Rundown (1/25/2026) Natalie Vs CRTs

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This Week’s Topics:

Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Natalie Vs CRTs

So, one of the pervasive subplots across years of Rundowns is my continued efforts to understand and criticize the loud niche that valorize the virtues of CRT displays and longingly wish to return to their warm electric embrace. This is something that I have struggled to understand as someone born in 1994 and who did not have ready access to an HD display until 2008. When my father gave me a chunky Philips TV that had a 1080p mode that I could use with an Xbox 360 that I got as my birthday/Christmas present. I was born in an era where CRT displays were… all large scale displays. CRT monitors were used on computers, and they just were TVs that I saw at every house I visited as a small child. The only exceptions were smaller handheld devices like cell phones and game systems like the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS.

I have plenty of prior experience with CRT displays. So why do I feel such a strong dissonance with my personal experiences with CRTs and the types of CRTs that I see certain pundits espouse as the superior way to experience low res sprite-based video games? …And sometimes movies/TV, if they are the sort of people who thinks VHS tapes have “character.” Well, after doing some digging, I think I have come to two conclusions. The first reason is that I do not have the same capacity for remembering quality as I theorize other people do.

For example, I remember familiar places from my childhood pretty well. Classrooms, school hallways, parks, people’s homes, front yards, backyards. And I tend to remember them in their full detail, or some approximation of it. I know that I do not actually remember all of this detail. I don’t have a clear 4K image of what these homes look like in my brain. When I think back on them, my brain basically takes a crusty JPG and generates something higher quality based on what it knows a bedroom or the like should look like. The result of this is murky and with myriad ambiguities that I can address by looking at examples of similar environments to inform my memories. Furniture styles, classroom posters or decorated cork boards, contemporary photos of the same locations.

Now, by taking in new information, I am mixing and mingling memories in a process that is by no means clarifying an existing memory. Instead, I am merging memories, transforming them into something that is higher quality. I am using new information to remaster old memories and my mind tells me this is how is should look, and how it did look, for the most part. So when I see footage of games looking clean, crisp, or otherwise highly detailed, I do admittedly have a tendency to overwrite my memories based on this new information.

I look at games with unfiltered upscaling, with big chunky pixels, or smooth polygons and think, right, that’s how the games look, how they should look, and on older lower resolution displays, they should have looked like that. I am inclined to say this is not the way every brain processes information and views the past, as human brains are complicated and different brains work different ways. But it’s how MY brain works.

The second reason for my dissonance is actually based in tangible reality, as not all CRTs were created equal nor do they have the same features. Which makes the fixation on CRTs to be somewhat perplexing to me. Any tidbit is going to be focusing on specific displays or a filter that John P. Videogames thinks is sufficiently representative of his point. (This gendering is deliberate and should be seen as a point of cultural commentary.) So, I think it is worth looking into the three main CRTs that I used as a child, which I used so regularly for so many years that I am fairly confident in my memories. …And no, I don’t have access to any of them anymore. Then I would be able to see what they really looked like, and this would be an inherently better preamble ramble.

My living room TV from about 2002 to 2022 (yes, really) was a huge-ass Sony Trinitron CRT (I think it was a KV-27FS100). That’s the TV depicted in the header image, as it’s a photo of my old family living room. The Trinitron lineup is considered pretty positively among enthusiasts, so this would be a good main TV for console gaming, and rest assured, this is where 90% of my Nintendo 64-ing and GameCube-ing was done.

As a TV that I saw nearly every day for over 20 years, I am very familiar with what it was capable of. …And it simply did not have many of the glorified CRT effects that people like to gab on about. The glow, the way it blended colors, the way it elegantly smoothed out the harsh edges of things, and so forth. It was just a big display that made everything look sorta blurry and bright. Arguably better at masking the imperfections of, say, a Wii or N64 game, but it was never as transformative as CRT enthusiasts like to say it might be.

The other TV I used regularly was a Toshiba TV with a built-in VCR, I believe it was the MV13N3. This was my tiny bedroom TV from ages 2004 to 2008. The TV was just 13 inches, I watched it with at least a three-foot buffer, typically did not use it for games, and mostly used it to watch VHS tapes and standard definition TV from a cable that went through my door. It was never a preferred screen, and even as a kid, I knew it did not look that great, being harder to see than the living room TV, having more of the trademark CRT blur, and a notable curve unlike the flat-screen Trinitron.

It was largely a TV for when other people were using the living room TV, and I basically never used it for video games, as they just did not look very good on it. The screen size and crunch of the CRT-isms made it hard to read text in general, and as a dumb kid who did not know what the tri-color composite cables did, I never wanted to plug in a three color thing into just two slots. And when I did hook up my GameCube to it, I remember it games looking simply worse than they did on my GBA. Even when I had a traditional-ass CRT, even when I was a child trying to play games on it while consulting an online walkthrough on my computer, I did not like how games looked on it.

Last, most importantly, and most confusingly, is my old eMac, my big 2004 birthday/Christmas present. The whole reason I chose this topic is because, all my life, I thought that this computer’s display was an LCD, just a very early form. However, it’s actually a flat screen CRT, not unlike the Trinitron, and that just confused me. Because this was my main PC from 2004 to 2012, when I upgraded to an iMac for a year, before ditching Apple in favor of Windows. (It made sense at the time!)

…And this is also where I begin questioning just WHAT a CRT actually is, because it had so few of the espoused CRT visual effects. When looking at footage of these displays, one can see some blurring. Zooming in really close to its 17 inch 1280 x 960 display, it’s clear that the pixels are just not part of the screen in the same way they are on my 1080p monitor. But comparing the way the other displays of the era, like my Nintendo DS or Game Boy Advance SP, the differences were not precise enough for me to perceive them.

Hell, it looked closer to my handhelds than it did to the 13 inch TV I had in my room. Leading me to view the eMac as something distinctly different from my TV. Because things looked different on them. Everything had a certain blur, a certain glow due to the way backlights worked in that era, being something widely diverse that simply varied across devices. So using the boilerplate label of CRT to describe them is conflating wildly different applications of the same technology with different looks that varied over the span of decades.

Is that the reason why I dislike CRT enthusiasm? Because a lot of its loudest proponents wish praise it as a monolith, with one intended aesthetic, rather than a bunch of different screens made by different people that achieved different effects. Which I view as distinctly different from modern screens, which generally all aspire towards the same goal of clarity and color depth? …Yes. It only took me years of getting angry at the subject and some inner reflections, but I think I got it. Very good!

…Also, when looking into this information, I could not help but run into aesthetic mud-runnings of some of the devices I mentioned here. Namely, people calling the eMac and original Nintendo DS models ugly. Not really criticizing their functionality, which would be fair enough, but mostly for these devices looking chunky, like pieces of equipment. When… that’s just a different aesthetic. I like how they look, and these criticisms are always delivered with an overwhelming sense of negativity that strikes me as weirdly classist and against the ethos of retro tech enthusiasm. These were the first runs or cheaper runs of what became hugely popular, and back in the 2000s, classism was all the rage! Oh, I didn’t have the first model, but I had the second model, and the second model was just sooooo much better

I liked the thing that looked and felt like I could slam it into concrete and it could work just fine. And as somebody who was used to chunky monitors with a fat-ass mid-tower, the eMac looked like sex. It was not as colorful as the candy-flavored iMac G3, but this was the iPod era, where being White, where the Millennial Anti-Aesthetic, where CaucasianCore, was IN!

