-ups that have happened at Chiyomaru Studio over the past four years. Steins;Gate 0 Elite was announced over four years ago, but has not come out. Developer Mages entered insolvency in late 2022 after Anonymous;Code did really poorly in Japan at launch. So maybe this remake is a Hail Mary to keep the studio alive by remaking its most prominent and beloved game.

Now, I do not think that is a good idea, as people have already played, bought, or watched the original, and a sequel would be the better call. But insolvency is a dire situation and this might, somehow, be a safer approach. Hell, this might just be an order from parent company Colopl. And they’re a company that bet big on blockchain gaming, so they only make the ‘best’ decisions.

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Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete Overview Released
(I Will Pay $500 For Dragalia Lost Complete, Nintendo…)

Oh. I nearly forgot about this one. 

Back in August, Nintendo announced that their third biggest mobile game, Animal Crossing Pocket Camp (2017) would undergo the inevitable fate of all gacha games, end of service. This would have been a massive loss if not for the fact that they paired this announcement with the declaration that they will release an offline version of the game. Well, not necessarily an offline version, but a “paid version that does not require a persistent internet connection.”

Two months later and with EOS only a month away, Nintendo has revealed this paid version as Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete. A title that aims to be… a complete version of Pocket Camp. One that does not require a ‘constant data connection”, has no multiplayer, does not have any gacha currency, and no battle premium pass either. But your profile and character will all be preserved, so the labor invested into this game will not objectively be all for nothing.

Now, I played the game for a week at launch and only redownloaded the game this past week. As such, I do not understand the nuances of its design, but from the overview trailer, it sounds to be about what people would expect and hope for. The game will have zero monetization elements beyond the initial purchase. All applicable premium pass exclusive features will be included in the game, like walking with your favorite animal critter. Some lite social features will be preserved with QR codes that players can generate and share with others, allowing them to meet the avatars of other players in a special locale.

Events in the game will rotate on a four-year cycle— which sounds crazy to me, but I guess Animal Crossing is meant to be a forever game. New events and items will be added to Complete through September 2025— which is just a bizarre decision. All limited items (presumably excluding certain crossover items) will be made available for purchase using in-game currency and, presumably, be available during event reruns that happen on the four-year cycle.

Overall, it is not quite the offline version I was presenting it as based on the initial debut, and we will need to wait to see how the game functions when it is released on December 3, 2024. Where the paid-app will debut with a 50% introductory discount, bringing the game down to $10 through January 31st, where it will go back to being $20. Again, an odd approach, but that’s a very low and approachable price that, most likely, will nudge many existing players to check it out. 

Heck, I went and pre-ordered the game, as a sign of financial support and encouragement for future projects like this, because I want more projects like this and Mega Man X-DiVE Offline. …Which means I went against what I said about Nintendo in April 2023, where I swore off from financially supporting them beyond Pokémon Home, because I have decades-old Pokémon on that thing! Oh well. This is only $7 going into their pockets.

I don’t want to take on any future commitments, but I will check out Pocket Camp Complete after it comes out and do something with my thoughts on it. Probably not a review, but at least a Rundown preamble ramble. Though, after playing the game for a few hours this past week, I cannot imagine my coverage being positive. Because this game just feels like a skinner box.

Also, I am serious with that subtitle up above. I would pay $500 for a Dragalia Lost premium re-release. Because I am a deranged bastard who spent WAY too much time with this game. It was my ‘pandemic live service’, I wrote multiple super-sized Rambles on it, I wrote a fanfic that I turned into a full-blown legally distinct novella. Shit, I spent over 250 hours working on a design document about how an offline version of the game should/could work.

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Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition Announced
(The Switch Consolidation Continues)

…And now all we need is a port of Twilight Princess HD, Wind Waker HD, and Yoshi’s Woolly World with the 3DS port content added in. Though a Pushmo collection and NES Remix double pack, reworked Paper Mario: Color Splash, and Kirby and the Rainbow Course are not impossible. But not a Splatoon 1, because what even is the point in re-releasing what was extensively a multiplayer game? Everything else, though? Too gamepad dependent. 

