Rundown (4/26/2026) Game Collection Imagination Fixation

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This Week’s Topics:

Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Game Collection Imagination Fixation

So, as part of a tax season and post tax season fatigue, I have been going through the Castlevania Advance Collection, and doing so has triggered something that I have been dealing with on and off for years whenever the topic of retro gaming comes up. As I have made abundantly clear in the past, I believe that virtually every game ever made should be re-released and made accessible, either for free or for a reasonable price. Technical requirements be damned, licensing be screwed. I’ve said that gaming was making waves towards this future with all the progress made from 2005 to 2013, before starting over with a reset on all digital storefronts. (Even though I egregiously forgot about the PS2 games re-released on PS3.) Currently though, it is messy, confusing, and generally hard to grasp the true state of retro re-releases.

Plenty of publishers are still re-releasing classic games on consoles and PC, preserving gaming in their own way through product lines. Console Archives, EGGCONSOLE, Limited Run’s digital releases, everything Digital Eclipse does and, I dunno, City Connection’s Saturn Tribute line. Standalone retro game re-releases are happening all the time. Collections are being assembled and sent out into the world with varying levels of emulation quality and additional features.

Efforts are being made, constantly, but my problem is that there are not enough of these. Companies tend to view collections as too low value to warrant investment, as they likely cannot sell millions of units and cannot be sold at a premium price. The company with the most valuable back catalog— Nintendo— has eschewed collections in favor of a subscription service. Making a good collection requires a different level of expertise than many more traditional avenues of game development. And certain companies are weird about the value of old-ass games that are small enough to be sent as an email attachment.

The corporate reluctance to re-release older games infuriates me, as whenever I happen across an older game not currently being sold, I have this cyclical thought process. “How could this be re-released?” leads to “How could this be improved through minor additions or features” leads to “Where would this fit in a collection?” Because I view that as the natural endpoint for older games. To be cataloged and maintained, not left to lurk in darkness as effective abandonware, but packaged on a store shelf as part of something bigger than themselves.

I think that collections are powerful ways to distribute games, as they provide additional context, giving the games a place in history, in a series, or within a group of developers’ tenure. They encourage people to try out new things as if they have the collection installed, they have the games ready to play. And they do much to endear people to gaming history as a whole by giving them a lot of an old thing for a reduced price on new hardware.

I love the idea of anything and everything being cataloged into readily accessible mass-produced volumes in order to make something widely available, accessible, and inexpensive for those interested in it. With digital distribution, we should have seen a swath of these. Game publishers should have continuously put together scrappy teams that gather up old games, select or create the best version of them, pair them together in a package, throw in as many extras as possible, and sell it as a great value collection. And for a while, it looked like we were heading there, but, well, the great reset of 2013 happened.

Nowadays, in the dystopian future of 2026, the digital climate for games has largely solidified, and I hope that we are enjoying a sort of “end of history” for online gaming storefronts and general cross-platform support. I don’t think consoles are ever going to stop, I don’t think Steam is going away, and I don’t think people are going to stop using computers. If the PlayStation 6 does not support playback of PS4 games, then you can amputate my foot live on stream, regardless of what the corporate-nation-state of Amazon deems legal. And if Nintendo dares to deviate from the model of the Switch, then kindly fuck them with a box of nails.

Akumako: “That’s impossible! Nails are the opposite of kind!”

If no massive company is willing to go all-in on high quality games collections, and there will never be a cross-platform Virtual Console, then I think collections would be the best way to organize and distribute older games. Unfortunately, few have been anywhere close to as comprehensive as I would like, and it drives me nuts how many companies just do not bother or fixate on inconsistent re-releases when they have a pretty robust back catalog.

Let’s see, example, example… I have been watching a lot of Marsh and Nyarly during repetitive tax season work, so Megami Tensei has been on my mind, and it boggles me how little Atlus has done to keep their older games accessible to modern players. I think the Shin Megami Tensei series has a truly fascinating history and evolution that should be analyzed and studied, but is only available through a few avenues. There are sparse Japanese only re-releases, fan translations, and old consoles with form factors, features, and presentation choices that would require some rejiggering to adapt to a modern 16:9 display. (Dual screen gaming was a mistake.) However, I simply do not know it Atlus would be willing or capable of doing this in a way that does not muck with the original games.

