Rundown (5/31/2026) Natalie Does Not Like Life Sims!

This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: Natalie Does Not Like Life Sims!
• My re:Dreamer Review Has Been Delayed (Because I’m Waiting for the Next Update)
• Unreal Engine 6 Announced (Because I Guess We Needed This)
• Dragon Quest XII Re-Announced (Also, Dragon Quest Monsters 4!)
• The Witcher 3 is Getting A New Expansion (Somehow, This 2015 Game Returned)
• Steam Deck Gets The Mother of All Price Hikes (More Like Steam DEAD)

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Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Natalie Does Not Like Life Sims!

So, about a week ago I got pulled into a conversation with a friend about a life sim idea they had. It’s one that was geared around schedule management, changing how a character looked, how they lived, and putting them on a new path over the course of a formative yet brief period. A slow/medium burn-transformation story where one could effectively mold existing characters into whatever they wanted through the use of player choices and a supernatural reality alteration system. It’s an idea that, on its face, has a lot of merit and potential for unique outcomes, basically being a choose-your-own transformation game driven by variable and resource management. However, I also had to give them a good amount of pushback, as this sounded like a game I would have just the worst time with.

While I once aspired to having a cosmopolitan view of gaming, I have come to gradually realize that there are types of games that I simply do not like on their face value. Why? Because they are trying to do things that I just do not come to video games for. If my almost 15 years worth of video game reviews are not enough of an indication, I tend to prefer games that are defined by their campaigns. I tend to be very goal oriented when playing games, striving for an end state, and wanting to clear them before moving on. Finish the campaign, complete the story, collect all the doodads, and then move onto the next game. Like one does with any other medium of entertainment, personal project, or miscellaneous life-thing.

This filters out a LOT of genres that I simply do not touch, such as fighting games, racing games, score attack titles, most forms of sims, and anything that involves competing against others. This is a rather narrow view of what gaming is, and while I admit that, this perspective is informed by what I come here for. I am not here to prove my mastery. While I enjoy playing around with systems, there is a not particularly high point where I will throw up my hands and tell the game to fuck off for being so opaque or unreasonable. Yes, even if that is the point of the experience.

I’ve tried to branch out, particularly into the genre of social/life sim titles, but if my ventures last year are any indicator… I simply don’t like these. For years, I have held Tokimeki Memorial high as being an exceptionally important game and a true reactive player-driven adventure where the mechanics are in large part the story. However, actually playing it, I found it to be a bloody infuriating experience of regulating the emotions of female characters who have high expectations, need routine attention, and where time is a precious commodity. I consider the game to be one where the romantic targets are obstacles first and people fourth, and for the math to be so wack, so uncaring, that I could see this game turning someone into an incel. Because Tokimeki Memorial is how incels view the world.

Later, I tried out the raising sim of Needy Streamer Overdose. The title is about regulating the career and mental state of a deeply disturbed young woman trying to make a living on a corporatized and dying internet while sacrificing a part of her soul with each stream. It’s a widely beloved title, big enough to have gotten an anime series, and a pivotal indie game of the early 2020s, and I bloody hated it.

Its UX is both inelegant and a vapid glazing of the aesthetic of retro computers, so divorced from reality that it is pure fiction in my mind, and also makes the game a fussy bitch to interface with. The soundtrack is so hostile I had to turn it off as it was hurting my ears, and I listen to crap like this. While the math around the stat regulation of the main character was tuned in a way where… I can only say unkind things about its main character. Regulating the emotions of people like this is labor, and not enjoyable labor because you can’t even clap them back when they start trauma bombing for engagement.

And this isn’t even a wholly new thing for me, as I have bounced off pretty much every other attempt at getting into the genre, such as when I played Princess Maker 2 for DOS back in 2013. I completed a playthrough, but found it to be among the most boring campaigns I’ve ever gone through, as it is just setting a schedule, managing finances, and trying to manipulate a complex system to get one of a dozen desired endings. You do have a lot of say over the decisions. You are effectively building a virtual adolescence for a young girl. But so much of the story just exists in your head, is extrapolated from the trend lines of dozens of stats, that I had zero interest after getting a second ending and seeing how limited the game actually was. Also, I felt my copy was curse after I triggered the underage nudity. …I DID NOT THINK IT WOULD WORK!

