This Week’s Topics:
- Rundown Preamble Ramble: Natalie Ditches the Dollar!
- Natalie’s History With Dragon Ball (Important Context For The Next Segment!)
- A Bunch of New Dragon Ball Projects Were Announced (A Deluge of Dragon Ball News)
- New Virtual Boy Games Are Coming in 2026 (Zero Racers and D-Hopper Live On!)
- Rayman 30th Anniversary Edition Got Leaked (Natalie Muses About The Rayman)
- Tomadachi Life: Livin’ Da Dream Direct (Don’t LIVE The Dream, BE The Dream!)
- More Than a Fourth of All Games Workers Have Been Laid Off (At Least Per GDC’s Polling)
Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Natalie Ditches the Dollar!
Okay, I have been mostly quiet about politics throughout January. Not because I am complacent with what is going on involving America’s attempt to take over Venezuela by abducting its leader. I, obviously, object to Trump’s moronic attempts to seize Greenland, a nation where the US could have deployed soldiers at ANY TIME. And I loathe the Clinton/Bush/Obama/Biden/Trump security state wet dream that is ICE continuing to go on a rampage, terrorizing the people of America, and conducting state-sanctioned murders of people like Renee Good and Alex Pretti of Minneapolis.
Trust me, my hate for them is beyond measure, and just thinking about it causes the hatred to grow. I want them dead, I want all these fascist fuckers boiled in piss, lit ablaze, before burying their ashes in literal dog shit.
Trump is destroying the rules-based world order pioneered by the US after World War II. A shitty order that existed to make US the global superpower, forged Western Europe and Japan into allies, and basically exploited every other nation in some way, shape, or form. So many military interventions, so many millions of deaths, and so many governmental/economic collapses have been conducted in America’s interest, while the nation remained largely immune to international punishments. When some tried to punish the US, their governments were overthrown a few years later, replaced by something repressive, evil, and favorable to America’s interests.
I want to do something. But I have gradually come to realize that… I’m too much of a homebody to really do much of anything that makes a difference in the streets. I’m sorry, but I’m simply not an activist, I was not made for organizing. When the revolution comes, I am willing to do the dishes, but only within the comfort of my own home. And while I do donate money to charitable causes, I also need to justify them for selfish reasons.
Right now, the most significant work I am doing is limiting how much tax revenue these fuckers get. I’m helping my clients strategize their capital gains and offload revenue to other countries, like Spain. …Or Portugal. …Or England. …Or Canada. And while this choice in profession allows me to feel involved, it’s also kind of a curse. I would like to ditch this country, but like most Americans, I have roots here. I only speak English. I have family who I don’t want to abandon. I have a home that I bought with the intention of retaining for 30+ years. And my job is as an American tax accountant who specializes in cryptocurrency taxation. So I cannot readily leave without encountering difficulties.
But one thing I do have is more money than the average person, and what I have been doing over this past year is trying to get away from the dollar. I bought a bunch of gold last year. I’ve largely divorced my investments from US companies after the April 2025 blip. I am currently in the process of moving my money over to a more stable currency, like Euro and Swiss Francs, as the dollar continues to diminish in value, even if the conversion rates are some hot garbage. But as the Federal Reserve continues to be threatened by a convicted felon who has committed real estate fraud, I want as little of my net worth to be in USD as I can reasonably manage.
However, there is a slight problem with that. Most banks don’t want to give people access to international currencies. And while they can buy Investco currency trusts, that’s not really the same thing. I was recommended a solution with HSBC and their Global Money accounts, but after some fiddling, I realized that these accounts are kind of bullshit due to their fees. Fees that I would avoid if I was just buying investments in securities via brokerage houses that don’t have fees, or have reduced fees. So, I decided to say screw it, I’m just going to move my savings out of staple savings and into Gold, Euro, Francs, and silver, like I should have done six months ago. I’d be at least $10,000 USD wealthier if I did.
Though, I even have trepidations about this. I fear the worst case scenario— that the value of my investment drops the day after I increase my stake— and feel that I should instead focus on eliminating the pesky matter of debt. As I’ve said before, I have a mortgage, with a 7.5% interest rate, and have been doing a pretty good job of paying it down. So good that I’ve decided that, instead of pouring more money into investments, I would make extra mortgage payments each month.
While this will not benefit me immediately, it will help me in the long-term. If I do need to flee America, I’m still going to need to do something about my home. How far away am I from paying it off? Uh… if I keep making the money I do, in terms of US dollars, then I might be able to pay off my home within five years. So… Imma gonna focus on that. Spending trash currency to pay down a debt denominated in trash currency.
Akumako: “Aight, but you want to live in the America five years from now?”
Not sure! Though, no matter the case, people will still need to or want to buy real estate, my home is in a desirable location. And if I’m leaving, I’m of the mindset that I may as well leave for good, selling my home in the process. And in that case, the lower my mortgage balance is, the better. …Also, I don’t want to pay $10,000 in mortgage interest a year if I don’t need to.
Akumako: “Cripes, these are such rich people problems…”
Oh, please. Just because my net worth is probably in the top twenty percentile of American people my age does not make me rich.
Akumako: “To most people it does.”
Well, that’s stupid. Don’t lump me in with rich bastards. I have a nut to keep me going for a year, and I want that for EVERYONE! Rich people just want to keep people away.
Also, after I wrote this, silver crashed and wiped me out of a bunch of money. …But my investments still made me over $7,000 in unrealized gains this month, so YAY for that!
Natalie’s History With Dragon Ball
(Important Context For The Next Segment!)
