Rundown (1/11/2026) The Internet is Working as Intended

This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: The Internet is Working as Intended
• Natalie’s Insane Pokémon Project (That She Will Never Finish)
• Nintendo Switch 2 Holiday Sales Underwhelm (And What It Means for Gaming)
• Cygames Opens up AI Studio (More like Cyg-AI-mes!)

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Rundown Preamble Ramble:
The Internet is Working as Intended

Two weeks ago, I decided to concede to the algorithm and let it decide what I was going to watch while doing my daily exercise. It was another video expressing a sense of dissatisfaction over what the modern internet is, the promise of what it could be, and how the old internet is lost, replaced by something that no longer feels good to use. The video was pretty good— it got me to think about a few factors I had not considered— but I felt that it was missing a broader takeaway as to why the modern internet feels the way it does, and what particular nostalgic essence was lost as the Web 1.0 era faded away. The video ultimately concludes that the problem is the sheer number of people, how there is no sense of etiquette, and a large appeal to the lowest common denominator. Which… I think is missing a few steps.

If I had to highlight the main difference between the 90s and the 2020s, it’s the importance technology plays in the average person’s daily life. The 90s were an era of newspapers, magazines, and TVs. The internet was something brand new to 99% of people when the floodgates opened in 1994, and as a new thing, it was widely talked about, but nobody really knew what to do with it, and people, by in large, did not need to use or interact with it. Even if one used a computer at their job, or had a home PC, they did not need the internet. They could just make Word docs, Excel sheets, type notes, print things out, run any number of programs from a CD, all without ever connecting to the internet for anything. If they wanted to get on the internet, they had to pay for it, sign up for an AOL trial, or get wiring work done in their home. It had many, highly practical, uses.

Email allowed for files and general information to be shared en masse without relying on placing countless phone calls or dealing with the days long delay of physical mail. Banking became far easier once average people gained the ability to pull transactions, review their balances, and transfer money digitally. You no longer had to call someone at the bank, wait on hold, and then slowly recount account numbers to the clerk. And while there was always the library, it was often just faster to get a fact or scrap of information by asking a digital butler. All nice conveniences that could make life easier, but they did not involve any online interactions. Someone using the internet to access their email and bank account is an internet user… but only through a technical definition.

Then, throughout the 2010s, the internet stopped being an optional part of life in most developed countries. All because of two interconnected things that happened simultaneously. The internet became dominated by a few platforms that made up the majority of all online traffic, becoming the places where “everybody on the internet” was. And the internet narrowed its scope in order to adapt to the limitations and capabilities of the smartphone.

When it started, there was barely any structure or resources to use the internet. There were no standards, no rules, and while companies thought it was the next big thing, they did not really know how or what should be done with it. Businesses made websites so they could garner more business, yes. But they were often designed one of two ways. Simple storefronts where people could search for what they wanted via what I will affectionately call a ‘dumb list.’ And corporate digital play places that, while likely monetized through ads or subscriptions or even cosmetics, felt considerably different today.

Companies made Flash games of their popular IP as a marketing ploy, entertaining their users and strengthening the connections they had with the IP. Companies compiled information databases on their IP for similar reasons, offering clips, timelines, resources, and other guides for the sake of deepening a connection with the internet user. And even when they made things that were beloved in retrospect, they were still made for cynical marketing reasons. But you also had to actively seek them out in most cases. There weren’t any ads or crap pushing kids to visit the Space Jam website or play Cartoon Cartoon Summer Resort (2000). To find things, just in general, you had to look around, as there was no true centralized source of information.

But that began to change as the 2000s came to a close, pillars of the internet were firmly established. Facebook handily defeated MySpace and became the premier social media website, a place for people to share photos, opinions, and connect with friends old and new. A site so well marketed and accessible that it’s still one of the biggest websites on the internet. YouTube became the place for online video, boasting countless clips, songs, and even full episodes of TV series broken up into several parts, all for free without much advertisement. And with free uploads, no limitations, and pretty liberal guidelines, no other competitor stood a chance. And Google handily won the search engine wars, becoming a verb, much like Photoshop before it. While Amazon proved itself to be so damn convenient and versatile that they became the one-stop shop for online shopping, especially after introducing Amazon Prime.