Atlus has tried to bring these titles forward with various efforts, but they’ve really run the gamut:

  • Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne HD Remaster was broken at launch and I think it’s still kind of broken without the use of mods.
  • Persona 3 Portable saw Atlus throw everything through an image upscaler rather than just have their PSP game look like a PSP game as Yahweh intended.
  • Persona 4 Golden actually had a very good PC port of a Vita game, and should have set a standard for keeping it simple, stupid.
  • Raidou Remastered: The Mystery of the Soulless Army is a remake, as they simply remade the game with new assets and radically changed the combat system, so it does not even count as an old game. Lexicon contaminating asshats….

But I also look at their line-up and worry that they would just screw something up if they were to release some of these older titles.

I want them to bring back their older titles, specifically more 90s and handheld offerings, and bundle them in collections to make them feel more substantial. Or at least available to people who don’t want to “break” the “law.” For example, Atlus released Soul Hackers 2 (2002) at a point in time where I don’t believe it was possible to digitally purchase either of the predecessors in the series, Devil Summoner (1995) or Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers (1997). They re-released these games with a 2005 PSP port and a 2012 3DS remaster, yet neither of those versions have been available to purchase for years. They could have done another port job of the latest versions, put them together in a Devil Summoner collection, but they didn’t.

The same is true for the first original three Shin Megami Tensei games, which all got PlayStation ports. Or the first three Persona games, which all got PSP ports. Or any of the other oddball ephemera that the series spawned. …Like the damn Last Bible games that were good enough to get re-released as part of the Game Gear Micro. Other ones would take more work, like converting any of their original DS/3DS releases to a single screen. (Why haven’t Shin Megami Tensei IV and Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse gotten ported? Because WHAT would they look like? Do you want to see illustrations compressed to 240p on a 4K display? Bark yes for no!)

This is just the surface level, and Atlus is just ONE company. I could do this whole song and dance about how dozens of games of theirs that be re-released, have no rights issues holding them back, and could make for a modest profit among freaks and dorks. But why should I expect anything from Atlus when their parent company, Sega, has pivoted so hard from collections?

Sega used to be an admirable example of a publisher re-releasing their classic games to new platforms, as they brought game collections to the majority of platforms back in their heyday, namely Mega Drive collections. Sega put out these collections on Saturn, Dreamcast, PS2, PSP, Xbox 360, PS3, PS4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC in several different flavors. But now, as of writing, there is no legal way to buy them on digital storefronts. Sega delisted their Mega Drive collection back in December 2024, and now you cannot buy that cluster of 40-odd games they released ad nauseam over the past couple decades. (Except on Nintendo Switch, which I legit forgot about.)

In addition to this, Sega has basically refused to re-release all but one Saturn game of note, despite offering the platform oodles of support with memorable oddities. They tried re-releasing maybe six Dreamcast games in 2010, the releases were not good, then they gave up. They developed dozens of fully featured arcade emulators for their Like A Dragon series, but have never once released a proper Sega Arcade Classics Collection. When… they should and could. Sega dorks would buy these games twice for the ease of booting up a game from a menu.

Seriously Sega, why are you announcing this Sega Universe initiative WHILE not selling your older games. Sell your games! This is precisely why I think there should be a “sell it or lose it” clause with copyright. Because I don’t need you to tell me how important Segagaga was. I want you to sell me a version that was actually translated into English by a human flesh person. Also, re-release Sakura Wars 1 to 5 in English and for PC. You released them on PC before, so you can’t even use the Saturn jank.

To me, re-releasing a game is just a repackaging and rejiggering of something that already exists, and that should be easy. You can probably get ten guys to do it in a couple months if they are given the tools and institutional knowledge (difficulty: impossible with all these layoffs). But the industry has this bizarre fixation on not doing this, thinking that remasters and remakes are the go-to way to bring back older games, make them more relevant, because they have higher potential profits. Not profit margins, just profits.

Daly, reality does not want to work the way I want it to, I instead play this dumb mental game of looking over lists of titles and wondering how they could potentially be re-released and what might go into making a good collection. Because even as the world is burning, or failing, or doing things in the big bad bucket of baddy bad, I will always have imagination.

Akumako: “Yo, Nat!”