So, this is a topic that I don’t think I’ve covered in full, but I probably should, as context for the next segment on the queue. I have mentioned this many times over the years, but growing up, I was a huge Dragon Ball fan. That’s not all too surprising considering my age range and demographics, however, my exact relationship with it was a bit odd. I’ve probably told bits and pieces of this story before, but for posterity’s sake, here’s my history with Dragon Ball as I best remember it, and why I do not consider myself a fan of the series nowadays.
I started watching Dragon Ball when I was 6-years-old in the year 2001 after my Assyrian friend Ashour suggested I watch it. At the time, Cartoon Network was in the middle of airing the Buu Saga of Dragon Ball Z and the original Dragon Ball, both airing in parallel as two shows with an overarching continuity spanning hundreds of episodes. It was the biggest conceivable thing I had ever encountered up until this point, and I was enamored with it. I would watch it every day after school, catching re-runs to get caught up on the story, piecing things together based on magazines, episode listings, and that Pojo’s Unofficial Total Dragon Ball Z book.
Some of my earliest memories of using a computer involved looking up information on early Dragon Ball fan sites, where I overwhelmed by the sheer breadth of information and captivated by the tiny screencaps. I filled an entire plastic bin of assorted Dragon Ball Z toys. I managed to somehow convince my parents to spend roughly $80 on about 50 Dragon Ball Z VHS tapes on eBay in 2003. When they arrived, mostly undamaged, I dedicated the bottom of my desk— the same desk I am using to this day— to storing them. And I would rent VHS tapes of the series from the library, having my father make copies of them, so I could add them to my personal collection. I never had every tape… but I had most of them. Enough to piece together everything that happened in the series.
I wanted everything, I watched everything I had, read as much of the manga I could at my library’s tiny manga section (it’s pretty big nowadays) and this process of watching everything took me an incredible amount of time. In fact, I would say that… it took me four years. Four years to watch almost all 500-ish episodes, the Bardock special, the Trunks special, and the 17 movies. Hell, I did not even wait for a bunch of movies to be localized. Just a few months after I got my eMac for Christmas 2004, I found these unlocalized movies on some long-defunct unofficial anime streaming platform. They had crappy subtitles and I hated the Japanese voices for being so different, but I watched them.
To reiterate, Dragon Ball was a fascination of mine from ages 6 to 10. This, and Pokémon, were my thing! …So, by the time I was done with it, by the time I FINALLY reached the endings, I was so, so deeply disappointed.
I saw the ending of Dragon Ball Z on TV, was really excited to see it leap into the future… only for Goku to meet this entirely new character, this reincarnation of the latest antagonist, who got worse with each transformation, and then take him away to train for five years in isolation, abandoning his friends. I did not understand the intention of this ending. I did not see how it was fitting after the series was so firmly about bonds, connections, and friendship empowering people and giving them the drive, the true strength, needed to succeed. And to this day, I don’t like it as an ending. For Goku to firmly reject his friends and just focus on some kid.
However, there was also Dragon Ball GT. For whatever reason, I did not wind up watching this on TV. Maybe there was a time slot issue, maybe I did not realize it was on, I don’t know, I was 9-years-old. Instead, I finished the series by renting THS tapes from the Niles library. For one reason or another, I was house sitting for my grandmothers, and decided to use this ample nugget of time to finish Dragon Ball GT in a massive marathon. I had seen the Baby Arc, somehow seen the “Lost Episodes,” and had managed to get all 7 tapes covering the entire Super 17 and Shadow Dragon arc.
With this fat stack of tapes and nothing but time, I watched them one after another, with nothing else to do, in isolation, hoping that the ending would be worth it. I knew about Omega Shenron, I knew about Super Saiyan 4 Gogeta— I literally had a bootleg Chinatown toy of him. But I did not know how the series ended. I had high hopes. This was a four year journey, spanning 500 episodes. They just HAD to end it on a high note, on something satisfying. Something BETTER than the lame ending of Dragon Ball Z. And… It was even worse.
In the ending of Dragon Ball GT, the Dragon Balls are destroyed. The world is left ravaged by the Shadow Dragons. And Goku, the protagonist, after an insane decades-spanning journey beyond any narrative I could even imagine at that point in my life… goes away and abandons his friends and family, again. This time forever.
Then it cuts forward to 100 years. Everybody is dead except for Pan, who is a decrepit old lady. Goku and Vegeta’s descendants, literally named after them, are at a tournament, battling each other, still using Super Saiyan, even though Pan was never able to. Then Goku, now basically immortal, is spotted in the crowd, and walks away. He does not talk to his granddaughter, acknowledge that she is there, or stay to watch his descendant’s fight. He just hops on Nimbus and leaves. The end.
I cried myself to sleep that night. In fact, just reflecting on this experience, on the sorrow I felt when I was alone, in a cold basement, with nothing else to do and no one to talk to, was enough to bring back the tears.
Later, I sought out Dragon Ball GT: A Hero’s Legacy online. I similarly hated it for reasons I only foggily remember. But it was so divorced from the rest of the series that it did not really hurt.
At this point, Dragon Ball GT was 8 years old. Dragon Ball was done, over, not coming back. And this was what it ended on. This immense journey of heartbreak, death, redemption, generational growth, transcending space, transcending time, and battling vore monsters… this? This is how you end it? I felt so betrayed by the series at this point. I tried to brush aside the ending, focus on the cool moments of the series, and I still liked Dragon Ball for the journey.