These platforms got bigger, the technology behind them grew more sophisticated, and these websites, which had been bleeding investor capital since they launched, began looking for ways to make money. And there were three main methods. Serve the audience ads, preferable targeted ones. Analyze their engagement and actions to keep them on the website for as long as possible to deliver ads to them. And sell their accumulated data to third parties, if not brokering deals with other platforms to hand off data to maximize user spending or retention. This is why Facebook started showing people adds on stuff they saw on Google or Amazon. Theoretically, anybody could launch a competitor. But these platforms were made over the span of years upon years, were staffed by thousands of people, had become big enough for the average person to know what they are, and had billions of dollars backing them.

As the recent boom in NeoCities and the “Indie Web” have shown, the technology needed to create a website of one’s own, to make something novel, weird, or eccentric, is not particularly difficult. However, the design of these websites tend to be considerably different. The internet of the 90s and 2000s was designed around the limitations and display of desktop computers, with chunky web pages meant to be displayed in squares and no ready standard to follow other than “do I like using this and do I think it looks cool?”

But this approach of designing websites for desktops is becoming a passé relic of a bygone era. For years and years, the stark majority of all web traffic has come from people on their phones, which represented the other major turning point for the design of the internet.

Cell phones went from conveniences that let people call people from anywhere— a wild innovation for sure— to personal pocket computers. Personal Digital Assistants that aimed to do the things one would typically want to do at a computer, but were pretty bad at all of them. Bookkeeping, typing emails and reports, printing things, accessing office databases, creating presentations, graphic design, and things that, throughout the 90s, had largely been done without need for the internet. There was not enough storage for all of this software. You could not load up a CD or DVD into these things. And the interface was so tiny, cramped, and limited that… who the hell would WANT to make a spreadsheet on this thing if a real computer was available?

However, there was one thing that these new personal pocket computers were good at. Giving people ready access to the internet. The growing popularity of Wi-Fi and improvements to wireless cellular technology made it possible for people to access the internet without relying on ethernet or the like. And turned these PDAs into cellular internet gateways, giving people access to a more recreational version of the internet. Something where they could read articles, watch videos, play music, and do whatever, while away from their desks, offices, or workstations.

Yet, the clunk of PDAs and variety of form factors made them undesirable as a standard device, and the mobile web did not really come into its own until the iPhone set a new standard. Initially a luxury good, it became the template for the modern idea of a smartphone. What did people typically use them for? Phone calls, emails, messaging people via text, online shopping, getting directions, 2FA for their workplace, listening to music, watching videos, and playing games. Once people got their hands on these tiny portable computers, they wanted to use them for all things recreation, as it felt more casual. More seamless. They just had to swipe the glass, let things scroll, and have things be delivered to them, just by tapping icons. No desk, mouse, or unpacking necessary. You just poke the thing and bam!

…Or at least that’s what people, and corporations, wanted. In practice, this represented a problem, as while smartphones could access the broader internet circa, say, 2009, a significant portion of the internet was absolute ass to access on a smartphone, giving websites four options:

• Change the design of the website to be more mobile friendly.
• Create a dedicated mobile site.
• Create a mobile app.
• Do nothing, because fuck them phones!

Eventually, the most popular option was the third. All of the biggest websites on the internet were launching their own app. Facebook, Wikipedia, Google, YouTube, et cetera. Curated walled gardens that were the only things that could be displayed on a smartphone at a given time, and gave companies access to far, far more data than before, due to the nature of these apps.

As the 2010s developed, the modus operandi for most app developers was to retain users for as long as possible, keep them scrolling, keep servicing ads, and keep showing them things that keep them in the app for longer. Sometimes it can be things that genuinely interested in them, but it is far easier to make someone upset than it is to make them happy. So a lot of these platforms began presenting people with things they might engage with, distract them, or inspire them to leave a comment or reply. Something of a new feature, as to really use most of these apps, you had to make an account first, meaning that all your data and behaviors are logged into a single bucket.

The internet homogenized, simplified, and became dominated by a few large platforms that wanted to become pillars of the internet. To put an end to the old ways. And why did big tech companies want that? Well, to make money. To accumulate power. To control a new frontier of the world, to create a tool people rely on for information, and a way to extract information about others.

This might sound dystopian, like a bad future, and like something that needs to be dismantled in order for the culture of the early internet to undergo its own rebirth. Though, I think that’s the wrong way to look at things. The internet did not change because something went wrong. The old ways were not some lost higher culture. People are just far away enough from The Old Ways to glorify them.

