Rundown (2/16/2025) The Future Is as Black as Obsidian

This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: The Future Is as Black as Obsidian
• State of Play Happened Again (And It Had a Few Things!)
• Shinobi: The Art of Vengeance Fully Revealed (It Sure Looks Like Shinobi IV)
• Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds Fully Revealed (It Actually Looks Better Than I Thought It Would)
• Digimon Story: Time Stranger Announced (I Really Need to Play Cyber Sleuth)
• Warriors: Abyss Announced (Roguelike X Musou, But For PSP)
• People Want to Play Better Versions of Games They Loved When They Were 12 (They Want UE5 Remasters, Not Basic Re-Releases)
• I’m A 30-Year-Old Stuck Writing Stories About Teenagers (And It’s My Own Damn Fault)

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Rundown Preamble Ramble:
The Future Is as Black as Obsidian

You remember how last week I was deliberating over Google Docs alternatives? Well, hearing about Google— and every other big tech company— becoming increasingly authoritarian, I decided that I really should give Obsidian another try. So, equipped with a greater level of determination, I went back into it and began fixing many of my existing issues. I realized that I was converting Google Docs to markdown in an outdated way by using an add-on. Google actually added markdown to the download type a while back. Meaning that the formatting errors I worried about were no longer issues. (Also, they added EPUB for easier publishing on Amazon. That’s nice, I guess.)

I fiddled around with the honestly kind of obscure, GUI of the software. I figured out how to change the presentation of the headers and images when in ‘reading mode.’ And I realized that there was a heading view feature, but it’s on the right side instead of the left one. That momentarily annoyed me, but when paired with the left side file view and the ability to adjust the width of the writing area to something more comfortable, I wound up liking this set-up a lot more.

In short, I was able to get Obsidian to a state where, while not ideal— yet— it was very workable. It has a simple dark user-interface that’s minimalistic but not in an annoying way, and while it has LOADS of features I won’t ever use, it manages to fulfill the role of a document writing tool nicely. Although, there are definitely some growing pains I’ll need to deal with using the Markdown language. Bolding and italicizing work just fine, same with strikethrough! (actually, WordPress does not seem to know what a strikethrough is and makes the text gray for some reason. How annoying) Links automatically work, adding a link is actually easier than with Google Docs, headings are denoted by stacking # symbols, and things like line breaks need a \
instead of a simple shift + enter. Kinda annoying? Yeah. But can I live with it? Yes!

Oh, and I am going to need to set up something to automatically replace certain words. Because I don’t want to type Pokémon with the accent on the é every time. Fortunately, the best part about software like Obsidian is that if you want a feature, somebody’s probably developed it. And boy howdy have I taken advantage of that by installing both a substitution plug-in— which probably should be a standard feature or core plug-in— along with a grammar editor that was a bear to get working.

LanguageTool is basically the Grammarly for the Open Source community, being a multi-language spelling, grammar, style, and writing tool. I have never used it before, but if I am going on this Open Source arc, I need to get experimental. Unfortunately, installing this software was bullshit due to BAD INSTRUCTIONS. First from the plug-in makers, who wanted me to install a doodad called Docker in order to download this basic software. Ignorant and gullible me thought that was the only way to get it, why else would they require me to download this bullcrap?

Well, it turns out that there was a super useful download page that is the peak of web design. So, I downloaded the software and… now what? Well, the tutorials I found said to run the command line and… I hate when I am told to run the command line. Either it is more difficult than just using a basic GUI interface, or it just doesn’t fuckin’ work. …This didn’t fuckin’ work! I used command line to run a server, the command line said it was running, but when I tested it and added http://localhost:8081 to Obsidian, it did not work.

So I tried running this .jar file that came with LanguageTool, and I was given this beautifully 2005-ass interface that is definitely functional. This being my last resort, I tried seeing if I could just use this as a secondary editing program in addition to Obsidian for writing. …Then I realized that the LanguageTool had an option that had to be toggled— on the GUI level— to activate its server functionality, for it to function as a localhost server while the software was running. Which meant I would need to run LanguageTool whenever I needed to edit something, but that is absolutely fine!

I was pissed when I figured out I had been running around in circles for an hour before deviating from the instructions to find the answer, but in the end, I did it! I managed to get the software I craved. And now I need to get everything stored locally, including literally 13 years of writing backed up from Google Drive, and convert everything to Markdown with the power of Pandoc. A… tool that I installed as part of getting Obsidian running in the first place!

It WILL take me some time to get everything situated, particularly my novels and getting the links working, as in-file link formatting is finicky and bastard-like. (I dunno what those curly brackets are supposed to do or why Google insisted on using them.) However, I am very much willing to accept this if it means I have control over my precious-most data, my writing! Which I host for free for all of you people and the generative AIs scraping most of the internet.

