This Week’s Topics:
- Rundown Preamble Ramble: Physical Gaming is DEAD!
- Crap, Sony and Microsoft Are Gonna Kill Discs, Aren’t They? (Discs Are DEAD!)
- The Plan to Eradicate The Game Console (Walled Gardens Must Die For the Future to Survive)
- Sentimental Graffiti Re Announced (Another Excuse to Babble About Japanese ADVs and SIMs)
- Studying is Hard, Studying is Serious (Study Too Much: You’re Gonna be Delirious!)
Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Physical Gaming is DEAD!
I originally planned on dedicating this preamble ramble to the discourse spurred by the fact that Grand Theft Auto VI will be a digital only release, with no physical release planned, period. I wrote that off as an unsurprising story, given how security and leak conscious Rockstar is as a company. You might remember how some kid accessed their servers and leaked pre-alpha footage of GTA VI online, well before the first trailer even dropped.
Rockstar went so far as to hand-deliver game copies to reviewers in the 2010. So, can you imagine the sheer clusterfuck that would follow if someone got a copy a week, two weeks, or a month early, and started streaming it? This is a game that people would do crimes to play early. The clout alone is too enticing!
This matter of digital ownership also came ahead as Sony announced that they were removing 551 movies from people’s PlayStation accounts, following the closure of the TV and movies section of the PlayStation Store. As Kotaku put it, this event is “reaffirming the fact that you are never truly buying anything that’s digital, just temporarily renting it.” And the physical media pundits were quick to come to arms over this, fighting a war that… they’ve already lost.
As many analysts were quick to point out when the GTA VI story broke, over 80% of all PS5 and Xbox Series users are digital only anyway. Yes, there are definitely some physical game enthusiasts and Nintendorks are keeping things a buck with a roughly 50/50 split between physical and digital. However, PC gaming, which is roughly the same size as console gaming, is 99% digital and mobile gaming is 100% digital. Gaming is largely digital, and when you consider how many games depend on a central server or online multiplayer, how the most popular games in the world don’t have an offline proponent, that makes sense. So what’s even the point in having a disc that does NOTHING when the servers go down?
Gaming is overwhelmingly digital, but I routinely see people who struggle or misunderstand what it means for something to be digital. When something is digital, it can be digital in roughly three ways.
- Digital files with no restrictions
- Digital files with restrictions
- Digital files that don’t touch your devices, a.k.a. streaming
A digital file with no restrictions can be any image you download from the internet. Go up to the header image of this post, right click save as, and you’ll be able to download that image. It has no online dependencies, you can copy, distribute, and edit it freely, and there’s nothing I can do about it. This is the ideal type of digital file distribution, and it is often referred to as being DRM-free, due to the utter dominance of DRM-based platforms for digital purchases.
People LOVE to forget that not all digital purchases have DRM. You can buy ZIPs, PDFs, MP3s, EPUBs, and oodles of other files via DRM-free storefronts. I do that all the time with sites like DLSite, Itch.io, Smashwords, and my beloved Bandcamp! I own these files. They are on my hard drive. The internet could die tomorrow, and I will still be able to use them however I want. If you are talking about digital games or whatever, and are not thinking about this, you are not discussing the topic to its fullest.
If you download a file with some DRM, such as an ebook from an irreputable peddler of anti-human practices, then you can only open the file by hacking it or by connecting online to verify this copy is legitimate. You have the file, but you can only access it so long as you play by the DRM rules. While not all console games have proper DRM, anything that is tied to an account and requires you to log in to access your purchases on a locked down device, is a form of DRM. As I realized when selling my Xbox 360 three years ago, this applies to all home consoles with a digital account system. You can only play these games if you unlock the DRM, which could stay unlocked for years, but can ultimately be re-locked by the publisher.
When people talk about having a digital library, 90% of the time, they are talking about this.
While streaming refers to something that’s on the internet but not stored on your hard drive or storage. When you stream video, you are storing the video data in your computer’s RAM, but unless you have sophisticated scraping software, or just record this data, you cannot do anything with it. Game streaming is largely seen as a dead end due to infrastructure and monetization issues, so we don’t see this all too often.
With PC gaming, the vast majority of offline titles are either digital files with no restrictions or digital files with DRM. That DRM is often Steam’s in-house DRM, which is meant to be lightweight, unintrusive, and gets out of the way. It’s also not hard to remove, to make a Steam crack. This gives Steam users a reasonable assurance that they will be able to play their games even if the platform goes to shit, and this trust system allows people, like me, to buy games like drunken sailors.