Akumako, I just ended the segment…

Akumako: “Yeah, but you forgot about something. There is one company that is aiming to be the king of retro re-releases by gobbling up the disparate motherfuckers and putting them under one roof with loads of IPs. That’s Atari.”

Well, they do own both Nightdive and Digital Eclipse, who are among the best at this sort of thing.

Akumako: “And they just bought Implicit Conversions!“

Oh, the guys who re-released most of the PS1 titles for Sony? And who highlighted how bonked the retro games re-release market is? I guess it’s good for them to be under one roof, but my point about them all those months ago was that this approach of developing and re-developing emulators is, well, silly. We should just have open source emulators to remove a technical threshold. If you could just use mGBA, lots of people would re-release GBA games they have the rights for.

Akumako: “Would that actually help developers re-release games?”

Hell yeah it would! Getting emulation right is, like, the hardest part. Other than that, you just need to rig the features right, get a good framework, and once you have the framework developed, you can just copy it over onto the next project! Work smarter not sharter!

Akumako: “Whatever that means…”

It means shitting while farting is a systematic failure!

Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynched Announced
(Because Ubisoft-Tencent Wants Money!)

Well, this was a Ubisoft secret, but at least it’s out in the open now.

Following over a year of speculation, rumors, and leaks, Ubisoft has finally announced their remake of one of their highest selling and critical, commercial, and cultural darling, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (2013). Why was it thought of so highly? Well, it came out before Assassin’s Creed fatigue set in and was one of the relative few games to succinctly capture the thrills and joys of a pirate action adventure game, complete with on-foot exploration, quality traversal mechanics, decent combat, and some of the best naval combat in gaming. If anything, I would argue that while the Assassin’s Creed namesake brought an influx of people in, most look back to this game for being such a great pirate game, something the industry simply does not have enough of.

Ubisoft recognized this immense success and would fast-track a successor with 2014’s Assassin’s Creed Rogue, which was largely ignored as a lesser follow-up, and less sexy than the GamerGate trigger Assassin’s Creed Unity. However, Rogue just a stopgap for a new pirate IP they were working on, which became the much maligned Skull and Bones (2024), a critical, commercial, and cultural failure. It spent a decade languishing in development, wasted an excessive amount of money, and was bogged down by technical issues and microtransactions. They spent so much time on this project that Black Flag has become a nostalgia property (over a decade old) and fans of the original are hungry for a solid single-player pirate action game.

Recognizing this value, Ubisoft and Tencent, Ubisoft’s co-owner, and effective owner in my mind, decided that Black Flag should be remade. A move not only meant to enrich Tencent’s Assassin’s Creed IP, but to bring in some damn money, as Ubisoft has been in the toilet for years.

This is the primary reason why a remake of Black Flag, dubbed Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynched, is being developed. And per what was shown… it is a full remake. Everything has been “built from the ground up,” uses the modern engine, features new lighting and water effects, is set in a recreated world, and brings forth oodles of extras. More maneuvers to make for easier parkouring. A flashier, faster, and likely better combat system taking more cues from recent entries. New tools have been added for more robust stealth-actioning. More side quests, sea shanties, boat customization, and boat sub-weapons are present. Additional characters were added to the protagonist’s pirate crew for good measure. The voice acting appears to be fully re-recorded, for better or for worse. They even improved the tailing missions to make them less meandering.

There is a clear effort on behalf of the hundreds of developers working on this project, and I never want to bemoan a game developer for doing their job in an industry that is so hostile to the humans who make games. That being said, I think this whole remake is absolutely needless.

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (2013) is not a modern game— it came out on the certifiable retro console that is the Xbox 360— but it is available on various gaming platforms. It’s a PS4 and Xbox One launch title. It has constantly been $10 on Steam for over a decade. It was ported to Switch in 2019. If you own a modern games console, you can play Black Flag, plain and simple.

The game was widely praised, was seen as one of the best games in its series and is not a game with many problems. As a late Xbox 360 title, its design is still modern, it does not have any huge problems, and I think it holds up pretty well visually. Nothing’s too blurry, messy, or hard to look at, and while there are definitely effects that look a bit “dated” I think anybody who scoffs at this level of fidelity is simply a graphics snob. It’ll even run on a potato, and that’s a boon in this K-shaped economy.

