This Week’s Topics:
- Rundown Preamble Ramble: The Natalie.TF Schedule Update – May 2026
- Natalie Muses About FMV Games (Blame The Saturn Panda Man!)
- Katsuhiro Harada Accepts Fat Check From Saudi Arabia (The Face of Tekken is Now Working for Saudi Arabia’s SNK)
- Sega Kills Their Super Game Initiative (A Hundred Billion Yen Down The Drain!)
Rundown Preamble Ramble:
The Natalie.TF Schedule Update – May 2026
Hey there!
It’s been a couple months since I had a proper update on what I’m planning on putting out for Natalie.TF, and now is as good a time as any.
So, why the hell hasn’t Natalie been doing the things she said she’d do? Well, first we need to outline the list of things I said I would do.
- 2026-01-13: Student Transfer Version 9 Review – DONE!
- 2026-02-??: Natalie Rambles About Monkey Man – DELAYED!
- 2026-02-??: Natsumi Legacy Route – Student Transfer Scenario Review – DELAYED!
- 2026-02-??: Maria Mania Legacy Route – Student Transfer Scenario Review – DELAYED!
- 2026-02-??: Suicide to Salvation (Novella) – CANCELED!
- 2026-03-06: Natalie Rambles About Pokémon Black – DOUBLE DONE!
- 2026-04-??: Help! I’m Turning into a Mermaid! – DELAYED!
- 2026-06-03: re:Dreamer Review #6 – Probably Delayed?
- 2026-07-01: Verde’s Doohickey 2.0: Sensational Summer Romp Act 3: Worldly Wonders
- 2026-??-??: Pokémon Legends: Z-A – Mega Dimension Review/Ramble
- 2026-??-??: TSF Series #019: TBD
- 2026-??-??: TSF Series #020: Chateau del Bitz
- 2026-??-??: Fate/Stay Night Remastered Review (Shiba Request)
- 2026-??-??: A Mirror’s Curse Review (TSF Game)
- 2026-??-??: Coffee Buns Review (TSF Game)
- 2026-??-??: Thread – A Tale of Identity, Monsters, and College Review (TSF Game)
2026-12-??: Pokémon Wind Review– DELAYED TO 2027 by The Pokémon Company- 2026-12-29: Natalie Rambles About 2026
As you can tell, there were a lot of things that I have delayed, a novella that I canceled, and a lot of stuff that I still want to do, so let’s go over the hits in some semblance of order.
First off, all of the delays can be attributed to two factors: I worked an insane Q1 at my job as a tax accountant. And I chose to prioritize work on Verde’s Doohickey 2.0: Sensational Summer Romp Act 3: Worldly Wonders above everything else.
Natalie Rambles About Monkey Man is a ramble where I go through a comic I made when I was a small child, called Monkey Man, which I have not read or even really thought about in 20 years. I figured it would be a fun exploration of my personal creative development, similar to my Fan Fiction Ramble. I still have a cluster of the comics my mother found, ready to be scanned, but I have not done so yet for one simple reason. I’ve been busy and this would be an involved process of scanning, reading, reformatting, and writing about these comics. I still want to do it, I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
As I said in my Student Transfer V9 review, I plan on covering the cut Natsumi and Maria Mania legacy routes with their own reviews. This would not take particularly long, and would mostly involve digging through the Git, playing these sub-hour-long routes, repurposing my old flowcharts, and writing a plain and frank review for each of them, probably 1,000 words each. It would not be a major investment, and I still plan on doing it. However, I was not vibing with Student Transfer too much after the update, so I switched over to writing my own body swap story involving a bunch of teenagers and milves.
For the record, Verde’s Doohickey was released on August 15, 2015— months before Student Transfer, so I didn’t rip them off. We both ripped off Press-Switch! (RIP Trigger, we hardly knew ye.)
Suicide to Salvation is a novella that I have toyed around with for a few months as America increasingly descended into fascism. It was to be a highly political novella about two people with the power to possess people, but can only un-possess them upon death, leading them to go on a political suicide spree where they possess the worst of the worst in the world and make them FUCKING KILL THEMSELVES!