Still, I am inclined to try out these titles, even if I just wind up cursing up a storm about how fucking bullshit their trash friction before function mathematics are. Yeah, if you thought I was bitter in my pieces on Tokimeki and Overdose before, that was the censored version.

Though, I know it’s a true fact that if I throw myself into something I don’t like enough times, I will eventually like it. If you eat poo-poo enough times, you will develop an acquired taste for it! So, inspired by this conversation with this friend, I decided to FINALLY check out the big TSF life sim game that people have recommended to me in the past, X-Change Life.

So, XCL is a large scale collaborative transformation game project that is home its own disgustingly complicated rabbit hole of history. History that I am in no way well versed enough to speak upon with any degree of authority. Even the game itself is so sprawling and massive that my five hours with it ultimately amount to a rough first impression, and I am probably overlooking things as I consulted basically no external resources. The gist is that you play a custom second person protagonist who ventures to the futuristic economic zone that is Summer City. It’s a magical place where sex change drugs, known as X-Change, and their derivatives, are commonplace, an AI is the quasi-divine mayor, and casual sex is a way of life. Staying with their stepdad and stepsister, the city is the protagonist’s play space, where they must work, fuck, transform, and indulge in miscellaneous nonsense.

It’s also chop-full of AI generated assets, though in one of the more “excusable” ways. It’s a free game, made by a small team, with no budget beyond crowdfunding, that needs a high level of variability with the assets it uses. I would say just taking images from random people’s social media page or random porn clips would be more respectable, which I’m guessing they also did. But I’m not going insist that they should have just paid someone to do this or asked for volunteers. The game would have dramatically fewer visual assets than it does. I don’t like it, everything has the coating of crap to it, and it is bizarre when they pair this slop with actual commissioned artwork. But also, nobody got laid off or denied work because of this AI usage, and AI companies sure as hell didn’t make money generating these porn clips.

Through my five hours this past weekend, I reached day nine of my playthrough and stopped because I was having a categorically bad time, specifically because it wants to be a “real” video game. If it was a visual novel or a text adventure, then I would have likely gotten along with it better, but the creators had a vision and I… I just found it to be one of the most confusing, demanding, and friction-rich things I’ve put myself through for a good while.

Like many social sims, the game does not really teach you anything, you just need to fuck around and find out what it wants. What X-Change Life wants, per my understanding, is for you to waste a lot of time trying to make progress, just as a rule, while trying to amass stats. You want character XP in order to boost too many stats. You need money for stuff. You need stuff for various flavors of stat buffs and opportunities. But you cannot get any of these without a combination of gambling and playing really fussy Computer Science 101 minigames— that are all far in a way worse than Snake.

(I’m not even insulting these minigames when I compare them to a CS 101 minigame, I’m being descriptive. I personally made some of these minigames back in my AP Computer Science class in high school.)

The protagonist works in sales, calling up various leads to pitch them on a catalog of transformation pills that suit their purposes. To work this job, you need to memorize, or screencap, fact sheets in order to initiate sales with various leads. The leads are randomly generated every time they are picked up, so every instance is a new experience, and you might not have any products you want. Still, you gotta press through, try to build your changes at making a sale, and bullshitting leads (the game’s term, not mine) by playing a 3×3 lights out minigame where you need to solve the puzzles in 5 turns. And, uh, I’m not very good at these. You need to make more mess to eliminate a smaller mess, and I just cannot intuitively wrap my head around that concept.

All of this eventually leads to the ultimate decision maker— rolling a d100 in order to see if you made the sale or not. If you did everything right, you can still end up with a low roll, losing out on the commission, having wasted your time. Great! You lose, you get literally nothing other than a loser streak. So, what do you do? You reload and go full gambler— just have the game set your odds, do the sales for you, and roll the die. If you like the results, get that money. If you don’t, then F5. Like, damn, I would rather be checking passports. I would rather be playing a filing minigame. I would rather do ANYTHING ELSE, because this is not based on skill, it is just memorizing random nonsense and then spinning a wheel. You could have just made a falling block game or SNAKE! Or some other nonsense! But no!

Sex is represented with two minigames. A fishing minigame where you need to move the cursor right and left in tune to a vague beat. It’s stressful and is really hard to pay attention to the bar when it’s overlaid on some “free sample porn gif” of two people— or AI facsimiles of people— going at it. It feels temperamental, and I simply did not like engaging with it. While the second, and better, minigame involves pressing the arrow keys in the order the game tells you, trying to maintain a combo. That’s perfectly fine. Easy, inoffensive, and if there ever was anything in the background while doing these, I successfully tuned them out.