I actually played the game in January 2014, back when I was 19, and even wrote a review about it. Did I like it? No, not really, but I was also in a very bitter and frustrated part of my life. I was stubborn, fiery, opinionated, and despite being praised for being smart, I was still very stupid. You know, like most teenagers or 20-year-olds. It’s why I tend to shy away from fiery opinionated 20-year-olds, because if they are anything like me, half of everything they say is bullshit.

Wild Audino: “…Does the same apply to 21-year-olds?”

…How the hell did you get here? I thought you were DEAD! Get back in your travel kennel, Audino!

With gusto and fire in her heart, Natalie grabbed the overstuffed pink critter and threw her into a glammed out travel kennel with an intensity that defied all eleven of the known laws of physics.

Wild Audino: “Audinooooo~!“

Anyway, skit aside, I truly do not believe there is any creative reason to remake Black Flag. You can’t even do the flimsy Resident Evil 4 argument that “its textures are murky,” “it doesn’t fit with the rest of the series,” or some other argument that I can’t be bothered to imagine. Hell, watching the reveal showcase, I legitimately mixed up the original and the remake at times, as most of the comparison shots were distance shots and the original just looked that good.

A sensible person might shrug off the very idea of paying $60 for a remake of a game you already own that is harder to run and takes up more storage space. They might ask “why not just replay the original? If you liked it then, shouldn’t you like it now?” However, for a lot of people, going back and playing an older game does not satiate what they actually want. This is something that I have alluded to before, but allow me to say it clearly: Gamers are fickle, insecure, and don’t want to reassess things. They just want to see the old thing they liked as a teenager, but new.

While people like games, they can often prefer the IDEA of a game over the actual game itself. When people look back on games, they often reflect on their crystallized memories of playing them years ago, rather than a more recent assessment. They want to believe they like good games, the best games, and rally around small elements of them. They might like, love, or downright adore their formative games, the games that led them to fall in love with the medium, but that is precisely why they do not want to re-experience them as they were. Because when one goes back to something they enjoyed from their past, they run the risk of reassessing the original finding new flaws, compromising their memories, and causing them despair.

This type of reassessment happens for everyone with everything, but video games are particularly vulnerable to negative outcomes. The merits of what make a good game follow an ever-changing goalpost. Graphics are the biggest offender, with there being a world’s worth of difference between good graphics in 2000 versus good graphics in 2026. But every other element of a game is subject to the same level of evolving expectations. How much content a game has, how much customization it boasts, how engaging is its story, how robust is its combat system, and so forth are all dictated by a broadly defined cultural understanding.

Because modern people are presumably used to modern features, presentations, and conveniences, this creates a barrier when revisiting any game that lacks these features. The game might have stayed the same, never aging a day, but they, the player, have changed, and are approaching this game with a different set of future person standards. This new perspective allows them to see the game differently, and can result in a few different interpretations. They might like it more because they can better appreciate what was done here and how modern conveniences might detract from an experience. They might find their thoughts largely unchanged. Or they might struggle to go back to this game. Which I’d imagine is what many people are afraid of.

The process of going from “that game is great and I love it” to “this game is weird, I forgot how it works, and I don’t like it anymore” is a painful one. It requires one to express a sense of vulnerability, to accept their prior (or current) stupidity, that they have changed, that they were wrong, or that in their old age, they have become wrong. Trust me, I have reviewed a lot of games over the years, and confronted this dozens of times. It is not a good feeling.

Furthermore, going back to a game can often be a lonely experience. If one keeps up with new releases or plays games in parallel with friends, then they feel like they are part of an in-group. They are where the people are, they are trendy, and have some symbolic sense of belonging. They might like games of their youth, formative years, or miscellaneous nostalgia period, but it might feel hecking boring to go back to them when nobody else is. It’s different if there’s a resurgence around an old game. For example, lots of people went back to Fallout: New Vegas (2010) after Amazon’s Fallout Live Action Episodic Film Serial (what a stupid way to say TV series) began. This made it into an event, a process in which people could find community with other people revisiting this game, and commiserate about what it does well and where it does not conform to modern standards.

However, these shifts typically happen when something new is either out or on the horizon, when there is a corporate or culturally approved reason to go back to these titles. There’s no shortage of ways in which this can be achieved, but one of the most surefire ways to regain interest in a nostalgia property or title is to remake it. Saying “hey, you remember this game you liked when you were younger? Well it’s back with modern graphics and all these cool additions” is enough to make a LOT of people giddy with excitement. This excitement is infectious, can inspire people who have no or little experience with this title to jump on board, and can allow people to harness the good vibes of a nostalgic connection without needing to reassess the original.