I worked up a 12,000 word outline for the story, but could not decide on a good ending. Then my entire drive to continue the story was interrupted when ICE invaded Minneapolis, killed two people, and detained so many others in concentration camps. I wanted to write a hyperbolic story, but reality became just as hyperbolic overnight, killing my interest to continue the idea. If you wanna read the rough, unedited, and incomplete outline, you can do ahead. I will probably not return to the concept considering the current political landscape and how much it will inevitably resemble reality. That is some of the most dystopian shit I’ve ever said but, uh, we are just living in a dystopia at this point. Not a hard crystallized dystopia, where people forgot what color the sky was, but what’s another 20 years.
Natalie Rambles About Pokémon Black was delivered on time and was expanded to include a second part where I analyzed every single Pokémon line in these games. I did this because Black and White have such bizarre balancing choices, and it drove me NUTS going through those games again. I did the thing, the product was delivered, good for me.
I said that I would cover Help! I’m Turning into a Mermaid! as my after tax season decompression game of choice. But I did not do that. I was too busy playing old GBA Castlevania games instead. The main reason why I did not cover Mermaid is that I was focusing on Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 and REALLY needed to focus on that story before any other TSF story that came my way. I still want to play the game, and plan on getting around to it later, but I want to finish my novel before I play someone else’s. I don’t know if that is a radical stance to have, but it probably isn’t. I hope to release a review sometime in the later half of July.
I previously announced re:Dreamer Review #6 for my big return to re:Dreamer after a two year hiatus (and investing an extra $720 into its development). Will I be reviewing it on June 3rd, also known as Gender Bender Day? Honestly, that depends solely on if CaptainCaption gets the pool update out on time. I have been waiting TWO YEARS for this scene to be finished, and it’s not done-done yet as of writing. It will represent a significant chunk of new stuff, the first update in about 9 months, so I do not want to just skip over it and wait until next year to cover it.
I will delay my re:Dreamer review if need be, but that will only happen if Cap, the solo developer, takes too long to get out the update and does not ship Version 0.21.0 until, like, May 27th. Sorry, but I need at least a week to re-read these hundreds of thousands of words and write a review that’s less than 70% reheated leftovers.
I have had my eyes on doing a Pokémon Legends: Z-A – Mega Dimension Review/Ramble since the games FINALLY got Pokémon Home integration a month and a half ago. Unfortunately, everything I’ve heard about Mega Dimension makes it sound fucking awful, so I have been procrastinating it. However, I will get around to it sometime this year, especially because I won’t have a new Pokémon game to review this autumn/winter. Pokémon Winds and Waves are not coming out until 2027, and that could be November 18, 2027 for all we know. (That would make for a great birthday present for me.)
However, the big project I need to give an update on is Verde’s Doohickey 2.0: Sensational Summer Romp – Act 3: Worldly Wonders. For those not in the know, Verde’s Doohickey 2.0: Sensational Summer Romp is my biggest novel project thus far and is currently projected to be a massive five act odyssey following a batch of twenty-ish characters as they spend the summer with a body swapping and sex swapping doohickey.
I originally intended this to be a far smaller epilogue for the three preceding novels— Verde’s Doohickey, The Malice of Abigale Quinlan, The Dominance of Abigale Quinlan, giving minor characters some time to shine and allowing them to reach some proximity of satisfying character arcs. However, I kept going in deeper and deeper into the characters, world, and sheer deluge of concepts that wanted to explore. As a project, Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 is incredibly vast, dynamic, and complicated, effectively being a sequel to everything I have ever done with The Saga of Dawn and Dusk up until this point. (Even Psycho Shatter 1988, as there is a literal crossover segment.) Any sane person would look at what I have assembled, with its routine genre breaking, character reconstruction, and utter inane nonsense and deem it too much. Overbearing. A load of phooey. However, it is a story that I feel I need to tell, need to bring to its conclusion, and has been delayed far too many times.
As of publishing this article, Act 3: Worldly Wonders has nearly been fully drafted, all 248,000 words, and I intend to release it from July 1, 2026 to July 15, 2026. I have something that I can release to technically meet my promised deadlines. However, I still need to do several things:
- Edit every chapter— a three-prong process involving proofreading it, using LanguageTool for grammar/style checks, and using text-to-speech to listen to the words to make sure they sound right.
