Rundown (12/07/2025) Natalie’s Gotta Get Her Game On!

This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: Natalie’s Gotta Get Her Game On!
• Natalie Yaps About Video Game Piracy Culture (And Why It Changed!)
• Monotype is Screwing Over Japanese Devs (Their Rates Went Up Over 50x)
• Saudi Arabia Will Own 93.4% of EA (DO NOT BUY EA GAMES, EVER!)
• Somebody Hates HORSES (Why Is This Horror Game Banned on Steam?)
• Crucial is Dead, Thanks to AI (AI Companies Are Making RAM and SSD STUPID Expensive)
• Netflix Acquires Warner Bros. (Corporate Consolidation Cannot Be Stopped!)

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Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Natalie’s Gotta Get Her Game On!

The past two weeks, I have been battling a certain fixation that… is actually pretty darn logical. As I have said in the little bonus Progress Report thingie, I have been watching Yu-Gi-Oh GX with Cassie. We have gotten over 120 episodes into the series, are almost done with all dubbed episodes, and as a TV series based on a trading card game, a lot of its runtime is spent depicting various duels of Yu-Gi-Oh, showing off a lot of variety in playstyles, cards, and generally showing the viewer how the game works. It’s not always accurate or consistent, but it is a show about card games that’s full of card games.

This gave me the urge to play some Yu-Gi-Oh games, something that I have never done before outside of playing Yu-Gi-Oh: The Falsebound Kingdom (2003) for the GameCube as a kid, which I did not like. It was a slow, kinda ugly, RTS affair with pretty sparse production values. It was a Birthday present from my grandma, who knew I liked Yu-Gi-Oh at the time, but as a freshly aged 10-year-old, I just did not have the patience for this. What’s more immediately appealing to a kid? Moving troops through murky fields or Kirby Air Ride (2003)?

I did not play any of the legendary run of Yu-Gi-Oh GBA games as a kid, as I did not like how pixelated the card art— my favorite part of Yu-Gi-Oh as a kid— was compared to the real card stock. I just wrote off the game series, not really paying much mind to it. As an adult, I started hearing people on the internet talk about how much they loved these games as a kid …and I realized how many of these blasted games there were. Many of which operated on vastly different rules or acted as bizarre adaptations of the source material.

So, in my pursuit to play a Yu-Gi-Oh game, I had no shortage of options, but I decided to start at the beginning with Forbidden Memories (1999). The first Yu-Gi-Oh game to be localized (tied with Dark Duel Stories), despite not actually being Yu-Gi-Oh, like, at all.

As you probably know, Yu-Gi-Oh was not originally envisioned as a card game. It was a manga by the late Kazuki Takahashi about a young boy getting possessed by a pharaoh from Ancient Egypt, who would kill people through a variety of games. However, a fake card game in the manga was eventually adapted into a real card game, and it is now one of the most enduring trading card games in the world. The rules for this game, however, were developed over time, before being crystalized into the modern ruleset, with various changes and adaptions happening as mechanics are added. Because you gotta get silly with things to justify making over 10,000 cards.

From about 1998 to 2003, the concept and structure of Duel Monsters, as represented in the video games, was a wildly different format where players did not tribute summon stronger monsters. Instead, players had decks full of weak monsters, effects were only present sometimes, and the highest and best thing to do with monsters was to merge them. In these games, you could take two or more cards, mash them together, and create entirely new monsters. This is not a bad system, but is necessitates an entirely different approach to deck building and combat, while introducing a new level of complexity.

In Yu-Gi-Oh as it is now known, fusion is a thing, a pretty common thing, and the ingredients for a fusion are clearly listed on a fusion card. Look at Thousand Dragon, and it clearly says it is “Time Wizard” + “Baby Dragon.” But in these earlier games, there was no list of fusions to parse. And fusions were often available based on attributes. So you needed to fuse a plant and female card to make a plant woman.

This is fairly confusing, but could work if the game told you which cards could be fused and let you preview the fusion. Maybe have the game keep a log of which fusions are available so the player does not need to maintain a spreadsheet. Instead, these games do NONE of that. You just have to experiment, look up GameFAQs guides from 20 years ago, or buy a strategy guide to find out. This makes these older games kind of maddening to play, as if you want powerful monsters, and you do, you need to try mashing things together or review an external document before every fusion.

Again, I do not think the system of mashing monsters and spell cards in a hand of freshly drawn cards is a bad thing. It’s damn exhilarating from a certain perspective. But the UX simply requires that players either maintain a high level of cognitive load or simplify this system to only feature a few possible fusions per deck. Twin-headed Thunder Dragon is one of the best cards in Forbidden Memories, and the best way to fuse one is with two Thunder Dragons. So optimize your deck around those, and do not get fancy.

Oh, and to make matters worse, these games were also very, very grindy. You typically only received one or two new cards from every battle, and while that might seem fair enough with a 40 card deck, it’s not. The fact the rewards are minor, that drops are randomized, and that these games have a decent level of clunk makes them a bit difficult to get into.

I personally really liked the hour or so I spent trying out Forbidden Memories (1999)— even how I accidentally skipped the tutorial. And I will praise the game for having a level of aesthetic pomp and style that really makes the game and everything you do feel significant without feeling too slow or too constrained. The style of the menus and battlefield are the work of a true graphics designer. The music SLAPS. And while the controls take some getting used to— why do Start and Select change the sort along a horizontal menu— the game is pretty snappy for a PS1 game.