On that note, when I said I did something with regard to Obsidian, I mean that I figured it out with the help of DeepSeek. Software like Obsidian requires a learning curve and searching for answers typically not indexed super well in official help documents. However, Obsidian is well known enough to be known by an AI, and DeepSeek was genuinely extremely helpful in this pursuit. Yes, yes, I know I should not just use an AI for everything willy-nilly, but DeepSeek is dramatically more energy efficient than other AI models, and the idea here is that I am ultimately doing this to limit the number of times I need to use corporate servers.

Per this experience, I think DeepSeek, and many similar AI models, are actually quite good when it comes to offering tech support and explaining information in a series of easy to follow steps, but the information is only as good as the human-made information put into them. So when people give bad advice, it spits it out. However, it does make relevant information way easier to find when it pertains to more niche topics like this. Also, sometimes they give you something that doesn’t fucking work! Just like random people on a tech forum.

So, what’s next? How can I distance myself from the world and limit my relationship to big evil corporations?

• I switched to Firefox last year after being with Chrome for a decade, so my browser is as legit as I can get it without using Tor, like a creep.
• I swallowed my pride and switched to FuckMuckHo PuckSuckYo DuckDuckGo as my default search engine, because the results are basically the same. Except for images, Google has less AI shit in their image feeds, somehow.
• I have been purging my Twitter of all but a few active accounts in the hopes that most of them disappear. Looking at you Vel, my beloved TSF bunnyboy! Come frolic in the blue skies!

My most visited sites are YouTube, Nebula, Wikipedia, Patreon, Bluesky, ResetEra, DeviantArt, Pixiv, Gematsu, and a few left-wing news sites like ProPublica and Lever. For doomscrolling purposes. I am not using an alternate YouTube player, because I WANT people to get money when I watch their videos, and if Google gets money too, then whatever.

Oh, and I sold the $11,000 in Google stock that I had in my IRA and bought mutual funds. Meaning that I sold Google and invested in Google and Friends! Hooray~!

So, what else should I change in my online life? What else do I have that has the corpo stink to it? Well, I should switch from Feedly to another RSS reader. There are a lot of indie options out there, but I need one with a Firefox extension. Dashlane is a privately-owned password manager that I like, and enjoy, and comes with a VPN, Hotspot Shield. I could pay 5 Euro a month for Mullvad, which I heard good things about, or Private Internet Access, but I find it hard to stomach something like that when I have an effectively free alternative paid for by my workplace. (No, they cannot see my logs.)

…But I SHOULD get a new personal email address! Proton Mail is the go-to, but I worry that Proton is very vulnerable to becoming corrupted by corporate greed or just being bought out and enshitified. I mean, they just rolled out a Bitcoin trading app, and that’s always sus in my book. (Says the crypto tax accountant with $150 in BTC and like $300 in ETH.) Mailbox.org seems a lot more humble in their goals, and their basic plan is comparable, but… I dunno. Either way, I would LOVE to have my email be Natalie at natalie.tf.

WAIT! What about WordPress? There has been something of an indie web movement in the past few years, and I would not be 100% opposed to jumping ship to a different platform. I would HATE to give up my legacy 200 GB storage plan, of which I am using 6%, but my site needs some TLC from someone who knows what they are doing. I would love to pay someone, I dunno, $2,000 to get everything set up for me and make my website fully indie, so I could do whatever I want. But that would be a tough pill to swallow, and WordPress is not really on anybody’s shit list… except for people who are trying to make money off of their WordPress site. I’d just need to find a web designer. (Actually, I think I know a web designer IRL, but her schedule is a mess.)

You know what? Baby steps! I should first get my damn NAS ready and loaded with TrueNas, or maybe Hex OS. Just so that I can have 4 TB of storage… and 4 TB of backup for that storage! Wait, how much do I have on my current drives… oh no. Am I gonna need MORE than that? Noooooo!

…And I also found a plug-in that generates MP3s of an Obsidian file, which is actually better in many ways compared to the Read Aloud extension I started using with Google Docs in 2020. Sadly, I still needed to use a server to generate it the text, and bonk your servers, dude! BUT THEN I did some digging and found Balabolka! A simple TTS program— that does not really support markdown— but can generate audio files via AI-free TTS voices installed on your computer via something called SAPI 5. This got me thinking that I could FINALLY bring back my sweetest Nicole to help me edit my novels, and I could. I downloaded a trial version, and it sounded thoroughly useable. That was the plan, until I saw something called NaturalVoiceSAPIAdapter, which is a tool to download Microsoft TTS voices other than David and Zira, the TTS software they shipped with Windows 95, and still use nowadays for compatibility purposes. So I downloaded all the English voices I could, and quickly decided that Microsoft Sonia was the best girl. Better than Nicole even! You have been replaced, you Aussie harlot! I don’t need anyone now!