- Create 16 160×90 pixel diorama header images, one for the novel itself and one for each of the 15 chapters.
- Create a master doc containing every chapter, formatted like a novel with a table of contents, information segment, and various image assets. This will serve as the master copy of the novel going forward.
Considering the process I have made since development resumed, i.e., actually started, on January 10, 2026, I am confident that I will be able to meet my July 2026 due dates. That being said, I will need to spend a significant portion of June locking in and editing almost 250,000 words of text. I do not foresee this being a “fun time,” but it remains my goal nevertheless.
Sidebar: Some writers consider the first draft the hardest part but love editing, whereas I tend to be sloppier with my editing, as I just want to get the thing I’ve already built out the door. I write stupidly extensive outlines to go through all the plot details and character beats, then I write the actual story with about 70% accuracy to the outline, as I get new, better ideas or realize that certain things don’t work. Then when editing, I have to rewrite like 10%-15% of the damn story I just wrote, so the words are betterer and smoothlier on the eyes.
Despite the fact that, as far as I can tell, literally nobody has read Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 in full, I will carry on with this project and intend on focusing on it as my main novel project after the completion of Act 3.
I am currently unsure what forms Act 4 and Act 5 will take considering certain changes I had to make with the scale and scope of the story. (The transdimensional space arc, Stellar Skies, was scrapped as it was too grand in scope and just felt blasé after Psycho Shatter 1988.) I may roll the remaining ideas into a single installment, or they may remain two parts. A full outline still needs to be written, and I will take the development challenges associated with Act 3— namely the average chapter length of 16,000 words— into account.
However, this will be the only addition to Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 this year, and any subsequent additions will be made in 2027 and possibly 2028. I plan on working on the outline sparingly, relegating it to a minor project, while stimulating my creative recipient and critical muscles by covering a bunch of stuff I’ve wanted to cover for a while now. Or in clearer, better, words, I’m putting VD2.0 on the backburner starting June 30th, will work on the outline stuff periodically, but will primarily focus on getting out reviews and the like for a while.
With all this being said, I have created a revised schedule of my creative ventures for the remainder of the year:
- 2026-05-27: Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance Review
- 2026-06-03: re:Dreamer Review #6
- 2026-06-17: Air Twister Review
- 2026-07-01: Verde’s Doohickey 2.0: Sensational Summer Romp Act 3: Worldly Wonders
- 2026-07-22: Help! I’m Turning into a Mermaid! Review
- 2026-07-29: Pokémon Legends: Z-A – Mega Dimension Review
- 2026-08-04: Natsumi Legacy Route – Student Transfer Scenario Review
- 2026-08-06: Maria Mania Legacy Route – Student Transfer Scenario Review
- 2026-08-12: Natalie Rambles About Monkey Man
- 2026-08-??: Beast of Reincarnation Review
- 2026-09-??: TSF Series #019: A Change of Flesh
- 2026-??-??: Coffee Buns Review (TSF Game)
- 2026-??-??: [Fate/Stay Night Remastered](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2396980/FatestaynightREMASTERED/) Review (Shiba Request)
- 2026-??-??: A Mirror’s Curse Review (TSF Game)
- 2026-??-??: Thread – A Tale of Identity, Monsters, and College Review (TSF Game)
- 2026-??-??: TSF Showcase 2026-01: Chronicstuss (Ouran Request)
- 2026-??-??: Natalie Rambles About Re-Whatevers
- 2026-11-18: TSF Series #020: Chateau del Bitz
- 2026-12-29: Natalie Rambles About 2026
Now, will I be able to do ALL this? As I have said before, and will say again… I sure fucking hope so.
I especially hope that I can finally get back to TSF Series, as I have been letting that series atrophy as I pursued bigger and crazier ideas, choosing to let whatever momentary TSF fascination I have die on the vine.