Console gaming simply lacks this flexibility, as modern consoles are not devices you fully own. They routinely depend on an internet connection. You cannot freely move files throughout them, unlike a personal computer. And the console manufacturers can, for whatever reason they deem appropriate, erase your account and brick your system, rendering it unable to go online, verify its downloads, maybe they can even disable the disc drive!
This has been a threat for over twenty years at this point, and people have been largely okay with this as they had a reasonable assurance that their purchases would be respected. This allowed people to invest in a digital ecosystem that benefits everyone. It’s easier for developers, publishers, the manufactures, as they don’t need to worry about pesky inventory or shipping deadlines. While customers get the convenience of digital purchases without worrying about stock issues. Plus, for many key titles, they could always get a physical copy that, while often just a physical license with an outdated version of an existing game, was a way to work around the DRM system, somewhat. I would not say there were zero restrictions with physical media for modern game consoles, but there were certainly not as many.
There was always an underlying limitation with digitally dependent consoles, not due to the nature of digital media, but due to the DRM and restrictions that comes with it. Corporations have always expressed their right to enforce these rules, and we just hoped they were not going to. Because if the bridge of trust is broken, then lawsuits need to be launched to determine the law, and there will likely be a lawsuit following the movie delistings.
…But the story that really broke all of this down and recontextualized everything was two bits of news released on the morning of July 1st.
After delaying it for six years, Sony has announced that they are formally closing the online stores for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita. In doing so, they are delisting thousands of titles, including hundreds that have not been brought to any other modern storefront in any meaningful form. This includes PS1, PS2, PS3, PSP, and PS Vita titles aplenty. It was already bad enough seeing these games needlessly excluded from the PS5, a system powerful enough to run basically all of these titles, including the PS3.
Now— because why not now— Sony is removing the ability for enthusiasts to legally purchase these games. Sure, all of them have been dumped, spread, and can be found across the internet. However, that is little comfort next to the fact that no legal, officially sanctioned, avenue was reached, while Sony is continuing to express a genuinely terrible effort at preserving their past titles. (I go into this in more detail in the second re-whatever Ramble dropping on July 8th.)
This is a tragic blow for game preservation as a whole, and the fact Sony was unable to come up with a solution should shine sourly on how they will treat anyone who invests in their digital ecosystem. Sure, you will be able to keep and download your previously purchased games so long as the server to do so remains operational. That is a solution and I do not want to take that for granted. But with the billions in profit they are making every year, you’d think they could afford to let their $900 console play games released for something less powerful than a decade-old watch?
It was bad when Microsoft did the same thing, terrible when Nintendo did the same thing, and now Sony is stepping into line.
Beginning August 2026, Sony will begin shutting down the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 storefronts. This will start with Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua, continue across Latin American and Middle Eastern countries through late 2026, and affect all countries by July 2027. Meaning we have about a year to preserve everything these stores have to offer and make final purchases that may or may not be honored a decade from now. Because, as we saw with their treatment of movies sold on the service, Sony can just delete things from your account.
An event like this might radicalize someone to pivot to physical media and try to mirror the “boom” that has been seen among Zoomies as they started making discs trendy. Not popular— just trendy. People could buy up physical PS5 games to send a message and partially reverse the stark 86% decline seen in physical game revenue following the peak in 2009.
However, that will not send a message, as Sony has firmly announced that they are ending physical disc production for new PlayStation games, effective January 2028.
Why are they doing this? Eh, because they can pretty much. They delivered the expected passive corporate fluff, probably groomed over by an AI. They call this a “natural direction” that will “align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today,” saying they will “drive innovation” while literally depriving people of a choice. The balance of physical or digital was a good one that gave people choices, and this is the elimination of one of two choices, because Sony would rather not bother.
This was a decision over a decade in the making. Since the advent of digital distribution, since Microsoft and Sony committed to a digital ecosystem, after a lot of fumbling to get things going, they have wanted to end physical game sales.
Sony was coy on the treatment of physical games and used games after revealing the PS4 in early 2013. Microsoft was overt with the fact they wanted to create a DRM box where physical games were just a tool to ease people with shitty internet connections, a license to download something from a server. And Sony was allegedly planning the same damn thing. Everything about their E3 2013 showing where they prioritized physical games? Marketing fluff.
Sony was playing the audience, playing you, and biding their time under the good guy Sony guise before becoming the de facto console market leader. They were easing consumers to switch away from digital with the advent of a digital only PlayStation 5. The PS5 disc drive attachment was just another way to ween people off of physical games, and it worked.
Estimates run between the 80% to 90% range, but the overwhelming majority of game players do not buy games physically, and Sony knows that this niche will have nowhere to go if they cut them off.
Honestly, I’m more surprised that Sony was the first one to announce that they were ending physical game production. I expected Microsoft to do that over a year ago.