Akumako: “…Okay Grandma, let’s get you back to bed.”

Natalie’s Dumb Ocarina of Time Vs Twilight Princess Discourse
(Because This Bitch Cannot Let Drama Die!)

So, this segment has nothing to do with anything topical by any stretch of the imagination, and is an adaptation of sorts of an argument I got into with one of my friends on Discord. The argument was tossed aside with no real resolution, but I feel the need to discuss it because of how deeply wrong I think they were, and the futility that comes with arguing with another person via DMs.

Basically, Lego and Nintendo announced a new Zelda themed Lego set based on the final battle from Ocarina of Time. I thought that this made perfect sense because… it’s Ocarina of Time. The friend later did some theory crafting how much cooler a Twilight Princess version would be, and how it would make sense for them to represent that game, when they had already represented Ocarina of Time with another set. …But I did not understand that was their intention, nor did I care.

Instead, I insisted that it was sensible and correct for them to use Ocarina because it was more popular and impactful than Twilight Princess. Both of which are loaded terms that can be read different ways, so allow me to define both of them. Because if you are not arguing about the same thing, you are just wasting hot air and life force.

Popular: Recognized by or prevalent among the people in general. Something that is widely liked and appreciated, and also has some level of cultural weight behind it.

Impactful: In terms of games, impactful means a game that sent ripple effects across the medium, industry, or broader gaming culture in some way, shape, or form.

So, let’s talk about what these two titles each have going for them

Ocarina of Time is a game that has a lasting legacy behind it. It was critically lauded, being one of the highest reviewed games of all time. It in many ways went on to revolutionize 3D gaming at large with its approach to level design, camera design, and popularized the lock-on targeting system. It created a fully 3D world that was massive in its era. It told a story with a surprising number of cinematic flourishes without ever needing to use pre-rendered cutscenes, a rarity in the early CD generation. And it hosted so many quoted, cited, and referenced gameplay innovations that I think it well deserves a high level of renown. Does it deserve as much as renown as it has been given over the years? Probably not, but that’s a topic for another day.

That being said, Ocarina is an old-ass 27-year-old game, so its popularity would have faded over time, but that’s not necessarily the case, as Ocarina is one of the more commonly re-released games of the past 25 years, allowing it to be widely accessible and garner new fans with each new release. The N64 was defined by Ocarina of Time, where it went on to sell 7 million. The GameCube got a port of Ocarina of Time with the Collector’s Edition. Ocarina was one of the first N64 Virtual Console games, making it widely available to anybody who could figure out how to use the Wii Shop Channel.

Ocarina of Time 3D was the first MAJOR 3DS game and sold like 7 million copies on its own. Wii U got Ocarina, a shit version, but a version. The Switch got a version of Ocarina via NSO. And Ocarina has experienced a continued presence in the modern era thanks to the decompilation from a few years back, creating a native PC version of the game, and opening up the doors for it to be ported on whatever. It also enjoys a persistent popularity as a game for speed runners. Partially because the speedrun is neat, but also because people generally like watching games they like. And if a game has a decent culture of streaming around it, that probably means it’s pretty popular.

Not one of these things is a load bearing pillar to support its popularity, and the intended takeaway is that the game was accessible, and accessibility helps bolster something’s popularity. That’s kind of obvious, but it needs to be emphasized. I don’t think a lot of people are playing Ocarina of Time on NSO, just in general. But the fact that there have been so many ways to play Ocarina means… there are more people who like and appreciate the game. More people who have had a chance to experience the game and garner positive feelings for it.

Twilight Princess had the benefit of being a Wii launch title, which is how most experienced it, as the big Nintendo published Zelda game for Wii, their most successful dedicated home console. And rest assured, it was a big fucking deal. It did incredibly well, selling like 10 million copies between the Wii, GameCube, and Wii U. It is one of the most commercially successful games in the series, received a wide number of critical accolades, and is by no means an obscure or forgotten entry in the series. It as, in all likelihood, the first Zelda for millions. Hell, it was the first Zelda I really got into. (I tried playing Four Swords Adventures and Wind Waker first, but I didn’t understand the controls of FSA and I got stuck on the stealth section in Wind Waker. I was terrible at games as a kid.)

However, there are a couple things that limited the widespread popularity of Twilight Princess.

Firstly, it has not maintained as consistent of a presence and availability as Ocarina. The GameCube was dead when it came out— I would know. By the time the Wii U version came out, the Wii U was on the boat waiting to die, overshadowed by the hype of Breath of the Wild. And by the time I am writing this in 2026, the game is not on Switch, capping its potential popularity. Nowadays the best way to play the game is likely via Dolphin or Cemu.

However, I tend to not count emulation as being that significant, as you can fairly emulate most games on systems weaker than the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Decompilations and recompilations, however, are different. They are generally viewed as better and more significant ways to redistribute games, effectively fan developed remasters of games that. Because each release is distinct, an event, these typically lead to a resurgence of these games, however niche they may be in the grand scale. However, if you are talking about the grand scale of gaming, then only like 25 games are popular and the rest don’t fucking matter, at all.

Secondly, while Twilight Princess was lauded, much of the game was a bigger and grander reprisal to the formula refined by Ocarina of Time. After Majora’s Mask and Wind Waker futzed with the structure, Twilight Princess is hella derivative of Ocarina. Just bigger, longer, and with more stuff to play around with. I am not saying this as a bad thing. Sequels typically should be inherently derivative. This in turn limited the game’s potential popularity by lacking the same newness factor. It was not a bold new take on Zelda, but rather a Zelda that catered to what fans, the public, and Nintendo’s marketing team wanted. A semi-mature fantasy action game with a punchy legacy name behind it.

That might seem like it should warrant a greater level of popularity, but gamers are generally bad at knowing what they want and what will be successful. (Same with gaming executives.) The game came out in 2006, at the dawn of the PS3 and a year after the Xbox 360. Gaming expectations had grown, presentation standards were raised, and there was an expectation that a new generation should innovate, not iterate. While Twilight Princess is probably in my top 30 personal favorite games of all time, I don’t consider it to be a highly innovative game. It took an established formula, polished it up, and making it dope as hell, but the real game changer, the innovator, tends to be more popular than the refiner that plays around with things established with an entry 8 years ago.

Ocarina was so different it was effectively a new series, as were a lot of 2D to 3D transitions. Twilight Princess was 3D Zelda number 4. The only way, to me, a Zelda game could overcome Ocarina in popularity is if it made as big of a splash as Ocarina and be so different it was effectively a new IP. …And Breath of the Wild sold like twice as much as Ocarina. A success that was propelled by being a 2017 release, back when social media was actually a useful tool to share games. Being a player-driven experience, encouraging them to make as much fun as they see fit. (Very little in my case, because I am an über conservative player.) And being a launch title for the most popular gaming handheld of all time.

Akumako: “What about Wind Waker? That one sold like dog rape by series standards, and it’s beloved.”

Internet popularity does not reflect reality. The fact that we cannot just quantify this, that all of humanity cannot just be logged into a single simple database, will drive me nuts until I die in 30 years.