After Nintendorks have gone thoroughly loco over the social betrayal of Nintendo and their lack of Switch 2 announcement, the company threw them a bone by announcing another Q1 2025 title. A remaster of a quintessential 2015 Wii U game that far more people were interested in than actually bought it. A game that aimed to make the most of the Wii U’s technical capabilities and make the system look like a current gen console. X! Or as it was later named, Xenoblade X, or as it is unfortunately known in The West, Xenoblade Chronicles X. (I just know that one marketing dude at Nintendo of Europe was responsible for bolting the JRPG-flavored word of chronicles to the end of the original title. And I hope they get bi-weekly night terrors for their crimes.)

Anyway, Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition was announced for Switch, debuting on March 20, 2025. Visually, the game is very similar to the Wii U original, but with slight yet meaningful changes to the character models. They’re a bit less realistic, more anime, and some of the jank has been smoothed out. Which is a good thing as some faces in the original, namely Lin’s were rough. Environments look to be largely the same, or similar enough, but that’s fine. The 2015 release was such a souped up mega-game that it required an additional download for texture packs, which is basically unheard of for a console game, let alone a Nintendo game. 

Additionally, the game will include an additional side campaign of some manner. One related to a raven-haired man who washes up on a beach and is greeted by a hooded figure. Perhaps this will be some prelude to a Xenoblade X follow-up, or some less devoted means of finishing up the story after the original’s open ending. I’d comment on who these guys are, but I have never seen a Wii U in person or downloaded Cemu. 

Overall, this is great to see, as the more valuable experiences that can be siphoned from older consoles rotting away in a basement, the better. I would ask why it has taken nearly a decade for this game to come to Switch, but this scenario actually makes total sense to me.

Series developer Monolith Soft has largely moved onto new Switch 2 projects and wants to get out one last low-cost project while the Switch still has an active install base. As such, they are remastering a game that people have wanted to see on Switch since 2017. Why not do it sooner? Because Monolith— or more likely Nintendo— did not want to dilute the Xenoblade series identity or plot with what is extensively a spin-off. There was a clear through line with Xenoblade 2 (2017), Xenoblade Definitive Edition (2020), Xenoblade 3 (2022), and Xenoblade 3: Future Redeemed (2023). They have similar art direction, sensibilities, mythos, and shared continuity. 

Hopefully Nintendorks with ‘nothing to play talk about’ actually check this game out this time, because I don’t think it sold even half a million on Wii U, despite being poised as one of its bigger titles. Or, if you don’t want to play the game, then at least listen to the soundtrack. Particularly the songs with vocals. They’re dope.

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Nintendo Music Streaming Service Announced
(Why The Frick Do Zoomies Use Streaming Services?)

I have said this before, but I do not understand why so many people pay for music streaming services. Music files are so small that it’s hard to justify streaming them instead of downloading them, even on the frustratingly small storage of modern phones. (I will never forgive Apple for their war against the 3.5mm jack or their refusal to support MicroSD cards. If your device ‘cannot fit one,’ you are a dirty liar.) I would much rather buy an album rather than pay a monthly fee, knowing that basically none of that money goes to artists whose work I enjoy.

Now, I know that I am a musical dinosaur. I like keeping a collection of music, arranging lone songs into albums, listening to them repeatedly, and rediscovering albums every few months, if not years, as I sift through my library. To me, this is the way to enjoy music, and I do not understand how streaming makes this easier. 

Is it because you can just press a button and have it discover similar music? Is it the ability to save and find playlists? Are people really that devoted to cross-platform audio sharing? I will admit, it was jank-as-hell having music on my work PC, home PC, and Vita when I was working downtown a decade ago. But like all good jank, it worked. And nowadays everybody and my mother has these stupid wireless headphones that are built to be replaced every two to three years, so I’d imagine they just use their phone to listen to music. Or are modern phones just designed in a way that makes it hard to just store and play music files? I genuinely do not know, but I’m kind of an old timer when it comes with phone tech. Many people my age view their phone as an all-in-one device, but I didn’t get mine until I was 24, when I used it for 2FA and games. Now, five years later, ain’t a damn thing changed.