So, what is the endgame here? Well, it is to make it so that if people want to play video games, they need to play by the rules of these companies. They don’t want you to be able to sell your games, share them, refund them, or even claim you truly own them. It’s a worse deal that gives them more control, more power, and less incentive to ever do anything nice for people, especially as consoles get more expensive and become luxury items. They want people to be scared, and to normalize a system where they are the ones calling the shots, and you just accept them.
This is how big tech companies work, the bullshit they have been repping for the past decade plus. If you don’t like it, if you do not trust Sony, a company that announced the closure of a digital storefront while saying that everything will be digital in the future, on the same day, leave. Stop buying games in their ecosystem, sell your damn PlayStation, divest, or play games in another way.
Xbox is twelve dead dogs in a hot air balloon, so that’s a dead end. Nintendo is too traditional to make this move, especially with Game Key Cards being largely accepted by normies, but they will do the same thing once digital sales exceed 80% or 90% for Switch 2. Valve shows that you can make a digital only platform that people and developers like, but should you trust them to always be the good guys? No, they give kids lifelong gambling addictions with their dumb Counter-Strike shit and invite Nazis into their house. The only moral options are, like, GOG, Jast, Itch.io and various other DRM-free PC storefronts, and none of them are seiso. Except Jast. We like Jast here.
Gaming platforms are an oligopoly, always have been, and all it takes is a mutual effort among all parties of an oligopoly for the average person to be screwed over while corporations reap immense profits. This all sucks, is terrible, and is allowable due to how this is all permissible, this is all legal, and the Overton window has shifted to the point where this is seem as expected, as normal. However, the loss of options, the loss of control of goods is not and should not be normal.
What we really need is a comprehensive rewriting of digital commerce laws, as we are using a 20th century patchwork written for an analog world. Unfortunately, the governments of the entire world are led by four genres of people:
- Geriatrics who don’t understand much of anything with their rapidly decaying brains
- Corporate-shilling opportunists who will throw millions under the bus for a couple million bucks
- Rich fucks who want to directly control the government to benefit their genre of people, as they believe themselves to be appointed by Christ to be a leader of the world, regardless of their religion
- People who want to use their power to actively harm as many as possible, as they are full of hatred of the common man, women, children, and their “racial enemies”
An outcome like this, behavior like this, is inevitable given the wider systemic issues plaguing the world, government, and human society writ large.
I know, I know, I always circle around to everything being political nowadays, but when presented with crap like this, I cannot reach any other resolution. Sony is doing this because they think they will make more money, have more control, and be able to extract more value from a customer base that will only decline in quantity in the upcoming years.
Consoles are expensive, will only get more expensive as the RAM cartel conspire against regular people and enable the technofeudalists in demolishing the middle class to create a society of serfs and lords. This will take decades to achieve, assuming it will work— and it fucking won’t— so in the meantime, Sony is hoping to do their part as a tech company. They are siphoning wealth from the lower classes and putting it into the pockets of their ultra wealthy investors and executives.
…I’m not going to lie and pretend to be a smartass for seeing the writing on the wall during E3 2013, when I was some 18-year-old stupidass. …But I kind of did. The avarice and bitterness of console makers at that time put me off, made me think that their digital and online only future was a trap, so I divested from them, went over to PC gaming. 13 years later, my only regret is not building a Linux PC in 2024.
So, what is the solution here? Well, as I said above, it is to divest. Someone fucks you over, you take your ball and go home, pursue other options, other opportunities, and get out of their system. This works, this benefits people, and it puts your limited funds out of the hands of brain rotten corporations and in the hands of little guys.
I am by no means a paragon of this. I’m still not on Linux, I’m using my refurbished iPhone XS, I watch hours of YouTube each day with my Premium membership, and I buy shit I need from my corporate Amazon account. Hell, I just bought $99 worth of Steam games as part of their summer sale, because I like having all my shit in one space.
But at least I’m no longer using Gmail and switched over to StartMail. I’m not using Google Docs after switching to Obsidian. I’m not streaming music, I just buy it from the artists. And I’m not using some obtrusive spyware-ass browser for personal shit, having switched to LibreWolf. I don’t think you can ever be fully free from big tech, but if someone pisses you off, if hearing all of this has you ripe fucking angry, the answer is to ditch PlayStation and move on.
It’s not like Sony is putting out many noteworthy exclusives— at least nothing compared to the old days. It’s a transition, there’s gonna be friction, but if you’re a gamer, you should have a friction addiction anyway. Different games, different stores, different controllers. You can switch over to something that treats you like a human, and you should.