As for what external factors could prevent me from achieving these goals, the answer is, as always, work. My work schedule is viciously uneven, my March was a damn gauntlet where I was working 260 hours in a single month. And while I am hopeful that my September and early October won’t be as aggressive, I ultimately cannot control what comes in and what I need to do in a given day. However, with no TSF Showcase taking up a week of each month, with no 250-hour-long visual novels, I am far more optimistic about H2 2026 being a time when I can get shit done!
Natalie Muses About FMV Games
(Blame The Saturn Panda Man!)
This past week, I sat down and watched the latest documentary slash game review from PandaMonium, a video creator who, years ago, decided to test his mettle by reviewing every North American game for the Sega Saturn. However, somewhere in the process PandaMonium shifted from sweet and punctual 10 minutes game reviews to expansive hour(s) long dives into everything these games were, trying to understand where they came from, what made them unique, and why they are special. His previous documentaries on Virtua Cop and Sega Rally were massive in scope, but cover just about every scrap of information you could want while endearing the viewer with a firm respect for these games.
Earlier this month, he released his longest and most extensive video yet, an 8 hour dive into the history of Digital Pictures. With Digital Pictures being a game developer that was fixated on live action FMV titles. DP is best known for the likes of Night Trap (1992) and Sewer Shark (1992), but they produced a bunch of titles that played around with the general concept of interactive movies. The documentary is spliced in with reviews of unreleased Saturn games, the unreleased final game of Digital Pictures, Maximum Surge, and interviews PandaMonium conducted with former employees of Digital Pictures. It’s all incredibly impressive stuff, doing a lot to humanize the people who made the Digital Pictures what it was, and why the studio mattered in the broader history of video games.
If you have eight hours to kill on an admittedly pretty niche topic, like I apparently did, I would recommend checking out the documentary in full, and some of his other stuff. As a console specific Sega Saturn creator, PandaMonium does not get nearly the amount of attention I think he deserves.
The Digital Pictures documentary is comprehensive, but it also skirts past (relatively speaking) what I think is one of the more interesting questions in any discussion of full-motion video games. We know how they came to be. A bunch of people looked at the possibility of home video, how they could interact with it, and developed the technology to put movies on CD-ROMs. But the downfall of these games, why we don’t see them around anymore, is a murkier question for me, as they did not really die per se, or ever fully go away. FMV sequences and real-life footage have been included in some video games for over 30 years now. It’s more that live action video in video games became less necessary, less popular, after the 1990s.
But before that question can be answered— why FMV games fell off— a broader context needs to be established as to what this wave of FMV in video games was, how pervasive it was, and how far it extended.
Arguably some of the first widespread examples of FMV in games were Digital Pictures’s early efforts on Sega CD, where they repurposed prior unreleased titles, Night Trap and Sewer Shark, while creating a bunch of corny music video editing games. In the early 1990s, visual innovations like this were being made all the time, with developers experimenting with new ways to make games look better, harness the ever-growing power of game consoles and chips, and making the most of this new CD-ROM format. It’s easy to forget this, but CDs gave developers over 700 MB of storage, well over the… 4 MB they were given with cartridges. Polygonal graphics, pre-rendered “3D” character sprites, and anything that simulated reality or 3D were considered selling points, and constantly hyped up by magazines.
The desire to make games feel “real” and to achieve a sort of “virtual reality” were both persistent fantasies in American gaming publications of the time, and frequently adopted by both advertisers and hardware manufacturers. Hell, I feel like I’m perpetuating misinformation whenever I bring this up, but Sega was indeed working on their own VR headset in the early 90s and had a working prototype. There were multiple forms of motion controls back then (all of which sucked). And you could officially download games off of the internet starting in 1994.
There was also a growing desire to make games appeal to a broader audience, to place less emphasis on “arcade reflexes” and deliver experiences that were more accessible to a growing number of people, using the CD-ROM as a medium. This is where you see all sorts of games that were trying to blend numerous nascent technologies in order to create “interactive media.” Titles that ranged from lower stakes adventure games full of puzzles, impressive pre-rendered visuals and a looser commitment to being a “game,” Your Myst (1993) and The 7th Guest (1993). Or software suites that were largely tools to mess around with what modern technology could do, like any “interactive digital museum.”
