This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: I Want to Do Everything! 
• Animal Crossing Pocket Camp Complete is Just An Offline Gacha Game (And It Sucks Because of It)
• Tetris: The Grand Master 4: Absolute Eyes Announced (An Offline Competitive Tetris Game in 2025?)
• Year-End Recaps Should Be at the END of the Year (December Is the Un-Month)
• World End Politico (What the Hell Is Going On in the World?)

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Rundown Preamble Ramble:
I Want to Do Everything! 

The past two weeks of my life have been dedicated to The Wotch. Reading it, writing extremely detailed critiques of it, and just stewing in its developmental history. And in doing so, I have decided to make it my first three-part showcase, as there is simply too much to discuss. And in trying to discuss it all, I have felt my sanity slowly fade away as my self-imposed deadlines draw near.

I want to do a bountiful number of things pertaining to my myriad interests and hobbies, yet the more large-scale projects I take on and the more commitments I make, the harder this goal is, and the worse I feel. I feel bad that I am limiting the number of works I am showing off in TSF Showcase this year. I feel bad for not getting out more Student Transfer scenario reviews. I feel bad about just not playing video games in the capacity I used to, when I love reviewing games. And I feel bad about not keeping my image library organized, letting shit pile and pile up, while I eschew further research.

But the thing that has been blighting me the most are my novels and TSF Series. I present myself out as a writer above all else, and despite just finishing a novel a month ago, I am desperate to get back to writing fiction. I am filled with a routine burning desire to just dig into a big meaty RPG. And I am haunted by the fact that I might not be able to meet the deadlines I have imposed on myself for the next 2.5 years. Basically, I want to write 5.5 novels.

I want to do everything, but I need to choose and balance everything. Including ‘unproductive’ time with ‘productive’ time. Because I am not and have never been someone who can just work, work, work, without ever stopping. I get distracted, bored, and run out of passion to work on most things at 1:00 in the morning. I want to be super productive and treat everything as a ‘run day’ (that’s an OLD reference) but I simply cannot do that.

So, I am left to wallow in this semi-productive fugue state, where I am keeping track of my progress every day, keeping track of all my things, but not able to fix underlying issues. Because you cannot fix that which cannot be fixed! You can only make sacrifices and sacrifice the un-sacrificed until you are left with… I don’t even know what!

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Header image comes from the lovely CrownCosmo, who I have been following since she first came onto the scene. However, I couldn’t help myself from desecrating her work by erasing her artsona and replacing it with my artsona of Akumako. I spent WAY too long working on it, and it kinda looks like ass, but whatever!

I swear, if Natalie.TF ever goes down, I’m just going to rebrand my online identity to Akmako, aka Akuma Kourine, and snag the domain of Akumako.TF.

Akumako: “Is that what it will take for me to become real?”

Yes, my precious daughter. Yes it is.

Akumako: “…That better just be a cute way of saying I’m one of your creations.”

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Animal Crossing Pocket Camp Complete is Just An Offline Gacha Game
(And It Sucks Because of It)

So, while aspiring to do everything, I somehow found the time to check out Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete. An offline version of Nintendo’s 2017 mobile experimental expansion of Animal Crossing, before it became an A-tier IP with the release of New Horizons. After this project was announced and went up for pre-order, I both bought it, re-downloaded Pocket Camp and played it for the first time in roughly seven years. Then I stopped playing it four days later, because the game kind of sucks.

Animal Crossing is in a unique genre as a real-time life simulation game. It was always meant to be a game you play at your own pace, ideally through small play sessions every day, perhaps a bit more on certain holidays where there is more to do. It was and is a low-stakes relaxing adventure, but with the rise of multiplayer, market manipulation, and full terrain customization, there is far more to do in its latest release. And presumably far more to do in subsequent releases.

However, Pocket Camp is a game that aims to break down and simplify Animal Crossing as much as it reasonably can, and in doing so, it destroys the facade the game was built around. Rather than having a unique town for every player, the world of Pocket Camp consists of a handful of tiny rudimentary environments. Forest, beach, island, river forest, outside shop, rock quarry. All of which the player accesses by teleporting, and all of which are designed for strict utilitarian purposes. Get resource fruit X from location A, find fish type Y in location B, and head to the bug island if you need bugs.

What are these used for? To perpetuate a resource exchange system. Every three hours, the four main environments become populated with a new series of animal friends with a handful of personalities between them who want random stuff. They want fish, bugs, or fruit, and you provide it to them in exchange for currency and myriad materials, mostly used for crafting, and experience points. Oh, and if visiting them and engaging in text conversations is too much, you can have a seagull man deliver them. It is far more efficient.