And on that reassuring note, this topic is over!

Life Is Strange: Reunion Announced
(AKA Life Is Strange Volume 6: Life Is Strange 3)

Life Is Strange, as a series, has existed in a particularly odd spot since its inception, and is something I’d really like to get smart on through a retrospective of some shape or form, as there is only so much one can glean from reviews and general community vibe checks. After 2024’s Double Exposure, I don’t know where the community consensus is, but I do know one thing. The series has been receiving an unprecedented amount of support from Square Enix.

  • Life Is Strange (2015) was a firmly AA episodic experiment by French developer Don’t Nod, trying to make an American drama about a lesbian art school teen with time rewinding powers. This could have easily fallen into dense obscurity, but it went on to become a cult classic and big seller.
  • Life Is Strange: Before The Storm (2017) was a prequel that followed the fan favorite Chloe before she began her alt chick lesbian arc, and was well received as a bit of supplemental material. Which was somewhat surprising, as it was developed by the American studio Deck Nine, rather than Don’t Nod.
  • Life Is Strange 2 (2018) was imagined as basically an inverse of the original, featuring a story about brotherly love, looking after a superpowered kid, and trekking across the country, trying to avoid ICE or some facsimile. Developer Don’t Nod wanted to push what the series could be, but in doing so they alienated their core base, leading this game to be forgotten as “the other one.”
  • Life Is Strange: True Colors (2021), developed by Deck Nine, was a standalone story that was well received and seen as the right direction for the series, as far as I can tell. It had a new protagonist, new setting, new set of powers, and aimed to tell a slightly more mature story with a deliberately diverse cast. It reviewed well and sold well.
  • Life Is Strange: Double Exposure (2024) was Don’t Nod’s attempt at creating a direct sequel to the original game, but was met with a pretty widely divisive reception from fans over the direction taken, what they did, and what they didn’t do.

Now, I can see how this yo-yo-ing would be immensely frustrating to any fan of a series who wants to feel the feelings that the first game brought. But I have to admire the sheer quantity of releases here, how frequent they all were, and how diverse they have been. I have brought up the recent trend of games taking forever to get sequels, and despite the wishy-washy closing I gave, I do truly believe that it is wrong that major IPs don’t get something new released every 5 or so years.

Not because I think it makes financial sense, but because it creates legacy, turns games into series, and gives people the experience of seeing a thing they love iterate and grow, rather than fade into memory before being, effectively, rebooted. Back in my day, you got sequels every 2-3 years, and my GOD do I love the fact that Life Is Strange has had exactly that. THIS is the type of thing I want to see across the board. Just new stuff again and again, regular experimentation, and pushing what a series can be.

…Also, there was a Remaster that I only remember hearing bad things about. Hate when that happens. Shit Square Enix!

However, I still say that the vibes of the series are definitely off. The series was basically taken from developer Don’t Nod, who went on to try to make similar games with Tell Me Why (2020) and Lost Records: Bloom & Rage (2025). There was a whole trunkload of nonsense going on at the new developer Deck Nine during their run of the series. Because some men just cannot stand the idea of working on a narrative game mostly defined by personal connections and female protagonists.

I bring this up as context and preface for the announcement of Life Is Strange: Reunion, the sixth game in the series and sequel to the Max Caufield Timeline of Life Is Strange: Before The Storm (2017), Life Is Strange (2015), and Life Is Strange: Double Exposure (2024). And looking at it broadly… this feels like the developers are backing down from what they were doing in Double Exposure by throwing in things that fans of the first game would superficially like.

Instead of featuring a third new power or reprising Max’s Double Exposure ability to shift between timelines, Reunion instead gives Max the time rewinding powers yet again. After featuring a brand-new cast and a new friend character for Max, Reunion brings back Chloe, now green-flavored, promoting her to a playable co-protagonist. The overarching goal of the game is to find some way to prevent the college she teaches at from burning down— which is fairly minor compared to the storm from the first game that threatened to destroy all of Arcadia Bay. Chloe has trauma for being a person who should not exist and is juggling dual sets of memories. Which is what I like to see. And Square Enix is being very forward about this being the finale of Max’s elongated story.

This all sounds good… but I have concerns about this release. Firstly, Reunion is coming out March 26, 2026, for PS5, Xbox Series, and PC. (Not Switch 1 or 2 for some reason.) That means there’s only an 18 month gap between it and Double Exposure. This would be nothing to worry about in the days of old, but knowing about the issues at Deck Nine, the holey story in Double Exposure, and the reality of modern game development, this raises questions. How did they make Reunion so quickly when it took them three years to make Double Exposure? Did they implement feedback from Double Exposure? And after previously encountering so much pushback for recasting Chloe during a voice actor’s strike, why isn’t Ashly Burch reprising the role?

I’m sure the community of Life is Strangers will have some complex thoughts about this game when it finally comes out, and while I hope for the best, I only expect the worst.

For Some Reason, Nintendo Updated Donkey Kong Country Returns HD
(Playable Dixie Kong, Psychotic Time Trials, and Switch 2 Upgrades)

So, Donkey Kong Country Returns HD (2025). It came out a year ago and was widely criticized as a pretty subpar remaster that broke several things in the conversion. Developer Forever Entertainment changed colors arbitrarily, lost a bunch of visual effects, made load times worse, and broke the physics of co-op. It was a mess, and I don’t even know how it came out like that when Nintendo should have an in-house pipeline for porting Wii games. It might need to be tweaked on a game-by-game basis, but… this cannot be as hard as they are making it out to be. Retro probably could have cranked this out with 20 people and 6 months, but they were all hands on deck with Prime 4, and, well… both games shipped!

Donkey Kong Country Returns HD was a throwaway release, a good addition to the Switch’s library, but easily overshadowed by the Switch 2 and Donkey Kong Bananaza six months later. But now, a full year after the game’s release, Nintendo released an update. …Because I guess they had people actively working on this re-release after launch? So, what did they add? Well, they added Dixie Kong as a playable character, which is just a crazy thing to add after launch, a whole new playable character in a game that did not even have a character select screen. They added an honestly terrible looking time attack mode called Turbo Attack where the game moves faster than usual, which is exactly how people like their platformers. Like, a time attack mode is a fine addition for fun, but who wants to play a platformer at 1.5x speed? They fixed various visual bugs along with an issue that made co-op basically impossible in certain stages. And Brazilian Portuguese was added, because Brazil is going to be as important a market as the US is in about… 10 years.

The game was also updated for Switch 2 and now runs at a higher resolution, loads significantly faster, and can be played locally via Game Share. …Wait, you can do Game Share with Switch 1 games? I thought it was exclusive to Switch 2 titles! And all of these updates are just part of the base package. There is no Donkey Kong Country Returns HD: Nintendo Switch 2 Edition. This is all in the base game, no paid update, it’s just there to anybody who bought the game. Again, Nintendo has been terrible about their branding here.

This is just baffling. How? Why? Huh? It’s an update that improves things, but why now, why like this, and why make a trailer for it? Aaaaahhhhh!

Microslop’s Developer Direct
(And Also Fable!)