So, instead of highlighting text and TTS-ing it in Google Docs, I can now take the unedited audio file and listen to it on MusicBee while editing the document in Obsidian. Is that a lot of work? YES! Yes, it is! But it is THE GOOD WORK!

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State of Play Happened Again
(And It Had a Few Things!)

It’s that time of the… quarter again. Honestly, I barely remember State of Play events, and that’s not even being a Nintendork about things. I simply do not think they have the same level of panache or significance as a Nintendo Direct, as Sony has fewer games in the pipeline and most of the games they feature lack a cohesive identity. They are just a bunch of games coming out to PlayStation and other platforms. Still, I check them out to stay in the loop, hoping that they will offer something privy to my eclectic interests, and… they did that. I actually had about 4,000 words of stuff to write, and let’s start with the things I want to talk about, but don’t have too much to say about either.

Onimusha 2: Samurai’s Destiny was given its first real trailer, after being announced a week ago. Because that was super necessary. It’s as I expected, just a straight touch up with some machine learning to make textures a big higher resolution. And now we know it is coming out May 23, 2025. Also, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, the new one, got its first real gameplay trailer, and it looks like a slower, more methodical action game, and features a decent amount of cutscene humor, which is a good thing. Games need to be less serious, and Capcom’s golden era was when they were being delightfully camp. Though, I am a bit miffed that I see so much Elden-Souls-Borne-ness strewn throughout the snippets of gameplay in this trailer. I’m not even trying to say anything when I make observations like this. It’s just that Souls went from a niche game with its own distinct mechanical language into a series for hardcore wet-dicked gamers into something so ubiquitous that it has become part of the modern action game. Kind of like how countless games in the late 90s and early 2000s had overlapping DNA with Zelda 5 (1998) and Tomb Raider (1996) in the late 90s. But that’s a topic for another day~!

Days Gone Remastered was announced for an April 25, 2025 release date on PS5, which… lol. Days Gone (2019) was a fine game, but it was definitely a game that only got as much buzz as it did because it was a first-party Sony exclusive. So diehard Sony fans kept trying to push the game because they felt like they should like it. Well, them and right-wing genocide enjoyers who wanted Days Gone to succeed because they enjoyed the values they assigned to it ahead of its release. Just like they do nowadays… Anyway, this remaster does feature some visual touch ups and lighting improvements, but if you told me it didn’t, I would not have been able to tell, because Sony did not bother to show them off. Instead, they are selling this remaster on a scattering of extra supplemental mode. Permadeath, a horde mode, DualShock 5ense support. Nothing really significant, but it gets a game out and on the shelves.

Similarly, Stellar Blade (2024) was home so much fake culture war bullshit that I have chosen to discard in favor of viewing the game as an earnest and admirable attempt for a company to make a AAA console game, and I would say they mostly succeeded. Story was a bit muddled and gameplay only got great during the end, but I’ve heard quite a bit about it from men I trust, and it seems like a 6/10 at worse. But it really should have come to PC right from the get-go, so it could get millions of extra sales as Korean men buy it out of national pride, like what happened with Wu-Kong: The Black Myth (2024). Instead, they announced a Nikke collaboration and that the game is coming to PC in June 2025. Nice! Look forward for the naked mods for people without taste. Because what is a naked woman without context? And if you can get off to nudity without context… your imagination and imagination probably suck, dude. Get on my level. Masturbate in your bed using only your brain.

MindsEye looked like Headhunter X Binary Domain if made by men who have only watched action movies and played AAA action games for three years. I don’t want to shit on a game that looks blasé, but holy crap do games like this just confuse me. Because it is trying to do something that we don’t see often. A lite sci-fi urban shooting and driving game set in a discernible location— the American Southwest. But it has big ‘Wednesday night basic channels TV drama you watch in a waiting room’ energy. I can see how a former GTA producer might have thought this would be a great avenue to pursue. And I am glad that it has at least two main big gameplay pulls in a AAA setting. But everything about this is just confusing to me. Like, why is IO Interactive publishing this? They have no business publishing games.

Saros was announced as the next game from Housemarque, the people who made Returnal. And it is basically just Returnal but with a bearded man instead of a 40-something-year-old woman. It will be another cycle-based roguelike shooter with a sloshy bucket or lore and mysteries to uncover. Though, I don’t see this as a particularly sensible move, as Returnal took 2 years to break past 1 million units sold. Yes, it reviewed very strongly, but I don’t think it had much of a broader cultural impact, and while it was boosted by being an early PS5 exclusive, people clearly did not go back to catch up on it. I have nothing against the game, I just think it’s weird that its successor is trying to be the same dang thing but with a bloke.