…However, I have used my phone to play music via Apple Music. Because if you buy music from iTunes, you get both the files and access to unlimited streaming, for free. That’s a damn good deal in my book, and is so convenient that I have used iTunes as my go-to place to buy music for years. Well, after my beloved Bandcamp, but I can’t get Nihmune on Bandcamp!

Akumako: “Yo, shout out to my cousin Akuma Nihmune! She’s been doing dope shit since she debuted, and I’m as proud of her as an auntie could be!”

Are we really making that the lore?

Akumako: “Are you trying to get 500 words deep in on this ish without getting to the fucking point?”

Yes! 

Akumako: “…Wait, so is my full name actually Akuma Ko-something?”

Yes, Akuma Kourine.

Akuma Kourine: “Kourine? Dude, fuck the fuck off with that shit, like what?”

Anyway, topic time!

Akuma Kourine: “Hey wait, I need to know if this is canon—”

***GUNSHOT***

Nintendo Switch Online is one of the rare entertainment subscriptions that continually adds new content and features over time to justify its existence without constantly axing things. At first, it was a lame way to get access to boring NES games, but over the past six years, they turned the service into… actually a pretty good deal. Sure, NES, SNES, and GameBoy games ain’t nothing special, but that’s nearly 200 games if you count all the regions, and I know Nintendo is gonna milk their GameBoy library for years. It took them six years to give the people Donkey Kong Jr. Math (1983) and Golf (1984), and they haven’t even brought over the first two Wario Lands yet!

However, I was not expecting them to roll out any major additions this close to a new console release… and then they announced that NSO subscribers were getting access to a Nintendo music streaming platform called… Nintendo Music.

Nintendo has been historically terrible about putting their music on major platforms, choosing to covet it for themselves and rarely even releasing CDs back in the 90s or 2000s. This has caused places like YouTube to be wild wests for Nintendo music uploads. To the point where places like them and Kingdom Hearts Insider have been the best places to listen to and download Nintendo music for… almost decades!

As such, Nintendo releasing an app where you can stream unlimited Nintendo music for only $20/year, while getting access to online and nearly 200 (mostly bad) video games… is a really good deal. Hell, this will convince 126,372 Nintendorks to cancel their Spotify by the end of the calendar year.

Ghost of Akuma Kourine: “That’s a totally real number by the way. Belie dat!”

On its own, I think this is a great move, a way to better endear Nintendo fans to Nintendo and make people associate and enjoy their music even more. I do not have a comprehensive list of titles offered on this service, but it seems to be about everything… except for Pokémon. It comes with a lot of curated playlists, the ability to loop tracks for up to an hour, and seems like a functional and attractive app that will be a boon to Nintendo likers all around. 

However, there is one notable shortcoming with this app. The fact that it is only an app and not available as a website, which I think is a missed opportunity. While I am sure most humans use their phones or smart devices to play music, there is a reason why most music streaming platforms have web players. Because if people are at their computer and want to listen to music while they work or browse, they’ll probably listen to music on their computer, just to simplify their life. 

Additionally, I also view this app as a potential harbinger of bad things. Namely Nintendo using the introduction of this new music platform as a cause to crack the whip on people using their music. Nintendo has always had the ability to cleanse YouTube of all Nintendo music… but they chose not too. And now that there is an official way to listen to their music, I worry that they will start taking down any ‘competition’. That sounds absurd, I know… but never underestimate Nintendo. They could rape and murder millions of children if they wanted to.

Edit 11-03-2024: Hey! Guess who forgot to check the music library of the Nintendo Music app before this shit was ret-2-go? ME! Yeah, it turns out they did include the Scarlet and Violet soundtrack, so the Pokémon comment was just WRONG and they barely included anything past the Switch generation. I get that they will take their sweet time adding more soundtracks, but FFS, guys. You should have launched with WAY more games. No, I do not care if Animal Crossing 5 has 400 tracks! (Yes, it is Animal Forest 5. Amigo Fart is a spin-off. Harpy Hope Destroyer is DLC for 4 packaged as a full game. and Pocket Prison is a load of bullshit that I tried playing this past week, and it sucks ass.)