However, even these cannot seem to escape from the dice rolls and other micro minigames, like needing to tell guys to not cum inside the protagonist before the sea of options fade away. Which you can easily miss if you are, I don’t know, reading in this text-based game.

I would FAR in a way prefer it if it were just a bunch of choices and stat checks, no choices, no dice rolls, because I always feel like I am doing something WRONG when I cannot get the results I’m SUPPOSED to get by playing PROPERLY. I am sick of wasting my fucking time trying to gamble for the right outcome, all while being subjected to the same crap. The same boring sales job that has no depth, no complexity, and the barrage of erotic movies that I really would rather not see. While the minigames where you need to stare at sexual imagery in order to see a word, and then pick which one it was out of a list of very similar words, can promptly crawl into a hole and never come back. It was a bad idea and I always failed it because I could not read the fucking words. It’s like reading a damn captcha.

…Now is a good time to mention that I wound up discovering that this game had a cheats menu where you had to move a UI element in order to access a menu that disables achievements (as if those matter.) This certainly helps ease some of the friction, but it still does not make the process of engaging with limited save opportunities, dice rolls, and frustrating minigames “fun.” Remove these crummy minigames, and then I might be willing to call it fun.

Now, you might be reading this and thinking that I just hate this game. That is… half correct. I do hate the gameplay. The gameplay here gets a 2/10 from me. But, as an adventure game, I really want to love it. XCL is effectively a huge scale TSF game where the player can get roped into all sorts of erotic situations, transform themselves however they see fit, and become a wide array of women. Players can shift their character over time, making them better, or worse, depending on how you like your TSF protagonist, or how you would want to be treated in this situation (ya kinky freak). And during my time with the game, getting to day nine, I encountered quite a few fun scenarios.

After a pretty humdrum working start, the protagonist’s stepsister took him out to the club, where he danced his ass off to improve his relationship to her before going into the backrooms. After stumbling on sci-fi nonsense he probably shouldn’t have, he discovered the private room of a nightclub performer, starting another relationship. Next day came the mall, where I quickly made a beeline for the X-Change pill depot, but noped out at how expensive the temporary pills were. (I don’t know how to make the transformation permanent, as I consulted zero external resources.) Instead, I decided to use the jank-ass transformation box in the corner, selecting a random transformation. This turned my Black male protagonist into a redheaded girl with no tits. Which, uh, as a redhead with no tits, I felt was the game telling on me.

Still, this is exactly the type of TF funsies that I wanted to see, and I proceeded to go through the extensively detailed mall. I grabbed a new outfit, some VHS tapes to watch from Blockbuster— complete with rampant copyright infringement (complimentary)— and even a janky PC, spending all but $68. Then I had the protagonist spend the night with his sister, watching The Princess Bride, letting the two of them bond.

Now with a TFed protagonist, I had them head off to the beach, since I was broke and the beach is free, where the protagonist met a bimbo who lost her beach towel and became their volleyball buddy. Volleyball has its own minigame, and while not good— it’s long, slow, and pretty cryptic— it is a respectable effort. This is an ambitious CS 201 midterm project, and it’s a largely optional affair. I figured this would be it, but after netting some stat buffs, I ventured over to the jungle lands near the beach and met up with a girl the protagonist met on his way to Summer City, Callie.

Callie opened up the beginning of, like, seven sex scenes, a faction of new characters, and a gonzo plot beat that completed recontextualized everything I have seen so far. I will not spoil it, because it’s crazy with a box of fries, but it involved tardigrade manipulating human DNA, homunculi, and the suppression and activation of latent biological memories. I was immediately overwhelmed, hooked, and curious as all hell about how much STUFF was hidden in this game and where its gonzo world would take me.

…Then I get to day 8, the real version, and I could not figure out how to masturbate, which is a prerequisite to maintain my protagonist’s current transformation. Conceptually, this is dumb. With a man’s dick, the protagonist can masturbate every night, but I guess they need to get laid at the local bar in order to cum while as a woman. Was I supposed to buy a dildo or something? Sorry I didn’t check every shop. I thought my second person protagonist would be able to cum half as well as me. What a dorkus.

I then spent about an hour going back and forward on what to do here, trying to get laid, properly, at the bar, before giving up. I was sick of the minigames, sick of the limited save opportunities, and while I want to see the story, the mechanics are so fussy and annoying that it simply wasn’t worth the trouble of playing the game.