Now then, onto the stuff I have 3+ paragraphs to talk about, because I went on historical tangents!

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Shinobi: The Art of Vengeance Fully Revealed
(It Sure Looks Like Shinobi IV)

Sega announced a new Shinobi game back in December 2023 at the Spike TV’s Keighley’s Game Advertisements, and since then we learned that it was being developed by LizardCube of Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap and Streets of Rage 4 fame. However, Sega has been hesitant to show off this game beyond… actually, I think that was it. The other footage I remember seeing was actually a leak.

Anyway, they took this opportunity to give the game what I call its first real trailer. A term that I am going to use as contrast to the modern trend of texture-less teasers that companies just love pushing out to keep the speculation churning. Per this gameplay, Shinobi, or rather Shinobi: Art of Vengeance looks to be a precise skill-based action title that prioritizes traversal, combat, and graceful displays. All while demanding that the player to stop, look, listen, and learn in order to circumvent challenges. Or in other words, a tough but fair 2D action game.

Skimming through a longplay of Shinobi III (1993), it is obvious this is effectively Shinobi IV, featuring many of the same key ideas, but rendered with more forethought, speed, and style. As it should, because even 2D action games have developed a lot in the past 30 years. The wall climbing, running animation, kunai, fireball, and jump kicks, they’re all direct carryovers from the series’ last widespread non-reboot entry (whatever this is, it does not count as anything). Based on LizardCube’s impeccable track record, this looks like it will be a grand time for those who can mesh with what it demands.

Shinobi: Art of Vengeance will launch for PS4, PS5, Xbox Series, Switch, and PC on August 29, 2025. Marking almost 14th years since Shinobi (2011) for 3DS, which was sorta trying to bring the series back to basics, but it was a game from EA’s Glu Mobile. It was alright, but nothing remarkable, and very quickly forgotten. Meaning the last noteworthy game in the series would have been the PS2 releases of Shinobi (2002) and Kunoichi (2003). Two games that I still don’t know if they are good or not, because they are both hard-ass-nails pseudo character action platformers with a bad cameras.

Also, I just realized we are getting three Ninja Gaiden games and a Shinobi game in the same year. I know that we are in an aborted timeline, but still, that’s bonkers.

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Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds Fully Revealed
(It Actually Looks Better Than I Thought It Would)

The Sonic ‘racing’ series is one that, to me, has always struggled to find any real sense of identity. Sonic Drift (1994) and Sonic Drift 2 (1995) were just basic Game Gear racing games and nobody really cared about them back then, let alone now. Sonic R (1997) is in this weird spot for being this confusing janky racing game that does not play very well. However, it has a level of charm that blows the socks off of so many games, due to its visuals and most especially its iconic soundtrack. (Definitely the best thing to wash down the taste of Sonic Jihad.) Sonic Riders was a fun if a bit too technical racing game, but it had personality and offered something unique to itself. It’s something that warranted further iteration. I mean, the second game was all about gravity manipulation, and you know what they did in Mario Kart 8 (2014)? Gravity manipulation! They were cooking up something good! Then the cooks all left for Nintendo, and that’s why Sonic Team sucked from 2012 to 2021.

When it was new, I considered Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing (2010) to be a Sega crossover first and a Sonic game second, but the series, developed by Tencent’s Sumo Digital, went on to become about the biggest Sonic spin-off series. The 2012 sequel, Transformed, was pretty much the best non-Nintendo kart racer of its era, and it really should have gotten a PS4 port. But instead, the series went on a hiatus before coming back with Team Sonic Racing (2019). A novel attempt to make a team-based racing game, though one that barely had anything to do in it other than race with other people online. Yet, it somehow was a sales success in the long-run, probably because it was a cheap Switch game for kids that debuted at $40.

These factors considered, I can understand why Sega would want to keep this subseries going. …Except rather than re-upping their agreement with Tencent’s Sumo Digital, they are seemingly developing a new racing game in-house, and it’s… a weird kitbash of a lot of different things. The gross under-designed generic furries from Sonic Forces (2017) are back as mechanics and crowd folk. The game will involve traveling across several courses throughout a race as characters drive through rings. Vehicles are a scattering of standard cars, hoverboards, motorcycles, larger heavier cars, and monster trucks. Vehicle transformation is back from SASRT. And the environments shown do look a touch more unique than what I would expect. A giant neon stadium is a standard, but dinosaur land, a dark pirate ship water course with a giant squid, and Metal Harbor from Sonic Adventure 2 are all sweet choices. Half of them even feel like they’re straight outta the Sonic Storybook duology, and I can totes fuck with that! While Chao Park is yet another knife in the gut that we will never get another Chao garden ever again. Oh, and also Jet the Hawk is back after 14 years. …After nearly 20 years, I still think that man looks like an early 2000s tribal tattoo X-Games version of Bean the Dynamite. …I thought that when I saw the initial Sonic Riders trailer in 2005 on IGN. I was right then, and I’m right now.