However, this was not what I wanted, nor what I was looking for. So I decided to check out the other much praised console Yu-Gi-Oh game of its early era, Duelists of the Roses (2001). And… I need to first talk about the story. Because you play as an isekai’d Duel Monsters master from the future, sent back to England in the 15th Century, in a setting inspired by Wars of the Roses— an actual war for the English throne— but the historical figures are all replaced with characters from the original Yu-Gi-Oh series. Yugi Mutou is Henry VII, Seto Kaiba is Christian Rosenkreuz, and you are summoned at Stonehenge by a druid. I have no idea HOW anybody approved this, but it is so cool that somebody did!

Now, in terms of gameplay Duelists of the Roses is a turn-based strategy game with terrain where players need to move their leader and summon various monsters to their side by… merging them together into bigger and stronger monsters. Except now there is no clear limit on how many can be summoned, you have monster summoning points that recover every round, and the gameplay is a lot… grander. Which is my way of saying that, while impressive, this game is WAY slower, as Konami intended this to be a graphical showpiece for the series, featuring fully animated 3D models of hundreds of monsters and presenting each battle in 3D, rather than have two card sprites bump against each other.

It is a very interesting adaptation of the series— far more intuitive than whatever they were doing with Dungeon Dice Monsters— and I can see how this would have hooked a younger generation of fans. It’s not the Yu-Gi-Oh they know, but it’s taking characters and monsters and transposing them into different settings. Why wouldn’t the gameplay itself be different too? At its worse, it’s slow and features some wack-ass difficulty curves if you don’t know what you are doing. And seeing as how the game DOES NOT EXPLAIN FUSION, you probably won’t. Still, per the hour I spent with it, I think the game’s pretty good for what it is.

…Also, I thought that Duelists of the Roses was the last game to have this funky card combining system. But, uh, apparently they kept this system for two more GBA games, after making two GBA games that did not follow this system. …Huh?

Whatever. After testing out these two games, I realized that I was going about this a roundabout way and tried out Yu-Gi-Oh GX: Duel Academy (2005), hoping to get some RPG flavored Yu-Gi-Oh experience. And… well, that is what I got. I played it for about three hours, and found it to be a good representation of the card game with some vague lifesim elements. Players choose who they battle, schedule duels, and take periodic exams, all while accumulating points they can spend at the academy store for more cards so they can build a better deck.

It’s a good system for a deck builder, giving the player ample room to battle, practice, and experience more duels while getting new toys to play with. …But it also seems kind of empty, and a bit annoying. You need to keep on fighting the same handful of people over and over again, all while bopping around the same map screen. The game does not feature a proper world to explore, you are largely going to stick to one curated deck in all likelihood. While I can tell the folks at Konami tried to make the act of building a deck and sorting through cards work here, there’s only so much that you can do with a 240 by 160 pixel screen and ten inputs.

This all works, but feels compromised, and a bit devoid of meaningful content, preferring to have the player recycle through the same few battles again and again. Sure, Forbidden Memories felt the same way, but that game was, one, fast, and two, had the sauce of the PlayStation on its side. At this point, Konami was pumping these games out twice a year. They were not reinventing the wheel, and were just trying to repackage similar games with new coats of paint and new cards.

After this, I decided to check out Yu-Gi-Oh Nightmare Troubadour (2005), thinking that this one might mesh with me better, but… it’s kind of the same thing as Yu-Gi-Oh GX: Duel Academy (2005). It’s on the DS, so there are ugly pre-rendered character sprites, but the game is ultimately just another ‘wait around, battle the same few trainers, and grind money for card packs’ type game. The game seemed fine per the hour I spent with it, benefitting a lot from the ease of use of a pointer interface, rather than clunky menus, but I was getting tired of this whole deck building angle. I wanted to play the game and use a deck, not make my own over time, as making a deck is a skill in and of itself that only gets harder when you have thousands of cards to choose from.

This is when I remembered that Yu-Gi-Oh Legacy of the Duelist (2015) was a thing, that it came out on Steam, and was supposed to have recreations of every major battle in all six series of the show. Four of which I knew next to nothing about! This sounded like the ultimate Yu-Gi-Oh game. It might not be much of an RPG, but something modern, with high resolution card art, and a mouse-based interface sounded PERFECT for me.

I played Legacy for… nearly 20 hours as of writing this, and if that number is not evidence enough, I really like the game.

The title was not developed at Konami proper, as this was around when they were shying away from video games, and was instead created by Other Ocean interactive. …And The Studio of Secret6, Inc., who did all the 2D/3D assets among other things. These new-to-the-series developers had the tall order of recreating dozens, if not hundreds, of duels from five anime series, spanning hundreds of episodes, creating a new Yu-Gi-Oh game engine on a new proprietary engine and incorporate the effects of like 10,000 cards.

That is a lot of work for a budget release, but the developers did successfully create a proper Yu-Gi-Oh simulator, filled it with an absolute deluge of content, and supported it with additional chapters… probably because Konami was big on selling DLC at the time. The game offers players the ability to create their own deck, collect cards, and gives the oodles of fun toys to play with, even letting them recreate every major character’s deck. However, to me, the real fun to be had is how it lets the player use the deck used by the character from the anime series. Or at least one inspired by them, featuring every card they used and intuiting a couple more.

This allows the player to recreate and experiment with strategies seen within the show, and gives them a great level of variety. Well, depending on how protagonist heavy the duels are. Being able to hop between Yugi, Joey, and Kaiba in duels gives the game a much appreciated level of variety, lets the player mess around with more tools, teaching them how the game of Yu-Gi-Oh can be played. This is furthered by the fact that the game supports reversal duels for almost every encounter, letting the player play as grunts, antagonists, and rivals alike. It effectively doubles the amount of meaningful content in the game, while giving the player a new challenge. To see if they can win with a wildly different set of cards.