Oh grief, I need to talk about Microsoft again… I don’t like ’em. I don’t like ANYTHING they are doing, but I’m currently stuck with them. I hate how they have been powering America’s genocide of Palestinians (Israel is a puppet state for America, argue about it in the comments below). I hate how they have been actively worsening Windows 11 over the past few years with crap like Copilot, Recall, ads, and general instability due to a lack of QA and general giving-a-fucks by management.

I hate how much I need to fight with the OS for it to fucking work as of the past few months, with stability getting worse and Explorer crashing like twice a month. Search is useless necessitating the use of Everything. Microsoft Store apps all have problems whenever I’m forced to use them. Everything just seems to run worse over time. They basically turned Xbox into a walking corpse that I want to see drop (dead) out of the console race just so I don’t need to hear about ’em or see their logo. And because of them I want everything to go over to a multiplatform of Linux based development platform.

Unfortunately, as I highlighted six months ago, I kinda can’t do that yet. I mean, I could for 90% of things. I literally can buy everything I need for a Linux PC, no hesitation. But with the current PC component shortages, namely RAM, now is a terrible time to buy a PC. I could use older parts to make use of my extra DDR4 RAM and extra M.2 drives to build an affordable new PC now. Except I don’t want to buy any PC components until the bubble pops. Why not just dual boot Linux? Because I would screw that up, SOMEHOW, and I would likely need to replace a drive anyway…

Oh, and Microsoft is also a BIG reason for this crap as well. Them and their vassal, Open AI, are doing no small part to aid in the component shortage we are seeing right now. And they are also actively contributing to rising power costs, which adds to the Cost of Living Crisis we are seeing all over the world.

…Okay, that’s enough political bitching, now let’s do some gamer bitching!

I’ve mentioned this before, but the very idea of a Fable reboot just strikes me as… off, and it only feels more off the more time passes between the last game and this new one. Fable (2004) was an overhyped yet nevertheless solid action RPG that sent a ripple effect across the industry. It showed that western PC RPGs could, and should, be designed around consoles. It popularized the trite morality binary of the 7th generation of gaming, which I just find cute. And it laid a lot of foundations that would be common in the sleuth of action RPGs to follow it. I never really got too into it, but I respect it for what it was, while choosing not to remember what it promised to be.

Then there was Fable II (2008), and I LOVED Fable II. It was a huge evolution over the original, basically introduced me to modern action RPGs, and I still think about its many eccentric design decisions to this day. The brilliant golden trail to track progress. The intuitive four flavored EXP system. How the game just stole your EXP during the prisoner arc. The dog who… I just love. That dog was as dumb as a box of crayons, but he tried to help me find that treasure, and distracted mooks in combat! While the ability to become a landlord whose pockets filled with copious amounts of gold every 5 minutes, and just wreck the economy after some blacksmith combo farming was good capitalistic fun. Would do that shitty mini-game again. 5/5!

I loved the variety of dyes and outfits one could wear freely without regards for player stats. The gargoyles who you had to find using audio cues as they teased you with embittered old British voices. The color coded three attack system was a bit basic, yet felt good in practice. Except for the sub-30 fps aiming, that was kinda shit. It had gay marriage in 2008. OH! And the fact that the final reward in the game was a sex change potion? That would have been great, but MTF characters looked… not very good. I played through it probably three times, and is one of my most missed games of the Xbox 360.

Then there was Fable III (2010). It was an 18 month sequel with a pretty good gimmick. What if you started on an adventure like in Fable II, but spent the back half of the game as the ruler of an industrialized fantasy England world? Great idea, but the game just did not have enough new concepts to really make it seem like a direct improvement, and more just a game with a lot of arbitrary differences. There was a new industrial setting, but gameplay was basically the same. The pause menu was now a big closet because Peter Molyneux was smokin’ that PACK! The series expanded to a desert nation, but didn’t do much with it. And the whole making choices as king to save the kingdom from destruction element was undermined through the power of landlordism. Fable III was not a bad game, far from it, but it was a far cry from what it could have been if given enough time and scope.

…And then the series died and no other Fable games came out.

Akumako: “What about Fable: The Railed Journey (2012)?”

Kinect game. And those aren’t games in the modern sense of the word.

Akumako: “Fable Heroes: A Tale of Dolls (2012)?”

…The pub minigame collection? Nobody cares about that!

Akumako: “That’s not. …Ah forget it. Fable Legends of Heroes?”

That game was basically finished but canceled. Also, it was multiplayer only, so even if it came out, it would be dead by now!

Akumako: “Do canceled games not count?”

Hell no!

After the DLC and PC port of Fable III, it has been 15 years since a new Fable. Lionhead has been dead for a decade. Peter Molyneux is out selling frog cocks in the ghetto, or some shit. And Playground Games has been working on Fable for about 8 or 9 years, because that’s how long games take to make under Microsoft’s pathetic management. The IP has been exhausted, there are no Fable diehards left, and with only a paltry 2014 remaster of the first game, it’s a pretty dead game series.

Why even bother rebooting it in a new continuity with new characters and a new developer with precious little carryover? Because the brand had value in 2018. And it might have retained that value if Fable Legends wasn’t canceled. …But it was, and I think it was dumb for Microsoft to think they could keep the flame going. Because a reboot like this is just the worst of both worlds. A new IP would be more exciting, and there is little about Fable that makes it a renowned series. It’s just a series of two good and one great action RPG.

Furthermore, when you have a new studio take on a series like Fable, they are always going to take it in a new direction, have their own interpretations, and want to make this idea its own. I don’t particularly like their interpretation as I think it is a bit too safe, a bit too focused on whimsy and afraid to be crass, trying to be bigger and broader based on certain things the original games did. A reboot like this is typically going to be an uneasy mix of old and new that may or may not appeal to previous fans.

Unfortunately, the marketing of Fable the Reboot invites players to expect this new Fable to be like the old Fable titles, and in a way that I think makes it easier to criticize this reboot. Because it just does not have the vibes of the original series. The developers viewed Fable as a fairytale, not a fantasy, as smaller interpersonal stories of people in a broader world. When, to me, what defined Fable was a sense of grit, the fact it was set in a world that had fantastical elements, but was still shaped by hues of British cynicism.

Even if the nature can be beautiful, it’s seldom fantastical. Characters could be misshapen in stylized ways that gave them a certain edge or silliness, like the weirdly big hands or feet. It had a somewhat subdued but deliberate aesthetic, very much informed by its era and the technology of the time, but an aesthetic all the same. One that requires a decent level of stylization, without ever being too twee.

Everything seems a bit too safe, like it was approved by managers with the personality of white bread— a typical Microsoft manager. The humans are realistic. Environments are idealistic and beautiful, the combat seems designed to be as normalized as it can be. And while it still has the ability to buy property, get married, have children, and become a Mega-Playboy capitalist, the whole way one interacts with NPCs seems both too involved and very shallow. Not helped by the factoids that appear whenever you talk to them, really making them feel like machines. While the push for an open world is… kind of lame in my book.

Worlds are more memorable when you are guided through them, when there is context to exploration, and when they are crafted around a clear goal. Being able to go anywhere cheapens that, lessens that, and genericizes the experience in so many instances. However, open worlds were seen as the de facto format for AAA games in 2018, so of course NuFable is an open world game!