Sonic Racing CrossWorlds will be released for PS4, PS5, Xbox Series, Switch, and PC this year.

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Digimon Story: Time Stranger Announced
(I Really Need to Play Cyber Sleuth)

As the subheader says, I really should have played through Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth (2015) by now. Because if you asked teenage me what I would have wanted in an RPG, it would have been that. A monster catching and evolving game set in cyberspace and Tokyo, with hundreds of dope-ass monsters to fight and raise, with just enough teenage-ness to keep things engaging without feeling pandering. I have an iron-strong suspicion that I would love the game if I were to play it, I just have not gotten around to it. Because who has time for video games when you could be optimizing your time on the computer and watching democracy die in sunlight? (They loaded the Sterk children onto the garbage trucks at the crack of dawn for a reason!)

Anyway, after eight years since the last Digimon Story game, Media.Vision and Bandai Namco have announced Digimon Story: Time Stranger. Another Digimon RPG involving a dark digital force trying to destroy all of Tokyo where the protagonist needs to amass their own monster companions to save the city. Except this one, somehow, involves time travel and visiting more of the digital world. And also that train guy from Digimon Frontier is back. I love that guy! As for the trailer… it’s awfully vague as to what is going on in a way that is emblematic for a lot of JRPGs, but at least it is another iteration in an established series. …It also looks like one too.

I remember seeing some interview where it was alluded to that Digimon Story models would be recycled in future Digimon games, and I would hazard they are doing that here. Because the game does not look dramatically better than the Cyber Sleuth titles, which were originally Vita games. Now, I truly do not care about graphical fidelity so long as the composition and style of the image looks nice. Yet, I find it strange how the current trajectory of graphics has remained the same for so many titles in the past decade. Especially for anime style games like this.

Anime games looked fine as hell on the PS Vita, and there are more than a few studios who have been gripping onto that level of fidelity for a decade now. Just to throw in another example, if you told me that Neptunia Riders VS Dogoos (2024) used a bunch of assets from Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1 (2014), I would believe you without hesitation. Part of this is because graphics really have gotten good enough that the envelope does not need to be pushed. After all, it makes games easier to make and allows developers to put effort into other areas. Or, you know, lay off fewer people.

Tangent aside, why the heck did it take Media.Vision eight years to come out with this game? Bandai Namco was actually on a good track with reviving Digimon as an RPG pillar for a few years. But then the pandemic hit, Digimon Survive (2022) got hit with three years of delays. And they just let that disappointment waft for two and a half years before announcing this? Weird. Was Media.Vision that busy with Too Kyo Games’ The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, coming out this April? I kinda doubt it. This smells like a cancelation to me. …Or maybe a bunch of people left to work on Armed Fantasia: To the End of the Wilderness, the Kickstarter Wild Arms successor.

Digimon Story: Time Stranger will be released for PS5, Xbox Series, and PC this year. I’d imagine that a Switch 2 release would be in the cards, but that’s just speculation.

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Warriors: Abyss Announced
(Roguelike X Musou, But For PSP)

The Musou series is one that has had a peculiar trajectory for the past few years. Dynasty Warriors was never a super popular game series in the west, but it was highly influential and celebrated in Japan. There is a reason why the series has spread to so many avenues, and why it has persisted across so many entries. Because the games, at their core, are fulfilling action games where feats of flair and displays of strength are easy to come by, and everything is painted in the colors of absurdity. The games can be a blast, but quality is always king, and when you produce… more than one game a year, quality can be spotty and hard to come by. And when the formula stops working, as it did with Dynasty Warriors 9 (2018), it is important to reassess what the series is and what it should be.

Dynasty Warriors: Origins (2025) was… not that, but it was the highest rated Musou game, ever according to Fandom’s Metacritic. Actually, Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes (2022) is technically higher than it by one point. But of all the Musou games with Warriors in the name, this one was the highest received, and many reviewers seem to like it the best. Which is a damn shame, as that games is a bold face denial of so many things the series used to be. Character designs were sent into the gutter, with everybody just being some schmuck in robes of some manner. The flamboyance and visual identity is just erased for something boring, serious, and historically accurate. And the expansive cast of dozens of playable characters is replaced by one predesigned self-insert bloke with the personality of a sponge and access to a handful of weapons that will be expanded via DLC.

