This Week’s Topics:
- Rundown Preamble Ramble: Natalie is Noncompetitive!
- The Backwards Compatibility of the Wii PS360 Era Ruined Games Preservation (And is Why We Have A Glut of Re-Whatevers)
- Amazon Kills Their Luna Game Store and Service (Its Impact Was So Subtle I Forgot It Existed)
- Level-5 Announced A Bunch of Things (I Don’t REALLY Care Because They Are In Their Slop Arc)
Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Natalie is Noncompetitive!
So, this past week marked the release of Pokémon Champions, an online Pokémon battling simulator that, rather than be designed in the vein as the Stadium trilogy and Battle Revolution (2006), is narrowly fixated around competitive play. Because of tax season, where 10-14 hour days are the norm, I have not checked out the game. But even if this wasn’t tax season and I had a lighter work schedule— with even more irregular hours— I would not check this game out or even play it. Why? Well, the reason is quite simple: it’s a competitive game and I HATE competing against others.
This is ultimately a very ME thing, as I was the weird autistic kid in my class growing up and lagged behind with the development of many essential human skills. This left me emotionally stunted for, uh, forever basically, and made me unable to stand on an even footing with my classmates when it came to anything other than academics. I did well in school, was good at math and science stuff, could remember history pretty well, but when it came to anything abstract, physical, or social, I only remember the failures.
Whenever it came time to play an educationally mandated game, I would either struggle to understand the rules or do the things that I was required to do. I avoided any class-based games whenever possible and opted to just sit in a corner, doing literally nothing, or caused a fuss until I was excused. When it came to physical games that required “complex actions” required by the activity like throwing a ball, hitting a ball, or kicking a ball, I simply would try to avoid doing those things. I was the genre of child who would play an entire game of basketball or soccer without ONCE touching the ball. I would just run around as that’s technically all I needed to do for the grade.
This inability to compete on an even level also applied to the art of board games, as I just did not understand how one was supposed to be good at them. They involved chance, guessing, and getting into your opponent’s head. This was something that I, someone who was struggling to figure themself out, simply could not do reliably, and every mental competition always felt like a game of chance to me. This inability meant I lost a lot. I lost, and lost, and lost, and if I ever won, those memories have faded away into nothingness, as they are as tough and taut as tissue paper next to the stones of each loss. Hell, the only times I remember WINNING anything as a kid was by a damn lottery, not any effort I put into anything.
Because of these bad formative experiences, I avoided games when I could, and chose to express my interested in things that were gamified in my own ways. I collected Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! cards for the art and the thrill of the collection, deliberately decided to NOT learn the rules because I did not want to lose, and… because they were a bit too hard for me to grasp without someone to show me. (I was not a smart 8-year-old, okay?) I focused my interests around insular activities, preferring to play along with my toys, watch TV, doodle in my notebooks, make comics, make trading cards out of printer paper, and write my own stories.
Then there were video games, something I was fascinated by a young age and that entered my purview when I got a hand-me-down Nintendo 64 for Christmas 2000. As someone who did not like games in general, these seemingly represented something I would not like, as they were complex series of rules that required developing a regimented skill set to play on a level of basic functionality. Something that, as a child without any real experience, I did not have, and nobody was around to explain them to me.
My father hadn’t really trifled with games since the Atari days and was absent for much of my childhood. My mother never liked video games, as they made her “dizzy.” And my older sister was… just not interested in them. I was kind of on my own with figuring out how games worked, how they were meant to be played. Sure, they had more rigid and defined rules and the games of reality, but figuring out how to do something with no help when one is literally 6-years-old is tricky. As someone who learned to dislike games, to dislike competitions, I had a stark fear of losing in my early gaming tenure. So I quickly devised a few ways to enjoy games without losing. Namely, by playing multiplayer games by myself.
Mario Kart 64, Pokémon Stadium, Donkey Kong 64, these were all games I mostly played via their multiplayer modes. It turned Mario Kart into a leisurely drive through a 3D world. Pokémon Stadium became a solo battle simulator, or minigame simulator. While Donkey Kong 64 acted as an opportunity to mess around in a 3D arena with multiple moves and characters to mess around with. I tried playing these games as “single player” games, but this fear of failure kept me at bay. I did not know where to go in Donkey Kong 64 and found the world to be horrifying, which, I mean, it is.
This fear of failure painted much of my early gaming tenure, but I gradually got over it through a years-long process defined by a few events.
I got an Action Replay for both my Game Boy Advance and GameCube, allowing me to play games with infinite health, infinite lives, boosted stats, or no fear of failure. This meant I could play through games with an effective god mode, allowing me to experience them without the fear, self-loathing, and pain of failure.