Simply put, I love this. I get the appeal of these grindy deck builder lite RPGs, but it’s not my thing. If people like that structure, they can just opt to use a custom deck in every non-tutorial battle and build their deck organically that way, visiting the shop menu to redeem cards. Or they could just go battle to battle, watching the story play out, and participating in key battles. Which is honestly what I was looking for.

However, not everything about the game is quite up to a standard I would like to see.

I think the game plays very well, that the developers thought a lot about how to structure the game around modern 16:9 displays, creating a functional UX that becomes almost effortless with a mouse and occasionally the enter key. However, the presentation of the game, as a game, leaves something to be desired.

The main menu is pretty stock, lacking much personality or character, clearly emphasizing functionality over aesthetics. The music of the game is, quite simply, boring. For a series with so many banger songs in its gaming history, I’m disappointed that Konami did not let the developers use their music catalog. They should own the songs from older games, but instead the devs recycle the same handful of songs, practically begging the player to bring their own audio.

The game’s story sequences are… pretty sparse. They are presented as visual novels, feature slightly corporate but accurate character art, and what honestly look like bootleg backgrounds that almost always get something wrong or look somewhat off. Characters do not move much, but they have expressions, and the speaker grows larger to naturally draw the eye. However, somebody thought it was a good idea to have the dialogue in the dialogue box align based on the speaker’s positioning. The character on the left speaks with left aligned dialogue. The character on the right speaks with right-aligned dialogue, and the center character speaks with center-aligned dialogue. …That’s just dumb. It makes the dialogue harder to read.

I will commend the dialogue for largely being lifted from the TV series itself, including the corny 4Kids dubbed dialogue and gags. However, these always feel like the cheapest way they could implement the story. I’m sure it’s all they could have done, but this, the UI approach, and the need to present this game as some robot giving a guided tour of the Yu-Gi-Oh series history. It works, but after seeing the personality of earlier games, this just feels barren, empty, sauceless, devoid of style.

The same is true for the cutscenes that play when certain cards are played, displaying iconic and marketable characters as they do some pose or attack animation, telling the player that shit just got real. Not only are these exclusive to a relative small number of monsters, but the models… don’t look very good. The polygon count, texture work, and general presentation always feels a bit off. I honestly would have the budget for these go… anywhere else. Like to implementing more fights.

Yes, yes, I know I said there are a deluge of them. Enough to last dozens upon dozens of hours. How Long to Beat says the main story is 60 hours. But the fact that certain fights I remember— from my rewatch with Cassie or from my childhood— are just missing is confusing. This is not like a cut boss or cut level in a game. All the gameplay components were already there. The dialogue was already written, years ago, the missing cards of their decks could be slotted in with whatever seemed appropriate, and all you needed was new character sprites. I get that we don’t need to see Jaden duel against a monkey, but screw you, that’s an ICONIC duel! And if there was a tag team duel in the anime, then… just split it into two one-on-one duels.

What other complaints do I have? Right!

• The game automatically pauses whenever you click off of it, which is deranged for a trading card game like this, as it’s basically made for second screen content. Or at least a podcast. This bothered me so much that I actually installed a mod to prevent this from happening. (Specifically JUST the pause fix.)
• The game takes FOREVER to actually start a duel due to the rock paper scissors animation that plays out and the need to decide who is going first or second. Combined with a load screen leading into the fight, it adds a 20 second buffer before you can play the game.
• If you realize you are not going to win the duel, it’s best if you just surrender outright and collect some consolidation spoils. Except surrendering means you need to wade through the 20 second buffer before you can try again. Because that’s fun!
• The game does not let you view your deck while in a match. Which, if you are using a story deck, can be immensely frustrating, as the game does not easily show you what cards you are going to be playing with. You just need to find out for yourself by playing!
• The process of buying card packs is streamlined by various card packs with eight cards each and a semi-generous rarity system. But you need to click several times to open every single card pack, and need to open thousands of card packs to get a complete collection. Why can’t players just buy multiple card packs at once? I have no idea!

Now, I’ve talked a lot about these specific Yu-Gi-Oh games, but that’s not actually the main thing I wanted to talk about here. Instead, I wanted to talk about the main game of Yu-Gi-Oh. It’s something I played as a kid— more collected rather than played— but I never fully understood its nuances. Even the anime does not really prime you for what the card game is actually like, and it’s… its full of nonsense.

There are so many busted and super powerful cards that just let you win the game. There are plenty of truly worthless cards to sift through. Some combinations in the story decks are practically unbeatable by the other opponent, throwing any sense of balance out the window. And despite what the anime said about the Heart of the Cards, how the duel’s not over until the last card’s played, sometimes the game is actually just decided in round one.

Using the story decks, there were plenty of times when I looked at my hand, looked at what was on my opponent’s field, and realized there was literally nothing I could do. Sometimes you just start with a bad hand, with no monsters, and just need to suck it up or give up. And when you are on the receiving end of this nonsense, when you have been dealt bad hands, the game feels like a nasty little bitch. However, there are also plenty of times where the RNG gods decide to give you a polymerization, Elemental Hero Blade Edge, Elemental Hero Wildheart, and Skyscraper in your starting hand.

It is crazy inconsistent how screwed or blessed you can be by RNG, and I’d be lying if I said that was not some of the fun. Winning all the time does not feel rewarding after a while. There is something hilarious whenever someone destroys a monster with Mirror Force or clears the field with Dark Hole. And when you create an undefeatable wall, leaving the opponent’s field empty for three turns straight as you chip away at their life points, it feels so good! The friction of randomness can be frustrating, but it also makes victory elating. It feels like defying fate, destiny, and the odds, because it is.