I played pretend with my fat tote of Dragon Ball Z toys and accessories, watched Team Four Star’s abridged series in its early days, because I liked Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged, even if I didn’t get half the jokes in either series. I even tried playing Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2 (2006) on Wii, but… I did not know HOW to play it properly, so I sold it after maybe five hours with it.
Hell, I eventually got rid of my massive VHS collection, leaving it for some guy to grab it from my alley. At this point, around 2007, I was inclined to just move on, watch more anime, different anime, better anime. I developed the usual adolescent attitude of “god, I was into some baby shit as a kid, I need to get into something new.” I think that is an important part of growing up, before reconnecting with what one loved once they were a bit older. I did that, I grew, I developed a life-long TSF hyperfixation, learned the forbidden swear words, got an Xbox 360, and almost learned how to masturbate. …Then in 2010, I started watching Dragon Ball Z Kai, and realized that, no, Dragon Ball Z is actually good.
This eventually led me to re-read the manga in 2012, relying on crusty old scans of dubious quality, and in doing so, I appreciated the series in a new way. …While also recognizing that the OG Dragon Ball is considerably better. It benefits from a looser structure, has a “down to earth” power scale, and achieves a mix of humor and action that I think masks its weekly comic imperfections a lot better than the intensity and drama of the later parts. …Also, I like the Buu saga the best out of any Dragon Ball Z arc. It was my first, and is the most endearingly silly of the bunch. I think Cell lacks a tangible identity and was far less captivating than the Androids. The Namek saga just lasts too long, no matter the incarnation. And the Saiyan saga… is too arbitrary for my liking.
I watched Kai, read the manga, and had re-established Dragon Ball as a thing I just like.
…Then came Battle of Gods in 2013.
At a conceptual level, the very idea of this movie rubbed me the wrong way. You are telling me that, nearly twenty years after the manga was over, Akira Toriyama and Toei were working on a sequel movie? No. There’s no reason for that. The story is done, over, got an extension with GT, and a remaster with Kai, only for that to end before my favorite arc. That just struck me as so needless. Accordingly, I made a point to not watch the movie. …Until I heard a lot of praise being offered to it by various people. So, I gave it a watch. And it was a pretty good return for these characters.
Beerus, while I don’t care for his design, functions as a more interesting antagonist than what Z normalized, especially with the movies. The party setting for most of the film was a brilliant idea. And while I still think Super Saiyan God was a needless transformation, I will admit that the final battle IN SPACE was sufficiently intense. It was a fine enough way to cap off the series after Dragon Ball Evolution (2009) left a bad taste in people’s mouths. If the series actually finished Kai and then capped off with Battle of Gods, I would think it was sufficiently done.
Then it kept going, and the longer it went on, the less I cared about it.
I thought Resurrection F was a dumb idea and came with dumb transformations. When the sequel series, Dragon Ball Super, started airing in 2015, the consensus was that it sucked due to how sloppy the production was and how it dedicated half a year of air time to recapping two movies. When they added new alternate universe Saiyans, I did not like how their proportions were so wildly different from the main characters. And the Universe Survival Saga lasted an entire year. By the end of all of that, once Super was over, I had become a classic Dragon Ball purist. I did not want to bother with any of this new stuff, as it felt that doing so would just be opening up these old scarred wounds for disappointment.
Aside from minor revisits, watching clips, an episode, or videos about Dragon Ball, I have not engaged with a lot of official Dragon Ball media since Battle of Gods. And I kind of don’t want to because… the story’s over. It’s done. I don’t see much of a reason to trifle with these extensions. Especially when… at this point, they just exist to keep the Dragon Ball IP going. It is important to emphasize that Dragon Ball kept going for about 40 years without stopping once.
…Well, beyond 1998 to 2001 in Japan, where Dragon Ball was just sorta over. Because of the success the series was enjoying in the international market, Dragon Ball became an annualized video game series. The manga and anime were reprinted and re-released constantly. Dragon Ball is a corporate machine that needs to keep going, keep finding ways to burn the flames, and it will never end.
If it does end, it will just be rebooted with a full-on re-adaptation, starting the cycle anew. Forever and ever. And I frankly see enough of that with the video games rehashing the same story of Z so many times that I think it might be the most officially adapted narrative in modern history. I can criticize this… but I still love the original story. It was a foundational narrative of my childhood, and I still carry influences from it even to this day. I say, if they really want to keep the train rolling, then just start the story over again, from chapter one, and make it different. Throw in some creative liberties, get creatives who love the series to work on it, and focus on telling a good story for a modern international audience over a straight retread. Or, shit, do both a manga faithful remake and a more daring retelling.
Instead, they just keep continuing it in ways never originally intended… while doing things that were already done in recent memory.
A Bunch of New Dragon Ball Projects Were Announced
(A Deluge of Dragon Ball News)
Now that I’ve aired out that history, it’s time to talk about the actual news. That a bunch of Dragon Ball projects were announced via a special livestream event, enough for me to show my heart and describe my love/hate relationship with the series. From that, you can almost certainly tell what my thoughts are on these new projects, but completeness is up there with cleanliness. Both are a matter of self-respect.
First, we have Dragon Ball Super: Beerus. A remastered miniseries based on the first season of Dragon Ball Super, which itself was an adaptation of Battle of Gods. A movie that received both an original and extended edition in addition to a manga adaptation. Dragon Ball Super: Beerus is due out sometime this fall. This by itself is an odd choice, leading me to theorize that this will be followed with a similar abridging/remaster/retelling of Dragon Ball Super in its entirety. Tt has been over a decade since Super began, and almost eight years since it ended, thereby making it old anime, but not so old they would need to remake it from scratch. …Actually, one of my friends, Rain, said that a re-whatever of Dragon Ball Super had been rumored for a while, and it will supposedly span 80 episodes, as opposed to the 131 of the original. But that’s just a rumor as far as I’m inclined to believe.