…This also applies to the inevitable Xbox Helix and PlayStation 6. They will NOT have disc drives based on this news, and that’s a fact you’ll just have to live with. If you don’t want it, then tell them to piss off, stick with what you know, or buy something else.
You could say fuck it to the industry, stop giving it any money, and just get into “retro gaming” with a swanky handheld or a SuperStation One. You could get a real computer and write it off as a business expense for your content creator business. I know I did! Or you could get a Switch 2 and hope Nintendo doesn’t stick it in your pooper when your guard is down. You ain’t got many options, but you’ve got some, buddy.
Crap, Sony and Microsoft Are Gonna Kill Discs, Aren’t They?
(Discs Are DEAD!)
…Nope, this topic is too big to let me bounce off and move onto something else!
Something that only occurred to me after stewing on this subject for a few hours is that not only is this the end of physical games, but it’s also a potentially lethal blow to discs as a medium. We are far from the peak era of discs in the 2000s, with CD, DVD, Blu-ray, and general blank disc sales all going down in units produced as time went on. This has also been paired with a decline in the production of disc drives, both for computers, standalone players, and, of course, game consoles.
It is important to acknowledge that both of these things are technologies that, while very scalable, require a proper factory to produce, expertise, and engineering knowhow. Without demand, these things cannot continue to be made, and unless they continue being made, then what was created will gradually break, decay, and potentially become lost. While physical game sales may have been declining, there were maybe a hundred million game discs being produced each year and millions of disc drives being both manufactured and sold via game consoles.
With all other disc sales down, a blow to the market like this could be severe enough to cause this industry to contract and see factories close. Discs are already well on their way to becoming a boutique oddity, but they could wind up costing considerably more than they did or should need to due to a dramatically reduced demand.
This is, simply put, not good. While discs have been largely outmoded through flash storage, SD cards, NMVe SSDs, and high capacity hard drives, that does not mean they should go away. Discs are far simpler items, divorced from the same production cycle of other storage devices. Discs are easier to sell and distribute than teensy SD cards and bulky drives that are often too large to contain one thing given modern file size standards. Discs, while digital storage, lack the same electronic components as other storage mediums, and can generally last quite a while. Well, barring scratches, being snapped in twain, and good old disc rot.
Discs were never perfect, but they served humanity well for quite a while, and with archival discs being employed by many as a form of reliable cold storage, there is merit to them as efficient storage devices. Hell, that’s the entire point of Verbatim’s M-Discs, they allegedly last a thousand years! Paper doesn’t last more than a few hundred years, so that’s crazy!
I might not own more than… seven discs, but it is also important to see Sony— the CD, DVD, and Blu-ray guys— discarding of discs as not only as a war on game ownership, but on media storage in general. This will decrease the global demand for discs by a drastic amount, and I don’t want to think about how many companies that will hurt. This will make it harder for games to be lent and rented to individuals, shredding any game rental store or friend group that shares games via discs. I know my library’s game section is going to look a lot more paltry come 2028.
Hell, given how Microsoft is rolling out a system for users to convert their discs into digital licenses, it seems that Sony and Microsoft want to not only stop, but cleanse the market of any discs not accounted for.
This would leave the secondhand games market without games to sell, providing an end of history date for many of them. That would make GameStop even more irrelevant, and if I were Sony or Microsoft, I would simply refuse to sell to them and watch them die. And, of course, this would all make game collectors very upset, as they can no longer amass the things they love.
…They also won’t be able to sell them, but I never put too much weight in the value of a game collection. Games are meant to be played, meant to be enjoyed in the moment, and I mostly sold my collection in 2023 because I didn’t want them anymore. $2,200 (maybe 30% of what I paid for them) in cash seemed better than some totes of things I wasn’t going to use. If you want to make an investment, buy bonds, buy gold, buy stocks. Be an adult with your investments, I hate this wave of kidult investments, and the tax treatment for them SUCKS!
Akumako: “Did you pay taxes when you sold your collectibles?”
No, because I sold them for what’s obviously a loss and didn’t have proof of purchase, so IRS does not care! If anything, I did them a solid!
By trying to assess your game collection’s value, you are merely choosing to financialize the things you like, and that right there is a path to absolute despair. Don’t be an art spectator, be someone who buys and enjoys it and shares it with people. If you don’t want it, give it away, sell it to a local business, or donate it to someplace.
No, the major loss is not your ability to make a quick buck off of a thing you bought. It’s that for as imperfect as they were, while game discs only contained an early version of what a game was, bugs and all. It was never great, but it was better than having nothing. …And that’s what we’re gonna get come 2028. NOTHING!
Also Natalie: This.
Natalie: “Eh, I’m going to give these all away eventually.”