The early internet was a third place driven by creative people exploring a new frontier, full of experiments, novelties, and a general lack of centralization. But there were some godawful things about it. The internet has always been full of assholes and all 31 Flavors of Nazi. And trying to find information on it, generally speaking, was pretty difficult due to the sheer number of things that had yet to be documented.

Much of the nostalgia around it stemmed from its rough edges. The relatively small userbase that made early users feel connected, like they had a shared culture and series of values you could assume everybody in a designated community had. And to enter this community, you had to learn how to do things, and learn about this community in general.

However, this was never the imagined end state for the internet by the companies who invested in it. Diehard internet users looked at the internet as a place to share creations, information, and form meaningful relationships with people they would have otherwise never met, the investor class did not give a shit. They don’t care about art or culture unless they can profit off of it. The reason why investors flocked to it was because of its newness and boundless profit potential. They saw the internet as a tool to sell products directly, deliver direct advertisement, and capture people’s attention through an interactive interface, rather than a passive television.

Nobody knew exactly how big it could be, but the end idea was always that a small group of companies would control this new frontier and enrich their owners in the process. That’s just how capitalism works. They find a new avenue to profit from, have a hectic free-for-all, and then a few dominating winners reap the lion’s share of “value” for their investors. We are seeing this with AI, we saw this when crypto was pushed as being mainstream, and we will keep seeing this until… this system stops benefitting the powerful.

Now, I am not trying to dismiss anyone using the internet as a tool to spread art, their creations, their ideas, or anything of the sort. The hell do you think I’m doing here, dude? The old web did not strictly go away. There are plenty of people running blogs, video channels, or making things for the joy of making things and sharing them with others. However, most people keep going back to these monetized corporate engagement trap platforms. Because they are the primary avenues people access the broader internet. They are where the people are. And that’s not going to change.

While I admire people trying to create new pockets of the internet for themselves, trying to make the “indie web,” it will always need to content with the fact that it’s not the “main” internet, as people will inevitably be redirected to a larger site or platform. A news story that was published on Twitter. A video that was posted on YouTube. Or a sub-community… that bases itself in Discord, rather than a proper forum. And in order to find something, people are going to go to Google to search for information. Or worse, an AI search engine. In order to run a modern website, one needs to contend with the corporate internet, follow their rules, restrictions, and supported standards. To browse the internet, you need a browser likely made by such a corporation. And to find anything, you need to use their tools.

Even if one could crush the modern power structure of the internet, so many things have been developed around these platforms existing, forever, that to destroy, shrink, or deprecate any of them would have dire consequences. I feel like an absolute tool in saying this, but… the internet we have is the internet that corporations, that the people who bankrolled the internet in the early days, always wanted. Something controlled, where corporations make the laws, and people are the product that enriches the owners.

Does this suck? You bet your ass it sucks! The modern internet is a technofeudalist digital society, modeled after the ideals that have been festering in corporate America for decades. As a digital society, people can just make new subsets of this society, effectively make more “land” that can be shaped into a “nation.” But how free is any nation when they are neighboring one a thousand times their size? Some platforms are fine, they may even seem great, but every one runs the risk of falling to the inherent madness that comes with being a ruler. And the only way to get rid of these giants is to divest. To stop giving them traffic, money, and users, as without revenue or data, they need to rely on investor class money.

…Now, do I think it is even possible for people to divest at this point? Eh… not really. Because you simply cannot escape the modern internet.

Where else are people supposed to go, and what are they supposed to do other than go online? TV is dying and shifting over to online video streaming. Radio still plays, but everything they play at modern stations just comes from the internet. Print has been “dead” for like two decades. And the outside world, at least in America, lacks third places, social structures, and has a price tag attached to everything that’s comparable to a month of Netflix or Spotify. What else can you do but… grab stuff at the library to busy yourself?

You need the internet to find a job, check your hours, communicate with your co-workers, get immediate news that won’t make it to the increasingly propagandized news outlets, and access essential information to exist as part of modern society. The internet sucks because it is mandatory. Because it is an extension of corporations exerting control and dominance onto our lives. Because nowadays, there are not that many options on what you can do without using the internet. And it gets worse the younger you are. Sure, you could just reject society and live alone in the woods, but… is that even living, dude?