I bought an increasing number of strategy guides that provided useful information and professional tips that helped me get through tricky parts of a game, telling me bosses’ weaknesses and where things were. You’d be amazed at how much easier this makes games like Pokémon, as you are never surprised by something you are not prepared for, and know where and when you will obtain certain upgrades or components of power.
I watched online video game gameplay, via unnarrated playthroughs and Let’s Play’s, so that I could better understand how one was meant to play a game. Which I think deserves special attention, as in the past 20 years this has become a primary way for people to learn how to play games. Previously, you just had to watch a person in real life who happened to be playing any given game, but that was heavily context dependent. Nowadays, you can learn how to play MOST games by looking at gameplay of them and extrapolating things!
After getting my feet wet with the cheated up Game Boy Advance and GameCube, I had to abandon two of these three training wheels when I moved onto the DS, Wii, and Xbox 360. I had gotten into gaming magazines and websites at this time, and wanted to play the cooler, newer, and more relevant games. However, Action Replay and strategy guides were both fading away at this time, so I had to grow up if I wanted to play the new hotness.
You might think this finally fixed me but, uh, it only did somewhat. After going on this journey, I had less and less of a problem with games imposing a challenge upon me. I learned to appreciate the friction and tension of something I had to do a few times in order to complete. Playing numerous AAA and Nintendo games of the era did not really season me for the hardest challenges, but by the time I was 20 I was playing Dark Souls and having a swell time. So, you know, big progress for someone who was afraid of playing Green Forest in Sonic Adventure 2 because of the scary time limit.
That being said, I was never really one for game mastery. I never cared much for speedrunning, in general, let alone trying it myself. I had no interest in mascocore platformers like I Wanna Be The Guy or Kaizo Mario, as while I enjoyed a bit of friction, video games were supposed to be fun, not punishments. I rarely bothered with harder difficulties, as I do not trust developers to not go hog wild with their difficulty scaling. Difficulty spikes have shat on my opinion of games before, and I’m sure they will, going forward, but I have rarely ever found a game to be too easy. If I wanted to do something hard, I’d do something that made me money.
Now, I have thoughts about game difficulty, how it is discussed and quantified. The importance of tolerance of error, player input precision, ensuring a steady difficulty curve, and implicit difficulty systems such as ranking systems and limited items, all of which make or break games for me. However, staying somewhat on topic, allow me to return to the matter of competitive games. While I had developed a decently dense hide for general challenge, I still hate competitive games due to how they are inherently built upon the idea of winners and losers.
In a single player game, if you win, that does not mean the game loses. You are just a player playing against a game that is, ideally, supposed to let you win. You are completing a challenge, and the world revolves around you. If you fail, you are supposed to just dust yourself off and try again. The language of “you lose” and “game over” is ultimately meant to be a provocation to try again. It is a true statement. The player has failed to win, i.e., lost. The player’s game session is over. But you’re supposed to try again. They are supposed to reach a defined end state by completing a consistent challenge that can be infinitely replicated.
Competitive multiplayer is designed around win/lose states. It is designed around an endless competition, in trying again and again. On a certain level, it is designed around continuous improvement, on getting better and better, but that goal is perpetuated on a level of perfectionist rigor against an ever-moving target and the expression of dominance against others. But in order to do well, someone must lose, in order to make gains, one must experience loss, and while there is an argument that both parties grow, that is hardly an exclusive virtue of competition.
I’ve tried to articulate what exactly I dislike about competitive multiplayer, as there are many things that I do not enjoy about it. A focus on repetition above all else, doing the same thing over and over again while providing no off-ramp, and each game striving to be the game that one plays.
The way it commodifies players née users into content while pushing them to do more with statistics, rewards, and nebulous prizes. How it denies people the opportunity to play something more curated rather than something driven on human randomness, which I value less than machine randomness. How SO MANY games over the years were denied the opportunity to be single player affairs due to the potential profits of being a multiplayer title. How effortlessly it is for me to extrapolate any competition into a sport, and I have always hated sports. First because I was bad at them, and later because I realized how they are just a nationalized weapon of state propaganda meant to endear patriotism to everything from towns to nation states. Or how easily any competitive environment devolves into some level of toxicity, scandal, and abuse, as there is a strong overlap between competitive people and the worst motherfuckers alive.