If a full re-whatever is indeed happening, that’d be smart. It would be a good way to bide time for a promised new project, fill up slots, and put out a product. Which is something the production companies clearly and dearly want, but has become a touch more… difficult as of late.
Dragon Ball’s creator, Akira Toriyama, died in 2024. The last things he worked on as the TV only series, Diama, and the Super manga, which spent several years adapting and expanding the 2022 film, Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero. The complicated web of production teams likely does not want to continue the series unless they have a firm plan in place and a creative lead they can trust to continue the storyline. The various production team have attempted that in the past, and the results were mixed to put it kindly. As such, it makes the most sense for them to milk what is already there, effectively re-do Super without the production issues that plagued the series, and then move on to adapting the rest of the series, based on the Dragon Ball Super manga, written by Toriyama.
This theory is supported by the announcement that an anime adaptation of the Galactic Patrol Prisoner Arc, based on volumes 9 to 15 of the Super manga, will be coming soon. This arc was later followed by the Granolah the Survivor Saga, spanning volumes 15 to 20, before the series spent over four volumes expanding upon the Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero, complete with an extended aftermath. Also, the manga is weird in that it omits both the Resurrection F (2015) and Dragon Ball Super: Broly (2018) films. So, uh, it’s kind of a mess to follow.
There is definitely enough material here to create enough Dragon Ball TV anime to last for years. And while that sounds kind of miserable for a rehash or adaptation, this is simply how entertainment product is most efficiently delivered. The start of Super is old enough to be retro anime, and this kicks the can down to road regarding anything that comes afterward. By that point, by 2028, maybe it’ll just time to redo the entire series with a new younger voice cast. Because Masako Nozawa is going to die soon. Hell, the Japanese voice actor for Buu died a few days before this media event. I might be sounding cynical, but per the nature of these projects, their emphasis on legacy, this would be the safest avenue.
In addition to announcing anime, there were a couple video game related announcements. The less interesting one pertains to Sparking Zero, the revitalization attempt to bring back the Budokai Tenkaichi series as a casual-competitive fighter with an obscene number of characters. There is much to be said about the title, how it is still trying to replicate what a smaller team did on the PS2 across three games and likely over 4 years of development. How higher production standards make everything harder. And the nature of modern expectations as historical precedent compounds and clashes with increased fidelity.
Uh… basically they are adding free updates that add a proper mission mode and a vaguely detailed survival mode. This is in addition to another set of paid DLC that adds both additional characters and another single player mode that involves navigating a world map in some capacity. Ultimately adding a considerable amount of new content to a game that already burned through its first year of DLC. Which neatly matches the approach taken with Xenoverse 2 and the Dragon Ball Z: Deadname (2020). No, I will not call it by its official name, as that name is bad. Goku is Goku. …Sometimes Zero, but only if you’re a dipshit.
I ultimately think that this type of continued support for games is good, as it makes games fuller and more complete experiences. However, the pricing situation for these titles just gets absurd as time goes on and costs compound. This is how you get $100 video games, and when price drops happen, you wind up with DLC more expensive than the base game itself, which just feels stupid. Like paying more to replace a phone’s battery than it would cost to get a new phone.
The economics of it are smart, but I hate the idea of someone paying so much for an old-ass game. And in the modern climate, where major titles are rarely given price cuts on digital storefronts, this issue just gets worse and worse. Sure, they might get a 75% discount two/three years after launch, but that’s still $25 to $30, when they used to be cheaper. Then again, everything used to be cheaper, and the dollar is rapidly becoming a trash currency.
Argh! Rambling! So, the more interesting game was a project called Dragon Ball: Age 1000. It was given a deliberately vague teaser trailer featuring a boring looking guy in a Capsule Corp tracksuit, which is like wearing an Apple tracksuit IRL, fighting some holographic mooks before going Super Saiyan. It seems generic, through the title alone is quite telling as to what this project could be.
For those not in the know, because this is barely mentioned in the main series, in Dragon Ball, years are referred to as Ages. For context, Dragon Ball Z (excluding the epilogue) takes place from Ages 761 to 774, so anything taking place in Age 1000 is over 200 years in the future. Dragon Ball games have played around with future settings, such as Dragon Ball Fusions being set stupidly far in the future, and the Dragon Ball Xenoverse games being based in Age 850 and 852. However, Age 1000 is of particular relevance because it is the year Dragon Ball Online took place.
Dragon Ball Online is something I only have tangential awareness of, as it was a 2010 MMO that only launched in Asian markets and died off in 2013. However, the project was meant to be the next step for Dragon Ball as a series, for it to comfortably move beyond the original continuity into a new future. This is where the idea of playable Namekians and the two Buu/Majin races was first introduced, along with various characters and lore that would later be repurposed in the Xenoverse titles. Arguably, the Xenoverse games were trying to do what Online did in a more contained, console-focused, environment.
So, what does this mean? Well, I think that Age 1000 could either be effectively a new Xenoverse game, or it could be another attempt at Dragon Ball Online. Maybe not as a live service. Dragon Ball is getting by on that just fine with their mobile games. But as a pseudo live service that could still be played offline and is jam-packed with monetization? That sounds plausible enough to me. Really, with no developer listed, and only a 2027 release date to go on, this project could be anything. We’ll just need to wait until the next scheduled announcement at an event held on April 18th. …Assuming we, as a society, make it that far.