…Also, to people saying that this will impact the prices of games, I think that’s more speculation than a surefire thing. Publishers have already set the MSRP at the biggest retailers and they only went on discount during specified periods. Digital only games have been given deep discounts for, uh, almost-decades. Sony’s pricing policy has been terrible ever since they did their last run of greatest hits back in 2018. Enthusiasts know better than to buy a game at full price, and if every AAA adopts the Nintendo pricing model, they are going to see oodles of commercial bombs.
Could this affect how the market works? Sure! But I’d like to think that game publishers know that people will buy games like drunken sailors if they are a tenner or less.
Also-Also, Sony’s surge pricing is just blatant discrimination of customers and it is a crime. If the law says otherwise, then the law is wrong.
The Plan to Eradicate The Game Console
(Walled Gardens Must Die For the Future to Survive)
What, you thought I was done? Hell no! PART THREE, bay-bee!
So, a few days after Sony changed gaming forever with a one two punch, I’ve mused over this subject a bit. The future of consoles, for physical media, and the industry as a whole. I read through the discourse, some articles about this, and I think I am ready to make a bold and radical claim.
The video game console, as a walled garden ecosystem, should no longer exist.
Game consoles made sense for decades. They were a way to economically create devices capable playing a wide number of games that could be bought, traded, or rented among individuals. Though nowhere as universal as a VCR, much of that had to do with the rapid technical innovations of game systems and the loosey goosey approach to computer hardware of the era, where every computer was different.
This stopped being the case in the 2000s, when game console hardware became largely homogenized, and grew increasingly similar over time, before being largely indistinguishable from a personal computer. With virtually few unique features not available on gaming PCs, the need for a console became lesser. The primary drive was their lower price and ease of use, as you did not need to deal with compatibility, drivers, Windows being a bugger, and so forth. They were just boxes you could put a game in and play them.
However, this simplicity gradually decayed— even in the late 2000s— as consoles became fussier, had more online requirements, and lost the simplicity that was their primary virtue. It’s why I left them beyond Nintendo, et cetera, et cetera, Natalie was right to think something was sus in 2013, because she knows that foreshadowing is a literary device.
The appeal of consoles was waning as PC gaming was getting more accessible, and more alternate ways for people to cheaply and easily play games kept popping up. Emulation handhelds, Raspberry Pis, MiSTers, all that jazz. However, over the past six years, consoles have gone to the toilet. Game consoles are considerably more expensive than they have ever been. New releases cut into a hefty chunk out of people’s wages as the post-pandemic cost of living crisis is becoming a de facto recession for the bottom 80%. And now the choice presented via physical games is no longer available, as companies are rapidly spinning a narrative that digital games are licenses where you own nothing.
So, what is the solution to this fine mess?
To ditch the old ways and make something better.
That is THE solution.
That is ALWAYS the solution.
Windows and Mac OS X are too limited? That’s why people are getting big into Linux. Does the Apple Music, YouTube Music, and Spotify oligopoly turn music into something without meaning? Get yourself a damn MP3 player and hit up Bandcamp, or any other music file seller, for some hot shit! People are sick of Unreal and Unity pulling hot bullshit? That’s why everybody’s going to Go-Dot.
Akumako: “Uh, no, it’s a French name, from the play, Waiting for Godot.”
Go–Dot!
The good future lies in creating more open platforms, where people claim ownership and control of the things they buy, and where there isn’t just one company calling the shots. The future is DRM-free digital storefronts that target the most open, uncontrolled, and widely accessible platform, the personal computer. You do not need tens of millions to make a Jast or GOG like storefront to buy games. Anybody can do it. And the only tricky thing is getting people to go along with it, sell their games there, and get people to buy games from there. People don’t use GOG very much, just look at their financials, and they got in some AI and Nazi controversies earlier this year, so I’m not gonna stand by their side. However, if you care about creating a DRM-free future, the market needs to shift.
Would this be more convenient than going to Steam, buying the games, and adding them to your account in their integrated social media network? Hell no! You’d have to manually install them and junk! But if you truly care about something, you should be willing to accept the inconvenience of, say, manually installing patches. Some might say that this is a level of friction that would make games meaningful. (Not me though. I’m a drunken sailor.)
I know that some console pundits and computer-scared folks would look down on this, but tell me what other technology platform is truly open theses days? Consoles are closed off and getting more closed off. Your phone is not a real computer, as it cannot realistically run a bunch of file types unless you are a power user. But anybody can make a computer, anybody can make a personal computing device, and anybody can make an online storefront where you buy games, download them, and just have them. What Valve is doing with SteamOS, Steam Deck, and Steam Machine is ultimately something that any major tech company could get on, and even mini tech companies.