But the real reason I don’t like competing is that I don’t like losing. I also don’t like winning in a competitive context, as that means someone else must lose. I don’t like losing, so why would I want someone else to lose? I know that I am not great at anything, I do not profess myself to be great at anything, so why would I want to test my skills through a competition? If I want to improve them, I know how to do so: by doing more of the thing I want to do. And competition is FAR from the only, best, or most effective way to achieve this goal. I only want to compare myself to my self. For I am me, and I know that comparing oneself to others will only bring despair.
Akumako: “That’s rich coming from someone with a body swap hyperfixation.”
You say that like it’s abnormal to be aroused by scenarios that one would never want to experience in real life.
…What was this supposed to be about again? Right. That’s the reason why I am not going to bother with Pokémon Champions. Pokémon has always been a single-player thing for me, and I do not need to prove my skills in it. I know I play Pokémon like an autistic 11-year-old who wants one move of every type on the team. That’s when it’s most FUN for me. Some might find this odd, especially those who play Pokémon Showdown during repetitive lectures, or those who primarily engage with Pokémon as a competitive institution. But that’s not me.
The Backwards Compatibility of the Wii PS360 Era Ruined Games Preservation
(And is Why We Have A Glut of Re-Whatevers)
Let’s see, all the global news about America jonesing to genocide every Iranian kept the industry quiet, so let me see if there’s some evergreen topic I can dig out of my magic bag… Ah, here’s one that I’ve been musing over for a few days as I’ve been pondering “remake and remaster discourse” for an article that may or may not see the light of day. Ahem.
I’ve spoken before about the seventh generation of video games and how glad I am that I was so actively invested in gaming during a time. For me, it was a turbulent era full of groundbreaking and landmark titles and a nice blend of games of varying scopes and mechanical complexity. It was the generation of big AAA blockbusters, PS2 games dressed up as Wii titles, handheld games of all sizes, indie games breaking the mold, the rise of Steam as the savior of PC gaming. Hell, it was pretty much the ONLY era in gaming where six platforms existed and all sold over 80 million units each, which is pretty insane to think about. People say there are too many games nowadays, but try managing six libraries back then on a recession budget. …Wait.
If I had the dedication and drive, I could probably write a book on this era in gaming, describing why it was the best of times and why it was the worst of times. Because, looking back, it really is where everything went wrong in so many respects. Studios collapsed by the boatloads, the mobile market was unleashed from the ether, budgets went WAY up as game developers pursued photorealism that looks more quaint than realistic looking back. But I think the biggest casualty with this era is how it left behind so many bodies in the gaming library.
The concept of backwards compatibility has a slightly skewed history in gaming. In the world of pre-Windows 95, a new computer often meant needing to use, or write, entirely new software, and the idea of playing a game meant for one computer on another machine was, well, crazy.
It was possible to emulate what another computer could do and run the software through having the same basic hardware. See the ColecoVision Expansion Module #1, Mega Drive Power Base Converter, Super Game Boy, and whatever they shoved in the Atari 7800. However, the nature of game cartridges and evolving technology made it untenable to build backwards compatibility into most consoles. So, come the 90s, game systems largely eschewed that technology, wanting to do new things without being reliant on what the company did 5 to 7 years ago.
This did not really change until the advent of the PlayStation 2, which boasted full backwards compatibility with the original PlayStation due to the fact that a disc’s a disc and PS1 hardware was cheap as biscuits around the time. It was a great idea, and would hazard a guess that this is one of the reasons why the Game Boy Advance was built with Game Boy game compatibility— that, and it made the GBA look better than that stinky WonderSwan.
Going into the Wii PS360 era though, backwards compatibility underwent certain… changes. A drastic number of major hardware changes were made in the jump to this generation, and with that, complications emerged.
For Nintendo and the Wii, there was basically no problem, as the Wii had effectively the same CPU and GPU, just updated and with a higher clock speed. It ran GameCube games pretty much flawlessly and backwards compatibility was at the forefront of the device’s identity before it was given the sixth dumbest console name in gaming. No, I won’t say what the top five are. However, there were slight hardware constraints in supporting the GameCube, namely the controller and memory card ports that made the system slightly more expensive than it needed to be. Accordingly, these features were removed as part of the $150 RVL-101 model released in 2011. …And also the $100 RVL-201, better known as the Wii Mini, in 2012.
For Microsoft, the Xbox 360 was a wildly different beast from the original Xbox. It switched from a literal Pentium II and Nvidia GPU to a fully AMD PowerPC build. The Xbox 360 was rushed to market and involved so many cooks it’s a small miracle it worked as well as it did, so adding a second SOC was out of the question. What did Microsoft do instead? They pursued software emulation, using it to play a couple hundred original Xbox games to mixed results. It worked, but it was rarely ideal, and they would not get good at backwards compatibility until they tried again with the Xbox One in 2015.