I would call this an “attempted schism” in what games could have been what could be classified as a game, that lasted from when CD-ROM drives for computers started getting popular in the early 90s until the end of the decade. At this point, there was definitely a cultural and market-wide shift, or perhaps correction, that coincided with the much mythologized Dot Com Bubble. I don’t have a fully satisfactory answer as to why this shift happened, but I have a couple of theories:
- While live action FMV made waves in publications and reports, while it was something that many developers had trifled with, it had limited penetration with the core gaming zeitgeist (young suburban Caucasian males) when it was new. The Sega CD, where FMV games made their “mainstream” debut, only sold 2.24 million units worldwide. This would be a failure in most circumstances, as it put a hard limit on how many people could play these games versus the 30+ million Mega Drives sold. CD-ROMs for PCs were also considerably expensive upon debut, and I would hazard that they did not become especially popular until the home computer boom that followed the release of Windows 95. While consoles like the CDi or the 3DO, also early purveyors of FMV titles, were similarly prohibitively expensive and, like, not a significant part of gaming history. I’m sorry, they were cool but insignificant. Just like Trad Caths.
- Live action FMV, by virtue of timing, was directly competing with the rising improvements made to 3D graphics during the era, and FMV was generally seen as more limited. While video footage of a person in a cutscene looked better than anything a PlayStation could render natively, that did not necessarily make it more desirable. Even on component cables and CRTs, the gulf between something filmed on a camera versus a bunch of polygons, versus even a CG cutscene, was pretty notable. Or to use a parlance that I don’t agree with: FMV videos were not immersive. They were actually less immersive than 3D games at the time.
- The gameplay of most live action FMV was inherently limited, and often more confusing. How to interact with the world, where to go, what to do, all was made more opaque by the illusion of reality, while being inherently more limited. With live action FMV, you are stuck with whatever you’ve got, whatever the film team filmed in the four weeks they had to shoot one and a half movies. With a 3D model, you can animate them however you want. I don’t want to say that the focus on opaque puzzles and mystery is what hurt these titles by giving them an unwanted level of friction via repetition and low tolerance of error bullshit. …But I think that criticism has some merit.
- Despite the relatively low-ball figures quoted for many of these projects, live action FMV was pretty expensive. Actors with name brand are not cheap. Set design is not cheap. Film is not cheap. And in order to stage everything necessary for a production like, say, Ripper (1996), you needed a lot of equipment, smart people, time, and money to get a product that would have been far in a way cheaper way.
- If you basically need to make a movie to make an FMV game, you have to, at some point, ask if you’re better off just making a movie. Maybe not something for theaters, but a made-for-TV movie that you go on to sell for $10 to $20 at Suncoast? That was very do-able back before big tech bought the film industry.
However, going through these options for my own understanding, I think the biggest one is that… Live action FMVs became unnecessary in games. There was a hard limit on what could be shown or conveyed through in-game assets in the early 90s. Even visually robust adventure games could only animate so much and incorporate so many cinematics, most of which would be static. But once 3D became the norm, the tech rapidly became sophisticated enough to achieve the cinematic flair of live action video without the same drawbacks.
It is important to emphasize the sheer evolution of techniques and approaches made to games from 1995 to 2000 and how much effort was put into things like camera work, both in-game and pre-rendered cinematics, and most especially voice acting. Next to a game like, say, Metal Gear Solid (1998) what inherent benefits does live action FMV have? You have the cinematic composition, (voice) acting, and has the ability to offer a cohesive experience. Whether you are watching a cutscene or sneaking through the snow, the game looks that same and that’s a feature. Though, uh, the Meltman faces are a bit of a drawback.
(If any of my readers remember Meltman: the man with the power to melt, please comment below.)
It’s tempting to say that live action FMV games paved the way for games to become more cinematic, and while there is definitely some truth in that, I think the cinematic angle in games was… pretty much inevitable. Everybody watches movies, videos, or TV, and they understand the language of cinema. It paints how they mentally view things, how they process things, and the desire to make video games more movie-like were already in place before the 1990s began. I’m just going to gesture at LaserDisc games and how games like Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark for Atari 2600 were made to recreate key scenes from their respective movies, i.e., replicate cinema.