As for the whole physical media proponent… anybody can just make physical media! There are companies like Blaze Entertainment who produce flash cartridges of their licensed retro games for use with their handhelds and consoles. It’s not unheard of for smaller game publishers to still release physical copies of their games in some way. There’s nothing preventing any of the Limited Run genre of companies from producing DVD-ROMs or Blu-rays of PC games. Or, hell, they could pivot to putting them on SD cards or bespoke USB sticks. Plug them in your computer, Windows, Mac, or Linux, maybe even Chromebooks, I dunno, and watch them go. This is all very possible.
The means and methods to make, distribute, and sell physical games for personal computers exists. We just haven’t normalized that as the physical enthusiast market is too mucked up with home consoles. But if they cannot buy physical games, and want physical gaming, this is one avenue to take. To normalize this, niche physical game distributors to shift focus away from PlayStation and toward PC. If the likes of Limited Run, Strictly Limited, and dedicated game retailers like Video Games Plus want to clap back, they should talk to each other on an avenue that works for them and release games that way.
Or, in other words, don’t look at this as the death of physical games, as I am cheekily calling it in the title of this post, but as a new opportunity for a transition to a new platform. To make this happen, companies need to collaborate, hash out licenses, and build something new and reliable for people to become invested in. Which they can do and have done before! Sure, now might not be a great time to launch a new venture like this, and it would be months, if not years, from fully launching. But the alternative is to just lie down and die.
Reclaim the computer, make it your own!
…And no, the end goal is NOT to make a new console. Some might find a certain level of beauty in games for different hardware being so different, in having unique hardware quirks, and will correlate the original hardware’s features as being essential parts of the video game experience. I can understand this fixation… but it’s also fucking ridiculous. Games have LONG needed to be standardized, and the very concept of creating a new walled garden, of creating further segmentation after releasing 30+ platforms in 50 years, is mind boggling.
If you look at any granddad medium, they have their shit standardized. Movies, music, books, they’re all files that get printed and pressed on standardized physical media! You can run them on any computer. Now, as interactive software, it will be harder to achieve this with video games, as they are simply doing more. But I think that making games modular enough to run on the big three of Windows, Mac, and Linux is a pretty good goal that does not require upending the entire home computing market.
Akumako: “Oh my gawd. Just get on with it! The gist is that you think this is a great opportunity for personal computer gaming to take off more, because you view PC gaming as the final frontier as it is the ONE major platform left where people can CONTROL their data.”
Yep, that’s the conclusion.
Akumako: “Just make everything a PC, with a general operating system, with games you can download from a digital DRM-free store, have three of them— have twelve. And facilitate a market where people are willing to buy a thing with a DRM-free copy of the game stored on it.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself! It’s ultimately the easiest and most sensible option I can think of, and I truly hope that others think similarly to me on this front. Because this is the future that I want to see, one power lies in the hands of people. And if we need to pay more for hardware or take a hit to conveniences, then so be it. So long as we are free from these closed systems and allowed to buy and play our games on our terms.
Sentimental Graffiti Re Announced
(Another Excuse to Babble About Japanese ADVs and SIMs)
…Something that I think is far too often overlooked when discussing the history of dating games and visual novels in the west is how there were many efforts made to localize older games for American Windows computers. Graduation, True Love, Desire, Eve: Burst Error, all hit in the latter half of the 1990s, really demonstrating the genre without too many compromises, Clinton jokes notwithstanding.
Unfortunately, these games were very obscure. Checking magazines of the era, per the Video Game History Foundation’s archive, none of these received any coverage beyond import listings, rare ads, and off-handed mentions. (I did not bother checking for Graduation and Desire alone, because those are terrible titles for SEO and I wanted to keep that hour of my life.)
This was an era where who was talking about a game and where news was published on it mattered loads. In the era of the internet, database sites and comprehensive storefronts make it easy to learn about a game. But back in the 90s? If your local store did not have a game, and it was not being featured in Game Pro, did it even exist?
So, it is wrong to say that Japanese adventure games, dating games, and visual novels were just not in the west during this era. …But when they were discussed, they were done so in the abstract. And when they were localized, nobody knew how to sell them, and they sold maybe tens of thousands of copies.
We would easily have a healthier games industry if we had these titles bopping around, consuming some of the same air, since the 90s. Instead, this entire field is shrouded in unknowns, enigmas, and titles of difficult to parse reputation and impact. Because we were not there and few people bothered describing what happened in English.