New Virtual Boy Games Are Coming in 2026
(Zero Racers and D-Hopper Live On!)
So, this past week Nintendo put out a trailer for their upcoming Virtual Boy Nintendo Classics line for Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack video game subscription service. I have previously derided this Virtual Boy service for arbitrarily requiring people to buy an accessory in order to play these games, which are basically souped up Game Boy titles. I ultimately like that Nintendo is making so many of their back catalog available and accessible to so many people, even if they just fiddle with them like kids digging through a friend’s toybox. They are doing a decent-ish job of selling this service, unlike the more slapdash yard sale approach of Sony’s PlayStation Plus. But their approach to these things just drives me up the wall sometimes.
The fact that Nintendo is dripping out this paltry library over the course of a year, if not longer, only launching with 7 of the 22 titles of its library. The fact that Nintendo won’t have a color changing filter for the games until some time later in 2026. And the fact that the red coloring is seemingly provided by the red lenses of the Virtual Boy lens in the recreated model, so… what even are they doing? I am inclined to believe this is a deliberate move to leave people frustrated, full of animosity, in order to increase their connection to Nintendo and keep them talking about it. Or perhaps they want people to be pre-disposed to excuse many of the bad things they do. This level of arbitrary design, if not incompetency, is so common it’s remarkable when they don’t pull some weird arbitrary nonsense.
Though the most arbitrary thing about this arrangement is, easily, the fact that they are releasing two previously unreleased Virtual Boy games. Zero Racers, an F-Zero spin-off for the Virtual Boy. Along with D-Hopper, which I would describe as a prototypical, overhead, vertically inclined Jumping Flash like. I think it is fantastic that Nintendo is digging through their back catalog to release finished yet never distributed games like this to the broader world, rather than keep them in their vault forever. I doubt they will appeal to more than niche loving weirdo freaks like me, but sometimes that’s all you can hope for with a release like this.
As for why Nintendo is doing this, I have to imagine it’s due to office politics rather than anything as pesky as a desire to profit. It’s easy to overlook this if you’ve never worked in an office before, but all it takes for a multibillion dollar company to do something like this is… one guy. One guy with enough managerial sway to make a fuss about it. Hell, that’s how the Famicom Detective Club remakes happened. It seems wildly informal, but plenty of companies are just like that.
Rayman 30th Anniversary Edition Got Leaked
(Natalie Muses About The Rayman)
So, I don’t really want to give Ubisoft-Tencent any more coverage after their announced restructuring last week, cancelation of games, layoffs, and their unions have called for a four day work strike. I feel little but contempt for the people running the ship, but when news I find interesting crosses my feeds, I want to talk about it. And this past week, word about a Rayman 30th Anniversary Edition leaked from Australian Classification. Supposedly a re-release of the original title for modern systems, with the listed developer and publisher of Atari, likely referring to Digital Eclipse, as they and Nightdive are their big re-whatever studios. But Nightdive generally works on shooters, while Digital Eclipse does everything under the sun.
Now, I could just wait to talk about this until the game is actually announced. Except that could be seen as giving too much publicity to Ubisoft-Tencent, and I feel like giving a little history lesson now.
1995’s Rayman is a rather odd game in the turbulent history of 90s platformers. And to explain why I think it is important to acknowledge how the concept of a platformer underwent a fair amount of flux during this period, due in part to the limitations of available hardware. Basically, in the 1990s there were two types of platformers. Console platformers and computer platformers.
Console platformers don’t need any real introduction. You play as a little guy, run around, and jump on stuff in largely linear and short stages with a mostly linear difficulty curve. PC platformers were designed by maniacs who knew that PCs could not do the fast past action or spectacle of what they were doing on the Mega Drive, so they compensated in three ways. Make the games long as the horizon, make the levels as big as country, and make the game brick hard. A lot of games of this era have a reputation for being overly long, requiring intense patience to complete, and full of rampant bullcrap, even the good ones.
Computer platformers were common in a lot of European households, which was a home computer continent before it became a PlayStation continent, and this arguably shaped the design of a lot of European platformers for PlayStation. …Not Rare though, they were always following Nintendo’s lead. And I would argue that a lot of Rayman’s design quirks come from the standards of the computer platformer genre. I say this because while the game looks genuinely gorgeous, has a dream-like and child-like demeanor to everything, assigning critters big eyes and assembling worlds of musical instruments, it’s a finnicky bitch to play.
Rayman is generous in many respects, with its gliding, ledge grabbing, and slower pace. But the game can also be relentless in its difficulty in spots, to the point where I doubt most people who played this game as a kid ever saw the ending. And I feel confident in that because of how successful the game was, selling over a million copies for the original PlayStation.
However, the legacy of Rayman is a bit marred by four things. One, it came out for the PlayStation in 1995, and this was the era where many games just stopped being on store shelves after a year or two, so people just could not find it later one. Two, it was a 2D platformer that looked like it could run on the SNES with only a few concessions. Meaning it was not sexy come… 1998.
Three, it was put out by Ubisoft when they were still getting their footing, and they prioritized the European market, rather than the American market, the cultural nexus of gaming in the Anglosphere, for worse or… for worser. Four, Rayman just hasn’t been given a relevant re-release in the past 15 years. It came out in 1995 for Jaguar, PlayStation, Saturn, and DOS. Got a GameBoy Advance port in 2001. the PlayStation Classic treatment in 2008. A DSiWare port in 2009. And it was part of that slapdash PlayStation Classic thing from 2018.