After half a decade of build up, I was very much underwhelmed by what Playground Games showed, and I really can’t see it having much of an impact when it finally releases. Not because I think it deviates, but because I don’t think it has shown or done enough to sell the game as its own entity. Yes, the NPC system is robust, but there are so many other ways to achieve the level of reactivity and dynamism that this title is espousing. Often ones with better and fleshed out characters rather than 1,000+ different people.

Fable (2026) will be released for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC this autumn.

Beast of Reincarnation… Looks Good!
(Game Freak Is ACTUALLY Making a AAA Action RPG!)

After being properly revealed at the Microsoft Summer 2025 Showcase with a two minute trailer, Game Freak has finally shown a detailed look at their upcoming dystopian action game, Breast of Reincarnation. A title that I was excited about, as it showed Game Freak’s intentions to modernize their development process by developing a real-ass AAA action RPG. Or AA if you consider Nier Automata a AA game, which you arguably should. (Ah, semantics, humanity’s greatest sin.)

As a Pokémon fan who did not like any of Game Freak’s other Gear Initiative titles, I was cautiously optimistic for this title, wondering how it would play out, and per the 10 minute segment dedicated to this game… it’s largely just another modern third person action RPG set in a ruined or post-apocalyptic world. A genre that I’ve gradually seen homogenized through the popularity of games like God of War (2018), Ghost of Tsushima, Nioh, Nier Automata, the Souls series, Black Myth: Wukong, Stellar Blade, et cetera.

While all of these games have their own unique identities, there are a number of aesthetical and mechanical throughlines, and anybody making a modern action game is likely going to take cues from them in some way shape or form. …However, taking too much influence also risks making these games feel rather samey, and look boring from the outset, like something one has already played before. And that’s probably the only major bit of criticism I can levy towards what I am seeing in the trailers. There are no signs of performance issues or problems, the game looks modern, and it does not look like any major design concessions were made. Which is a pleasant surprise.

Anyway, the title itself is set in a post-apocalyptic Japan where nature has overtaken the world, spreading through a mutation known as the blight and destroying the majority of humanity. Plants and animals have merged into powerful malefacts that threaten to eke out whatever vessels of human society remain. Robots with human souls from centuries past, known as humans, have grown powerful and aggressive over time, becoming powerful predators.

The player takes the role of a Emma, a swordswoman who is he only one capable of “sealing” the blight and defending the vestiges of humanity. Her unique abilities, and infection with the blight, had led her to be largely shunned by human society as an unpredictable liability, but she is joined in her quest by Koo. A giant wolf who doubles as a narrative companion and battle beast, similarly capable of using the power of the blight for their gain. Together, they must venture out and defeat X number of powerful nushi (bosses) to obtain their powers and defeat the titular Beast of Reincarnation.

All of this is fairly standard— it’s honestly is not too far removed from a Pokémon Mystery Dungeon plot. Though, the decision to jump around, show brief snippets, hurt my ability to gather what a slice of the game would be like. Specifically the combat system, where the player is adorned with oodles of UX candy that… I could not parse, and I doubt most viewers could. I think the fact that Koo has a list of abilities that can be triggered via a slow mo menu is really cool. Same with how Koo’s moves allow Emma to combo enemies into submission. Per the amount of piddly accessories and the girth of the skill tree, it seems that Game Freak wanted to fully flesh this combat system out. …Though, I think it is very telling how they mentioned this game was in development for SIX YEARS. See, Game Freak can make games that live up to modern “expectations” if they have enough time!

Beast of Reincarnation is slated to arrive on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC sometime this summer. Strangely, it’s skipping out on Switch 2, when I KNOW a game like this could run on Switch 2. If Final Fantasy VII Rebirth can run on it, this Beast definitely can. But optimization can take a lot of time, and Game Freak probably wants to avoid another Scarred and Violated scenario.

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time Remake is Canceled!
(Welcome to the Era of Ubisoft-Tencent!)

LIES! LIES! LIES!

It’s been almost a year since Tencent claimed a 10% stake in Ubisoft and siphoned some of their biggest IPs under a joint venture where Tencent has more influence. An event I reported on, and in the successive months, I’ve been trying to keep track with the fact that Tencent is the real mover and shaker at the publisher. They’re the ones pushing decisions and trying to take over from the inept leadership of Yves “Friend to Abusers” Guillemot. The next few years are going to mark a major transformation for the publisher. Meaning a lot of unfinished art is going to get vaulted forever, where it can be written off in whatever manner keeps tax bills low and keeps income statements sexy.

This past week, Ubisoft announced that they canceled six titles in production. Three new IPs. A mobile title. An unspecified other game that I’m guessing is either Beyond Good and Evil 2 or Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Remake. But the most prolific cancelation is Prince of Persia: Sands of Time Remake. A remake announced in 2020 with a notorious reveal trailer that did not do justice to the original game. Not because of a wild departure, but because the game clearly lacked the TLC it needed. NPCs were copied and pasted in cinematics, the visuals were a mix of varying qualities. And the entire game smelled of a product from a team that lacked many things.

That is because Remake was being developed by Ubisoft Mumbai and Ubisoft Pune. A pair of Indian support studios who were assigned this title, likely because labor in India is cheap, and no disrespect towards the developers, but the game did not look like it was ready. It needed time… and the trailer said it was due out in four months.

Ubisoft could have just cut their losses, put out a bad to decent remake of a beloved title, but they instead chose to delay it once, then indefinitely. Then Ubisoft Montreal took over the project after the game was content complete— which is really bad, that means they fucked up so drastically some White guy deemed the Indian developers too incompetent to fix their project. This was followed by delay and delay without any additional footage of the game being released. This is not inherently a death knell to a project, but it is always a cause for concern.

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time Remake had been in development for seven years, has been content complete at least once, and has been delayed more times than I care to count. But now… it’s just gone. Faded away to the annals of time, lost like sand in the wind. This represents a monumental fuck-up on behalf of every manager assigned to this project, and to the executives who kept greenlighting this project.

Ubisoft has had a turbulent five years, with everything kind of falling apart after the release of The Thomas C. Calancy – The Ghost Recon: The Wild’s Lands 2 – The Breaking Point (2019). Their stock price has been tumbling down from over 80 Euros five years ago to less than 5 Euros as of writing. Their entire company is being restructured to place Vantage Studios, a joint venture between Ubisoft and Tencent, as their number one studio, higher than all other “Creative Houses.” And with Tencent and their people now in effective control, the new leaders demanded that cuts be made.

As usual, I am aghast at the wasted opportunity, at how this all could have been avoided. However, rather than do another corporate bitching party, I would like to touch on something that may be lost on younger readers. And that’s the legacy of Prince of Persia. What it did, and why it faded away into irrelevance.

That’s right, baby! We’re already over the 7,500 word soft cap, so it’s time to make this an Xtra THICC Rundown with a history lesson!

…Oh, and they also delayed a seventh title that people suspect to be Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag Resynced. So, uh, sorry to my boat game enthusiasts. Cassie’s boyfriend be in shambles fr fr…

An Impromptu Prince of Persia Retrospective
(Why Prince of Persia Mattered!)

I spent 4 hours on this segment, you’re not gonna get a better header than this!

So, the story of Prince of Persia begins with Jordan Mechner. A creative who was fascinated by the early world of computer gaming, animation, and art writ large, leading him to develop a game called Karateka while attending Yale University in 1984. Powered by gusto, an Apple II, rotoscoping, and a fixation on Japanese media, he created an early example of a fighting game, remarkable in its era for its smooth animation and artful presentation. It was a hallmark title in its own right, was spread across a deluge of computers, and even got a Famicom port.