…This brings me to Sentimental Graffiti (1998), a popular Sega Saturn dating sim that I had never heard of. Developed by NEC as a sort of successor to their Graduation or Sotsugyou and a clear response to Tokimeki Memorial, Sentimental Graffiti was a huge multimedia venture. It involved real life Japanese (disposable) idols that voiced the respective characters, earned itself an anime that was licensed by Media Blasters in 2004, and also snagged a sequel. …Then Tokimeki Memorial 3 (2001) killed the dating sim boom by being, uh, shit. If you care about that topic, you’ve prolly seen Punchy’s video on what a disaster that game was.
So, how have I never heard about Sentimental Graffiti? Well, it’s an untranslated Saturn game, that’s point one, and two, it pretty quickly faded into public memory. It was seemingly a flash in the pan series that was left to fade into public memory, and was barely reported on in the west. In fact, here’s the only contemporary article of the game I could find in the VGHF’s archive and it, uh, it’s something.
“‘Virtual’ women smile coquettishly from the shelves of Japanese game stores, boxed and badged as ‘Girlfriend Simulators’. Having sold games for years with advertising artwork depicting shy, beautiful nymphets, certain sections of the game’s industry have elected to cut out the middle-women
Edge, issue 58
and just sell the girls instead.”
Like… I feel embarrassed for the writer just reading that. You have to TRY to be this racist and sexist at the same time! Gosh, and this section is even called “Virtual Petting.” I know they don’t mean that definition of petting, they’re referring to some pet-play shit.
Akumako: “Is this just a thing you are going to do now when talking about games history?”
I hope so, because I think learning how bad the past was is pretty dope. It’s reassuring.
So, why bring up Sentimental Graffiti now, almost 30 years after its initial release? Why, because they’re doing a remake, of course! With they being visual novel publisher Entergram Inc. and the original illustrator, Tomohisa Kai. Entergram is a familiar name if you peruse a lot of visual novel stuff, handling both development and publishing. And if you don’t follow this niche… you might get them confused with Enterbrain, the RPG Maker guys. They are mildly obscure, have precious little presence, and I don’t believe many of their games have been localized before. Virtual Ties: Isekaijoucho Träumerei and Okayunyumu were both recent releases that were localized, but that was by an outside publisher.
However, GungHo Online Entertainment has somehow become involved as this game’s publisher and will hopefully eye a worldwide release. Because if we cannot get the originals due to the industry being a poopyhead for reasons I’ll get into in a few days, then a remake should be just fine. Hell, maybe it’ll be a straight remake and upgrade like Doukyuusei: Bangin’ Summer. That game was a dope time, and I am so glad that we got it in English.
Akumako: “She says after busting her balls to make a walkthrough of the game.”
I might have had an annoying time with the game, but at least I played it.
Studying is Hard, Studying is Serious
(Study Too Much: You’re Gonna be Delirious!)
Let’s see, I want to talk about something personal today, and what else can I talk about other than what I’ve been doing for a few hours every weekday. Studying.
As you all assuredly know, I am a tax accountant, specializing in cryptocurrency taxation, working for a boutique firm, where I am holding myself out as an Enrolled Agent for the IRS. …Because I passed the Enrolled Agent exam back in 2023 and have kept up with my CPE. Basically, I am allowed to file tax returns for people, practice before the IRS, represent clients, and all that good stuff.
You might think that’s all you need to be a tax accountant, but certain fields can be elitist when it comes to what letters you have after your name, and accountants generally want Certified Public Accountants. To become an Enrolled Agent, you mostly need to know accounting basics and know tax law pretty well. It takes maybe 150 hours of studying if you know your stuff, and is spread across three tests. Kind of a pain in the butt, but not too hard. You can reasonably do it in about three months.
To become a Certified Public Accountant, or CPA, you need to receive a bunch of education in oodles of fields and take a four part test. Each part covers a different facet of accounting: Financial accounting, auditing, tax, and one free space. In my case, it’s more tax! Each part requires over 100 hours of studying leading up to a single test. Each test costs several hundred dollars to take. To past each test, you need to score 75% of higher. And you need to complete all four tests within two years, or else you need to retake them, fees and all. Oh, and the tests are notably harder than the Enrolled Agent tests.
…This is a considerably higher bar to clear. In fact, comparing it to the notorious BAR exam would be a somewhat apt comparison. It’s a fuckton of studying, and for me, someone who mostly does tax stuff, there are a lot of things I either never learned or have not used in nearly a decade. I originally planned on taking it— sitting for it if you want to sound like a dip— after getting my Master’s in Accounting at Northeastern Illinois University in December 2019. …Then the pandemic happened. I was working from home, at my healthcare admin job, with my mother in the other room, also trying to work from home, pestering me whenever I dared to go to the toilet and freaking out every day.