However, I cannot argue that live action FMVs were a pointless venture or the like. They may have been a “dead-end innovation” that was largely discarded aside from a few stray novelties like certain Need for Speed and Command & Conquer titles, where they made a bunch of sense. (There are no humans in Need for Speed.) Or highlight the contemporary Square Enix deaf-sim kusoge, The Quiet Man (2018). But it is an innovation that I think warrants further exploration, if only because I think the economics have circled back to it being cheaper and more effective in many senses.
Games have achieved a graphical fidelity where the divide between gameplay and live action footage can be relatively seamless. Sure, one could tell when a cutscene is playing, but with photogrammetry getting easier, good cameras getting cheaper, and gaming hardware getting better (barring the past two or so years), there is no longer a world of difference. Actually, what is stopping indie developers from just filming stuff and making an interactive movie? It has been done before and with filmmaking being more accessible than just about ever before— you can just make a movie on an iPhone— there could be a wave of new FMV titles.
…And there is!
Yeah, this is a niche that I have barely seen anyone discuss, but over the past two years, there has been a notable groundswell in East Asian romance FMV titles. Much of which can be attributable to the highly popular Chinese adventure game Love is All Around (2023). It has become a burgeoning pocket industry full of titles that have varying shades of complexity in them. Some are just horndog crap, but others are genuinely intriguing titles committed to telling a compelling story with branching paths.
Check out IdolismJ’s videos on Love is All Around and FMV titles that have followed in its wake if you want a thorough examination. IdolismJ is another video creator who does not get nearly the amount of attention he warrants. His perspective, analysis, humor, and flashes of editing flair make him someone who deserves some flowers, as he’s sitting at less than 2,300 subscribers as of writing. Or check out Full Motion Emotion, which is pretty much THE English language resource on this growing FMV romance game genre.
I think this is a cool innovation and expansion of what games could be, and I hope they flourish, branch out to other genres, and continue to deliver experiences that might otherwise not be possible to make. Because FMV games really are not that hard to make with modern tech, and I am all for people pursuing smaller, weirder, and more experimental game ideas. It’s how the industry evolves. And you don’t even need to basically film a TV series to meet these requirements. Nothing is stopping creatives from pursuing something like, I dunno, Gothos (1997), which was filmed with heavy use of green screened actors and pre-rendered or photo backgrounds. That was just beautifully economical.
Akumako: “I’m surprised you’re actually respecting this stuff…”
Huh? Why? Because I’m normally so against what I call “dead end innovations” like motion controls, dual screen displays and rear touchpads? The key difference here is that these games are still playable as games, and while most of them look like cloaca afterbirth due to the compression needed to get them on a CD, I can still respect them for what they were trying to do, and many of them can still be enjoyed to this day. Don’t get me wrong, I HATE how so many pre-rendered visuals are just STUCK being low-res splatters, with the original production files gone or lost. But you can at least play them as a video game and display them properly on any contemporary display. They aren’t just doomed to be suboptimal like anything developed with the Wiimote or dual screens in mind.
…God, we are like a decade away from a new breed of 20-year-olds who look at the DS and Wii and think they are weird nonsense, wondering how and why people ever liked playing those systems. I look forward to these people entering the culture, but they might not even understand what a single player game is because society deprived them…
Also, also, part of the reason why FMV might still be a rarity is because video codecs can be a NIGHTMARE to deal with on a release with multiple SKUs.
Katsuhiro Harada Accepts Fat Check From Saudi Arabia
(The Face of Tekken is Now Working for Saudi Arabia’s SNK)
No! Harada, no! Stop! Please! Harada, the money is not worth it! They’re using you for propaganda! No! No! Noooooo!!!