Akumako: “You’re forgetting about Rayman Forever.”
Whom?
Akumako: “It’s the original Rayman with a level pack and level creator released exclusively for PC in 1998. GOG re-released it over a decade ago and it’s currently just $1.50.”
…Wait, that’s the original Rayman? Forever’s not a good subtitle to tell me that! “Forever” doesn’t even appear on the series’ Wikipedia page! The store page does not reference how this is the original Rayman! The series has such a bad history of using whatever words it can find for its subtitles, and none of them make any sense!
Ahem. My point still stands in that the series just is not on modern consoles and the same is true for every game except for (Rayman 2 via Nintendo Switch Online and) Rayman Legends. It’s basically dormant at this point, and it;s easy to see why. It does not match the modern Ubisoft style, and Rayman’s lead creator, Michel Ancel, was working on other projects that will NEVER come out— Wild and Beyond Good and Evil 2— before leaving the industry in 2020. Also, Ancel may or may not have been a sexual predator. Considering the culture at the top of Ubisoft, that would not surprise me. Predators protect and promote predators after all.
This is all a roundabout bit of history leading into the subject of a Rayman 30th Anniversary Edition. Ultimately, I think this would be a good way to keep the game available outside of the niche of GOG. Most of the geriatrics who grew up with Rayman played it on console, or the Game Boy Advance, so that would be the best place for it to live on now and for as long as console libraries live forward. Sure, fans did their own remastering with Rayman Redemption a few years back, supposedly the best way to play the game nowadays. But to the likes of Ubisoft, that just means there’s an audience to sell the game to.
Now, I think that re-releasing one game in a legacy series like this is a bit silly… though I can see why they would not want to touch Rayman 2: The Great Escape (1999). A pretty celebrated 3D platformer that was brought to N64, PS1, Dreamcast, PC, and PS2. All of which have their own quirks and differences, and that’s before getting into the later ports for DS and 3DS. Doing a re-whatever of a game with a history like that would be a nightmare of juggling expectations.
…That being said, the Game Boy games would be simple port jobs. Rayman Triple: Havoc in da Hood (2003) has already been remastered for PS3 and Xbox 360, so the source code should still be around. Rayman Max: The Arena (2001) would just be a funny extra that I doube anyone would ask for, as it was basically a bunch of souped up minigames in a trenchcoat. And Rayman Origins (2011) could use a port to modern consoles. Yes, Rayman Legends (2013) remade 40 of its levels, but that means 20 levels weren’t remade, some were cut, and some people might prefer the flatter art style of Origins.
Akumako: “On that note, the Gematsu article you linked to said Ubisoft was also working on a remake of Rayman Legends (2013).”
…I could see a Legends remaster making sense, if only to include 4K art assets, remake the levels from Origins, and fix some of the online challenge stages. If it’s actually happening, I hope they don’t screw it up, as Rayman Legends is a personal all-time top ten in my book. …But I’m not giving them any money. Nor am I gonna use uplay or whatever guff they’ve replaced it with. Tis better to steal than to use uplay, and this is a fact.
Tomadachi Life: Livin’ Da Dream Direct
(Don’t LIVE The Dream, BE The Dream!)
So, Tomadachi Life. Tomadachi Life for Nintendo 3DS was pretty much the talk of the town for the two weeks it released, due to the fact that it was peak Nintendo weirdness in an era where the company was struggling. A social simulation game that encourages players to create digital simulacrums of their friends and family before having them engage in all manner of low-key nonsense and conflicts, enhanced by their stilted text-to-speech dialogue. I never played it. I did not see much of a point in these little social simulators when… I can just write this crap. I don’t need to play a game to arrange silly scenarios involving my OCs. Do not sell me your tools, when I have the power of a god within my hands!
The 3DS installment was a rousing success, especially in Japan, and while I think Miitomo (2015) was meant to be a successor of sorts, it just did not work as well. Ideally, Nintendo would have harnessed this power in the halcyon era of prime 2018 to 2021 social media with a new game in the series for Switch. …Unfortunately, that did not happen. Based on the current landscape of social media and communications in general, I have to ask about the viability of a deeply silly game like this, where part of the appeal sharing it with others. Spreading it to not only friends, but social media followers, as they hope that the customized characters and prefab events mesh together into something jarring, unnerving, or otherwise funny.
However, I don’t think that’s really possible nowadays, with politics being culture and social media primarily being a place for politics, propaganda, power play, and profit. The idea of social media as a place for people to hang out has been replaced by something that feels transactional by design, with the user and their eyes being the core product. This is a very deeply cynical view to have, but the longer things collapse, the more I feel vindicated in adopting this perspective.
Twitter (The Social Media Site of all time) was bought by the richest man in the world and became the domain of MechaHitler’s Child Sexual Assault Material, and a place where people profit from spreading misinformation and disinformation à la carte. TikTok went from a hip and happening place to a domain devoted to censoring anything criticizing America’s Super Gestapo, aka ICE, so long as they are in America.
Using any number of these platforms will likely siphon away vital personal information to the fascist powers that be so they can control the masses, monitor for dissent, and imprison outliers and disposables alike. Prison enriches holders of capital at the cost of the State, as they are given slaves they can work in order for them to get perks. …Like clean drinking water. …Or food that is not full of parasites. …Or the ability to talk to their children. …And no, none of this is hyperbole!