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Sony Closes Down Concord Developer Firewalk Studios
(Hopefully The Final Concord Segment)

Well, this was inevitable. Two months ago, Sony launched and subsequently unlaunched Concord (2024). After gauging their options following a worst-case scenario, they are now shutting down the Bellevue-based developer, Firewalk Studios.

In the past two months, far too much digital ink has been spilled over this always online hero shooter live service, and I am no exception. But not because of the game itself. For whatever mechanical and narrative merits Concord had, it was seldom ever discussed as a game, but as an entity. It was a symbolic thingamabob that represented industry trends, a widget whose merits as a game are not only irrelevant, but anti-relevant. …All while being my personal pick for the most culturally significant game of the year. 

Now, this closure is far from a good thing. The past two years have been dreadful for people trying to make a living in games, and this is another hammer to the wall of stability, as over a hundred people are now out of a job. This will displace families, put people through financial hardships, and the project these people have spent years of their lives on have nothing to show for it. This, by every account, fucking sucks, and should not be happening. Sony will always need support studios to help with other projects, and Firewalk could do that. Unfortunately, Bellevue is prohibitively expensive, so the best Sony is willing to do is offer the staff positions at their other studios. 

While details on the production of Concord (2024) are slim, and I do not believe the shitslingers who have made up likely fictitious anecdotes, I am inclined to put the majority of the blame on Sony. They determined what the game would be, oversaw the production, and approved everything. But rather than punishing the decision makers, the innocent workers are getting sacked. 

If you think that’s shitty… vote for Kamala Harris in the election on Tuesday, ya dumb-pea, and keep voting for Democrats or whatever left-leaning parties you have in your neck of the globe. Just not your Green Party equivalent. It won’t change things immediately, but you need to think of life in terms of trends and decades.

Oh, and they also sacked a German and Finnish mobile studio they acquired back in 2022. Formerly Savage Games yet now known as Neon Koi. None of their projects were announced, and because it is a mobile studio, the console-brained core of the online gaming zeitgeist don’t give a hoot.

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The REAL Reason Nintendo is Suing Palworld
(A Lawyer Explains Nintendo v. Palworld!)

I’ve been following Palworld’s cultural reception for a while— because I like the game and find the controversy around it to be fascinating. January was a house fire of people flinging poop and hay around while the game kept selling millions because of the signal boosting. Things became spicy when Palworld Entertainment was founded as a joint venture between Aniplex and Sony Music back in July. Then they became superhot when Nintendo sued developer Pocketpair for patent infringement back in September. I identified the lawsuit as being more of a saber rattling attempt to keep Pocketpair in its place and for Nintendo to show their teeth. However, I was never good at business law, let alone international business law, and do not fully understand how companies of any scale or nationality function. Well, except for small corporations who I do tax returns for. They function badly. 

Fortunately, there are people like Moony and Moon Channel that have expertise in these fields and he presented a very interesting breakdown of the situation. On why Nintendo is going after Pocketpair and why they are pursuing a patent lawsuit. As always, watch the full video for his full analysis, but it comes down to a few points.

• The Pocketpair, Sony, and Pocketpair Entertainment situation is analogous to the relationship of Game Freak, Nintendo, and The Pokémon Company circa the mid-90s. Indicating that Sony is, reductively, trying to position Palworld as their Pokémon.
• Japanese legal agreements and business relations are driven by a lot of unspoken agreements and social contracts, with the true intentions often being unsaid. Which, as an aside, is wildly different from the more literal agreements of the western business world. 
• Patent lawsuits are complicated, time-consuming, costly, and risky, so companies like Nintendo typically only use them if they are particularly threatened. 

• Nintendo is likely concerned about Palworld obscuring the brand image of Pokémon if it becomes a major multimedia franchise backed by Sony. And Pokémon is the crown jewel of the Nintendo empire, so the idea of a rival company going against them is concerning.
• This is all, in a way, related to the infamous failed Sony developed Super Famicom CD add-on that gave way to the development of the PlayStation and Sony Computer Entertainment. An event that happened three decades ago that birthed Nintendo’s greatest rival. This, per his view of history and the social contracts of Japanese business, still remains a sore spot for Nintendo.