Remakes have the benefit of nostalgia, the salability/hype of a new game, and don’t require players to engage in the standards of an older title. They look modern, have modern features, and are just modern games. …For the most part anyway. Which is why you have people specifically asking for a REMAKE of titles they either liked back in the day, or games that they superficially like the idea of but do not want to engage with as older titles, as they do not want to “lower their standards.”

…Yeah, this is just a rough draft for my eventual re-whatever ramble.

What was I talking about again? …Right. Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced strikes me as an unnecessary remake of a game that already aged well. However, market and cultural forces dictated it into being, executives approved it, and people will not need to wait too long to get their hands on it. Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced will launch on July 9, 2026 for PS5, Xbox Series, and PC. Not Switch 2, surprisingly, but I’m guessing Ubisoft only has so many dev kits to go around.

Dragon Ball Xenoverse 3 Announced
(Such A Boring Follow-Through…)

Back in January of this year, Bandai Namco announced a new Dragon Ball titled by the name of Age 1000, revealing it with a vague trailer and leading me to hypothesize about what it could be. I figured it could be something new, something of a re-do of Dragon Ball Online, which was meant to be a huge project for the rights holders, but suffered from the volatility of the climate of late 2000s MMOs. However, that was all speculation, and I ended the segment with this:

“Really, with no developer listed, and only a 2027 release date to go on, [Dragon Ball Age 1000] 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.”

April 18th came and went, and a day later Bandai Namco formally unveiled this new game as Dragon Ball Xenoverse 3, marking a continuation of Dimps’s insanely thoroughly supported action RPG, Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 (2016). Dimps is returning to develop the title, of course, and the announcement trailer told us impressively little despite its length, featuring a kitbash of different presentation styles in a manner that always makes me suspicious. There’s 2D animation showing a futuristic West City and an organization of what I can only assume to be superheroes. A couple seconds of an in-engine interaction between two characters standing around. What looks to be the game’s introduction sequence so heavily scripted and full of so many bespoke effects that even if it isn’t pre-rendered, it may as well be. And finally another in-engine cutscene with the player character and the descendant of Bulma Leigh. Yes, that is a real character.

Trailer composition aside, it effectively communicates the central hook of Xenoverse 3. Rather than the hub world with instanced missions of the first two Xenoverse titles, Xenoverse 3 is seemingly built around an open city structure. This is interesting, at least conceptually. Dragon Ball games have featured open explorable worlds in the past— that was kind of the hook to Dragon Ball: Deadname (2020)— and if they want to make another action RPG, having a proper city to explore and interact with is a good one. Menus may be more efficient, but part of the appeal of any licensed game like this is exploring the world, and it’s easy for people to correlate big explorable city with high production values and high value.

Will this work out? No clue! Do I think this drip feed of micro-announcements is a good idea, just in general? No! Can I do anything about this? No times three!

Dragon Ball Xenoverse 3 will be released for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC in 2027.

Splatoon Raiders Gets A Proper Reveal
(The Extraction Horde Schlooter Spin-Off)

Splatoon Raiders was announced last summer through a minute-long and particularly vague teaser trailer that was offset by four minutes of Splatoon 3 updates. If it did not specify that this was its own game and a “Splatoon spin-off” one might assume this was just a second expansion for Splatoon 3. Now, ten months later, Nintendo has finally graced us with more than a morsel of news about the game and solidifying what people thought it was going to be.

Splatoon Raiders is a single-player focused Splatoon game that’s primarily built on horde battles rather than the level-based puzzle platformy elements of the prior single-player campaigns. Stranded on a mysterious island with the idol group from Splatoon 3, the player character is responsible for raiding this island of assorted treasures and goodies using a wide array of creative, if not gimmicky, weapons. Uggo sewer fish creeps (Salmonids) have taken home on this island, and per the doctrine of squid/octopi warfare, killing them is justice, and rewards the player with resources and treasures to allow them to take on incrementally greater challenges.