To conclude, I think there is merit to the claim that the internet was better when it had fewer people. It was far less centralized and did not have the same pesky monetization, engagement farming, and retention traps that liter it nowadays. We all ultimately reap benefits from the innovations of the internet. The ability to quickly access information, video, audio, and writings makes it a genuine marvel, and the ability for anyone to post whatever into the ether is a beautiful idea. (And only an idea.) Plenty of people are creating, making a living off of video, music, and the creation of art, possibly more than there ever have been in history. But the tactics of these platforms, their ubiquity, and their importance to existing within the modern world makes them… suck.

The internet, for a few years, maybe a decade, was an escape from the broader world. But now, it’s just an extension of it. And while you can try to leave, to escape the need to be online, you’ll need to check in sooner or later.

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Natalie’s Insane Pokémon Project
(That She Will Never Finish)

This has been a slow news week in regards to gaming, so I should talk about something FUN. Something that has been consuming too much of my free time. And something that has been yanking away at my attention for… over a year at this point.

I am an accountant, so it should come as no surprise that I enjoy creating spreadsheets. I enjoy organizing information in a visually appealing yet highly technical manner, and have a history of making spreadsheets about fickle, minor, and technical video game nonsense.

Case in point, one of my larger projects, Dragalia Lost V3 Re;Works. A mock game design document that explored a hypothetical re-release and re-balanced version of the Cygames mobile action RPG Dragalia Lost. I went through all 298 adventurers and redid their kits to make them more balanced. I did the same for all items and equipment. I went through individual quests to determine their drop rates, and even changed the upgrade costs for characters and items to minimize bullcrap and grinding.

It was a massive project, took me well over 250 hours to complete, but I loved doing it. I loved figuring out how to present information, work within the constraints of page limits, and learn new Excel techniques. And while I will admit that V3 Re;Works is a bit sloppy in some regards— I openly don’t know how to use Acrobat effectively to create massive PDFs, I am still super proud of what I accomplished with that. It was arguably time that could have been better spent doing other things, but… fuck that. I had FUN and I made something! That is literally my main goal in life!

And this same philosophy is currently driven my new side project, which I began… back in December 2023. But is arguably a reprisal of a thing I have been doing since I was, like, 10-years-old. Hyper-fixating on Pokémon and attempting to organize it into something different. Writing out when each Pokémon could be obtained in a linear order. Creating an imaginary roster for a pair of Pokémon games that mostly contained version exclusive Pokémon by researching historical version differences. Going through every final evolution of a Pokémon and deciding which good damage-dealing moves they could learn in X and Y along with its ideal nature. This process came in waves throughout my entire life, flaring up around the start of each Pokémon generation. Or, in this case, after I developed permanent Pokémania after watching every Pokémon movie.

Originally, this project was meant to be a way to gather as much core information about Pokémon as I could. The stats, moves, types, items, abilities, and use them to create a hypothetical fan game that I only ever intended to pursue as an idea. A MOCK game design document for a game where the player controlled a team of six Pokémon at once in turn-based battles, where they fight against one or several buffed Pokémon. The plan was to make an entirely new move pool, make new abilities, give three to each Pokémon, butchered the type chart into something balanced, give every final evolution two types as a rule, buff all of their stats to establish a sense of parity, and turn held items into permanent upgrades needed to get past difficult battles.

The story, for what little was there, followed a malicious human that managed to merge itself with Arceus, Dialga, Palkia, and Giratina and uses this immense power to, effectively, destroy the world. Wiping out the protagonist in a tutorial battle before sending them into a destroyed world covered in darkness. With the help of a navigator character, and a team of 6 starter Pokémon— Panpour, Pansage, Pansear, Pichu, Eevee, and Poipole— the protagonist would need to go through a series of hundred of battles where they are rewarded with a new Pokémon, relics that buff their entire active party, or battle item that the protagonist could use to buff or heal their team, functioning as the seventh party member.

The structure of this would have been heavily based on the World of Light campaign from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (2018). A big board game like map that the player explored in order to fight new playable characters and equipment (spirits) that they obtained after completing some challenge. I know that this mode attracted a fair bit of criticism, both on launch and in retrospect, but I personally loved it. I was making good progress on this idea… but then I had to stop pursuing it as I got busy with tax season, started turning to PokéRogue as my fascination, and watched more Pokémon challenge run video producers. And by the time I returned to this idea, I realized that it was kinda stupid.