The series is in a weird space, where its personality might be reserved exclusively for crossovers as it pursues this more serious angle that people seemingly like. Especially amongst those who care about Romance of the Three Kingdoms. They’re basically the Ancient Rome Bros but for The East. So, what do they announce a month after the last game came out? A roguelike spin-off called Warriors: Abyss, which is… not a fucking Musou game. Like, by definition, it does not belong to the genre the series invented!

Okay, let me bring up something that used to be super common but died out when dedicated handheld gaming stopped being a thing. When making the transition for a 3D game series onto a lower-powered handheld, namely the GBA, PSP, or DS, games had to be completely redesigned from the ground up. Third-person 3D action adventure games frequently became overhead or side scrolling 2D or 2.5D adventures. Though, my go-to example of this is Killzone Liberation (2006), a PSP spin-off of a PS2 FPS that became an overhead shooter. Some essence was retained, but the game felt like a gimped down compromise due to the change in perspective.

Compromise really hits the stigma that genre shifts like this always carried. It is the act of taking something robust and 3D and turning it into something that, in the parlance of gaming genre hierarchy— a thing that should not exist— is inherently lesser. I do not agree with this interpretation, but it is an interpretation that I think of whenever I see spin-offs like this.

I bring this up because Warriors: Abyss is a 2025 game… that does not look like a Musou game, as it goes against a static principle that has been in place since 2000. It’s a behind the back third-person hack and slash where you fight against large waves of enemies in an exaggerated yet deliberate manner. Abyss changes this to be a distinctly overhead affair, something that the series did not ever do, not even when it was bringing games to the PSP. And this change just cascades downward to make a game that simply does not look and almost assuredly does not play like a Musou game. Which begs the question of… why go this approach, especially when the formula is already so well established?

Attacks are too flashy and wide, the damage numbers bursting out of the targets feels sick and wrong in the world of Dynasty Warriors, and that’s from someone who barely played the series. It just looks like another overhead bashy-bashy roguelike, with paper fodder enemies and bosses who deal obscene levels of damage, so… it’s not even really a power fantasy in the way the series has always been. Rather than emphasize a large number of characters, it’s biggest selling point is the number of special move combos one can perform by equipping supports with cooldown-based skills. Oh, and there is an $80 complete edition for this $25 spin-off. Because that makes sense! …At least Zhang He got his claws back! Stephanie Sterling will be happy to hear about that!

God, this just makes me want to get Dragalia Lost working on my phone so I can play Enter the Kaleidoscape a few more times. Because so many roguelikes are just worse versions of that. A Warriors roguelike is a great idea. But if you are going to do it, and reuse assets from an existing game, make it play like a Musou game!

Warriors: Abyss shadow dropped this past week in what was a real boneheaded move, because people are probably still wrapping up DWO. It came out for PS4, PS5, Xbox Series, Switch, and PC.

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People Want to Play Better Versions of Games They Loved When They Were 12
(They Want UE5 Remasters, Not Basic Re-Releases)

The latest trailer for Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater caused me to stop and think about how confusing the realm of modern re-whatevers actually is. Because the cutscenes are basically just a 1:1 Unreal Engine 5 upscaling of the original game, complete with the same voice acting. While the gameplay has been modernized, taking cues from The Phantom Pain, and adopting a more traditional third-person aiming. Which begs the question of… is this just a highly gussied up AAA mod of Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, or created from scratch except for the cutscenes… and environmental layouts that look damn near exact. I mean, we just saw that with Ninja Gaiden II: Black 2, an Xbox 360 game ported to PS3 ported to PC, made to look extra shiny and pretty with UE5. And we are going to see that again with the Oblivion remaster that will be announced any day now.

I think that UE5 remasters of PS2/PS3 games will become BIG in the next few years. A corporation can easily farm out so much of the work to Global Southern Asians and just have a few people touch up the gameplay. Or, shit, get an AI to make the visuals, or have a photo scanning place just scan real objects instead. Now, I do not want that to happen… but I think it’s going to, and I think people will love it. Because something I have noticed in my 17 years of observing gaming communities— in seeing the prominent nostalgia core for the 20-something-game-dude shift from the SNES to the Xbox 360— is this:

People want to play better versions of games they loved when they were 12. Back when life made sense, when their brains were becoming developed enough to have a firm sense of identity, and they started puberty— droppin’ balls and birthin’ boobs. People, generally, love games they played when they were 12 and use them to gauge what is and is not a good game. And what these people at least think they want is to play better and prettier versions of the good games they know and love. Just look at how vintage Halo fans fawn over the original Bungie titles as paramount triumphs of the medium, and how Pokémon fans are downright obsessed with the games from 2002 to 2012.