As a mechanic, the player character has access to both a mech— piloted by Big Man the manta ray critter— that functions as a computer-controlled companion, and a web of upgrades. Gadgets can be developed for doodads, expanding player skills, and existing weapons can be further upgraded, making the newly added damage numbers bigger and make enemies deader fasterer.

I’m being slightly cynical in my explanation here. I view the move to pure shooting to be less interesting than, say, a standalone single player campaign that I wouldn’t need to pay $80 to fully play, despite it being almost 9 years old. I suppose this would not be much of a spin-off if it was just a campaign stretched out to maybe half the runtime with no multiplayer included, but even in its best form, I do not find the horde approach to be particularly interesting. Plenty of shooters have horde sections, but those are challenges meant to punctuate moments in a longer more varied adventure, not necessarily highlights.

Sure, have a horde mode, make anything into a mode. But going in, fighting waves of enemies, and snagging loot sounds like it’s missing a… oh, goldarn it. I don’t think this is actually a horde shooter. Is this supposed to be a single-player extraction shooter? I wasn’t even aware that extraction shooters COULD be single-player, as every one I’ve seen cited is built on multiplayer. Hell, Splatoon Raiders does support co-op runs, so in a sense it is a multiplayer extraction/horde shooter billed as a single-player experience. I’ll of course wait to see what the consensus is, but to me this feels like about the most boring way they could have made a Splatoon spin-off.

Splatoon Raiders will be released exclusively for Switch 2 on July 23, 2026 and will retail for $60 physically and $50 digitally, per Nintendo’s new pricing policy. This is clearly meant to look like a digital discount, but I would hazard that this is not meant to be a full priced game, and merely looks like one due to Nintendo’s attempts of manipulating public opinion. If they do their job correctly, we’ll soon be respecting their decision to sell a game with $100 of value to us for $100.

Xbox Game Pass Price Drop
(Because I Guess Too Many People Canceled. Keep It Up!)

Next on the docket, we have an unfamiliar phenomenon that befuddles me to see in this modern climate. A price drop for a major subscription service. After replacing their Game Pass Ultimate tier with a new more expensive one of the same name, Microsoft has decided to back down from their aggressive demands for more money and drop the prices of two of their four Xbox Game Pass tiers.

I already talked about how aggressively greedy Microsoft was being with their October 2025 price increase, and this is clearly a direct response to that. A response that is only happening after the company has changed their figurehead, read the graphs, and decided now they can change Game Pass prices without looking like a sweet little baby pig afraid of its own shadow. (I love making metaphor mess bowls.)

In exchange for these lower prices, Microsoft will not include future Call of Duty on Game Pass Ultimate, a decision likely made following disappointing sales of Call of Duty 2025: Black Ops 7. With the removal of this $70 title, Microsoft is decreasing the price of Game Pass Ultimate by roughly the price of a new Call of Duty. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is going down from $30 a month to only $23 a month, which is still a lot and full of a bunch of crap between the Fortnite and EA subscriptions you are forced to get with this tier. But it is technically a better value.

Meanwhile, the oft forgotten PC tier of Game Pass went up from $12 to $16.50 a month back in October 2025 in exchange for precisely zero new benefits. Microsoft has dropped this price down to a mere $14, which is still too much, and indicates that Microsoft only valued a new Call of Duty game at $30 on PC. Which, uh, no. That is not how that works. For what people are actually getting with PC Game Pass, the service should cost like $10 a month.

However, any analysis I could do about the value of Game Pass is undercut by the fact that Microsoft is a pro-genocide company that has aided the Israeli’s government ongoing ethic cleansing campaign. Even if you are indifferent to the lives of Arabic people— because they are over there and you only care about here— Microsoft is still worthy of deep contempt. They have gobbled up a disgustingly large sum of the games industry, destroyed thousands of people’s lives, and burned countless projects. Even if it is cheaper you should CANCEL YOUR GAME PASS NOW!

Akumako: “At least they’re doing stuff under new management.”

Yeah, that’s the main reason why I am highlighting this shift, as it is a tangible change in the services they are offering. However, ever since Asha Sharma took over, Xbox been farming the attention economy for headlines by saying things without doing much. Everything about their upcoming Project Helix console is just hype and leaks for a box that I don’t think people should buy on principal. This talk about exclusivity standards changing is just to gauge community sentiment and spread the name Xbox after people, like me, declared Xbox as DEAD. While their recent pivot away from the Microsoft Gaming label and back to Xbox is symbolic at most.