These crafting materials are in turn used to amass furniture, clothing, and facilities, which are used to appease animal friends, which grants the player with more animal friends. It all perpetuates a system that I would simply describe as grinding for grinding’s sake, performing task after task without any real underlying gameplay or story to keep the player engaged. There is no true strategy or depth to one’s actions, only inventory and trinket management. The animal friends never have anything interesting to say, and it only took me minutes before I began treating them like the gussied up chat bots they are. Cute yet hollow facsimiles who only exist to convert one resource for another to perpetuate this machine.

It’s mindless, boring, yet FOMO keeps players coming back every three hours in order to continue churning the machine, with the hope they might get something good. Yet, the only light at the end of this rainbow is the customization. And holy potatoes does this game have some wild customization options! During its 7 year run, the game went bananas with its household decorations and outfits, creating a catalog that makes a Sears Wish Book look like a damn leaflet. And as an offline title, the game does give the player some coupons they can use to purchase anything in this bountiful catalog.

And that’s part of the end of this game’s supposed game loop. You do a bunch of meaningless busywork, get money, and spend it on sick threads and ill furnishings. Then, you are supposed to call forth the most aesthetically appealing animals to your crib and position them like the living dolls they are. That is the core appeal of Pocket Camp… and that’s so lame. I love a good character creator with dope outfit options. And despite never being into the genre, designing virtual houses and arranging virtual furniture is fun!

So, is that all there really is to Pocket Camp? Just spin the wheel day in and day out, doing events in exchange for doodads and currencies all so you can have a cool character and a cool place to put them in? …Pretty much, yeah. And that’s also why it’s a bad game in my book. Because there are so many other games that do that without wasting your goldarn time on stupid crap that doesn’t matter. Like Fashion Dreamer. Or any of the handful of fashion and furniture mobile games that just focus on being play places for people of all ages. Or any of those dress up flash games that you can play if you get the right browser. Shout out to Sonic Charrie Maker. I spent hours making furry waifus in that thing.

Okay, so… how does ACPCC fare as an offline live service then? Well… it only costs $10 instead of having a limitless price tag. But unless you are a diehard Animal Crossing fan, which I certainly am not, I can only say I respect the game’s effort. The fact that it does preserve years of work, remove the predatory bullcrap, and make things… more balanced. The premium currency substitute is only available as time passes. But they made a lot of what were once premium purchases ten times cheaper, allowing people to more quickly amass stuff. Sure, the game is still a time waster, same as it always was, but at least it’s no longer predatory. …Right?

Well, no. You still have dailies that you should complete every day, a lot of boring, dull repetition and processes needed to amass things. It still has the gacha fortune cookie system for new clothing and furniture, but now it is far cheaper to buy things. And despite its many features, I must stress how absent I find this game’s fun factor to be. The bombardment of animal friends, the fact this is not a town with its own random personality and geography, and the pesky to-do lists you are given each day. It successfully transforms from being a creative play place to being a mundane chore, comparable to completing dailies on Microsoft Edge for bonus bucks, but with cute character designs and animations.

And all I can really say about it is… it is an offline version of Pocket Camp. It succeeds in what it is trying to do. It is far less objectionable than many mobile games. But I also did not enjoy my limited time with it.

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Tetris: The Grand Master 4: Absolute Eyes Announced
(An Offline Competitive Tetris Game in 2025?)

I do not really understand what differentiates a great Tetris game from an okay Tetris game beyond the UI and certain minor features. But I have heard enough from Tetris aficionados that I know that Tetris: The Grand Master, and its sequels, are considered among the best Tetris games out there. Mostly due to the level of speed it affords the players. Seriously, Tetris speed runners are usually insane, but when it comes to TGM, they are able to perform feats that seem humanly impossible!

The series had three games to its name, wrapping up with 2005’s Tetris: The Grand Master 3 – Terror‑Instinct. But there actually was a Grand Master 4 deep into development. It was announced in 2009, canceled in 2010, saw arcade location testing in 2015 in both Japan and the US, before being forgotten. Now, 15 years after its original announcement, it is finally coming out, exclusively for PCs, sometime in March 2025, under the final name of Tetris: The Grand Master 4: Absolute Eyes. …As an offline only release. Even though it is a Tetris game in a subseries that was extensively built for head-to-head multiplayer.

I understand that maintaining an online system for anything is difficult, but you could at least allow players to connect to each other peer-to-peer, which is something that someone will absolutely do with the game, using Parsec or something. But releasing an offline only multiplayer game in the year 2025 either takes a set of ironclad gonads or a brain full of boron.

Why can’t we just have nice things with no caveats…

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Year-End Recaps Should Be at the END of the Year
(December Is the Un-Month)

For the past few years, I have been… deeply annoyed at how corporations, platforms, publications, and by extension people have been rolling out ‘end-of-year’ lists and summaries in early December. Platforms like Spotify and YouTube do their year-end user summaries, like the alleged cultural zenith that is Spotify Wrapped and the ‘I guess you’re here’ that is YouTube Recap.