Last year, Tekken series producer Katsuhiro Harada left Bandai Namco behind to pursue new ventures as he entered the final stages of his career. This is not an uncommon move, and everybody wished him luck in whatever new venture he stumbled into. However, nobody was really expecting, much less anticipating, that he would buddy up with SNK to form VS Studio SNK. (Not Versus Studio, but V-S Studio.) This would normally not be anything too unusual. The Japanese fighting game dev scene is particularly known for breaking off and spreading developers across different studios, including formal rivals. And SNK was historically a rival for the Tekken series, which was positioned alongside titles like King of Fighters and Samurai Shodown. However, all fighting game devs have been on friendlier terms after arcades declined in relevance and crossover characters became the norm, so Harada going to work for SNK should not be a big deal.
…Except SNK is not an independent or publicly traded company. They are the owned by the Electronic Gaming Development Company, part of the Misk Foundation, also known as the Mohammed bin Salman Foundation, with Mohammed bin Salman, or MbS, being the Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia. Ergo, SNK is owned by Saudi Arabia, and support of SNK, no matter the flavor, is directly supporting Saudi Arabia.
Where to begin with Saudi Arabia? Their government is an oppressive regime, full of human rights violations, that is desperately trying to moneyhat their way into the lucrative sports entertainment industry in order to siphon money from other nations. They are trying to buy EA, own Newcastle United F.C., own the EVO fighting game convention, and own Scopely, publisher of Monopoly Go and Pokémon Go. They are trying to buy up as many cultural industries as possible to engrain themselves in the lives of people in other countries and siphon money from them.
Quite simply, I do not support them, do not think you should, and while you can mime arguments about how “isn’t supporting any corporation in a bad country a problematic choice?” But that is not what I am talking about. I am talking about a company FULLY owned by the state, subject to its whims, and without any significant barrier in-between. For as much as I hate certain major current governments in the world and will openly call them fascist shitbags that should be wiped away from the Earth to benefit The Greater Good, Saudi Arabia is worse.
Akumako: “I might fully expect ICE to shoot up a Kindergarten before the midterms, but I’d rather be here than Saudi Arabia.“
Egg-xactly!
As such, the fact that Harada is ruining his good name by working for Saudi Arabia, taking their money to create products and IP that they will profit off of long after he is dead, is upsetting. I understand that it is hard to secure funding in a world veering toward a recession, but this is simply the worst option. I hate many companies, but countries are still technically stronger than tech companies.
So… thanks, Harada. Now nobody will ever ask you for anything ever again.
Sega Kills Their Super Game Initiative
(A Hundred Billion Yen Down The Drain!)
One of the more confusing pivots that Sega has made over the past decade has been their attempts at launching some flavor of live service super game. Why? Because their investors think they are big enough that they should have one. Or maybe management did.
Signs that Sega just was not cut out for this were obvious after they announced their own live service shooter, Hyenas, in 2022. Developed by Creative Assembly, the title was an irreverent sci-fi shooter that was launching into a climate that publishers have known for decades to be a small bowl that can only accommodate a few fish. Multiplayer shooters are a great way to lose money, and someone at Sega realized this in September 2023, when they announced the game was canceled, as it wasn’t going to make money.
While cancellations usually make me upset, as years of effort is thrown to the wastes, it’s harder for me to build fire in my belly in cases like this. Multiplayer shooters are inherently social games that, without players, simply do not function. For as much artistry, effort, and skill that goes into these games, their dependency on others, makes them a hugely risky product as what people are buying into is the playerbase. If no one else is playing a single player game, and the player is not hopelessly co-dependent, then the game can still be fully enjoyed. But a multiplayer game often cannot even start with just one player.
This has been an obvious problem well before the like of CliffyB’s LawBreakers (2017). You cannot build a multiplayer shooter and hope they will come. And anybody who does not understand that by now should have their money taken away from them and invested into a goat farm. The same principle applies to any online only experience, and I wish the floor of corpses would clue people in that this is a bad idea.
When Hyenas was canceled, I assumed that this meant Sega was shutting down their 2021-announced “Super Game” initiative, where they invested $882 million toward multiple big budget projects. Apparently that was not the case, they were still mentioning it across financial reports, and mentioned it in their Q4 2026 presentation, claiming that they “Decided to cancel Super Game.”
…Well, okay then.