In fact, that is a good way to summarize my thoughts on a lot of life sims, in general. I want to go to this genre for the characters and story, but those features are so often masked by friction that… I would rather just read the game’s script and imagine a better game in my mind.

Some people don’t like it when story gets in the way of their gameplay. I don’t like it when fussy, finicky, and obtuse gameplay gets in the way of my story. And when fussy, finicky, and obtuse gameplay is the story… then the story sucks too.

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My re:Dreamer Review Has Been Delayed
(Because I’m Waiting for the Next Update)

I’m going to make this really quick, as this is a follow-up to my last state of the site update a few weeks ago. I previously said that I would release a review of the latest version of re:Dreamer on June 3rd this year, but I would only be able to meet that deadline if the game’s creator, CaptainCaption, released an update before May 27th, seven days before my review would go live. That did not happen, and accordingly my latest review of re:Dreamer has been delayed to “a week or two after the next update drops.”

In the meantime, I am wrapping up things with my TSF novel, Verde’s Doohickey 2.0: Sensational Summer Romp – Act 3: Worldly Wonders and I will be busy doing extensive write-ups for the summer gaming showcases. After this, I will go through my schedule, but re:Dreamer will be slotted to next in queue when the next update drops.

That’s all. Here’s hoping Cap can deliver things sooner than later.

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Unreal Engine 6 Announced
(Because I Guess We Needed This)

Well, this certainly came way, way sooner than I expected it to.

This past weekend, Epic-Tencent announced the next numbered version of their premiere product, Unreal Engine, with Unreal Engine 6. This is not unexpected, but the timing is strange, and the details provided about Unreal 6 are quite limited, so… time for a history lesson, my favorite!

Unreal has been around for about 30 years and its contributions to gaming are so immense that I am forced to be cringe and describe them as “unreal.” The first rendition was an early powerhouse engine back in the late 90s that grew increasingly adept throughout the early 2000s, being used in dozens of games. Shooters, RPGs, action adventure games, and even a surprising number of licensed kids titles. However, the engine did not really cement itself as a true industry staple until they released Unreal Engine 3 in 2006, where it was probably the most used engine of the Wii PS360 era.

Over 200 titles ran on the engine in some way or form, and it played no small part in defining the broader look of console/PC games of that generation. This was both for good and for ill, as while Unreal 3 was a powerful engine, it was chiefly an engine made for shooters, specifically Epic’s own Gears of War. Despite being made primarily for HD consoles, the engine was notorious for its blasé environmental colors, texture issues, specific flavors of lighting, and nonexistent Japanese documentation, which did not deter Japanese developers from using it. Did you know Lost Odyssey (2007), Shadows of the Damned (2011), and Drakengard 3 (2014) all used Unreal 3? I did. But now you do too!

This was, of course, followed by Unreal 4 in 2014, which aimed to expand what Unreal 3 could do and facilitate a far wider spectrum of games, genres, and types. Epic made some excellent progress in tuning Unreal 3 over the past 8 years, and the results of Unreal 4 kind of speak for themselves. It was used in over 500 video games over the span of a bit over a decade, reaching numbers only challenged by the likes of the Unity engine (which I still don’t trust after the whole runtime fiasco). While the engine still had its own fussy issues, like any highly powerful software suite, it ultimately proved itself to be an engine capable of basically whatever you wanted it to be. Narrative adventure games, shooters, open world games— something Unreal 3 always struggled with— Japanese RPGs aplenty, hell, Pikmin 4 (2023) used Unreal Engine 4!

This is when Unreal became a truly inseparable component of the games industry overall, where Unreal experience became expected among its workers. And with a royalty program that was pretty good for developers and Epic alike, there wasn’t really much reason to avoid the engine. You could try to build all of these tools in house, but that could cost millions and be nowhere as efficient.

Come 2020, when new consoles were at the cusp of their reveal, Epic announced Unreal Engine 5, which was meant to take advantage of the power of these new engines with superior texture meshes, lighting tech, and general visual effects. Epic sold this engine as a direct upgrade, indicating that developers could port their Unreal 4 files over to Unreal 5, but, uh, it was not that simple.