Every 32-bit publication that aspires to produce clickbait is producing their Top # *MEDIUM* of *YEAR* publications. All to drive up engagement, rake in the lucrative December ad money (the most succulent of all ad money), and boost the quarterly earnings reports by inspiring Christmas presents. Or χmas, pronounced kai-mass, iffin’ you’re feeling in a dip. Not a dipshit, just a dip (noun). 

Awards shows like The Platform Agnostic and Self-Important Geoff Keighley’s Spike Video Game Awards X Advertisements happen in the first/second week of December. Meaning they view the awards years as spanning from Black Friday to Thanksgiving. Which doesn’t even make sense for any business of any sort. 

(The joke is that businesses can basically have their financial year end on any given day they so choose, but I have never encountered one that doesn’t choose the end of a month.)

Also, Marvel Rivals and Path of Exile 2 came out this past week, are doing banger numbers, and may become some people’s favorite games of 2024. Yet they are getting snubbed because they chose to release in THE UN-MONTH!

Now, this all pisses me off for one simple reason. This is the wrong time to do this crap. Celebrate the year-end when the year is actually over or basically over! Here at Natalie.TF, I have an annual tradition of releasing year-end posts, and have been doing so for all 12 years of this site’s existence. I’m talking about 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023. And you know when I released these rambles? From December 25 to December 31st. Also known as Twixmas for people who pray/masturbate to a damn candy bar— The Week of Festivity to me, and the least eventful week of the year. A lot of people are off work, nobody is really motivated to change anything, and people are busy with travel and family, not checking their dang phones, so there’s no sense to announce or release stuff.

However, it is the perfect time to reflect on the events of the year, and read other’s thoughts on it. Sure, people are busy, and might not be able to prepare things like live shows, but you know when every TV or film awards show is held? January or February. The year is still young, people still have optimism and think they can achieve all of their sparkling new goals, and the last year still weighs highly on their mind. But noooo~! People need to know things now, and know things when they are still ample and eager to buy, not when they are making these pesky resolutions.

So, to buck this trend, you can expect Natalie Rambles About 2024 to be released on December 30th this year. Why not the 31st? Because TSF Tuesdays must be upheld, and ending the year with Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki will be a lot more FUN than the tragedy train I have in store! 

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Also, I just remembered I have this little gem in my magic bag!

YEAH!!!

NOW I’M GETTING EXCITED!

Also, RIP TandyGrant, who made this piece. I dunno if they are dead, but that would be on brand.

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World End Politico
(What the Hell Is Going On in the World?)

This past week, I just have to shake my head in frustration and ask what the hell’s going on in the world. America got into more deeply rooted political discourse after current president Biden pardoned his son. Which, on one end, I view as an old man taking his only living son out of prison so he doesn’t need to spend the last few years of his life cold and alone. But on the other, this shows Biden to be a blatant liar, and sets a precedent that the president can just open the doors to prisons and free everyone in exchange for loyalty. Which… is a very bad thing.

Also, wait, doesn’t this mean the president could have freed everybody thrown in jail for stupid drug possession charges? Yes. Yes, it does. They just needed to have their secretaries write a letter and sign off on it. Meaning they could basically make crimes legal. Which is scary as shit! What’s next? Letting the president just arrest everybody who they disagree with and imposing the death penalty? I don’t know. SCOTUS has already said that the president is The God Emperor of America, so maybe.

Or, better yet, the leader of a nation could declare martial law and position themself as The Shin True God Emperor (double true is the truest truth until triple true). Which is what happened in South Korea, where President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law in response to his party’s dramatically reduced political power. As such, he sent in troops to capture politicians and prevent them from voting on whether this martial law was allowed. But the military probably didn’t want to impose a fascist regime, and crowds of people came to the National Assembly to protest this crap. So the politicians were able to enter the National Assembly and cast a majority vote against martial law. 

All of which led to calls for the Korean president to be impeached. From what I can gather, this was a transparent bid for power, to stay in office, and the people clearly DO NOT like him. If this works, that will be a great international precedent for when America’s Mister Shitsack tries doing the same damn thing when his party gets voted out in 2028.

Oh, and then there is France, which has no government at the moment. …That is a linguistically confusing, yet apparently correct, way of saying that there was a vote of no confidence with the current coalition government. Effectively, France has three parties. The conservative/far-right party. The liberal/neoliberal/center party, and the left/progressive party. The right-wing got the most votes, but the center and left parties agreed to a coalition.

This coalition, led by a man named Macron— who I’m just going to assume is a talking Macaron— frustrated the French people, his polls tanked, and he appointed a right-wing bloke named Michel Barnier. Barnier proposed a budget that neither the right nor left parties approved of. He passed it anyway. So a vote of no confidence was cast, and Barnier is going to be stripped of his office soon enough. Meaning there’s a good chance we’ll have a repeat of what happened with prime ministers in the UK during the Tory reign. 