This means that Sega invested up to $882 million into this project, and just scrapped it. Hundreds of millions of dollars, across however many titles, and we are left with nothing to show for it. The developers who spent years working on these projects have nothing they can point to and say “I made that.” The investors are left with nothing but holes in their proverbial pockets. And Sega’s management, despite this lethal-scale misstep, will keep their jobs. Money was spent, money was wasted, and that’s the end of that.
The profound levels of WASTE present in the video games industry will never cease to amaze me.
Progress Report 2026-05-17
Well, this is a nice little bonus. After announcing that the Switch 2 would get a price hike to $500 effective September 1st, a generous lead time, Nintendo also announced that, starting this June, they will roll out a $500 console bundle where you can get a Switch 2 alongside one of the three biggest games on the platform: Mario Kart World, Donkey Kong Banana, or Pokémon Pokopia. This is effectively a better version of the launch bundle that came with Mario Kart World for $500, just with the power of choices. And if you are getting a Switch 2, there is a near 100% chance you would want one of these three games. Sure, they are available digitally, but most people are just going to accept the compromise, go digital, and accept the fact that ownership is just a societal fallacy. Everything is temporary, everything can be taken from you through legal means, and while it is tempting to bemoan the death of physical, physical died to me when games started requiring day one patches to finish them. So, in 2014.
Then again, I am mostly PC, i.e., Steam, and Nintendo for Nintendo stuff, so my perspective is skewed on this.
2026-05-10: Wrote 3,300 words to wrap up VD2.0 Ch 7-08. …Then I decided to move ALL of the additional segment over to 7-09, as it would work better after the segment originally planned for there. Cot damn, there is so much time traveling involved in writing this shit, bro… Then I wrote 5,400 words for the new VD2.0 Ch 7-08. Meaning I wrapped two chapters in a day by writing 8,700 words. I have literally three more segments to write, and three days off this week. Time for a break!
2026-05-11: Long work day before three slim days. My boss intended on me breaking up my work over multiple days but, lol. lmao even. It was late, and I did not want to move into writing, so I just played a bit of the Twilight Princess decomp, watched some of that excellent Digital Pictures documentary from PandaMonium, and wrote 800 words for VD2.0 Ch 7-12 before deciding I needed to take a more creative approach that I wasn’t able to get into at 1 AM.
2026-05-12: 3,500 words for the FMV, Sega, and Harada segments. 4,400 words sputtered out for VD2.0 Ch 7-12. Ran out of drive afterwards. I was spent on writing stamina afterwards and did not want to start another chapter, so I just didn’t. I played Air Twister instead. That game is fucking WEIRD!
2026-05-13: Wrote 7,000 words to finish the second segment of VD2.0 Ch 7-14 in one GO! Hell yeah! Just the final chapter left! Wrote 600 words for that before deciding to just save it for then, as I was spent.
2026-05-14: Polished off the preamble with about 500 words. Wrote 5,500 words to FINISH the initial draft of Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 Act 3: Worldly Wonders. I FUCKING DID IT! Then I edited this Rundown and made a header image. I figured that was enough and just fucked around playing video games for the evening.
2026-05-15: BREAK DAY~! Did work for a couple hours. Played Maxim mode in Harmony of Dissonance, which I still think is DOPE. It took me three hours. Wrote 2,500 words of scribbles and loose segments for the Harmony of Dissonance review. Got a BAD ITCH to play 2009’s [PROTOTYPE] because it is sort of a TF game, and I wanted a basic screw around action game to play as a reward for editing my novel. I spent most of my time with it so far getting the damn orbs. 197/200. I know where two are. I have no idea where the other missing one is. FML.
2026-05-16: Wrapped the Harmony of Dissonance review with another 2,000 words. (Also rewrote a bunch of sentences to glue them together.) Will edit it later. Then I started on the Air Twister review, getting 1,200 words in while getting distracted by the fact that I cannot buy Valensia’s music. C’mon, man!
Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 – Act III: Worldly Wonders
Progress Report
Current Word Count: 248,125
Estimated Word Count: 250,000
Words Edited: 0
Total Segments: 29
Segments Outlined: 29
Segments Drafted:
Segments Edited: 0
Header Images Made: 0
Days Until Deadline: 45