Basically, the internet is now part of the broader world, and the world is not fun, ergo, the internet is no longer fun. I wrote like 600 words of other stuff, doomposting about the nature of communication and how futile it is to give these people anything, while there are few viable alternatives due to people being trained to embrace the convenience of platforms. Which are so convenient that alternatives are hard to come by, forcing heavy internet users to use these platforms to have a grasp of what is going on with the world. Because you simply cannot trust the American press these days…
Akumako: “Ma’am, we’re here to talk about a Nintendo game.”
FINE! I’ll talk about your dumb Nintendo game.
So, Tomadachi Life: Livin’ da Dream is a game I don’t fully get on a more fundamental level. It is a creative game. You make characters, assign them personalities, choose their outfits, their diets, their preferences, tweak them over time, and push them to have relationships with other characters of your creation. The world is yours to forge right down to the textures of the floor and buildings. There’s a bunch of stuff to buy. A robust photo system to arrange characters in an aesthetically appealing manner, and storylines to pursue that see the characters get in wacky situations. The player is effectively a god character in a god game, and it would not be wrong to compare this game as being a Nintendo take on The Sims.
My issue with the game is the fact that it has all these things that players can do, but it gives them little control or agency about what actually happens. It is a creative game where the player takes the role of a god, but has a more vague sense of authorship of the events that happen, despite creating the world and characters. This is because character interactions are punctuated by randomness, by chance events, and prefabricated scenes written with little regards for the actors playing any given role. The player does not have control of what happens when one character sets off to confess their love to another, instead the outcome is determined by a random variable and what writers and animators thought would be funny.
It is not a role-playing simulator, you are the player, God itself, not a Mii Character. It is not a strategy game, as there is no clear endgame that the player is deliberately thriving towards, with the exception of achieving the monogamous normative dream of marrying a loved one and receiving a baby from a stork. (I don’t know where the babies come from in this game, but I’m guessing it’s a stork.) Except you have limited control of who any given character loves or cares for beyond when they ask for your input. They have free wills, just like a random number generator, but they also adhere to what their God wills.
With Animal Crossing, the underlying goal was to accrue capital and improve the stature of one’s home while messing around with their quirky neighbors, if only to accrue stuff and fiat from them. The goal was to amass stuff, to build a home, and to craft a town into something of an aesthetic value. Cash Rules Everything Around me, so you may as well gamble away on Sow Joan’s Stalk Market, manipulating FX trading in order to get gains that are not taxable in the Cayman Rayman Islands. Here? I guess the end goal is to similarly acquire outfits, rare foods, and to craft a large island full of Mii Characters to gawk at. However, that is a far more extrinsic goal that raises the question of… why create this way?
To whom is this the optimal method of creating and indulging in one’s creativity? Kids? Yeah, I can definitely see that, this is like a cartoon maker of yore but with a lot more prefab events to enjoy, making it both a toybox AND a TV show. But people in their teens, twenties, and thirties generally don’t play with toys like small children do. (Implying that people go back to the toybox once they reach 40?)
So, I look at this and kept asking myself… why not just make something all your own, based on the ideas you have in your head? So many of the skits shown in the trailer feel like they would work just as well as little doodly comics. If you want to explore characters, just write about your OCs doing stuff. If you want to make a city, then there are plenty of ways that you could forge one, though not as many as there should be. Or if you just want to see funny random videos of people doing silly stuff… wait until you hear about this cool site call You Tube period com.
…Is the appeal because it’s easier? Because creativity is labor, not everybody dreams of labor like I do. Not everybody fetishizes labor to the point where they consider everything to be labor in some way because they collapsed the walls of work and pleasure well before the pandemic. There are probably oodles of people who want to feel creative without putting their heart, soul, and gonads on the line, and that’s the target demo. …Or at least that’s the best I can come up with.
Tomadachi Life 3: Living The Dream of Property Ownership will debut on Switch on April 16, 2026.
I’d say something about this game’s chances of success, but at this point, I have no idea how well ANYTHING will mesh with the populace at large. The rules of global order are dead and burning, the standard established and maintained for 80 years is over, and nothing matters except for money and loyalty. However, Nintendo kind of shot Living the Dream in its foot before the race began, as they are restricting image sharing features of this game.
Why? Honestly, it’s probably because people can do a lot of weird stuff in this game. You can probably make a Nazi themed town with all the editing features, and make the text-to-speech function say terms like “jen-o-cyde” and “fah-gutts” and “hail hitt-lurr”. …Also, you can make characters nonbinary, gay, and give them multiple sexualities. Which is only controversial now because the fascist right has been racking up W’s while the Liberal establishment has been going along for the ride. What was once so uncontroversial that it was deemed protected by the US Supreme Court is now too dangerous to be set free without restrictions.
More Than a Fourth of All Games Workers Have Been Laid Off
(At Least Per GDC’s Polling)
To follow up one downer with another, let’s talk about layoffs. It is no secret that the entire games industry has been suffering from rampant layoffs as the market matured following COVID. However, it’s hard to grasp the significance of these numbers. Sure, 2,000 developers might have lost their jobs at this or that closure, but how many developers are there? 200,000? 2 million? Well, per GDC, we don’t have hard numbers like that, but we do have percentages.
Within the past two years, a third of all game developers in the United States have been laid off. Which is… catastrophically bad. That is losing generational talent, represents and immense lost for the medium of video games, and it is not just limited to the US. While GDC’s data on this is likely biased or limited, they are estimating that 28% of developers around the world have been laid off. And that… that is just beyond damning.
The loss of these people will result in games taking longer to make as workloads are shuffled around. Games will be worse as knowledge is lost and expertise becomes rare. And it will ultimately make the industry a smaller place with fewer opportunities and fewer chances of risky titles that do anything but the safest thing possible.