I still argue that Xbox has destroyed its identity, betrayed the trust of the broader gaming audience, and should not be trusted by anything they say, announce, or show. Anything new they announce could just as easily be canceled 5 years down the line. Until they start putting out bangers, until they release critical and cultural (not commercial) success, they should not be trusted. To provide a proxy, Konami used to be the shite publisher, but since they put out games people asked for, and genuinely good titles, they have been brought back into the house of good favor. This is not because of their words, but their actions, and until a habitual let-downer does better, you should not trust them with a ten-foot pole.

Akumako: “Uh, that’s not how the phrase works.”

Yes it is. You can cause some major grief and pain with a ten-foot pole! You could even kill someone with it! I would not trust just anyone with that sort of power!

There Are Too Many Games Showcases Nowadays!
(Showcase Psychopathy)

This past month, one of my key frustrations has been trying to keep track of the utter deluge of video game showcases that have been happening as of late. Now, video game showcases are nothing new. They have been an institution for over a decade. However, in recent years, it has become clear that literally anyone with a semi-large platform could hold a games showcase, do it whenever, and fill it with whatever games they can get their grubby little mitts on.

However, I think this past month we’ve reached something of a limit. It’s April, a pretty ho-hum month in terms of game announcements, right after the end of the standard corporate fiscal year, busier than the dead months, and home to an average chunk of news. It’s not Segmented Summer Showcase Season. However, per my math, mostly based on Gematsu’s excellent event calendar, April has been home to the following multi-game showcases:

I only brought up the first four to establish that there were showcases earlier in the month, as my real takeaway is that there were FIVE showcases in a single week. And this is not S3 week or anything. Summer Game Fest, the Future Games Show, PCGamer show, Xbox thing— all of those are over a month away. So, why now? Well, I have a pretty simple theory: It’s because games discoverability is screwed and this is the best way people can sell or promote games.

The rise, proliferation, and dominance of live services has made it incredibly difficult for people to reliably hear about new games, as they already have their game and don’t need a new game. The gradual collapse of Twitter has made games discoverability harder than ever. The death of the share button due to locked down APIs discourages people from sharing clips on social media, adding more friction (yet people say friction is good, checkmate globeheads). And we are at a point in time where, due to the nature of game development, the shifts caused by the pandemic, and imminent release of The World Ender née Grand Theft Auto VI, there are simply a LOT of smaller games in development or wrapping up development, ready to begin their hype cycle.

However, it is incredibly expensive, and difficult, to advertise a game these days, as you need to be able to put it in front of people. Many of whom have ad block on. So, game publishers need to rely on showcases— consensual advertising as entertainment— in order to put a game in front of a couple thousand people and get certain websites— like sweet, pure Gematsu— to publish an article about them. If they just saw a press email, they could shrug it off. But if they are covering one of these showcases, that’s a different story.

I wanted to note this phenomenon— who else is going to bring this up— but I really have to question the viability of spamming a gaming audience with titles like this. The more showcases there are, the more they let anyone host them and shove whatever into them, the less appeal there is in watching them. The reason why people watch major A-grade gaming showcases like Nintendo Directs, the Geoff Keighley, Sony State of Plays, and Xbox whatever-the-fucks, is because they have the promise of something familiar, something big, something that appeals to a wide audience, and something with surprises. They are curated theatrical productions, at least when done right, and are meant to perpetuate a cycle of communal hype.

Indie showcases, by comparison, don’t have this hype, surprise, or IP factor. When you watch a showcase of over 100 indie games, you are going to see a bunch of indie games. Most you won’t care about. You may wind up wishlisting a few. And you may buy these games in a few months and find them quite nice. However, these showcases don’t have much sway over gaming culture, the games industry, or what games people are definitely going to talk about in the next few months. Which is what many have come to expect from the major showcases. It’s why they watch them. So they can be part of an in-group, part of the culture, and comment on what is going on.

Now, indie games absolutely can manufacture hype and importance. That much should go without saying. However, the indie games capable of generating this hype and importance don’t need to rely on a C-tier showcase to get attention. They can just wait for Nintendo or Xbox or whomever to show their trailer to more people in a more impactful context. Also, most of them are edited in an absolutely random manner and have very little in the way of a style guide. If a showcase feels like watching a series of randomly selected game trailers as part of a YouTube Mix thing, then something has gone wrong.