For Sony, they were determined to make the PlayStation 3 the best thing since sex, but they also decided to use the much maligned Cell processor. A technology that I have not heard of since the PS3, and it is attributed as the reason a lot of PS3 games ran like kidney stones. When used well, the PS3 was clearly the most powerful system on the market, and it was compatible with both PS1 and PS2 games. …Kind of!
While PS1 games were emulated well via software— because emulating 12-year-old tech was not a problem in 2006— the PS2 was a different story. The PS3 initially shipped with the PS2’s CPU, the Emotion Engine, built into the device itself, but this was phased out with the second revision of the system to reduce costs. The system was doing dogwater at launch, as 599.99 US Dollars in 2006 money is almost 1,000 US Dollars in 2026! And Sony would learn from this mistake and never make a game console anywhere close to the PS3’s launch price tag adjusted for inflation. Never ever!
The loss of the Emotion Engine ended the PS3’s reign as the ultimate PlayStation, and firmly showed that console manufacturers viewed backwards compatibility as something less important. I wish I could say the same was not true for the handhelds, but, uh, it was.
With the Nintendo DS, it was only compatible with DS and Game Boy Advance games, ditching Game Boy and Game Boy Color support. Why? Well, Nintendo probably did not want to make space for a souped up Sharp SM83, a chip that Nintendo literally included in their handhelds for over 15 years. So they just shoved the GBA’s processor into the DS, making it backwards compatible with (basically) every GBA game as they did not want to fully commit to the DS with the PSP looming on the horizon. However, after the GBA was old news in 2008, they ditched the GBA cartridge slot and made the Nintendo DSi. I hated this decision… but also not a lot of people were playing GBA games in 2008, and Nintendo was phasing out the hardware.
The PSP was a new breed of game console, but it was pretty much doomed the day it launched with Universal Media Discs, or UMDs. Sony was determined to not use game cartridges in their new handheld game system, so they made these funky mini discs that they put in plastic shells. They… worked, but were clearly going to be a temporary medium from the get-go. This always led me to view the PSP as more of a digital system, in part because the portable PlayStation angle was fully fulfilled digitally, as the PSP could play most PS1 classics released on PlayStation Network. Though, this pivot towards software was eventually taken to an utter extreme with the digital only PSP Go in 2009. A new revision with worse ergonomics, a higher price tag, and fewer games. It was discontinued in less than two years. It seemed like a dead end… then the Vita came out had a messy backwards compatibility history that, as a former Vita owner, I STILL don’t understand!
…The point is, by the late 2000s console manufacturers were NOT interested in backwards compatibility. The nostalgia cycle was not there, and game publishers were more interested in re-releasing OLD games that hit a more profitable nostalgia cycle. The Wii Virtual Console, various re-whatevers of old games on Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network, the PlayStation Classics line-up of hundreds of games, all of these were great efforts, and some major progress was made over the 8-year-long generation. People had invested in libraries like never before, and a nice cluster of video game history had been saved on these systems. Surely, going into the next generation, the big three would build upon that, right? …Right?
By the end of the generation, the idea of backwards compatibility was still being propped up by Nintendo, who would make Wii games compatible on the Wii and make DS games compatible in the 3DS via hardware emulation. Their approach with the DS was great, as if you played DS games on it, you played the games, plain and simple. With the Wii U though? A system that already shipped half-finished? They decidedly half-assed their approach.
Rather than incorporate the Wii software, channels, and online purchases as part of the Wii U, they instead relegated all of these things to Wii Mode, an emulated version of the Wii’s home menu where one could play Wii, Wii Virtual Console, and WiiWare games. While this might sound like a minor quibble, it showed a break in continuity and an unwillingness to actually carry forward people’s purchases from a prior console. You had to access a walled off emulation of what the Wii would do in order to play Wii games, and that just made it trivially easy for them to resell the same damn Virtual Console games for the same damn price jus so you could play them with a modern controller. It was an effort, but not a good one.
Oh, and Nintendo ditched GameCube support. The Wii U could run GameCube games, it literally had the hardware inside it. But rather than re-release GameCube games or let people play GameCube games in Wii Mode, as dumb as that sounds, they opted to block off this feature as they assumed nobody would want to play GameCube games. …And yes, I know the Wii U lacked GameCube controller ports, but, counterpoint, the Smash Wii U controller dongle. They could have made it work. They just did not want to.