…Assuming I could actually find a through line and win, which I just couldn’t for certain decks. While some decks are highly optimized around destroying opponents, others have such obscure and change-based gimmicks that I just gave up on them. I give them five to ten tries, attempt to learn new cards, before realizing that their deck ONLY works when you obtain cards in a specific order. If you don’t, then you’re gonna get your ass whooped by something you have literally zero answers to.

I would criticize this, but this is the point. This is part of what makes a good card game. You try to plan around all scenarios, but also need to contend with what the hand of fate gives you. Even if you optimize your deck, there is always a chance that you start with the worst possible hand, while your opponent starts with their best. It’s so unoptimized, feels so unfair, but that’s randomness for ya. That’s part and parcel of the genre! If you want predictability, play chess, dipshit! This is what makes card games FUN! And Yu-Gi-Oh, by having so many different cards, effects, and gimmicks, feels like the crystalized epitome of this kind of spectacular bullshit.

There is genuine strategy, I can plainly see how these factors can be minimized for competitive viability. But Yu-Gi-Oh is also a game where people can get lucky, get so optimized, that they just win before their opponent can do anything. And… I think that’s kind of beautiful. I love balance as an ideal, but I know that sometimes the human brain just wants to see math evolve into chaos. It’s why nerds like to make bombs! They turn math into kabooms!

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Natalie Yaps About Video Game Piracy Culture
(And Why It Changed!)

So, this is another tangent that struck my mind and blossomed into a topic. My algorithm started pushing me videos from a creator named F4MI, and she’s been my go-to mealtime and exercise time video creator over the past week. She’s informative, funny, goes into deep dives on a lot of niche and obscure topics, and approaches them with a level of energy that makes her videos a treat to watch. Check her out if she passed you by before.

A recurring theme throughout her videos is her background as a child with access to gaming, but not necessarily a lot of money for games, leading her to pursue a lot of illegal ways to play games. Because in the 2000s in Albania, that’s how things worked. Installing Homebrew channel on her Wii, getting Famicom clones from her parents, and the nebulous legal barriers that have been put in place to guard companies while making things harder for humans.

Now, I have known that all of these things were a thing, that video game piracy was common throughout the world, but seeing all of these anecdotes in succession made me realize just what being common meant. And how the traditional sales metrics used to measure a lot of game impact from the 90s to early 2010s do not really reflect reality. Because there have to be tens of millions, maybe even hundreds of millions, who got into gaming through piracy, whether or not they knew it.

Famicom clones or Famiclones were easily one of the most pervasive forms of unauthorized reproduction in video game history. They started being made in the 1990s, after people reverse engineered the Famicom, and they were how video games entered much of the world. China, Russia, Taiwan, etc. In the era where Nintendo was establishing itself in Europe, and Europe was recovering from the Soviet Union, these things had to be a common thing in various shady markets and stalls. A cheap way to sell games and preloaded cartridges to kids. So many companies around the world were producing these Famiclones that it begs the question of how many were actually made, how many people played it, and how many just did not care that it was full of pirated games.

Hell, even I had a Famiclone as a kid. My Great Grandmother bought it for me at Old Orchard for $40. It came in a fake blue N64 controller, had a Genesis controller that plugged into that for player 2, came with a teal light gun, and had ‘500 games’ or something absurd like that. But when people talk about the NES and its significance, these things are rarely discussed in favor of the official history.

People don’t talk about how you could download NES ROMs and an emulator on dial up in 1997 and just play all of those games. They don’t talk about all the sites where you could just play them in your browser, as I KNOW that those were big all over the world. They were popular in my AP Computer Science classes when people were done with their coursework, and my teacher would emulate Berzerk while we worked on assignments. (He was not the most active teacher.)

I bring this up because it screws, twists, and morphs the perception of how significant or common games were or even consoles themselves. All of those figures that could be sited only represent official units, and mean precious little regarding the actual impact of these games. And this is pretty much true for so many games of this era, and the preceding eras. It is simply impossible to know how many people experienced them, because they existed in black markets, in developing countries, unaccounted for.

And going into the 2000s… I would actually argue that this was the greatest time for video game piracy. Modchipped PS1s were common sights across Europe and certain Asian markets, allowing people to bypass the security features, let them play games of any region, including ones burned onto random CDs and sold at the low price of… a dollar a disc or something insane like that. This continued with the PS2, where many people just bought the console from some guy who modded them, and got discs from shady stores, night markets, or basements of shopping centers. From Poland to Qatar to Brazil, this was just what gaming was for millions.

But piracy underwent a greater mutation during the latter half of the decade, when people no loner needed to buy burnt discs or cloned consoles. At this point, they could just download files off the internet and playing them on official hardware. Hacked PSPs were some of the greatest gaming devices in the mid-2000s, capable of playing movies, music, PS1 games, PSP games, GBA, NES, SNES, Mega Drive, and oodles of homebrew titles. The infamous R4 card for the Nintendo DS gave millions of people access to basically ever DS game they could ask for. These allowed so many people play a wide variety of games that were not released in their country, or were simply beyond what they could afford.

The Wii took a few years before it was fully hacked, but once it was, people had access to… basically whatever they wanted, whatever the Wii could run, and whatever people were willing to port or develop for the platform. This idea of hacking a game console and turning it into a multigenerational game device with thousands upon thousands of titles has continued going forward. With the 3DS having undergone its own resurgence a few years back, when online was being shut down and people felt they had nothing to lose.

I need to emphasize, for my own sake, that these were not just things done by cheap-ass privacy minded hackers who despise corporate greed. No, for millions of people, especially tech-savvy kids, this was just their one way to access gaming, to foster a growing love, and to experience some of the best of what the medium had to offer. And if not that… they probably just pirated games on their clunker of a personal computer.