And this is not a matter of AAA studios versus indies. Across the board, people have been laid off, lost their jobs, and now have few options in such a hostile global labor market. So, what is the answer? Well, the same article highlights unionization as a highly favored thing, with 82% of American respondents being in support of unionization efforts, and only 5% opposed.
To which I say… 82% of these American respondents should join the United Video Game Workers Union, or another union available to them. Even if it does not work out, any attempt at joining a union is a good thing. Your artform is under threat, and they will lay off most of you unless you form a coalition and seize the means of production. Nobody is going to come save you. So you need to save yourself.
Progress Report 2026-02-01
Okay, I am making significant progress with VD2.0 Act 3 now, and am reaching a major turning point in the story, which I want to talk about. Basically, Act 3 splits up the characters into five groups, switching between which stories it tells with each chapter. Rather than write it chapter-by-chapter, I am going to write then based on the groups of characters to maintain a more consistent narrative and voice.
This is going to make it trickier to track my progress, and I’m not sure what the optimal order will be, but after the HUGE July 4th chapter, I am looking forward to telling a more focused story. It was not a great idea to jump into a project this complicated after a year without writing a story, as I can still feel bits of rust in my framing and ability to switch between characters. But I’m not drowning, and I’m excited to bring some of these ideas to life after waiting so long.
However, I am going to have some issues with what comes after this, as I do not have an outline for Act 4, and I have discarded my initial plans for Act 5, which was going to be a sci-fi affair where characters are stranded and go on their own adventures in worlds that reflect their minds and personalities, overcoming trials before merging together into a giant mech that fights an ancient evil with lore that nobody but me cares about. I am probably going to need to do some heavy research and thinking about what I can do and what I want to do with these characters now, while also interjecting semi-new characters. Like Richie Kikansky II: The Better Version. …It makes sense to me, okay?
I have also decided that I do not want to interrupt VD2.0 with another major project, so Psycho Shatter 2000: Black Vice Mania is delayed. Probably until 2028 if I am being honest, because Acts 3, 4, and 5 of VD2.0 are cumulatively going to be 400k words at a minimum. And I will want to work on some TSF Series stories as well. I feel really dumb for taking a decade to actually write Black Vice Mania, but sometimes that’s just how making things works.
2026-01-25: Wrote 1,400 word segment for the Dragon Ball announcements. Wrote 2,400 words for the Pokémon Black Ramble. Played a bunch of Pokémon Black. Watched Garden of Sinners with my friends. That anime is cool, but if you ever watch it, please watch it chronologically. It makes so much more sense that way.
2026-01-26: Wrote 2,200 words for the Pokémon Black Ramble. Worked on a related side project as part of that Ramble during some status meetings. Wrote 1,000 words for Preamble Ramble. 3,000 words for VD2.0 Act 3 July 4. …How? This was a work day and I stopped at 1 AM! I even dragged my ass on VD2.0! LONG!
2026-01-27: Okay, so I got into a mental bugbear and spent several hours compiling a collection of Andrea Sanchez’s Man of House series, and good golly do I HATE when crowdfund creators distribute their works. The PDFs she was hosting were egregiously large and I had to do a lot of work to make the files somewhat reasonable. …And they still wound up being 5.5 GB for over 4,000 pages! ARGH! Also, crap like this and Windows 11 just being a load of dung is REALLY making me want to build a Linux PC with two NVME drives I bought in 2024 and a fresh HDD for backups. Wrote 500 word Virtual Boy bit. Only wrote 2,300 words for VD2.0 Act 3 July 4. Gotta get my game on with that ish! Wrote 500 words for the Pokémon Black Ramble.
2026-01-28: Wrote 2,000 words for the Pokémon Black Ramble in the morning. Wrote 1,300 words for the Raymond bit. Wrote 2,800 words for VD2.0 Act 3 July 4. This lady is LONG LONG LASS!
2026-01-29: Wrote the Tomadachi Life bit and the GDC bit, total of 2,000 words. Deleted a bunch as well, but dead words don’t count, like dead people! Scrapped together some headers, and edited this fat bitch! Finished around 00:30, so that was all for the day! …Then I wrote 1,200 words for the Black Ramble, because fuck me, I guess.
2026-01-30: Wrote 5,000 words for VD2.0 Act 3 July 4 and wrote 1,000 words for the Black Ramble. Would have done more, but I got distracted by finance stuff. I was struggling with VD2.0, as there were a lot of perspective shifts and I had to write for 17 different characters, which is hard to manage, and harder to keep interesting. REALLY hope I can finish this chapter tomorrow!
2026-01-31: Started writing at around 14:00. By 23:00, I had FINALLY finished the longest segment in ALL of Act 3 with an additional 8,300 words for VD2.0 Act 3 July 4. This segment is currently 21,671 words, not counting the ONE MORE segment that I need to add to the end (it’ll be like 3k/4k words, basically an epilogue.) This is the problem with large group storytelling. If you dedicate two scenes to 17 characters in one chapter, you are looking at 10k words just there before getting into the plot. Aaaaahhhhh! Next chapter will be fun though. It will feature an airport chase sequence!
Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 – Act III: Worldly Wonders
Progress Report
Current Word Count: 60,534
Estimated Word Count: 200,000
Words Edited: 0
Total Segments: 30
Segments Outlined: 30
Segments Drafted: 7
Segments Edited: 0
Header Images Made: 0
Days Until Deadline: 150
Snoo
Snug-a-lou~!