As for the next PlayStation and Xbox? Well, Sony and Microsoft looked at backwards compatibility, the strives they made to expand their libraries, the thousands of games they sold digitally, and the classics preserved on their modern platforms. They could have made the next generation better than ever, leveraging their past titles from ALL generations in order to make a veritable super console that would be able to play ALL of your games. …Instead they shrugged, said that was too much effort, and restarted everything from scratch.
The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One launched with zero forms of backwards compatibility and, like, 20 playable games on each system. Technically speaking, this was because of the move to x86 architecture and the immense amount of work it would take to run games of prior generations on this hardware via software emulation. This was too much work for both parties, so they predictably spread lies. Lies that this was not possible, that backwards compatibility only mattered at the start of the generation, and that it would be too difficult to implement for every game.
Really, Sony wanted to leverage their back catalog for their PlayStation Now streaming service, having people pay to rent PS3 for a few hours. Not many people did. While Microsoft was smoking that pack and did not want to do the hard work of making older games backwards compatible. That is until they announced backwards compatibility in 2015 and subsequently made over 1,000 titles backwards compatible with Xbox One and Xbox Series consoles.
This was a terrible move for Xbox specifically, as the break in continuity gave people the opportunity to switch over to a new console. This led many people to switch over from Xbox 360 to PlayStation 4, led people to pick up PC gaming as a more economic alternative— like me— and led like three people to switch from a PS3 to an Xbox One. I do not want to know who these people are.
As for Nintendo… I like to think they looked at this, how there was no outrage over the loss of backwards compatibility, and decided to not break continuity with the Wii U and 3DS and jump for a new beginning with the Switch. Obviously, technical reasons were probably the main one, but this also presented them with an opportunity to resell their back catalog… now in the form of a subscription!
Basically all three of the big players— Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft— had the opportunity to honor their past and make much of their past libraries available on their consoles. If you bought a game from them in the past, they could honor your patronage and let you play it on a modern system. Naturally, some cut-offs would need to be made because… how would you fit a Wii disc into a Switch? But when it comes to digital goods, to digital games, that excuse simply does not fly.
These three had the opportunity to maintain continuity from these early efforts, yet that continuity was wholly lost and prior efforts made during the Wii PS360 era were ultimately in vain. The Wii Virtual Console’s library was lost and only partially re-re-released. PlayStation Classics were subject to the same fate, despite there being literally no technical reason why the emulator could not have been brought over to PS4 in 2014 at the latest. And most re-whatevers of that generation proved to be kicking the can down the road, rather than preserving these games for future generations.
It’s easy to forget this in the current climate, but remasters of generation old games boomed in popularity during the latter half of the PS3 era. Publishers had these legacy titles that could no longer be played on modern systems. So, wanting to make some extra cash, they re-released them, had them render at HD resolutions, and touched up little bits and pieces for good measure. Sony fucking loved doing this, re-releasing what amounted to best-of collections of their PS2 titles with Jack & Daxter, Ratchet & Clank, Sly Cooper, God of War, Ico & Ico 2: Shadow of the Colossus— Hell, they had a damn branding label for this crap!
However, ALL OF THIS proved to be in vain. These re-releases cannot be played on modern consoles, despite them being powerful enough to emulate a PS3. And despite Sony offering PS2 games on PS4, they have not re-released most of the ones I just mentioned.
To reiterate, NONE of this would have been necessary if Sony kept to their original vision, maintained PS2 emulation on PS3, re-released PS2 games digitally, maybe reprinted some discs to keep them in circulation. They could have developed their tools, kept at this massive years-long project, and maintained a persistent library of titles that would follow the user forward similar to anybody who invested in a Steam account in the mid-2000s.
The same is true for Nintendo, and the same was true for Xbox— who really did clown on both Sony and Nintendo with their efforts to emulate and enhance a significant back catalog. Hell, they even added performance boosting features that effectively remaster games, bumping them from 720p and 30 fps to 1080p and 60 fps. However, Microsoft waited too long and eventually disbanded the backwards compatibility team responsible for this feature.
Now, if EVERY console could play any 10-year-old or 20-year-old games released for their predecessor at 1080p and 60 fps, would there be any need to remaster them? Not really. So long as the games can be bought, played, and enjoyed on modern hardware, and are available on every major system, there is no need to re-release them. …Unless the developers want to make changes that could not be achieved with a patch. This would still be a stratified industry, built around three different hardware manufactures, and PC gaming, but it would have handily addressed the need to re-whatever games while preserving literal thousands of games that are still not available.