I was just trying to make a Shin Megami Tensei game with a Pokémon skin, and it was, in many ways, betraying the mechanical ethos of Pokémon. If I wanted to stim with this idea of a Pokémon fan game, then I would need to rethink my approach and come up with something semi-traditional.

So, I reimagined the scale of this project as being a hypothetical Pokémon game that would aim to rebalance things. Revise the learn sets to be semi-uniform, instead of the random nonsense they often are. Remove a number of useless moves that have no distinct element. Introduce new moves. Standardize the effects, damage numbers, and practical terms of moves, and rename every move to something sensible. Because… Pokémon moves are so wildly inconsistent with naming things. It’s often some type-based word paired with a noun or verb. Flame Charge. Torch Song. Heat Crash. Heat Wave. But none of these moves are very descriptive of what they actually do other than… they deal fire damage.

Oh, and I wanted to add new moves for much neglected type categories. Like special Rock-type moves. The act of making sense of these moves, of going through over 900 of them, has been immensely time-consuming, requiring me to categorize them, tag them, rewrite their description using a format I just stole from Smogon, and come up with a naming scheme that, while lame-as-hell, was at least consistent. This might not sound bad, but it was going through over 600 moves. Deciding what bucket they should be thrown into. How their effects should be balanced, what their names are. And how to keep this broader range of attacks more consistent and fair.

…I also had to search for, scrape, and manually rearrange just a STUPID amount of data. I had to flag inconsistencies, come up with an ordering scheme, and scrape through obscure event moves in order to cover my bases as much as possible, all in order to get what I call the Move Matrix! The Move Matrix is a highly inefficient lookup table for over 100,000 rows of data that searches if one of 1194 unique Pokémon forms can learn one of the 844 “standard” moves. All because I wanted to create a list of every move every Pokémon could have possibly learned in the past.

BASICALLY, I am just fucking around in a spreadsheet, in a complex system, thinking that I can create something more uniform than the rampant chaos and inconsistency that is Pokémon.

Okay, okay, but what is the end goal of all of this? Or am I just making a complex spreadsheet for shits and giggles? …Uh, I do have plans for what this could be. But it’s not going to be a game. Do you know how HARD and how TIME CONSUMING it is to make a game, even a ROM HACK? Hella hard. Stupidly hard. And the more you want to rework, the harder it will be to make it happen in a game. There is a reason why most ROM hacks only tweak things. Well, aside from cultural expectations of fans who primarily engage with Pokémon via Pokémon Showdown and VGC.

Instead, my ultimate idea is effectively similar to Dragalia Lost V3 Re;Works. To not create a game, but a document. And if I am being completely honest with myself, with my sensibilities, I would like for this project to be a strategy guide and script for a game that does not exist. Tentatively dubbed Pokémon Natalie.TF Version, the game would be another damn reprisal of Kanto, but set in the future and with a far greater emphasis on story and characters. With the protagonist being a pre-set character with a defined personality who, along with a dozen or more other trainers, would be sent off on a Pokémon journey. But with a lot more difficult trainer battles against recurring characters with defined types, gimmicks, personalities, and story arcs. It would not be a game about a personal player’s journey, but one about a bunch of characters— a class of characters— going on a journey together that gets weird, but never beyond PG weird. (Which is not saying much.)

As the protagonist progresses, they would obtain new Pokémon by completing battles in each route, rather than search for individual Pokémon. Pokémon that cannot be released, traded, or so forth, and are treated more as party members who the player can slot in and out of their active team. Not all battles would be required, as that would seem like a chore. EXP would be be used to increase a universal player level, meaning there would be no leveling up individual Pokémon. EXP sources would be limited and tied to campaign progression, meaning there would be no way to over level. And battles would primarily be double battles, as they are complex than single battles, with many mechanics only working in the context of double battles. All of which would be done to create a more structured and technical experience for the player, which is arguably against the deliberately wonky balancing of Pokémon. …But I don’t care!

Okay, so, I have these aspirations, but before I can do ANY of that crap, I first need to come up with a good technical framework. So, what have I done?