This is not a wrong desire. This is something that people who enjoy PC gaming have been able to experience for decades due to the prevalence and accessibility of mods that improve and add to games. And in a technological medium that has experienced such extreme growth, I think this desire is both understandable and a good one. People want games to grow with them, with the industry. Which is why I am such a supporter of re-releases that enhance older games, improve their quality of life, and enhance their finest features, rather than just throw them out with no frills or improvements. Because when a publisher just shoves out an old-ass game, without improving the resolution, frame rate, aspect ratio, or just about anything, it feels… underwhelming.

On that note, another thing highlighted in this State of Play was how the PS1 Armored Core games are being re-released along with Patapon 3 (2011). I think that’s great, but for as good as these games are and were, these re-releases are ultimately static experiences that are being reissued as is. They are what they are, and there would not be any hope of enhancements, mods, or anything being done to make these games better or give them more life. It is just something old that was on sale for years being reissued for sale yet again. I do think that every game that could still be sold should be sold, as a rule.

However, there is something deeply unexciting about that, as this cycle has continued for almost decades, and is just scattered and random at this point. It turns no frills reissues of games into non-events, while making substantial re-whatevers easier to latch onto. Because they feel more important and, at least in theory, can make games significantly better. …But most of the time, they don’t, because the devs did not have enough time.

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I’m A 30-Year-Old Stuck Writing Stories About Teenagers
(And It’s My Own Damn Fault)

I remember, when I was 17, looking at the bevy of 30-something creators who were writing long-running series with teenage protagonists and thinking ‘that ain’t right.’ While anybody of any age can write any story with anybody of any age, there is something very iffy about writing teenagers, especially high schoolers, when one builds up substantial distance from their teenage years. When somebody is over a decade removed from high school— in their thirties or older, they are generally closer to the age of a teenager’s parents than a teenager themselves, and that changes the way they look at teenage characters. It becomes harder for them to remember or resonate with the teenage mindset. Emotional ranges get skewed, thought processes get muffled, and it becomes harder to capture the essence of teenage adolescence. While also just feeling a bit weird.

Like, why is this thirty-something person still writing about people in high school? They’re done with high school. They have a college degree, a full-time job, a mortgage, and are trying to find a partner. Grow up, dude! Stop doing what you were doing as a teen and writing about high schoolers. Why not write about people in their 30s?

I was aware of this when I was reading things like El Goonish Shive and The Wotch, knowing fully well that the creators of them should be pushing their 30s circa 2011, and I was committed to never making the same mistake. To avoiding having a cast of characters who I would out-age over the years, and I tried to circumvent the teenage character phase all together. …But then I fucked up and made an ongoing series following a bunch of 18-year-olds that I have been writing since 2015, when I was 20-years-old. I have spent a decade writing characters who have aged about seven months in that time, and I lack a recourse to fix this. With the story I set out, I lack any way to just age up the characters a decade. A good chunk of the story I am telling is intrinsically youthful, so it would feel weird if they were 28-year-olds at a minimum.

With Verde’s Doohickey 2.0, I am making it my goal to end my time writing teenage characters, so I can finally move on to people who are in their twenties at the minimum, and stop this commodification of youth. …But I also know that what I have planned in the pipeline also involves teenage protagonists.

Psycho Shatter 2000: Black Vice Mania has a cast who are age 18 to early 40s, and the main four cast members being college kids is essential to the story, so the most I could do is age up the youngest from jail bait to 20-years-old. Which won’t be as taboo, and being taboo is the point! This work of Y2K nerdcore art requires underage sibling incest!

When I get around to Psycho Shatter Alternative: Kaede ♥ Senpai ~Kiwami~, I know for a fact that it will need to start in a damn high school on graduation day. Because it is aping off of established tropes and trends with love confessions at the end of high school in Japanese media. Don’t blame me, blame the nation of Nippon!

Oh, and the big projects I have intentions of doing afterwards, IllMalice and Psycho Shatter VN: Vice Novus are going to involve a teenage protagonist and a fresh college graduate respectively.

Just… DAMN IT! I want to be freed of this stupid curse and write about characters who are fully formed real people, with full lived experienced behind them, but I keep going back to writing about fucking teenagers. (Double entendre intended, but only for 18+ teens.)

Now, I could perform an intellectual argument about the value of having characters of different ages in a story. How people often exist in worlds where people of varying ages collide rather than being nestled into age groups where they don’t see people of deviating ages. 20-year-olds and 50-year-olds work together in a lot of places. Or how there is a je ne sais quoi to the life or freshly developed body of a teenager. (When I phrase it like that, I probably should Boomer it up and call them teen-agers.) But at the end of the day… I think I have just stifled my creativity by engaging with so many works that involve teenage protagonists, and it limited my imagination. I mean, every major TSF visual novel involves teenagers, if not students in some way. Like half of the TSF manga that I read, or discuss, involves teenagers. An excess of the anime I watch with friends every Sunday— it’s church for the soul— involve teenagers.