…But in saying that I am ignoring yet another vital factor that screwed over SO MANY games of this generation. The hardware gimmicks. How do you bring a PSP game to another system? Well, that’s fairly easy, you have all the inputs. Most 360 and PS3 games fall in the same bucket. …But how do you bring motion control driven Wii games, Xbox Kinect games, and PlayStation Move games to new platforms? Hell, how do you bring DS games, which used two screens AND a touch screen, to a system that uses one screen and a controller? Coward answer: you don’t. Realistic answer: you need to extensively rejigger them.
The rampant “hardware innovation” of this generation, this thirst for power, lack of future proofing, and dwindling commitment to the prior generation all led this generation to be an anomaly. A generation that wanted to be a logical continuation of what came before, yet gave up as time went on, did new things, and was eventually abandoned by the entities who created these platforms. Their lack of care and commitment prevented literally thousands of games from being widely available via backwards compatibility. Their desire to make games something more with dead-end innovations ultimately left hundreds of games incompatible with modern control methods. And by destroying continuity between systems, they unleashed a frothing demand for people to have access to old games that SHOULD have been available on these systems, but simply weren’t.
Without a systematic process of re-releasing older games, like what we had with PlayStation Classics and the Virtual Console, every new re-release needs to be treated like an event, a new product. So they remaster it, they remake it, they make it part of a collection, and try to make it stand out in the attention economy. If it’s just the original, then it has whatever boons or deficiencies that come with it as determined by its emulator’s quality and features. If it is a remaster or remake, then it needs to contend with new expectations, the fact that it is expected to change things, while needing to not break the original in some way.
The modern climate of re-whatevers is a mess, a patchwork, and a genuine pain to try to keep up with or categorize due to how scattered even basic re-releases are these days. People are trying things… but they wouldn’t need to if Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft continued to run their own shows and kept building on what they started in 2005/2006. I’m hoping that things can change, but over a decade after the great reset of 2013… I don’t see things getting better. In some ways, things are still worse than they were circa 2008.
…Yeah, this write-up is a bit messy, but I am not above using Rundowns as a place to fan out ideas for something I may do in the future.
Amazon Kills Their Luna Game Store and Service
(Its Impact Was So Subtle I Forgot It Existed)
Well, I should have seen this coming.
A couple months back, at the tail-end of layoffs and closures, I talked about how Amazon was effectively giving up on gaming after spending more than a decade failing to make a dent in the industry. They had money, they had technology, they bought and built up studios, yet they just could not get things together fast enough to impress the higher brass. They also completely failed to make a dent in the games storefront wars of the late 2010s and early 2020s with their service/store, Amazon Luna.
Luna was their attempt at a game streaming service, similar to Google Stadia, except they had a monthly subscription model, the power of Amazon Web Services, and a library of a hundred of so games. From what I heard, it was a pretty decent time, but its library was nothing special. Everything that was on Luna was readily available someplace else, limiting the reasons why anybody would want an Amazon Luna subscription.
In addition to this, Amazon Luna doubled as a storefront, but only kind of. Rather than host their own games, Amazon Luna was more of a launcher and secondary storefront for GOG, EA, and Ubisoft’s stores. I did not realize this until just now, and I immediately have to ask… why? What was the plan? How were they planning on scaling this up? And why didn’t Amazon’s game store have Amazon published games on it? Aside from a pretty cheap subscription service, what was the plan here?
Another complicating matter is how Amazon actually gives away free games every month via Amazon Prime. This would have been a great way for them to have millions of people build up gaming libraries, give them an excuse to use their platform, as everybody has Amazon Prime! …Or at least Prime Business… Instead, the dozen or so games they gave away every month were just keys for GOG, Epic Games Store, and… whatever the heck Legacy Games is. It’s a neat bonus, but… what does Amazon get from this arrangement? They are literally directing people to stores that sell games, while not actually having a store where they sell games.
The more I dug into how Luna works, the more it sounds like it was made to fail IF Amazon had used their leverage, their resources, and pushed people to using Luna as a true Steam competitor, then maybe history would have played out differently. Instead, Amazon Luna is now DEAD.
You can no longer buy games for Luna and the service will be fully shut down on June 10, 2026. Any purchases made will still be available via connected platforms such as the EA App, Ubisoft+, and GOG, but they will not be refunded. It is a sudden and unceremonious end… to a project that feels like it was misaligned from the very start. The biggest store in the world could have competed with Steam if they tried, but they clearly did not try hard enough. What more can I say other than big tech companies should get their hands out of video games, as they clearly do not understand the industry. …And that includes you too, Microsoft.