However, as a 1984 PC game, its audience was rather limited, and was not widely available until Digital Eclipse’s excellent The Making of Karateka. Which serves as both a re-release, remaster, and interactive documentary, full of Mechner’s notes and even earlier builds of the game. All neat stuff for retro game dorks. Like meeee!

With one game under his belt and a working relationship secured with Broderbund— who were a big name in 1980s PC gaming— Mechner moved onto a spiritual successor with 1989’s Prince of Persia. A title that aimed to take the rotoscoped action of Karateka in a very different direction. One inspired by the evolution of the nascent platformer genre. The act of jumping and climbing over direct combat. And a more reactive environment, rather than the… straight line level design of Karateka. Also, the game had an Arabic theming because… honestly, I have no idea. There was a surprising influx of Arabic inspiration in American and Japanese media from about 1985 to 1995, and I haven’t the foggiest idea as to what the impetus for it was.

The games goal is pretty simple. As the titular Prince of Persia, the player must make it through a series of dangerous catacombs filled with traps and thugs in order to save the Sultan’s daughter within sixty minutes. Sounds simple, but the game can be a foreboding challenge, requiring the player to more swiftly yet cautiously, learn how the Prince moves, and adapt one’s approach accordingly.

This might seem like a barrier to accessibility, but Prince of Persia was, by all accounts, a huge hit. It was ported to over a dozen platforms, remade and reworked by as many studios, and was one of the most widely available games of its heyday. This popularity proved to be highly influential to designers who wanted to capture a greater sense of realism in game presentation and movement, and basically laid the foundation of the cinematic platformer genre. …You know, Flashback (1992), Another World (1991), games like that? Point is, it showed that games can be a whole lot more, and its influence should not be understated. This is one of the important video games.

Next came 1993’s Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame. And this one is not nearly as fondly remembered. Partially because it was not given the same port push that other titles got. Just MS-DOS, Mac, and Super Nintendo ports for the West. Just looking at a longplay of the title, I can clearly see why. PoP2 aims to be a bigger and grander adventure than before. One with more settings, more platforming feats, and a greater emphasis on magic and the supernatural.

Everything aside from the legendary doppelgänger of the original was pretty grounded in reality. PoP2 has floating heads you need to slash to bits climbing structures that require a greater suspension of disbelief. It makes heavy use of spirit magic during the final stretch of the game. The Prince travels on a flying horse— no a horse with wings, just horses that can run through the air. It’s an odd jump in a direction that I don’t care for on a surface level. …Also, I think it looks kinda ugly by the standards of 1993, with three pretty drab environments that lack the realism and class as the original, but that’s just me.

Then there was 1999’s Prince of Persia 3D. The game was developed by a fairly small team that made use of sparkly new 3D tech, and had invested a good deal into pre-production. They were doing seeming everything right. Which does not guarantee a great game, but typically at least a decent one. Unfortunately, the project got shuffled along for a ride after publisher Broderbund was bought by The Learning Company, who was then bought by Mattel, who forced the game out when it was fundamentally broken. Gee, why does that sound so familiar?

Even if the title shipped with few bugs, it also suffered from the rapid innovation of early 3D gaming. From about 1995 to 2005, there was an expectation that games should innovate constantly, that every new entry should be bigger or better in some capacity. This was an expectation propagated by magazines, early online gaming communities, and rampant technological improvements.

This is where the idea of games becoming “outdated” really took a foothold in Western gaming culture, the graphical arms race went bonkers, and marketing for games became incredibly competitive. As such, Prince of Persia 3D was fighting a losing battle from its inception, as it was very similar, arguably even derivative of Tomb Raider (1996). A series (almost) four entries deep, and itself seen as outdated next to the likes of Ocarina of Time (1988), which changed how people expected 3D games to look and play.

Prince of Persia 3D was not a bad or terrible game, at least once the patches were applied, but by the standards of 1999, it was not exciting. And the attempts to salvage it with a spruced up Dreamcast port were not that much better, as they removed the quicksave feature in a game full of cheap deaths. …Also, Mechner was not really involved beyond the story, too busy working on the banger adventure game The Last Express (1997), which was WAY better and more interesting the PoP3D.

So, that’s it, right? A great series came out swinging, had a pretty good sequel, and a less than graceful 3D outing due to publisher meddling. A fair enough story… but then, for some reason, Ubisoft bought the rights to Prince of Persia off of Mattel. This was strange, as Ubisoft was nowhere near what they are today, or were in the 2010s, but I’m guessing Mattel was willing to give the rights for pretty cheap. …Or rather the license to the back catalog, as Mechner still owned the IP, somehow.

Ubisoft put a team at their then new Ubisoft Montreal office to work on a new Prince of Persia title. They got Mechner on board as a creative consultant and the game’s writer, and somehow made Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2003). So, it’s hard for me to accurately stress of gauge the importance of Sands of Time, as it was coming out in an era of relentless bangers, but this game was hugely praised across the board. People loved how it evolved and streamlined the platforming core of the series to something more modern, stylish, and freeform. The combat system was expanded to something flashier and deeper, adding environmental interactions. And there was a profound novelty with its trademark Dagger of Time, allowing the protagonist to rewind time when he gets chopped up or kill enemies through time death.

Point is, Ubisoft had a hit on their hands, and wanted to immediately capitalize on it. Only a year later, Ubisoft Montreal put out a sequel, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. Which, depending on who you ask, is either a massive betrayal of the original, or one of the most 2004 games ever made. Heck, maybe both. After the fairly all-ages adventure of Sands of Time, Warrior Within targeted a firmly adolescent audience by turning the generally pleasant prince into a tormented soul. Set seven years later, the young prince has become a gruff man, shoved out of his homeland by a shadowy force that wishes to punish him for meddling with the Sands of Time.

Venturing through a darker world, the Prince is armed with dual blades and equipped with gory finishers. The soundtrack cuts to Godsmack and metal when things get intense. There’s an overly sexualized “babe” antagonist who’s dressed in basically a battle bikini and boots. The game is very isolating and lonely in a way that the former really wasn’t. And the artists relied way too much on graphical effects like bloom and ambient occlusion to enhance pretty drab ruins.

I fuck with the mid-2000s edge so much that I would fuck Shadow the Hedgehog. And this is like 60% of the way there, but it’s not quite right, and can easily be read as a big step in the wrong direction. Still, it was building off of a good foundation, everything that made the core gameplay fun in the original is reprised here. And the edginess, in retrospect, is arguably more endearing than anything. Like watching a 14-year-old try to act like they know anything about anything.

Then in 2005, Ubisoft Montreal released Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones. The third game in the Sands of Time continuity, and one that definitely aimed to deliver a more refined and evolved version of Sands of Time. …By undoing the events of The Sands of Time, and casting the Prince to save the kingdom once again.

…While also harnessing the power of a dark half, risking his own corruption. Presenting him with the external thread of the malicious vizier from the first entry, and his own growing dark side. Yeah, it was a bit all over the place narratively, but was still seen as a good third entry, aiming to appease fans of both the first and second games, but there’s a reason why Sands of Time tends to be the game people focus on and praise from this era of the series. It did it first, and did it best. (I really should do a segment on the types of trilogies.)