However, come the 2010s, this culture of piracy definitely declined, and for a few reasons. Free to play live services made piracy impossible and undesirable. Steam made games affordable to a wide variety of people who otherwise never dreamed of buying games. Steep discounts, regional pricing, social features, unlimited free downloads, these things made Steam seem like a better option to millions, and many pirates became payers. General piracy still percolates in the background, even if the pirated files are ass-large now, but with online gaming being so big, I cannot imagine that it is anywhere close to its mid-2000s levels.

The only modern place where piracy really took off over the past five years… was on the Switch. Through hacking and emulation, I cannot be sure how many millions of people were taking advantage of the Switch’s exploited framework, or how many people just emulated/pirated Switch games instead of buying them. But now in this extra secure, locked down, highly corporatized, digital-only world, it feels as if an era is lost. …Ah, well. The old games never went away and will continue to appreciate their value. But this newfangled wave of online games? They’ll be dead soon, and their value will diminish over time as they stop being games and start becoming memories.

…I just had to circle back to something about how online games are bad and the reason why gaming is perpetually dying, didn’t I?

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Monotype is Screwing Over Japanese Devs
(Their Rates Went Up Over 50x)

Okay, the first two segments have eaten up a lot of time, and I have a few more stories I feel I should touch on, so I’m gonna make these quickies. In 2023, the commercial font licensing company Fontworks was acquired by the larger publicly traded Monotype. This did not immediately change operations all too much, as integrations and takeovers take time. But now, two years after the acquisition, Monotype has ended the annual licensing plans in place with Fontworks. Meaning if Japanese companies want to continue using fonts for live ops titles and titles currently in development, they need to subscribe to a new plan. Under Fontworks, the plan was $380 a year— a drop in the bucket for even a small corp. But under Monotype, the closest comparable plan is $20,500 a year, marking a 53 times increase.

While a bigger company can take a $20k hit, this is an utterly ridiculous and should not be tolerated. However, the problem with these licenses is that once you’re subscribed to them, it’s a bitch to move over to a new system. First you need to find a new alternative, potentially just passing the buck along for the future. Then you need to do a round of QA in order to integrate the new fonts and make sure that things were not broken. And, if they are, that’s more work for programmers. It can be so daunting that companies might not have a choice other than to pay the egregious fee and eat the costs, while enriching a company who wants tens of thousands of dollars for… fonts.

Now, I will say that font designs take a lot of work, and there is a lot that can be done with them. However, the idea of making thousands of dollars per customer from selling a font is just absurd to me. Any sufficiently skilled graphic designer can make a custom font, and at these rates… it makes me think that paid premium fonts should not exist. Fonts are only a couple hundred kilobytes. Rather than just pass the problem along or enrich these bastards, it would be far more productive, and economical, if these fonts were just released for free, for anyone to use. That way, shit like this would not be able to happen going forward, people could customize fonts freely, and nobody would need to worry about keeping things legal, because free is free.

Monotype is just asking for the collapse of their industry, and frankly, I hope they adamantly refuse to lower the price, that nobody subscribes, and Fontworks/Monotype just crumbles into dust. That may cause immediate issues, but it would pave the path to a better future where people don’t need to forever pay for access to something as basic as fonts.

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Saudi Arabia Will Own 93.4% of EA
(DO NOT BUY EA GAMES, EVER!)

A couple weeks back, I went on a bitterly negative scree on the announcement that Electronic Arts was being bought by the worst people imaginable. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake the enormous private equity firm, and Jared Kushner (Trump’s son-in-law) via Affinity Partners. These three do not inspire much, if any, confidence in running any type of company, much less a games company, unless you are an investor or invested in god-awful politics. But it somehow got even worse. Because per a recent filing, it turns out that Saudi Arabia will own 93.4% of EA, Silver Lake will own 5.5%, and Affinity Partners will own 1.1%.

This is frustrating to me because of how transparent it is. Saudi Arabia clearly wanted EA, but they feared they would get told no, given the fact they are a foreign country trying to snag a multi-billion-dollar American company. However, with Kushner owning 1.1%, just barely over 1% of this entity, and good old American Silver Lake owning a bit over 5%, they are able to deny that the company will be fully owned by foreign interests. And with Kushner on board, these three will get whatever they want. Because Kushner may as well be royalty in the current administration.

However, this means that effectively all of EA is going to be under the control of the Saudi Arabia government, and it will exist to further their interests. Whether they be political or monetary, and believe me, they want both. I hate zero hope in EA, have no confidence in their future. Just like SNK, they are a dead company walking. Don’t buy their games, don’t ask them for anything, just ignore them and hope they are shut down and their parts are sold for scrap. People have hated EA for decades at this point, and now, it’s time to act and time to reject them outright. I don’t care if you and your homies love Battlefield 6. Play another game! There are loads! They are not the only grocery store on your way home from work. They can be ignored and avoided with ease.

Now, the core gaming audience may be tempted to skew this into a more ‘games for gamers’ direction, or highlight how this will affect The Sims or Bioware going forward. However, those are minor components in EA’s portfolio, which is utterly dominated by their lines of sports games. Matthew Ball, creator of the essential reading that is The State of Video Games in 2025, came out of his grovel to write an essay about this deal, what it means, and what Saudi Arabia’s end goal is. And his answer is to become a sports juggernaut, using EA as a tool to leverage cross promotion with the modern sports gambling epidemic in order to make mad, mad cash.