Level-5 Announced A Bunch of Things
(I Don’t REALLY Care Because They Are In Their Slop Arc)
Man, I miss when I was excited to see Level-5 return to the forefront. The studio produced some genuine classics and absolute bangers during the PS2 to 3DS era, but then just fell off as they took on bigger and bigger projects, seemingly rudderless after Yo-Kai Watch 4 (2019) failed to take off and their international branch was shut down.
When they “came back” in 2023, they took WAY too long to release anything. Hell, they waited so long that they allowed their reputation get dragged through the mud as they started peddling AI slop in their trailers. Not only that, they openly showcased how they used AI in game development to “allow” their artists to make less art. I simply do not want to support their games because of this, as I do not trust their rulers to value quality, value art, when they are so willing to sell games on something that was generated via prompts. Something that anyone could make with enough tokens.
Sure, they avoided much flak for Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time (2025) and Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road (2025), as I think people just assumed they did not use AI in these titles. Me though? I wrote off the titles early on, and I am very skeptical of their future ventures due to their fixation on AI and effectively filling their games with garbage. Anything they show has to face immediate allegations of being AI slop, and I am inclined to write off the developer/publisher because of that. However, what they showed in a recent showcase soured me so much that I feel the need to explain why.
I was previously harsh to the Inazuma Eleven remake, Inazuma Eleven RE, and I still think it looks rather bad. It no longer has that garish overzealous lighting effect applied to everything, but it still reads as a low budget re-whatever that is simultaneously afraid to modernize certain things and ashamed that it used to be a DS game. The result looks to be a game full of design decisions that would not be made if this were not a remake. It uses Live 2D style character art, enhanced versions of the 3D special skill animations from the original DS game, and chibi 3D models placed in a detailed world, giving everything a toyetic feel. I see where they are going, but this just makes me hate the Link’s Awakening remake even more for pioneering this disrespectful reinterpretation of an older game.
Decapolice, their cyberpunk pig game, is still supposedly years away, was given a veritable non-trailer full of screenshots and backgrounds that, knowing what I know about Level-5, I HAVE to assume they are just AI generated mock-ups.
The new trailer for Holy Horror Mansion looks absolutely NOTHING like the original reveal. The title now uses Fantasy Life i’s technical foundation, a smeary camera filter that makes everything look worse, and a far away overhead view that, combined with the shimmery shading, makes everything look like a playset. I actually enjoy games that look like toys, but it is clearly not aiming for that look, and everything seems off.
The level of detail is all over the place, using unique signage and textures for utterly benignly minor details while repeating the same bush patterns over and over again. Character models vary in proportion and detail at such an extreme level they often don’t look like they belong in the same world. And the Vaseline smearing here just looks dreadful. I hated this aesthetic choice since I first noticed it, and my hate has only grown since then. Which is before getting into the fact that… this is simply NOT the same game they showed when this was announced in 2024. Admittedly, that was ALSO not a game, but that just leads me to believe that THIS is not a game.
A new Yo-Kai Watch spin-off set in the Meiji era was announced, dubbed Yo-kai Watch Puni Puni, and… this entire trailer was just AI. The backgrounds look uncanny and have so many oddly specific yet micro-details that I cannot imagine a human deliberately creating them. Character animation simply has AI artifacts in them, so much that I think you could spot an artifact in every frame. Movement simply looks wrong, hands look wrong, and backgrounds are also, simply, wrong. This is slop masquerading as a video game, and it is insulting that they think this blank promise, based on nothing but ideas, is worth showing to the world.
Snack World is the media venture Level-5 launched after Yo-Kai Watch, but largely failed to many a dent in the west. It was a 2017 3DS title, was re-whatever’d for Switch in 2018, and largely faded away from prominence about a year after its release and its 50 episode anime series wrapped up. The game did not make it to international markets until February 14, 2020, where it was met with middling scores and was promptly overshadowed by the pandemic ruining everything for the world.
It had its time, maybe made some money, and was then swept away. …So why the heck are they remastering/remaking it as Snack World Reloaded? I could not tell you, but the game ultimately looks pretty generic. It has too many post-processing effects, diluting its cartoonish art direction behind bloom. Combat looks pretty blasé despite being the cornerstone of the game, just a regular old masher. While its status as a “roguelike dungeon crawler” makes it a hard sell in a market oversaturated by cheaper more mechanically interesting titles.
I have to imagine that this project was shoved into development after Fantasy Life i did well for them, priming them to repurpose the tech and assets in order to remake a semi-recent game. I guess that’s fine, but also… why do this when these same developmental efforts could be put into any number of projects that are deep in active development?