While this seemingly ended the story for this incarnation of the Prince, Ubisoft had a good thing going with this series. It and the Thomas Clancy IP helped make them a household name. So it should be no surprise that, after Sands of Time’s release, employees were already working away at a Prince of Persia game for next gen consoles, one with an open world setting and the series’ signature acrobatic gameplay. This project, working under the name Prince of Persia: Assassin, eventually evolved into Assassin’s Creed (2007), dropping the fantastical elements of PoP for a sci-fi framing device, and a more series tone to coincide with a generation that would be defined by grit. Meaning that Assassin’s Creed was originally imagined as a Prince of Persia spin-off. Funny how that worked out…

Rather than just cast Prince of Persia aside however, Ubisoft decided to take the series in a wildly different direction by rebooting it a resounding three years after The Two Thrones. This was a contentious decision to fans of the series, and the game that resulted from this was arguably a return to the roots of the series. …Or a title that was deliberately differentiated from Assassin’s Creed as much as possible while still recognizable as Prince of Persia.

Set in a desolate and destroyed world of desert ruins, 2008’s frustratingly entitled Prince of Persia was primarily a parkour platformer where the Prince and his circumstantial magical companion, Elika traverse a decayed world of ruin with the goal of restoring it to its natural beauty and splendor. This is achieved through a bevy of platforming challenges in an interconnected world, punctuated by like four repeated enemy encounters. The game is very accessible, as you literally cannot die, and was arguably one of the best looking games of its generation thanks to its use of cel-shading and stylized character designs.

This trailer alone convinced me to buy the game. Though, the high review scores didn’t hurt either. It was a different era.

I would loosely describe it as trying to mesh the cel-shading and nature restoration of Okami (2006), the Tears of Light hunting from Twilight Princess (2006), and some of the dismal interconnected environments of Shadow of the Colossus (2005). Though, it’s not as good as any of those. Prince of Persia (2008) and Fable II (2008) were the two games I got with my Xbox 360, and looking at their respective E3 2008 trailers, comparing them to what was out on the Wii at the time, the difference was stark.

So I have a lot of nostalgia for this game— it’s the only Prince of Persia I’ve actually played for more than an hour— but I also think the game is kind of flawed. It only has so many things for the player to do, hundreds of orbs to collect, and often bogs itself down in puzzles peppered with the same snarky late 2000s dialogue that became the basis for “modern AAA game dialogue.”

Prince of Persia 2008 still does a lot right, and I’m sure that I would have all number of things to geek out about if I played through it again. But through recollection and my own fading experience, I consider it to be two hours too long, for an 8-12 hour game, and a very solid 7/10.

…Also, I just realized that, in some reptilian facet of my brain, I consider both Prince of Persia 2008 and Fable II (2008) to be successors to Twilight Princess. Because I sought them out after bearing Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker and wanting a modern Zelda like game. Don’t ask me to explain why these games were Zelda-like, they just felt that way when I was 14.

Also also, looking at footage of this game reminded me that I thought Elika was one of the hottest female characters I had ever seen when I was 14, and… that explains several things.

Prince of Persia 2008 sold over 2.5 million units, which is about on par with Warrior Within and Two Thrones, and had a sequel teased in its post-launch epilogue DLC. The type of thing you would ONLY release if you had greenlit a sequel and had every intention of going ahead with it. …Well, actually, they sorta made a sequel. Prince of Persia: The Fallen King (2008), a touch-screen-only book-style DS game with a chibi art direction… that also ended on a cliffhanger. I never liked how this game looked, and now that I know this is considered a sequel… I like it even less.

Okay, sorry for the detour, I just needed to get that out of my system. I’d share the Prince of Persia 2008 review I wrote when I was 14, in middle school, but that’s been lost to time.

Anyway, the next step for the series was Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands (2010), released to coincide with the 2010 Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time film adaptation. Yes, they made a movie, and it was supposedly not very good. At the time of this game’s release, I saw it as a replacement— a deboot— casting aside the 2008 entry for an interquel between Sands of Time and Warrior Within. In actuality, this game was developed in parallel with the 2008 entry, and Ubisoft bet big on this, wanting to make four distinct versions. A PS3, Xbox 360, and PC version developed by a fairly small team at Eidos Montreal, PSP version by Ubisoft Quebec, DS version by Ubisoft Casablanca, and Wii version by Ubisoft Quebec. This was an insane commitment by most metrics, but Ubisoft had high hopes for this IP to really take off— raising questions as to why PoP 2008 was a new continuity.

There is much to be said about these games, and much to be pried about them… but what I remember most about these games are a bunch of 7/10 review scores and poor sales numbers. This was back when physical was the primary way games were sold and per NPD, the game sold less than 100,000 units in North America during its first two weeks on the market. …Across 6 SKUs. That is awful. Though, that’s not too surprising, as Forgotten Sands came out in one of the more notorious months in the PS3 generation, May 2010.

This was the month where Split Second: Velocity, Blur, and ModNation Racers all came out within a week, vying to be the hot new racing IP. Lost Planet 2, 3D Dot Game Heroes, and Skate 3 are all incredible games if you’re a weird fuck (like me!). Alpha Protocol and Nier both basically came out in May if you think about it. Alan Wake came out after like a decade of development. Super Mario Galaxy 2 gave Wii owners something to enjoy. And there was this little known niche darling by the name of RED DEAD REDEMPTION! Forgotten Sands came out on the same day as Red Dead Redemption, and that just completely killed any chance it had of making waves.

This undermines the discussion of these games, which were generally seen as good. The PSP one was a solid 2.5D adaptation of the modern Prince of Persia formula and one of the more impressive PS2 flavored games on the system. (Whatever that means.) Screw the DS one for basically being a sequel to The Fallen King. The Wii one was developed as its own entity and catered to the system’s quirks, for both good and ill, mostly good. While the PCS360 version was… an HD Sands of Time sequel with wilder acrobatics and more brawler style combat. …Also, a skill tree! Very necessary!

DOPE!

Forgotten Sands served as a major blow to the future trajectory of the series. Ubisoft began pouring more resources into other IPs with more girth behind them, like the annualized Assassin’s Creed, and canceled a fairly developed pitch for a game known as Prince of Persia Redemption. A Ubisoft Montreal project that aimed to take the world of the Sands of Time continuity in a more fantastical, serious, and gritty direction. Not edgy like Warrior Within, but with a distinct God of War flavor. (God, I swear the original hexology was memory holed by the PS4 duology. The youth don’t remember what these games were, and they were so coooool!) Oh, and of course some cues were taken from Uncharted too, as it streamlined a lot of Prince of Persia’s mobility systems.

We know as much as we know about Redemption because of a trailer posted in 2012 that took years for anybody to discover. A pitch trailer made for internal purposes, but one that I sort of adore. I’d highly encourage that you watch the full trailer for Redemption. It just SCREAMS seventh gen gaming in a way that words cannot do justice, while also looking like an impossibly robust bullshot. Like, this stuff would NOT be able to run on a PS3 or Xbox 360. The terrain is sliding, buildings are crumbling, NPCs are wandering around, the protagonist can seemingly rewind time during all of this. The physics are nonsense, and everything is so railroaded it barely looks like a concept of a game. It’s like watching an E3 trailer made of lies for a game that never really existed! I love it!