Now, I think Moony is reaching a bit with these conclusions— especially the last one— but there is good cause to his conclusion here. Nintendo might not want to go after a little guy, though when Sony is pushing to turn an indie game into a multimedia juggernaut, they have reason to care, to at least look aggressive. If they lay down and do nothing, then it will be harder to fight Palworld if it does grow to be something bigger than it already is.

…And before anybody talks about how the game was ‘just a fad’, a game does not need to be a ‘life consumer’ or ‘talk of the town’ to still be popular and successful. You are basically begging Valve to lock down on Steam’s API with comments like that.

Moony also mentions that patent lawsuits often take years of hard litigation and proving or refuting points. So there’s a good chance that nothing definite will come from this case for almost a decade before Pocketpair gets slapped with a $30 million bill and required royalty payments.

Also, I was wrong when I said that “Aniplex and Sony Music are basically different companies than PlayStation” in the aforementioned July post. I was being an American and assuming that the rest of the world worked like America. Though, modern PlayStation is an American company— why else would they have American executives and close Japan Studio? So I just straight up do not understand how their relationship works nowadays.

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Natalie Rambles About How Sports Games Were Ruined
(What’s an Accolade?)

Oh hey, a loosely convenient excuse to talk about something only vaguely related! My favorite!

I don’t think there is a single genre in gaming that has undergone such a substantial decline in quality and diversity as sports games. Sports games used to be a regular pillar of the industry. From basic baseball, football, basketball, and Americaball games on older systems to titles that were genuinely considered some of the best of their era. Sega had a brilliant run with sports games across the Mega Drive and Dreamcast. Games like NBA Jam, NFL Blitz, and the EA BIG Sports games of the PS2 era were both good-ass games and good-ass sports games. But come the rise of the HD era, the genre started to suffer. The burden of annualized releases stifled innovation and improvement. There was a greater push toward realism over fun. And the games gradually became casinos before becoming straight up bad.

Unfortunately, Big Sports Entertainment basically controls the entire genre in these modern times, and they do not really care about replicating the joy of sports. Oh no. Instead, they want people to think of sports as a monetary exchange for pleasure and emotion. They want people to buy tickets, buy concessions, buy access to live streams, gamble their paltry savings on sports, talk to people about fantasy sports leagues, and gamble in their simulation sports games.

Admittedly, there is nothing to prevent someone from making their own equivalent to any of the good sports games. …Except for the fact that sports are all about brands, about celebrity athletes, about consumerism, about your team, your hometown, your allegiance, your Christ. And to get access to these things, a game developer would need to pay an arbitrarily high licensing fee. 

This means that unless you want the live service sim slop of EA’s NFL’s John Madden’s Football, Take-Two Interactive’s NBA 2000+, EA’s Formerly FIFA Football Club, and whatever else, you’re shit-outta-luck. And I think part of the reason why things turned out this way is because the gaming core is/was filled with so many anti-sports people who want to keep gaming clean of this vile jock stank. Like me circa 2008, back when I used gramer like it was a slur. (Cripes I’m getting old…)

Sports games can be just as fun and rewarding as any other type of game imaginable, and there is a reason why they remain so popular. But capitalism has corrupted this good with its monetization. And to think, we wouldn’t have this problem if it weren’t for games going online and evolving beyond simple fun. Sports games should have always remained ‘easy to learn hard to master’ casual multiplayer-driven games without any of this progression-based bullshit.

I swear, progression-based online multiplayer and ranking systems are genuinely the worst thing to happen to online games. When Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007) introduced its experience and leveling system, the genre suffered catastrophically and people started playing for metrics over fun. I would argue that shooters should never make their player stats or K/D ratios public, because it turns what should be intense yet ultimately casual, distinctly game-y, fun into a competition. And competition is bad, actually. 

Rage quitting, cheating, scummy tactics, harassment, or just being toxic would all go down significantly if multiplayer games were simple instances, without progression, and without ‘achievements’. Instead, they focus on the ‘pride and accomplishment’ of being good at a video game, when this genre of human historically hasn’t accomplished shit with their lives. All while being little more than gristle for an engagement machine, dopamine addicts who do not realize how they are the ones being played.