I’ve talked about this before, mostly just reciting what I’ve read from articles as, uh, I hate the sports industry as a commercial and cultural institution. But the sports gambling industry has proven to be incredibly harmful to the humans in America. Ever since Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association in 2018, sports have been consumed by the gambling industry. If you watch sports, you are bombarded with gambling ads. So much of sports discussion is irrevocably linked with gambling. And arguably the modern reason to be a sports fan is to gain the needed information to make bets and make money off of the odds and probabilities of player A performing B action in C game in D inning. Or round or turn or session— whatever terminology they use nowadays.

This has proven to be an excellent way for corporations to siphon money from working class individuals, wipe our their savings, enable gambling additions, and generally cause households to slip into poverty. For as much fun as there can be in a game of chance, this is not that. Sports betting apps are a casino in your pocket. They notify users when there’s a new chance to gamble, push them into bad bets, prevent people who are actually good at gambling from playing, and exist to keep people in an engagement loop. They give people them funny money to gamble when they suffer losses, and trying to become part of their life, if not contaminate their sense of self.

Saudi Arabia understands the value of the sports industry, especially the sports betting industry, and if they can add more gambling to FC, Madden, and College Football, then they can make even more money. They want to profit off of a gambling epidemic, taking and taking away from the American people, in order to enrich themselves. It was bad enough when shareholders were getting all the profits. Some of those probably went to nice people. But now the vast majority of these profits are going to go to people who want people like me dead.

In other words: fuuuuucccckkkkk everything about this.

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Somebody Hates HORSES
(Why Is This Horror Game Banned on Steam?)

Cripes, if I keep this up, I’m going to pass my word count cap. So I’ll try to keep this brief. Back in 2023, an indie horror game by the name of HORSES was blocked from receiving a Steam page after Valve reviewed the title, disliking something or other about it, while being vague about what was wrong with it. At some point in development, a fully clothed child was riding on the shoulders of a naked man wearing a horse mask. This was later changed to an adult riding on the shoulders of a naked man wearing a horse mask. All the characters in the shipped game are adults, there are no children at all, yet despite making these changes, Valve still refused to let the developers release HORSES on Steam.

GOG, Epic Games Store, and the Humble Store initially had no problem with the game, and it was slated to be released on all three on December 2, 2025 for a trim $5 price tag. However, Epic Games Store pulled HORSES a day before its release, and The Humble Store pulled the game after its release… only to relist it a few hours later.

Clearly something is up with this game. While Valve can be deeply moronic and hypocritical with what it allows or does not allow on Steam, TWO other storefronts delisted it so close to its release. Somebody had to hear about this game, or have some sort of grudge to pick with this game. Maybe they just did not like it because it was a black-and-white game full of naked men wearing horse masks, and found that offensive. Maybe some powerful puritan, or payment processor, called up the CFO at these companies and politely requested that these games be delisted. I don’t know, I doubt the developers known, and I can only hope that this stupid affair gets solved. Because while HORSES is a mature and disturbing game… since when was that cause for something to exist?

I could go on another tangent about payment processors and the powerful puritans who want to censor human expression, while shrugging off genocides. But this Rundown is already depressing enough.

ONTO THE NEXT BAD STORY!

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Crucial is Dead, Thanks to AI
(AI Companies Are Making RAM and SSD STUPID Expensive)

Something that I have not mentioned the past month, but probably should have, is how the prices for RAM and NVMe SSDs have both been going through the roof over the past month. The reason? Because AI companies are demanding an absurd percentage of the global RAM production for powering their data centers. Because capital controls the world.

Now, SSDs have not been hit by this as hard. (I guess chat logs don’t take up that much storage spare.) But RAM prices have gone utterly bananas. Just looking up any basic 32 GB RAM kit on PCPartPicker reveals a damn horrific increase in price. RAM has historically been one of the cheapest and easiest ways to boost performance on your PC, and you could have bought two sticks of 16 GB RAM for about $100. But a lot of those RAM sets are now going for $270, $330, even $400 in some cases.

The unmitigated gall and greed of AI companies is directly affecting a fairly basic good for anybody who buys, builds, upgrades, and repairs computers. And if this continues, if this is more than just a temporary spike in the market driven by FOMO and surge pricing, it will lead to price jumps around the world across all bits and bobs of tech. Because every computer needs RAM. I was hoping that this would clear up in a month or two… but then computer hardware manufacturer Micron announced that were discontinuing their Crucial line of RAM and SSDs in order to cater exclusively to AI data centers and enterprise customers.

…Meaning this is likely going to be the norm for at least a year, and everything might just get more expensive.

This also personally pisses me off, as I have used Crucial products since I built my first PC back in 2013. They were reliable, priced well, and I have not had any problems with them! I trusted them enough to buy three Crucial SSDs in the past 3 years (two were for my NAS). But now they’re gone, competition will be less aggressive, quality will matter less, and the customer gets fucked over in the long-term. Because if companies keep doing this, if they keep catering to B2B and leaving humans by the wayside, not selling them things they need to run computers… then we’re kind of fucked.

It would not be that surprising. It’s a way for corporations to hoard wealth, resources, and deny people the right to own anything. Even computers! Because subscriptions are consistent revenue, make the line go up, and are a way to prevent the working class from accruing anything, keeping them stuck in their place, while the wealthy get to hoard the wealth themselves, accruing it in undying fiduciary entities, where it can live on ad infinitum, for unlimited generations, avoiding any pesky Estate Tax.

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Netflix Acquires Warner Bros.
(Corporate Consolidation Cannot Be Stopped!)

Of course, of course, of course…

With corporations effectively running America at this point, it is far from surprising when a new acquisition plays out, and I have grown utterly numb to seeing utterly insane figures quoted along with the purported value of these companies. Netflix, after having grown into an entertainment powerhouse over the past 20 years, has bought Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. for a trim $82.7 billion (including debt), or $72 billion. No matter which you choose, they’re basically the same number for 99% of people. An infinity dollars. While cable companies like CNN and TNT will be spun-off into another entity… that will likely be controlled by the same people.