Then… the series was just dead for over a decade, barring occasional interview nudges and some phone games that nobody really cares about. This was until they brought back the series with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (2024). A 2.5D Metroidvania with a Black guy protagonist, which was a big controversy at the time. Then the game came out, was great all things considered, but struggled to sell well, leading Ubisoft to scrap a sequel in pre-production and disband the team.

Following this, the developer of Dead Cells made a quality and stylish roguelike 2D action platformer, The Rogue Prince of Persia (2025), which I have only heard good things about, even if the rougelike space is just overstuffed.

It seemed like these two titles, plus a Sands of Time remake, would be enough to bring the series back to some form of relevance, but… that whole plan was thrown into the toilet. Now I’m guessing the series has been vaulted for the foreseeable future, as the remake went so terrible that only a damn fool would even think to try again. The series had its legacy, got a 7 year run with more than 5 distinct games, and two more games almost 15 years later. I think it sucks that it was denied the opportunity, but that’s just how companies like modern Ubisoft operate. They don’t make art, they make products, and will prioritize products that math says will sell over new products that they lack much data for. I’m happy when they prioritize artistry and let creative people do creative things, but considering their scale and the current state of the games industry, I don’t see that happening.

…Well, maybe Digital Eclipse will release The Making of Prince of Persia documentary. That would certainly be warranted! But I won’t expect anything else.

Good night, sweet prince. You deserved a better home…

Progress Report 2026-01-25

MIDNA! – Drawn by Ian Samson

The following is a scrapped bit from the Zelda segment this week. It was going nowhere, so I cut it, but I did not want to TRASH it!

I want to talk about the fandom cycle. Which I am using as a broad term for how fandoms, who do have some influence over general popularity, tend to shape discourse by shifting around whether they like or dislike a title, which changes as standards are reassessed, nostalgia cycles develop, and new entries shift the perception of older entries. It’s the latest and greatest, paving a new standard for the series— actually, it kinda sucks and didn’t all it could do— but it got so much right and should be celebrated— but it seems pretty lame and outdated next to the latest game— oh, but there is an artistry and purity in its simplicity, while the newest title comprised its vision. Y’know, that sorta thing.

This yo-yo-ing happens a lot among games as part of Japanese legacy series that appeal to an all-ages audience, and I generally try not to pay attention to it. I try to pay less attention to other people in general these days. I don’t really follow what the Zelda series is up to as, well, I sorta wrote it off after Breath of the Wild, which I did not particularly like, and pivoted 3D Zelda into effectively a different genre. But I was around the general fandom sphere enough in the 2010s to gather what this cycle was based on… and every game is subject to the same basic pros and cons.

The pros are the hype moments, aesthetic choices, or myriad quirks about these titles that resonate with the people leading the narrative at the time. While the cons are that these games have slow or boring crap that interrupts the flow of a playthrough. Ocarina has a bunch of these like the slow text, Navi’s butting in, that dumb monologuing owl, and The Water Temple as commonly cited frustrations. All of which can be generally surmised as frustrations at the sense that one’s time is being interrupted by roadblocks or dialogue when people want to be in gameplay mode.

2026-01-18: Wrote 3,900 words to polish off VD2.0 Act 3 July 2. It’s almost 11,000 words. SOMEHOW! Yeah, every chapter here might be 10k+ words except the final one. DAMN IT! Got distracted by technological doom musing, trying out some open source software, and realizing that I was bamboozled. Clementine is a music player that is WILDLY different from what I, a former iTunes bitch, can understand. Odoo locks their fucking ACCOUNTING services behind a subscription, when that is the MAIN THING I would want to try it for. Also, cleaned up the SORTME arts folder. My kingdom for a local Danbooru-like image tagger so I could sort my bloody images better… Wrote 3,100 words for VD2.0 Act 3 July 3, which took forever because I had to come up with outfits and find creative ways to describe what three characters looked like. Yes, I am re-describing what every character looks like in this act, and I am giving characters more outfits. What do you TAKE me for? However, I did finish the first part of this chapter, so that’s goody good!

2026-01-19: Wrote 1,600 word preamble based on unrecorded scraps. Wrote 1,200 words for the Microsoft/Fable bit. Wrote 700 word preamble for Life Is Strange. Got sidetracked with work in the evening. Decided to start playing Pokémon Black for my upcoming Ramble. Messed with some outline stuff, scribbled some notes for the Black Ramble, then decided to start the next part of VD2.0 Act 3 July 3, getting 600 words before realizing I need to review the outline and maybe add a new segment. The gym trip needs to go somewhere, and this chapter is in need of something like that.

2026-01-20: Wrote 2,400 words for VD2.0 Act 3 July 3, wrapping up a talky segment. Decided that, yeah, no, I straight up NEED an active segment to begin this chapter. This chapter is gonna be weird. Wrote 750 words for the Rundown. Life is Strange expansion and Donkey Kong madness. Started work on the Pokémon Black Ramble after getting into a game design argument with Missy. Wrote 2,400 words for that. Finished at around 1:00, was tired, decided to read TSF manga before bed. Read Popularity by Arisane. Good shit! Also played more Pokémon Black.

2026-01-21: Got carried away with Prince of Persia segment, which exploded to 4,200 words. Fuck Ubisoft! Took me longer than usual to write, as I had to fact check, skim longplays, and do light freshing up on facts. I know MOST of this stuff in my head, but if you’re only 80% sure, you should look it up. Edited 8,100 words of this Rundown.

2026-01-22: Wrote 1,300 words for the Fable and Beast of Reincarnation bits. Finished editing the Runodwn, so about 4,000 words. I was not sure where to go with VD2.0 Act 3 July 3, as I needed to add an additional segment, so I put the idea aside, played more Pokemon Black, and realized that the ROM hack I was playing was full of bullshit, so I spend through the first two gyms of the vanilla version in about 2.5 hours with the help of fast forward. Would have been faster, but I had to get a Drilbur, the right type of Audino, etc. Came up with an idea for the new segment while exercising. Have it set in Navy Pier, and involve some antics. Spent 1.5 hours looking up crap and sketching out part of the new segment. At this rate, every chapter here is gonna be over 10k words long. And that’s okay with me!

2026-01-23: Spent too much time playing Pokemon Black. Really breezy time at points, and I like it, but BOY do certain things just not mesh with me. Finished deciding what to do with VD2.0 Act 3 July 3. Talked to Missy and Cassie too much.

2026-01-24: Wrote 8,800 words for VD2.0 Act 3 July 3, wrapping it up! Then a bunch of Dragon Ball stuff happened, and I felt the need to write a 1,800 word essay on my history with Dragon Ball for next week’s Rundown. 10,600 words in a day is hecking good though. Like, one of my best every, some-fucking-how! I guess I was just determined to invest myself in something after ICE murdered Alex Pretti, a nurse at a Veteran’s hospital, because he tried to protect a woman, even after getting pepper sprayed in the face. My hatred for these Nazi fucks is beyond language. End them all, no punishment is harsh enough for them.

Hey, this was a heavy Rundown, but… The Xbox Developer Direct thingie counts as a major event, right? RIGHT?

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