After its initial release in 2022, I heard of nothing but problems with this Unreal 5. Developers had issues upgrading projects, so they shipped using Unreal 4. Look up any forum, and you will find PC players complaining about Unreal Engine 5 games having bad or suboptimal performance on PC. And the fact that so many developers went with stock of standard visual assets when developing their first Unreal 5 game turned the engine’s namesake to be an insult in some circles. Especially when referring to “Unreal Engine 5 remakes.” Many of which are not even official remakes, just people throwing older games into Unreal 5 to make Nintendo Hire This Man fodder.

This is not really the fault of the engine though, as people can, and are, making plenty of games that don’t look like they are using Unreal, such as Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, Never Mess to Ever Less, or To a T. However, it still feels like developers are coming to grips with the engine and that Epic is fixing up an engine that shipped with problems four years ago. Surely, with another four years, the engine will be in a far better place and games will have access to better tools and optimization.

…Which is why it’s so surprising that Epic-Tencent is jumping over to Unreal Engine 6, planning on debuting it with an update to Rocket League, similar to how they debuted Unreal 5 with Fortnite. What new features are being added that will warrant this being a new version of the engine? No clue! Why not just add these features to Unreal 5 and wait until 2030 or whenever to roll out Unreal 6? Same answer. No clue! I would say it’s because of investors, but Epic is not publicly traded. They are a privately traded corporation with six owners.

So maybe this is just a way to save face after Unreal 5 got a bad rep. I dunno!

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Dragon Quest XII Re-Announced
(Also, Dragon Quest Monsters 4!)

I feel like a real crumbum for not staying savvy with the Dragon Quest series.

I fell in love with the series playing Dragon Quest IX when I was 15, putting in over 300 hours into that title. I loved it so much that I went back to earlier titles with Dragon Quest I, II, IV, V, VII, and VIII— but never completed II or V. Dragon Quest X was Asia only, even the offline version. And while I should have played Dragon Quest XI two times over, I kept being intimidated by its length. I was annoyed at how the development of Dragon Quest XI S was a partial side-grade because the developers did a bad job managing the project. (I literally just bought it now, after 5.5 years of mild spite.) And I similarly have not touched any of the spin-offs or remakes that have been sputtering out over the past few years.

It’s just so hard to justify playing a big girthy game like that when I have stuff to write, visual novels to read, and TSF malarkey to sift through. Anyway~! It’s Dragon Quest’s big 40th anniversary this year and Square Enix used this as an opportunity to update folks on a few projects. They did not announce any new remakes, possibly because of how much Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake changed over the course of its development. However, they did talk about the elephant in the room.

Dragon Quest XII: The Flames of Fate was first hinted at a year after Dragon Quest XI came out before being formally announced on May 27, 2021— exactly five years ago from the date of this showcase. It was poised to be a different take on the series, with many theorizing that this game will feature a different art style and real-time combat. Two things that did not sit well with the fans of DQ enjoyers as a whole, and for good reason. Dragon Quest has persisted because of its consistency, because its vibes only refined with time, and it does not do the Final Fantasy thing of reinventing itself with every title. This works swell with some brands, and Dragon Quest is one of them.

We don’t know what exactly happened with The Flames of Fate, but executive producer Yosuke Saito made it clear that there were development issues, leading the project to be restarted. Really sucks how developmental restarts these days add five years to a game’s development, but… I’ll talk about that in more detail at a later date.

Now titled Dragon Quest XII: Beyond Dreams, the game looks… like a sequel to Dragon Quest XI, which is a good thing! The game world is positively lavish with detail, reaching heights of fidelity that manage to make the game look like a material upgrade over its PS4 predecessor, which was already a helluva looker. I’d actually argue that it’s a bit unnecessary to make it look this good, as this is a game with an inherently cartoony art style, and we don’t need to see 2,000 blades of grass at a time. But it still looks cohesive, and that’s the important thing.

The other takeaway from their quite brief reveal trailer are the character designs, with the hero boy being on the lankier side of thing, with only partial armor and the sides of his head cleanly buzzed, leaving only a stubble. This is a hairstyle that grew in prominence in the 2010s, but I never quite understood the appeal of it. It’s not short hair, it’s just choosing to have your hair concentrated in one space while choosing to make it uneven. Why would you want to be uneven? Is this some sensory thing for boys who hate the feeling of hair touching their ears? I know that was something that bugged me a lot as a little kid, before I grew out my hair to cover my ears…

However, I can understand this choice in hairstyle, as the protagonist either transforms into— or just is— a lizard man with large horns poking out from the back of his head. It would be weird for him to have a full set of hair covering the area around these horns, so he has this funky mohawk-looking thing. Clearly, they’re going for something different, and I can respect that. There’s also a cool punk/rogue-looking engineer lady with her own Dragon Ball GT looking robot companion, both of which are killer Toriyama designs, and strangely give me flashbacks to both Chrono Trigger and Blue Dragon. Which aren’t Dragon Quest, but sorta are.