• Rebalanced 1325 Pokémon forms’ stats around this idea that most final evolutions should have a minimum of 500 base points, along with other arbitrary rules.
• Consolidated (and expanded) the 310 abilities to 195 abilities with an approximation of a balancing methodology.
• Created a preliminary list of items to include in the game.
• Made minor type chart adjustments to buff Bug, Ice, and Rock.
• Organized the Pokédex based on Pokémon “families.”
• Consolidated the aforementioned 844 standard moves to 641 moves with their reworked effects, stats, new TECHNICAL descriptions, new types, new categories, and new names.
• Created 31 new move concepts following the same requirements, because even 6 physical Fairy-type moves was not enough.
• Created the Move Matrix containing every move a Pokémon could have learned via TM, tutor, egg, event, or level up in a prior game.

So, now what do I need to do?

• Assign three of the new abilities to each Pokémon, as screw having multiple abilities, just give Pokémon three at once.
• Come up with a working methodology to create and present an updated move pool for Pokémon using this new library of moves.
• Basically create a strategy guide like “Pokédex page” entry for every Pokémon form.
• Use this finalized information to design a damn game that will never exist. (The draw the rest of the fucking owl step)

Akumako: “Natalie, what the fuck is wrong with you? Why are you doing that when you could be working on your fucking novels?”

Uh, because I am using a different part of my brain when working on novels. Because I cannot write them while I am watching something in the background. Because I am a bitch who loves numbers and mapping out something big and complex. It’s a thing that I like doing. I know that this whole thing is dumb, that I could be using this time to do anything else. But here’s the thing: I don’t want to. This, this is what I want to do. To create something, to find order within chaos, and to achieve something different than writing.

Akumako: “…I fucking swear, if you procrastinate on Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 to do this shit—”

I’ll begin work on that when I’m done with Student Transfer. It’s the next priority. And when I have a creative project like that lined up and before me, I will tell myself to put this toy away. But seeing as how I’m not writing a creative work at the moment, I need to practice my creativity through the marvelous medium of spreadsheets!

Akumako: “…And what about Suicide to Salvation—”

The world is too crazy at the moment for me to harness my rage in a work like that. I wrote the outline two weeks ago and its ideas are already too tame and too outdated! So the project is shelved until the time is right.

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Nintendo Switch 2 Holiday Sales Underwhelm
(And What It Means for Gaming)

Crumbs. I’m near my word count but want to add a third topic for this week. Politics and the US being a rogue state have been the go-to topics this week and drowned out everything else. But I don’t wanna talk about that so… time to talk about the Switch 2’s holiday performance instead!

Per an article from the Geoff Keighley backed Substack outlet, The Game Business, the Nintendo Switch 2 did not have the best holiday season. Well, at least compared to the Switch 1’s first holiday season on the market. US sales are down 35%, UK sales were down 16%, France was over 30%, though Japan sales were only down 5.5%. All of which seems like a meaningful decline, but not an unexpected one, as there are several reasons why the Switch 2 is not repeating history.

The Switch 2 is largely iterative and does not offer much that’s immediately recognizable as new or particularly novel. (I have already forgotten about the mouse controls.) It’s a Switch, but better, and every game released on it thus far looks, to the layperson, as something that could have worked on the Switch 1. In fact, most of the major first-party titles began as Switch 1 games. The system has only been on the market for 7 months, rather than the 10 months the Switch 1 was on the market at the end of its holiday season. And the Switch 2’s 2025 is not a great parallel to the Switch 1’s 2017.

Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey were landmark titles critically, culturally, and commercially. They were something bold and new after a decade of Nintendo being seen as the gimmick game company. And everybody could enjoy Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. It was the first true handheld with “console quality graphics.” And had an immediate novelty factor as a dockable game system with detachable controllers. It was a cool gizmo that appealed to even lapsed Nintendo fans who wrote the company off after they put their DS in a drawer in 2010.

The Switch 2, meanwhile, has lacked a game with a wide cultural impact. Part of this is due to the nature of the modern online climate. Back in 2017, everybody was sharing dope clips of people stuntin’ through BotW in 2017 on Twitter. But games discovery is in the toilet at the moment due to changes with social media sites as people have chosen to follow algorithms rather than humans. …Also, every major release for the Switch 2 has had something that inhibited it from being a banger success.