Shit, maybe the people who say gaming peaked in 2005 actually have a point. Loads of my favorite games are from the PS3 generation, but that’s when all the bad shit we’re dealing with today started coming into focus. 

…Wait, what was the topic for this rant?

Ghost of Akuma Kourine: “I dunno, something about a compilation of unlicensed sports games made by Accolade.”

Oh… So 2D sports games. Yeah, no 2D sports games, generally speaking, were pretty rough and the sports game genre, much like the racing genre, underwent a dramatic evolution in its transition to 3D. I love 2D games, but 2D sports games are hard to go back to. Overhead ones work for certain contexts, but 3D just makes them more approachable and less abstract.

Ghost of Akuma Kourine: “So this was an unrelated tangent that you just wanted to get off your chest?”

Eyup!

Ghost of Akuma Kourine: “And you are still using the trailer for this Accolade Sports Collection thing as the header despite that?”

It’s easier to write this half-assed excuse than make a new header…

Ghost of Akuma Kourine: “And why are you this passionate about sports games when you ain’t never even played one aside from Wii Sports?”

It’s the principle, damn it!

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Progress Report 2024-11-03

Drats! I might not be able to get a TSF Showcase out on Monday. I sidelined it and as of Thursday I have not started writing anything for Shoujo Nyuumon. Which is a really good slice-of-life school affair following two TSF’d MTF protagonists. I want to do that, then Choripan’s latest ST scenario, then Mayonaka no X Giten, then Lady Valliant, then some Literotica stories some guy sent to my inbox. And TSF Series #019 will be a summer-set Christmas entry, at best.

2024-10-27: Wrote the 850 word Steins;Gate bit. Wrote 650 for the Animal Crossing bit. Also wrote 2,000 words for the preamble. Got cracking on the header images, starting with the first two chapters before working on the cover. Went through two versions for the cover image before I realized I was on some kimochi with the OG Weiss Vice header, so I just did that X Dominance of Abigale Quinlan. Got through the two cover images and the first four chapters. 

2024-10-28: Busy with work until around 15:30, when I got back to working on the PS1988 header images, getting up to chapter 11, so that is 7 headers in a day. Not bad.

2024-10-29: Wrote 650 word Xenoblade bit. Wrote the 400 word Concord bit. Made another 5 header images, with just ONE remaining, as I worked till 17:00. Tomorrow I will polish off ‘n’ up the header images, export ’em, and upload ’em. Wrote 1,700 words for the preamble because I wanted to feel more productive.

2024-10-30: Wrote 600 word Palworld bit and the 1,000 word Nintendo Music bit. Made the final header, exported every header image twice after realizing a systematic error, then got all the images uploaded. After finally completing everything at midnight, I just ran out of steam and decided to call it a night. Because I just finished my latest novel, ya stinky poop!

2024-10-31: Wrapped up this Rundown like a stanky little condarn (because condamn(condom) is a swear) and wrote the 800 word sport game bit, based on a shower thought from Tuesday night. Thanks Wrestling With Gaming, you’re cool! Did maybe 600 usable words for the next TSF Showcase, which I delayed working on because my creative juices are still sapped from finishing up a novel and passion is low with the election threat looming over my head.

2024-11-01: Hey hey! Guess who was being a lazy girl by doing basic bookkeeping and assembling for like four hours before playing four hours of PokeRogue ‘cos they had an event going on! Dis Bitch! But I did manage to wrap up the Shoujou Nyuumon piece (1,000 words, editing 1,600 word mini showcase), which was like getting blood from a stone, because I lacked the brain milk needed to make my shit atomic. (Nat-nee really is an enigma wrapped in a mystery and a mystique myriad.)

2024-11-02: Uh… I did 5 hours of CPE today because I am finally done with tax season. Then I did some work, chores, hung out with Cassie and Shiba for a bit— they’re my friends and I love ’em— and started reading a 600 page ongoing TSF body swap comic per a request.

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

Current Word Count: 115,162

Words Edited: 115,162

Total Chapters: 16

Chapters Drafted: 16

Chapters Edited: 16

Header Images Made: 16

Days Until Deadline: 2

It’s doooone~! *Dies*