Is there anything new or exciting to witness here? Eh, not really, but it’s a new Dragon Quest. I think that’s plenty reason to look forward to this game… eventually. Because despite being in development for so long, no release window or platforms were announced.

Not content with just announcing one game, Square Enix also announced a new Dragon Quest Monsters, Dragon Quest Monsters 4: The Withered World, which is a damn Dragon Quest V prequel staring Bianca and Nera. Who, for those now familiar with DQ5, were the original romanceable characters in the game, after the first time skip. Because every Dragon Quest Monsters game, except for the Joker subseries, needs to be a prequel to a numbered Dragon Quest game! Zero footage was shown, but the game is “coming soon” for PS5, Xbox Series, Switch, Switch 2, Windows, and PC via Steam. Presumably, it will be a direct mechanical successor to Dragon Quest Monsters 3: The Dark Prince (2023), and also headed by the fine folks at the indelible white label studio, Tose, because that’s how sequels worked back in the good times!

(Sidebar, as a last minute update, an ESRB listing for Dragon Quest Monsters 4 went live a few days after the game’s announcement, indicating the game is nearly completed and implying that it could release later this year. Wow! That would be two Dragon Quests in a year! What a time!)

That being said… Square Enix, PLEASE do the world a favor and release accessible versions of Dragon Quest IV, V, and VI for PS5, Xbox Series, Switch 2, Windows, and PC via Steam! The remakes for DS were great expansions on what the original did, but I would settle for anything! The people need to know how dope these games are without running them through MelonDS! …Though, I guess they could play the PS1 remake of DQ4 and PS2 remake of DQ5. Both of those were quite good too…

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The Witcher 3 is Getting A New Expansion
(Somehow, This 2015 Game Returned)

The Witcher is a series that I respect, but was pretty decidedly turned off from before it became a truly huge thing. Dig through my girthy archives and you’ll find a bad review I did of the second game back when I was still in high school. I liked Eastern European action RPGs, like Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga (2010) and Two Worlds II (2010), but I simply had a firmly bad time with that game. I was utterly disengaged in its story, finding it to be dark, dreary, and complex for the sake of itself, without much in the way of levity, just pure miserycore.

I found the narrative progression system to feel less like forging one’s own story and more like limiting, letting players unwittingly screw themselves out of the story. The combat was deeply uninteresting to me. And the game was firmly a guide game: a title with so many missable hidden doodads, buffs, and hidden things that you are playing the game wrong if you aren’t playing it with a walkthrough.

“It tries, it tries substantially hard to be a stepping stone in gaming, but for me, it is one of the least fun games I’ve played in a while. The world, characters, lore, mechanics, none of it clicks for me. It is a game where I was bored after fighting a dragon and meeting a man dressed like a chicken. It is certainly well presented, but that’s all it is. A well presented and ambitious title, that I found to be nothing more than a chore.”

Natalie Neumann, Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition Review (2013)

Now, it’s very possible I was just wrong back then, not engaging with the work in a sensible manner, and was going in with preconceived notions while not understanding the genre at a base level. I wanted something between Skyrim, Divinity II, and Two Worlds II. I was a deeply oblivious and clueless kid who was trying to figure out why I liked or didn’t like something. And… well, it clearly worked.

Anyway, because of this bad experience, I did not fall for the hype surrounding The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015), and never played the game. I did not want to go back into its world, be confronted with the same flavor of storytelling, and risk ruining a seminal masterwork of a game by playing it and not agreeing with the consensus. Or, if you’re spicy, the objective fact, because so much of what people consider to be objective is just consensus. Because Witcher 3 was BIG, a GOTY winner across the board and a hugely successful game, selling over 60 million copies, just some insane numbers. If you disrespect something that big, that influential to the culture and medium, you are just wrong. And I don’t like being wrong.