Buzz around Mario Kart World has been notably negative, as while many had fun with the game, others thought that it did not provide what they wanted from a new Mario Kart. Their opinions shaded by what Mario Kart 8 has been for them for 8 to 11 years, and a less immediately engaging online experience. Metroid Prime 4 was derided for many of its structure, design decisions, and approach to narrative, being both too much of a departure and too based in a “””dated“”” open world design. Kirby Air Riders was a party game and a Kirby game, so even if it was one of the few Switch 2 games to go buzzing on social media, Kirby’s always been a B-tier series. I love Kirby, I’d crawl into their mouth, but them’s the facts.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A’s hype was undermined by a bunch of leaks and the Pokémon outrage machine that has been doing hella fine numbers since 2019 when people imposed PS4 level expectations on what were effectively HD 3DS games. (I liked Sword and Shield, but am I even wrong?) Hyrule Warriors 3 had the baggage of Age of Imprisonment’s brittle narrative convictions, the anti-Asian sentiment that comes up whenever Musou is discussed in English, and the baggage of “not being a real Zelda.” This should have been a banger year, but the vibes, and critics, have dubbed it an 8/10 line-up. …Except for Donkey Kong Bananaza, but the last culturally relevant Donkey Kong game was in 1999. Before the vital demographic of 16-year-old to 25-year-old Nintendorks were even womb warm.

Also, people are poor. Much of the world, not just America, is in a K-shaped economy, and lots of people can’t afford to buy a $450 games system. That could be used for a month’s worth of groceries for one person. The main audience for the Switch 2 is currently diehard Nintendo fans and people whom I disaffectionately call Performance Enthusiasts, who get a kick out of seeing games perform well on their devices. And I would not expect it to start doing huge numbers until Nintendo releases their next 3D Super Mario game. A Zelda game in the same mold as Breath of the Wild. Or their next Animal Crossing.

Even then, there are going to be major challenges in getting the masses onboard. Gaming is not in the same place as it was in 2017. Live services have exploded in popularity, with some shifting into being game platforms in and of themselves, insulating millions of people from the broader world of games, and conditioning them to just play one game. The entire perspective of console generations and upgrading to new hardware has been warped by the pandemic. And this perspective will be further warped the current RAM and GPU shortage that will only make new hardware, like the Switch 2, more expensive. Console gaming is on the decline, just in general. All forms of entertainment are attempting to cannibalize each other in the modern attention economy, and gaming is not as compelling as TikTok brainrot.

Hell, some people have completely lost all reason to play video games now that they can just use Elon Musk’s XAI to generate Infinite Child Sexual Assault Material based on REAL PEOPLE for them to jerk off to! NOW YOU CAN CYBER RAPE ANYBODY JUST BY TYPING WORDS!

The games industry grew drastically over the past 20 years. But as budgets balloon, layoffs continue without any sign of stopping, everything gets more expensive, new markets dry up, and people keep playing the same game day-in day-out for a decade, it will become impossible to replicate past success. …And I just realized I should have saved this rambly musing until the Matthew Ball presentation on The State of Gaming in 2026 comes out. Drats! Segment and Rundown are now OVER!

Edit 2026-01-11: Corrected the comment regarding Elon Musk’s Child Sexual Assault Material generator. You DO NOT need to pay for Twitter Premium to use it. ANYBODY can just demand MechaHitler née Grok to generate child porn.

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Cygames Opens up AI Studio
(More like Cyg-AI-mes!)

Goldarn it all…

So, the publisher of Granblue Fantasy, Dragalia Lost, and Umamusume, Cygames, has decided to “get with the times” by opening up an AI centered subsidiary, Cygames AI Studio. A subsidiary for developing and utilizing AI models to assist with development process, and I just have to groan at this fact. Cygames, as a studio, has become what they are to day due in no small part to the artists they employ. Their games have boasted some truly excellent illustrations, character designs, and animations, allowing them to stand out next to their competitors by virtue of sheer quality. So hear them say that they intend on using AI in order to create things is, well, incredibly upsetting.

It is not clear to me how exactly they will be incorporating AI into things. If it will be used to make quick and dirty prototypes, generate assets, or help perform good old fashioned analytics, because executives think LLMs are better at that than analysts who exist within communities. However, as I have said in the past, the current cultural consensus in the circles I frequent has been becoming fiercely anti-AI, and with how it is being used, to create garbage, propaganda, and deepfake pornography, I cannot really blame them for their blanket rejection.