As for Professor Layton and the New World of Steam… I’m sorry, but after everything else Level-5 has pulled, I cannot look at every single 2D asset in this game and wonder “was this made by an AI?” Looking at it broadly, I don’t THINK it is. I HOPE it is safe, and I think the game looks pretty good, if a bit too bombastic for a damn puzzle game. But I genuinely CANNOT trust any company that is THIS willing to use AI.
If I wanted to turn AI into an “essential” tool for creative works, I know I would want to shove it into literally everything, pair it with things that don’t seem to be AI, and make AI seem inescapable. So, I’m going to just assume that every AI pundit wants to do the same. They all want to trick you into liking something that has AI, to shift the realm of acceptable thought, until they win, artists lose, and capital has full dominion and control of art. None of which would happen if not for desperate companies like Level-5 trying to shove AI into everything. So, thank you Level-5. Thank for your lowering the bar for art.
Progress Report 2026-04-12
I was going to add something pertaining to the prestigious indie game showcase that happened on Thursday, but I frankly CANNOT muster up enough of a care to focus on individual video games rather than something more abstract. I despise the process of getting out extensions, as I ultimately view it as my fault. It is my fault for relying too much on my boss to do work he said he was willing to do and not being proactive enough. I do not like reaching out to clients. I was told I did not HAVE to do it, but bitter experience is telling me that I SHOULD. I am ABJECTLY miserable during this time of year, and the only solace I can find in the moment is in imagining my own death and how it would free me from this cycle, punish my boss, and could, in theory, make the world a better place. It is an unfalsifiable theory that your death will make the world a better place, but that also means it is not wrong.
Anyway, here’s a video of a woman being murdered as posted by the president of the United States, just a few days after he advocated for the genocide of the Iranian people, not even being subtle about it. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” is downright cartoonish, it is what a middle schooler would write as an example of a line of someone declaring genocide.
Akumako: “This is the fourth murder video you have shared on your website…”
YES! And at this rate, it won’t be the last…
2026-04-05: More Re:Zero, but my internet was shitting the bed a lot, so it was harder for me to get into it. Plus, it was flashback city. Still Good Times™ with Cassie and Shiba. Wrote 3,600 words for VD2.0 CH 7-08, which is where the story jumps the gun into madness, but I have already blown up the Earth TWICE, so talking [REDACTED] seems fine enough to me.
2026-04-06: 10.5 hour day at work, which is totally fine given the time of year. Still PISSED TF OFF about the workload my boss was procrastinating on. played more of Circle of the Moon to unwind, and it went from a flawed but curious game to a king of massive pain in the ass. It plays like a game that only went through one pass of playtesting maybe. Wrote 1,800 words for VD2.0 CH 7-08, finishing the first of four chapters for this story arc. It will end with Nazi punching. …SHIT! I need to write a song parody for next chapter. ASS!
2026-04-07: Wrote 2,000 word preamble while my boss was fuckin’ around with whatever the fuck. Wrote 2,900 words for the backwards compatibility bit, because I had to quell the poison form my soul. Also, I was not in the mood to write the next chapter on the slate, as I am so stressed out about my damn day job. My boss isn’t stressed, so I need to be, working my ass until 2 AM as I realize that he forgot to do something. Ugh. Asses to asses, dick to dirt, in my mothafuckin’ self I trust…
2026-04-08: Had a 13 hour day, so kindly GO FUCK YOURSELF progress goblin. You are just a tool for fucking! Made the header image as a little image editing project. Twas fun to expand upon a 2+ year old gag like this. The Mawile is a reference to Missy Scrumptious, who will no longer contribute to Natalie.TF, but I also thought it looked funny.
2026-04-09: Another 12+ hour day, so FUCK YOU goblins telling me to make progress. Just edited this fat whore and threw her in the oven, which is still the place I want to die…
2026-04-10: 11+ hour day, managed to SOMEHOW write 1,900 words about Amazon Luna and Level-5.
2026-04-11: Natalie just realized that there are two Lake Genevas in the world, and the one she visited as a kid is FAR from the more important one. Orz. America, why do you gotta steal the names of so many places! Now I gotta specify this, as I ignorantly assume EVERYBODY knows about Lake Geneva, WI! …Worked 8 hours with the bossman, made bad progress, but was too exhausted from a 66 hour week to want to do creative writing.
Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 – Act III: Worldly Wonders
Progress Report
Current Word Count: 156,013
Estimated Word Count: 250,000
Words Edited: 0
Total Segments: 30
Segments Outlined: 30
Segments Drafted: 18
Segments Edited: 0
Header Images Made: 0
Days Until Deadline: 80
FUCKING TAX SEASON!