At least that’s the impression I get from TSF historian, Chari Shal, who lives in France, but does not follow politics too closely.

I’d bet that this chaos will last until summer 2025, and hopefully by then people will wake up to the fact that the far-right parties will do nothing to help the average person. They just want to stuff the pockets of the rich and deprive the French people of the hard-earned rights they have accumulated over the decades. And of course, the leading cause for all of this is the anti-immigration movement going on throughout Europe. 

This… is just related to Europe’s own long-standing White Supremacy issue. Europeans might think they are more cultured than that, but they really aren’t. They are the direct descendents of the people who colonized Africa and Asia, who killed dark-skinned people because they would justify them as sub-humans, who invented shit like phrenology, etc. Americans have way more opportunities to be racist, but familiarity does a lot to curb the most extreme versions of racism. And a lotta Europeans have never had an in-person conversation with a non-White person. 

White supremacy really does ruin everything…

How does that apply to South Korea though? South Korea’s government was designed by the US who put one of their guys in charge of it. Just like with Japan, South Korea was groomed by the United States to be a staunch ally in the Pacific Theatre. And also a place to produce American’s shit. And they still are, to an extent. 

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Progress Report 2024-12-08

As a final bit to bow out this week’s Rundown, didja hear that the CEO of the scumbags at United Healthcare— the most evil of all American insurance companies— got shot? Welp, he did, and the age restricted video above shows security camera footage of his death. It’s plain, unceremonious, and mundane. A dude went up behind him in a street, shot him, and bailed. And in this preposterously fucked political climate, this is the sort of thing that gives me assurance. Because no matter how powerful someone is, they will die if you shoot them enough.

Yes, yes, political violence is bad and whatnot, but anybody with a cursory understanding of history will confirm that killing people changes the world. It gets shit done! It can cause problems, but it can also make them go away! It can lead to a reassessment of a person, and end the cult of personality they once held. History has been, and will be, shifted by bad motherfuckers with a gun. And in times of unrest, I think it is important to realize the truism that people die when they are killed. That some people, quite simply, should be killed. And if this fear of death prevents a certain flavor of person from engaging in certain actions, then all the better!

Murder: It Fucking Works

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2024-12-01: Five hours of anime with Cassie, and 3,700 words for The Wotch showcase. Really not happy with how slow my progress is on this one, but it’s something.

2024-12-02: Worked a standard 7-hour work day, my NAS arrived like a month early, but it turns out that buying a NAS kit does not include the case, so I had to shop around for that for way too long. Wrote the 500 word preamble for this week and spent WAY too long working on a bad header image. Wrote only 2,000 words for The Wotch showcase, because I ran out of time and am running on fumes. …But then I stayed up late to write 1,000 words on Animal Crossing Pocket Camp so I can uninstall this BAD GAME. 

2024-12-03: Wrote 250 word Tetris bit. And I dunno how but I wrote 4,900 words for The Wotch showcase. Still not done with season 2 though. 

2024-12-04: Wrote 500 word early year-end tangent. Only wrote 3,000 words for The Wotch showcase. I blame Rain for blowing up my DMs about Steins;Gate and Spotify and miscellaneous other things. If I like somebody, and they have the same talkative introvert brain mesh that I have, I can lose entire evenings of productivity!

2024-12-05: Wrote another 1,000 words for the Rundown and did the editing for the Fundown. Wrote an extra 700 words to wrap up The Wotch season 2 draft. I decided to play some PokéRogue, as it has been a good week and I wanted a treat. I wound up doing basically an entire run and decided that, okay, this needs to stop, so I left the Discord server, fiddled with my router settings again, and decided that this could not continue. And I swear, I will be done with Pokémon TCG Pocket by the end of the month. I CANNOT keep getting duped by these time bandits. Also, I have a four day weekend, for some reason, so I decided to knock out my last CPE for the year. Started editing The Wotch showcase, got 2,700 words in, as the intro was kinda messy.

2024-12-06: 14,200 words edited for The Wotch showcase. Part 1 is edited, part 2 is getting there. Still have 9,700 words left to go. Could have done more, but it was 00:30 and I was tired. Also, watched anime with the Cassie and got sidetracked by some computer diagnosis issues for my side job. I was planning on going to bed early, but my irritating desire to stay up late to do more stuff led me to write 1,200 words for next week’s Rundown.

2024-12-07: Finished editing TSF Showcase 2024-49 for Wotch season 2. Started grabbing images for this, and holy balls I will need like 50+ images for each damn part. Thank goodness I’m grandfathered into the 200 GB WordPress business plan. Also, another big anime day with Cassie and Shiba.

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