Like… why would you throw a creature collecting card-based tactics game with a cutsey art style right next to a Resident Evil throwback and then Map Map – A Game About Maps Have sections, have segments, have themes, have a hook, have some damn SHOWMANSHIP in your SHOWCASE! If we need to have a showcase of some sort every week— which we might— then they can at least be decently edited.

Progress Report 2026-04-26

This is what I originally planned on using for the cover of this week’s Rundown, but then I realized that there was no good way to fit six of these covers in a 1920×1080 canvas. To make this idea work, to use everything I made, I would have had to do another two mock-ups, at the least, and I had already spent two hours making this damn header.

The best three mockups I made were the ones I spent the least amount of time on, maybe a fourth of the total time I spent making this header. The Shining Force III mockup should have been easy. It was meant to be a play on the golden font used for the metallic text of the Premium Disc. But I was using a low resolution embossing and FORGOT that I could/should downscale the embossing, it just looked like a dog’s wet ass.

Also, thank you to SteamGrid and wiki editors who list what fonts a logo used. Y’all are dope-dope and I super copped yo shit.

2026-04-19: Wrote 400 word Dragon Ball bit, edited the Circle of Moon review, getting it ret-2-go, wrote 2,200 words for VD2.0 CH 7-11, mostly just writing one action scene in the process. And I watched half a 8 episodes of anime with Cassie, as she is leaving on a trip.

2026-04-20: Worked a little, played through a BUNCH of Harmony of Dissonance, because that game is DOPE! It’s Symphony of the Night 2 in many respects, and is just SO MUCH more fun than Circle of the Moon was for me. In fact, I beat it because I felt like doing that today. Then I wrote 3,800 words for VD2.0 CH 7-11, namely two exposition scenes and one action scene. This story gets so fucking weird and stupid it’s great.

2026-04-21: Big Rundown morning! Wrote 1,700 word Preamble. 600 words for Splatoon Raiders and 400 words for Xbox Game Pass. Wrote 1,900 words for VD2.0 CH 7-11. I wanted to write more, but Vampire Crawlers took two hours of my day and I was having trouble figuring out a gimmick for a fight scene, and was not sure if I wanted to have it be a virtual reality battle. So I played Rez Infinite for inspiration. The game is a damn trip, a true classic, and I like it a lot, but it’s also pretty tough with a controller. With a mouse, it is WAY easier, but still tricky, mostly due to how missiles blend in with the environment. Ultimately decided that no, that would be too much in this already wild chapter. Ah well, at least I saw why Fear is the Mind Killer.

2026-04-22: FINALLY finished VD2.0 CH 7-11 with the final 3,500 words. This one section wound up being 16,003 words! And the entire chapter is 20,349 words. That is too much… But a LOT happens in this chapter! It featured a lot of characters whose personalities had to be established, two fight scenes, two sex scenes, a new form, and a new setting that warranted a prologue just to explain what the hell happened between chapters. I literally could have made that prologue its own chapter, but… NOPE! Also, I played too much Vampire Crawlers. This game is dangerous and I keep wanting to upgrade things. I’ll talk about it in next week’s Rundown.

2026-04-23: Rewrote and expanded some things for the Assassin’s Creed bit I wrote last week, netted out to an extra 500 words. Wrote the 1,100 word gaming showcase bit, edited this fat hog, and got her ret-2-go. Wanted to do more, but Nat-Nat needed sleep badly.

2026-04-24: Fuck, I played too much Vampire Crawlers and got busy with a 3.5 hour long outing. Only wrote 1,000 words for VD2.0 CH 7-13. Bad day!

2026-04-25: Locked the fuck in and finished VD2.0 CH 7-13, writing 8,800 words to write a partial conclusion to a shitty story that nobody ever read but me, yet I have made a part of canon, and half of the story, at this point, is the canon. I am a comic book!

Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 – Act III: Worldly Wonders
Progress Report

Current Word Count: 181,760

Estimated Word Count: 250,000

Words Edited: 0

Total Segments: 30

Segments Outlined: 30

Segments Drafted: 20

Segments Edited: 0

Header Images Made: 0

Days Until Deadline: 66

AAAAAHHHH! I gotta get it done! I gotta!

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