Cygames is a tech company that, much like Larian, likely does not want to be “left behind.” But as a tech company, they also need to consider the fact that a growing number of their potential customer base does not like AI, does not want to support products with AI, and will reject a studio if they use AI. It’s possible that the critics are all full of hot air and have no real bite— gamers are notoriously bad at boycotts— but I am hoping that the fear of being culturally blacklisted works. Just so that they can backpedal, close the studio, and go back to doing things the way that made them a major player in the first place.

There is room for nuance and discussion regarding AI, but we don’t live in a world where nuance is allowed. We live in a world where massive corporations are trying to siphon everything they can from regular people, replace them however possible, and are pushing AI as their latest hype-driven tool. We live in a world of extremes, and the two ones are for the consolidation of power and the equal distribution of power. And anybody pushing AI is on the side of consolidation, in fueling the world that techno feudalists want, where they own the software, hardware, and every means of production.

…And I think that’s enough for this week.

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Progress Report 2026-01-11

I watched movies with my friends last week, but I don’t have much to really say about them. The first was Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure (1977), which is one of the most Nataliecore movies that has ever existed. I could write an essay on that movie, because I genuinely adore it for what it attempts and succeeds in. As a story, it’s pretty standard, and the music is more of an acquired taste, but the animation and imagination are both impeccable. I have zero idea how any human made The Greedy, but damn do I love that thing move. One of these days, I might make a parody of this movie, using my characters, and X-rated perversions, because it would be fun. But Isadore & Malachi in Nightmare World has to be on the backburner for a while.

Then we watched The Day After Tomorrow (2004). That movie kind of sucks. It is effectively a climate change disaster movie about a flooded, frozen, and snow swept New York City, created by Roland Emmerich, one of the most pro-American immigrant directors, as his first film after 9/11. Its cast is too sprawling to really connect with people. Its attempt at creating a climate disaster is so hyperbolic that it becomes pure fantasy, and the film really feels like it was only propped up by a few ideas that were switched together with early 2000s Hollywood cliches. It looks nice, rather impressive given the technology available at the time, but whatever message it has about anything falls apart throughout the movie’s overstuffed two hour runtime. We should have watched Independence Day (1996) instead, as I want to see The White House get blown up.

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2026-01-04: Movie night in The Shrine. Played through the rest of Joyride and took Cassie along. We had a Good Time! Then I started the Kyoko Mistake route, which is ass long! Got bored and decided to work in my big stupid nonsense Pokémon spreadsheet.

2026-01-05: Had a full work day all lined up, and kept on messing with my spreadsheet project, because I find that to be the most fun thing in the world at this moment. Yes, even after a DAY of messing around in glorified or actual spreadsheets. Played more of the Kyoko Mistake route for Student Transfer, which is very good, but I also really just want to do something else. Orz…

2026-01-06: Completed one ending of Kyoko Mistake, and was disappointed by how little was added in terms of a continuation. But there are two more branches that I will TRY to do tomorrow, as I need to attend a dinner party, and am basically working full-time at the moment. Wrote 2,000 word bit on my dumb Pokémon spreadsheet project.

2026-01-07: Worked from wake-up to 17:00, then had to go to my grandmother’s house for 2.5 hours. Time I could have spent doing other stuff. Played Student Transfer V9 until 2:00, finished the Kyoko Route, meaning I can work on the review… later, as I need to get this Rundown out the door!

2026-01-08: Worked until 19:30, edited this Rundown, made the header images, then slept. Lots of mind-numbing bookkeeping work today!

2026-01-09: Wrote the 400 word last segment real quick before work. Wrote the last 2,200 words for the Student Transfer review. Will finalize tomorrow for publication on Tuesday.

2026-01-10: Wrapped the Student Transfer V9 review, editing it, grabbing images, all that shaz. Then I took a look at the outline for VD2.0 Act 3. It all came back to me, I realized I had to change the ending significantly, and was hit in the face with a decade of emotional labor I had distanced myself from over the past few months, which made it hard for me to jump back in. It’s like opening up a box of old family photos… Rewrote 2,700 words of outline for VD2.0A3.

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This week’s header image is a collage of the Opte Project internet map and computers by raemz, back when Medical Whiskey was still up.