However, what we are seeing with Witcher 3 today is rather… strange. While the recently expanded CD Projekt is chipping away at The Witcher 4, the publisher announced an expansion to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015), dubbed Songs of the Past. Co-developed by Fool’s Theory, an independent CD Projekt offshoot founded by former staff members who are also working on The Witcher: Remake, this expansion is coming in 2027 and… this whole thing is strange.

It’s not unheard of for games to receive DLC that comes out well after the fact as a preamble for a sequel. Borderlands 2 (2012) had Commander Lilith and the Fight for Sanctuary in 2019, leading up to Borderlands 3 (2019). Two Worlds II did that, but the DLC was shipped broken, never patched, and the sequel never came. However, a decade gap between DLC sounds like it has to be a record of some sort. Sure, you had games like Quake and Doom that got new episodes added decades after their prime, and EverQuest is still pumping out new expansions, somehow. However, it is suspicious for a single-player story-driven game to get an update like this… and if the rumors are to be believed, the reason for this is more cynical.

Allegedly, the driving force for this expansion is upper management who, through some corporate arrangement, are to receive a significant bonus upon shipping this expansion. I don’t think that’s a great reason to do anything, but if the story is good, and the expansion adds to the experience, then sure, why not?

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Songs of the Past will be released for PS5, Xbox Series, and PC sometime in 2027. No Switch, PS4, or Xbox One release because… this is probably just easier for them.

Also, big ups on CD Projekt for just announcing this via a press release, no need for a trailer or anything. Nat loves to see it!

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Steam Deck Gets The Mother of All Price Hikes
(More Like Steam DEAD)

Well, this is unfortunate. Valve’s Steam Deck has been out of stock for weeks at this point, and as Valve restocked it, they also increased the price. Why? Because we are living through one of the worst hardware shortages of all time, if not THE worst, and it’s getting so bad that “when” is becoming “if” and it is starting to pessimistically look like “no.” The world benefitted immensely under affordable computing, and I only found a purpose or passion in life through affordable computing. Without a computer, there is no me, and all who wage economic warfare against the components needed to create a computer are, simply put, my enemies.

I despise what these tech giants, fascist politicians, liberal capitalist drones, and opportunistic oligarchs of tech companies have done to computing. Their systemized deaths, optimized for pain, crystallized in video, rendered eternally, would bring me a satisfaction far in a way beyond any personal satisfaction I could ever feel. I HATE them, because they are destroying the foundational things I love, and are threatening the world I exist within, both mentally and physically. They want people to have nothing, be unable to think without their AI, believe in whatever propaganda they shove down their throat, and kindly die when they are no longer a revenue center.

Oh, and they are also responsible for a 40+% price hike on the goldarn Steam Deck.

Yes, the introductory Steam Deck OLED (512 GB) went from a nice $550 to an obscene $790, marking a $240 and 43.6% increase. While the premium Steam Deck OLED (1 TB) went from the reasonable $650 to a whopping $950. Just make it a thousand bucks and be honest at that point, Chelsea. Which is a $300 and 46.2% increase.

I, of course, do not blame Valve for these price hikes. They ain’t shit next to other consumer electronic producers. This price hike merely reflects the deplorable reality that anybody who has tried buying a computer has experienced firsthand. It raises doubts about the viability of their upcoming Steam Machine, which could easily cost $1,200 at a minimum. And it raises the question about how people will even get to afford a decent computer if even a 1 TB NVMe drive and 32 GB of RAM will cost over $500 on their own, at . Shit used to be half of that.

Over the past year, computers have gone from a solid investment to being an overpriced necessity, and I high key wish I wasn’t such a cheap wad and bit the bullet to buy fresh hardware when I could. My current PC is fine, barring Windows 11’s fuckery, but I am NOT looking forward to when I need to upgrade and the mortgage payment it’ll cost me. So why am I waiting, when I have the money in the bank? Well, because I don’t want to replace something that’s working fine and go through the laborious process of setting up my 50 programs and 20 libraries on a new machine. For now, I just need to maintain my storage as, uh, I might need to switch in one of my lightly used NVMe drives sooner than later. I really should have replaced the stock one when I got this machine in 2021, but noooo!

Sidebar: I still LOVE watching that Charlie Kirk got shot video. Just seeing the blood drizzle out of his neck like juice from a punctured bottle. I hope all my enemies suffer a similar fate.

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Progress Report 2026-05-31

HOLE!