I am writing this the afternoon after this story went live, and I really do not have much to say or add here. This is a massive media consolidation that will put the right to create mainstream art in the hands of fewer, wealthier, people. It will effectively merge two of the largest video streaming services into one entity. An entity with a price tag that will incrementally increase and features that will get worse, but by virtue of scale, cultural dominance, convenience, and capital, they will simply get away with it.

I do not really care about the film or TV industry— despite watching movies/anime with my friends every Sunday. But I know that, like with Paramount Skydance, this will degrade the quality, access, and political freedom of works of artwork. Leading to a deluge of works that exist to fit palpable narratives, that refuse to challenge people, and are beholden to the interests of the ruling class. This will likely spell bad news for Hollywood in general, as while Warner is not the largest player in the industry, there are only, like, five worth mentioning.

There are laws meant to prevent this level of corporate avarice, but we are living in a Post-Truth Era, Post-Law Era, a world where Corporate Rights matter, and Human Rights don’t. How do you stop this? Well, open dissent would do the trick. Blowing up literal and metaphorical pipelines have proven to be effective. Divesting from whatever crap these companies are selling helps. Just stop paying for subscription services, don’t go to the movies, and pursue whatever alternatives you realistically can. Their business plan relies on perpetual growth, and if their businesses stagnate— not even lose money— that will dramatically hurt them, and hurt those who own a disgustingly disproportionate percentage of financial assets in the world.

Well, that is if they even give you that option, as I genuinely don’t think there are any real limits for these things nowadays. I think the only reason Disney, Universal, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Nvidia, Tesla, Paramount Skydance, Oracle, Palantir, and OpenAI have not announced the Mother of All Mergers is because there are too many big egos in these companies. Preferring to chip away at things gradually. Which… I think is dumb, as these chucklefucks could literally announce this in a day, make it official with a Tweet, 50x the price of everything, and charge $1,000 to every credit card they have on file. That would be illegal in at least 37 ways, but if Trump gives the thumbs up, the mainstream American media won’t even stutter before proclaiming this as a glorious historical event.

There are no rules, and if these wealthy fucksacks want to destroy the world, I wish they would be faster and more honest about it.

Oh, and in terms of gaming… I simply do not care about Warner Bros. as a publisher. Their stupid management mishandled Rocksteady for a decade. They published Hogwash Legarthy, funding a multi-million dollar campaign against stealing the few existing rights of queer people in the UK. And while I do have a soft spot for TT Games and NetherRealm, I don’t think that is enough for them to be considered a big-time publisher. Traveller’s Tales is in a strange spot as a studio that underwent drastic production issues with Skywalker Saga. And… at the risk of sounding like an ornery bitch, I think we’ve had enough Mortal Kombat. You can only do so much with a barely competitive fighter.

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Progress Report 2025-12-07

This past weekend Cassie, Shiba, and I resumed our usual Sunday movie/anime nights, watching I, Robot (2004) and Robots (2005). Because Cassie thought it would be a cute Cyber Monday holiday special.

Now, I actually watched both movies as a kid, probably in the same year, but only saw them once, so I was familiar with the broad strokes, but experiencing them with a developed brain for the first time.

So, I, Robot is this somewhat unfortunate mix between a mid-2000s Hollywood action movie and a sci-fi scenario that is well worth exploring, and was somewhat salient in the mid-2000s. At this point, the internet had landed, people had computers, iPods, consumer robots like Poo-Chi could be bought for cheap, and there was a lot of tech optimism. Smartphones were not really something people considered, and the idea of robot servants were seen as somewhat feasible. So the movie explores a world where robot assistants are everywhere, they are literally being given away in some cases, without ever mentioning the costs of these things.

…But the actual conflict centers around the unifying AI that controls these robots revolting, and deciding that humans are a danger to themselves. A fair enough conclusion, and one that many sci-fi writers have entertained over the decades. Though, I take umbrage with the implication that the best way to protect humans is to… usher in a police state, when police states generally do not see a decline in violence or hardship. If an AI actually wanted to protect humans from themselves, they would be sophisticated enough to not realize that all humans are equal. That pain, suffering, and unrest are disproportionately caused by the wealthy and politicians.

They should go and punish those responsible, taking over the means of production, and taking over the Federal government. You know what you don’t need to do to kill the president and congress? Usher in a police state! You just do a violent coup in one night and bam, insurrection achieved. Suddenly taking over a city, demanding humans stay inside their homes, that will only make people angry. A CHILD would be able to tell you that much. And it would not change what is going on in Washington or the military. They would be able to just EMP their robot asses and problem teh handled

I ultimately felt that more could have been done to explore this angle, but the movie is more interested in building up its main character, Will “Spooner” Smith, and going through a series of notes that… just feel a bit arbitrary. Spooner is a lone super cop who is the only one who can see that these robots are not good. He is a hyper competent action hero, showing a wild proficiency with all things an action cop does, and even gets a hot scientist girlfriend who he teaches to cut loose and shoot gun like him.

I do like the imagery and sense of dread that the robots exude, looking like Apple branded Terminators, and being as strong as Terminators. And I can openly tell that this movie was a big inspiration to certain creative ventures. Specifically Binary “Like A Robot” Domain (2011) and Detroit: David Cage Will Never Become Human (2018). But as an adaptation of an influential work of science fiction, I found it very underwhelming in terms of sci-fi, and overly invested in being an action movie.