Try as I might, there is something far more endearing about an 18-year-old swapping bodies with a 40-year-old than a 30-year-old swapping with a 40-year-old, or even a 30-year-old swapping with a 60-year-old. Youth means something in the society I exist in, and bumping an age up by a decade, or 7 years, just to be safe feels… wrong. An 18-year-old has endless possibilities. A 25-year-old probably has student loans, a degree, a job they are already sacked with, and a committed relationship. If you had to take over somebody’s body and life, which would you choose? Do you think you could fake it till you make it with a degree in a field you never studied?

Cripes, I wanted this segment to force me to reassess things, but all I did was liberal it up and defend the status quo. When I don’t like the status quo! I want to blow things up! And come up with a new kind of sexy! But I guess I’m not creative enough to do that anymore…

Akumako: “Natalie, a lot can be said abut your work, but it is too weird to not be creative.”

D’aw, thanksies, my sister-cousin-wife! Now then, back to writing about a Blasian 18-year-old traveling to another dimension to fight a trans-racial god of White Supremacy in order to get a bigger dick and hotter boy body so they can better fulfill their genderfluid desires!

Akumako: “…Also, there’s like a talking dinosaur, a man made of pudding, and a cyborg woman with a rocket-powered vagina— shit be wild, yo.”

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Progress Report 2025-02-16

Sooo… My village was without any water access for about 24 hours this past week, and as of writing this, the water is still not safe to drink or use for food prep. A water main broke, streets were covered in ice, and they had to dig up a whole street to repair things. Homes have flooded, there’s a bunch of property damage, and peoples cars got frozen. I am fine, the village was good about distributing bottled water to people, and school was canceled, but things are not good, and it may take a few days before things are 100% okay. However, because I have a good local government, things are being fixed.

Also, you know what the sad thing about my shift to open source software and keeping my important shit more private? My work PC is my personal PC, and I need to use a bunch of products and services for work so, in a sense, my data may already be compromised. I need to use a Chromium browser for work, use Microsoft services and OneDrive, use Intuit services as my primary way of making money, and cannot get divorced from Adobe Acrobat. (But at least it’s an old 2017 version.) Also, I have Discord open most of the time, and I dunno if Discord is scraping data. Orz…

2025-02-09: Finally realized that it is a ripe pain in the ass to try to map out five different storylines at the same time. No wonder I was having so much trouble with this, so after wrapping up July 8th and the first half of July 9th, I went into review mode and decided to address the Gaiden chapters later. Then I revised the outline for July 10th, revised what I had for July 13th, before realizing that I FORGOT to write down a really hot idea I had to end that story arc. Basically rewrote what I had there, 1,000 words, and bolted on 1,500 more before I realized I was too tired to write two good drunk body swap sex scenes. So I went to bed and thought about the mechanics of it while trying to masturbate. Do most erotic writers get off to their own ideas? I dunno!

2025-02-10: Yeah, another day where it is hard to quantify the work that I did, but I went over 6,000 words of stuff, adding at least 1,500, double-checking a bunch of lore, finding some new details, planning out names, appearances, stuff that I do not like to consider work or progress. Because it is so nebulous and hard to quantify. But I did pinpoint a BIG continuity issue and nibble that in the butt, before going back to Nari’s Log to work out some lore details as I remembered a character who was so minor I did not include him in my The Saga of Vincent Dawn summary. Yeah, there are some DEEP CUTS here.

2025-02-11: I was busy getting Obsidian and other technical stuff ready today, which makes it still work related, I swear to the Earth Mother! And I experimented by mucking around with a Markdown version of VD 2.0 act 1. That took me a while too, but it did a lot to help me get comfy with the software. Fixing messes is a good way to learn!

2025-02-12: Wrote 3,900 words for the PlayStation event bit. Figured out TTS solutions for this new software set-up, and worked to get my stuff organized for this bold new transition.

2025-02-13: Added like 1,200 words and edited this Rundown, marking the first Rundown written in Obsidian! Then I was busy converting my old novels and TSF Series into markdown format. Yes, this takes a LONG time.

2025-02-14: Busy with more markdown conversions, then 6 hours of surprise work on what was meant to be a light day, then started work on TSF Showcase 2025-2.

2025-02-15: Had little on my plate today, so I finished reading the material for TSF Showcase 2025-2 at around 14:00 and spent the rest of the day working on the write-up, getting 5,300 words in. Would have done more, but I kept getting DMed by my friends to talk about politics or whatever and got in a long conversation about food with another group. Productivity would probably be better if Discord was off, but I love my friends and like chattin’ with them.