2026-05-24: Wrote 800 words for the Unreal 6 bit. Watched ALL of A Wild Last Boss Appeared! with Cassie, as she wanted to see how it ended. It’s more isekai OP fantasy stuff, but pretty good, 7/10. Also watched two episodes of Keijo! with her. Keijo is DOPE! Did not get around to starting work on VD 2.0 until 20:30. I wanted to do extra editing, but I had the misfortune of getting a song stuck in my head, thanks to this. I spent over an hour trying to remember where I heard that beeping noise that began a song, before I remembered it was the opening theme of Mob Psycho 100. I went through my anime song directory SO MANY TIMES before I remembered that, no, THIS is the one. That ate up an actual hour because I was so stupid and did not remember the lyric of “Your life is your own, OK?” properly. Orz… I blame the song for being like three songs jammed together! 11,600 words edited for VD 2.0 CH 7-10. It’s something!

2026-05-25: Edited the remaining 8,600 words for VD 2.0 CH 7-10 then added and edited another 1,500 words for a segment that I initially passed on writing, but felt I needed in retrospect. So this novel is DEFINITELY going to be 250,000 words long. Hell yeah! NEW RECORD! Then I edited 20,400 words for VD 2.0 CH 7-11. Wanted to play some video games after my shower, but my Xbox controller’s triggers are getting stuck so, uh, so much for that! I need to a damn repair tool to get it open, as if I use a screwdriver, I’ll just scratch it up something fierce. So I decided to just edit another 7,600 words of VD 2.0 CH 7-12 before I go BORED! Also, watched 5 more episodes of Keijo with Cassie.

2026-05-26: YOU GOT INCEST! More like in-BEST! Edited the remaining 9,600 words of VD 2.0 CH 7-12, edited 14,000 words of VD 2.0 CH 7-13, FINALLY finishing the hottest part of the novel for me. Wrote 800 words for next week’s preamble because I was bored at work.

2026-05-27: Wrote 2,500 words for Dragon Quest, Witcher, and Steam Deck. Decided to proof this fussy brat of a Rundown before moving back to my main goal. VD 2.0 CH 7-13 got completed with 9,900 words, then did 12,300 words for VD 2.0 CH 7-14. With less than 15,000 words left, I decided to wait until tomorrow to FINISH the editing process of this novel. Also, Scott the Woz put out a new 3-hour-long Wii U video. So I watched that while doing some formatting stuff. Specifically, I was adjusting the master copies of Act 1 and Ac 2 ahead of the great epub conversion and mirroring the format for the first 13 chapters of Act 3, as they are done barring eleventh hour changes. …And the headers. I swear, I’m not procrastinating on those, I’m just a fan of doing shit in order!

2026-05-28: Bitch, I’m done! VD 2.0 CH 7-14 was edited. VD 2.0 CH 7-15 was edited. The master file was assembled, images aside, and everything has been schedule to be posted, images aside, including an updated table of contents for all chapters. Blessed be da templates! After doing that and working, I was not in the mood to switch to working on other stuff, so I didn’t!

2026-05-29: I started doing some epub stuff, and taking care of things I’ve left on the sidelines for three years. I told Missy about this, she bitched at me for doing this now, and I decided to get started on the header images instead. I wrote up the summaries, made five new sprites, and made the first three header images. But then I realized that I NEEDED to standardize the way I treat shorts and leg accents and that certain characters need to be fattened up, leading me to create a new FAT body type. Arguably, I should also have short and tall body types to go along with this, adding pixels to make characters lankier, but nah, fuck that, Jack. Wrote 1,300 words for next week’s Rundown, the Rayman bit.

2026-05-30: Had chores in the morning, work in the afternoon, filing my taxes FINALLY, and then I managed to crank out another two headers. One of which involved arranging 20 characters and making new outfits for, like, 16 of them, and the other also involved making a mostly new environment along with three new characters who will ONLY appear in this one header. Orz… Just 11 more to go! Also wrote 2,000 word Sonic bit because I was BORED!

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

Current Word Count: 250,483

Estimated Word Count: 250,000

Words Edited: 250,483

Total Segments: 29

Segments Outlined: 29

Segments Drafted: 29

Segments Edited: 29

Header Images Made: 5/16

Days Until Deadline: 31

And with that, I have fully completed the editing process and the wordstuffs of the novel are DONE! I still need to take care of the images, but I have some sweet, sweet time for that, so I’m gonna take my time working on that while working on something else. I think it’s high time I release updated epubs of my work, converted from Markdown to epub, which shouldn’t be too hard.