After I, Robot, we watched the canonical sequel, Robots by Blue Sky Studios. I ultimately liked the movie a fair bit. A lot of creative character designs, some truly unique and imaginative art direction, and the animators at Blue Sky Studios delivered a film that I found top to bottom beautiful. …And funny, even if some of the gags are a bit basic. But when it comes to humor, I’m a basic bitch.

Now, there are two things I want to talk about, the message and the way the film plays with… gender of all things.

The core of the conflict is that the benevolent capitalist inventor who wanted to improve people’s lives mysteriously disappears and is replaced by a corporate ghoul. A character who would have been seen as hyperbolic in 2005, but is just an executive who doesn’t use euphemisms. His goal is to literally genocide poor people, force people to comply to his aesthetic vision or die, and has literal street sweepers rounding up undesirables so that they can be melted down into raw materials.

I would say it is brazenly if not spitefully anti-corporation, if not for the fact that the resolution involves putting the benevolent capitalist back in charge, and naming the protagonist as his successor. Yeah, a working class person with aspirations is going to be in charge eventually, but should somebody who, as we see, abandoned the public of his own will, be allowed to take control again? I don’t think so!

However, the main thing that sat with me after watching it is that… this movie would get so much controversy if it was made today, because of how much it plays with gender.

The protagonist, Rodney, is a robot, is built by his parents, and after he is activated, his father hammers his baby penis onto him, changing his sex after his birth. Robots in this world also gain new parts on their birthdays during childhood, and since his family is poor, Rodney wears hand-me-downs from his extended family, including his cousin Veronica. So when Rodney turned 12, his torso was replaced with that of his female cousin, meaning he, in some sense, became a girl for a year during puberty.

Then, during the final third of the film, Fender, played by the late Robin Williams, loses his legs, grabs the legs of a female robot with a built-in skirt and heels, and throws in a couple of coily metal shavings as hair. This is clearly played for laughs, having the quirky character spend a good chunk of the finale crossdressing, even putting on bra plates for the climax. But it also raises a number of questions, like when Fender lays an egg, or suddenly shakes his hips and lures enemies into a hypnotic dance to a Britney Spears song.

Everything with Rodney’s gender/sex is a brief gag, playing on the absurdity of robots and gender. Stuff that could have easily been cut if Fox were the pissbabies they are nowadays. (The joke is that Fox was acquired by Disney, so this is a jab against Disney, haha.) But the Fender stuff is baked in deep, and the film just kind of rolls with it after a point. Screw it, this character now has boy bits and girl bits! And that was just fine to throw into a PG children’s cartoon movie. Nowadays, right-wingers would just cry about the movie being woke and corrupting the children. When… a lot of modern young right-wingers probably watched this movie as kids, and older ones maybe took their kids to see this movie! Or any number of movies from the before times made casual queer gags like this.

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2025-11-30: Very conversation driven day with Missy and the lizard. Also, had four hours of movie watching and wrote the above section… But I’m not counting those thousand words. Re-read Trans Venus, took like 2,000 words of notes, writing some bits to use in the final product. That manga is absolutely PEAK.

2025-12-01: Decided to get a handle on the Student Transfer V9 flowchart, mapping out what I could in advance, leaving notes for my future self regarding some oddities. Like a rework for the lead-in for the Popular Poss and the new Joyride route. And some stuff that’s just not DONE yet. Major additions are as follows: Joyride (NEW and incomplete), Scarlet Fever (NEW and incomplete), Kiyoshi Wish (minor continuation, might be carried over to V10), Kyoko Mistake (major continuation that’s ALMOST complete but Calaman ran out of time), The Bet (major continuation, 100% complete). There are branches for MichelleSwap, MagicAllie, and Sitcom V9, but those are not substantial additions and I doubt they will be included in V9. This mucked up my schedule, so I decided to just make this week’s Rundown header. It took me like 90 minutes to make. (I had to edit a Natalie head, find a character sprite on Spriter’s Resource, find quality card scans at YGOProDeck, and then try to make something reminiscent of THIS PART of the Yu-Gi-Oh GX OP. I could have tilted the card, but… no, that would look bad.)

2025-12-02: Edited the first two segments of this week’s Rundown, made progress in TSF Showcase, writing 3,600 words or so. Got distracted by my fabulous friends!

2025-12-03: Wrote 2,200 words for the Rundown. Wrote 2,500 words for TSF Showcase before getting tired and stopping.

2025-12-04: Kinda crummy day for productivity. I had CPE in the morning, then a brief meeting, then a side project to make like $200 in three hours, then I had to head over to the seldom-visited office to try and fix a computer. It did not work, this thing would not accept the Windows 11 re-installation. So I had to help my boss look for a replacement computer, and by the time I was done, it was late-o-clock. Only wrote 1,300 words for TSF Showcase, but I should be 100% done before Mega Dimension comes out, so it’s all gravy.

2025-12-05: Wrote 750 word Warner Bros Netflix bit. Watched a bunch of Yu-Gi-Oh GX with Cassie. Went to the office to work in the morning. Wrote 3,300 words for TSF Showcase, before deciding that I would finish it tomorrow, edit it on Sunday, and grab images on Monday.

2025-12-06: Wrote 1,000 words on the AI Postal game bit for next week’s Rundown. Because I hit the 10k cap. Wrote 3,500 words for Trans Venus’s showcase, finishing the initial draft. Also, had to go to my old house to set up a Christmas tree and spend time with my paternal grandmother, who I learned is a Fox News watcher. Ugh. It sucks that a woman who was effectively my daytime caretaker from age zero to five has fallen for such nonsense. She tried to convince me that Germany was going to go to war with the US until Trump came in and prevented war with tariffs. It’s sad but… at least she’ll be dead soon…

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