Needless to say, I was not able to study, and did not want to study. I became a proper employee of my boutique accounting firm after helping with a nine figure crypto tax audit at the end of the year, and… I was not in the mood to start a two-year-long commitment. So I put off the CPA exam, decided to just get my Enrolled Agent status, and move on with my professional life.
…But no! My boss kept pestering me that I would need to get a CPA exam if I wanted to make it in the “real world” of public accounting. Because some people are elitist assclowns who care more about credentials than the work some people do. So I have had to spend a few hours each weekday the past almost month trying to make some headway with the audit exam studying. How has it been going for me? Not very well!
I’m starting with the auditing exam for one very simple reason. Because I do not like the subject, and if I’m going to fail any of these exams, it’s going to be auditing. Auditing, as an exercise, is about finding mistakes in someone else’s work, uncovering fraud, and making sure things were done correctly. In practice, that’s fairly engaging. In theory? It’s WAY too abstract for my liking. After several weeks of this, I’m just sick of the subject.
I don’t like remembering the right procedures, the categories of things you can do, the methodologies, responsibilities, the terms of this that and the other thing. They have a purpose, sure, but needing to learn all of this for the sake of knowing it, for the sake of a test, is a pretty miserable experience. I know I am not going to use this stuff. I am not going to be auditing anything, ever, and this isn’t some general principle I can apply, like Maths or Chemistry or Psychology. No. It’s just a highly specialized field, with lots of information, that needs to be applied to questions that are often written to confuse you, not test your knowledge.
It sucks, I hate doing it, but I know for a fact that, unless my boss has a sudden change of heart, I am going to need to keep doing this crap for two fucking years. I don’t want to do this. I am not going to be a more valuable employee in practical terms after this. I’m just going to have more letters after my name, allowing my future employers to upcharge me for my services while I remain the same person. I am not learning, I am not developing a new skill, I am just retaining raw information about something I do not care about, for the sake of credentials.
This is all unlike school, where I genuinely wanted to learn about the subjects I was taking. English, math, science, history, all cool stuff. Technology, programming, accounting, psychology, basics of laws, that’s all stuff that I recognize as important for obvious reasons. But auditing, specifically the duties of an external auditor engaged to provide an audit report to a client? I’m going to say that less than 10% of the 1.6 million accountants in this country are auditors, and the vast majority of accountants do not need to deal with auditors. If I recognize something as unimportant, if I do not have good reason to care about it, and am just studying for a damn test, then the entire process is going to suck. I have been looking for ways out of studying, struggling to put in the “expected” three hours a day, and settling for just one unit a weekday instead.
…So, if I seem a bit slow, or bitter, over the summer, know that I’ve got this bullshit bopping around in the back.
Progress Report 2026-07-05
When reviewing the preamble ramble, this song kept bopping into my head, because I have brain problems.
2026-06-28: Movie night with Shiba and Cassie. For some reason we decided to do a Ronald Emmerich double feature. Independence Day was a good fun staple, not a great movie, but a consistently engaging one. It’s a classic! Stargate was a lot more dull for me, as its characters were not as developed and once the aliens showed up, I started zoning out, as I knew how this was going to end and there wasn’t much for me to hope for. Wrote 700 words for the GungHo bit and the noncountable trap bit. Played more Help! I’m Turning Into A Mermaid. It’s good, but these life sim elements do not mesh with me.
2026-06-29: No writing, just playing more of Help Mermaid, and also Ball X Pit.
2026-06-30: Got bored and wrote 1,200 words for the Xbox bit. Spent the rest of the day studying, playing Help Mermaid and also Ball X Pit. I like my run-based resource accumulation games, alright? They’re tasty!
2026-07-01: Woke up with Missy telling me the PlayStation news, as if I wouldn’t see it the moment I opened up Bsky-Wsky. Decided to scrap the original preamble, used like 700 words of it, wrote 3,500 new words as I want on my anticap scree about this and divesting from big tech. Fookin pissed right off about that. Wrote 1,000 word scree on my educational pursuits. Played more of Help Mermaid, but it was mostly the lifesim stuff.
2026-07-02: Edited the Rundown, decided that the Xbox bit should be the front-runner for next week’s Rundown, because I think the context of how we got here should be presented before a full, final, description of their hit list. More Help Mermaid.
2026-07-03: Struggled to crank out 1,500 word extension to the PS5 thing. FML. More Help Mermaid.
2026-07-04:
Natalie.TF 2026 Progress Report
2026-07-08: Natalie Rambles About the Modern Reality of Remasters, Remakes, and Re-WhateversDONE!- 2026-07-15: Help! I’m Turning into a Mermaid! Review
- 2026-07-22: Pokémon Legends: Z-A – Mega Dimension Review
- 2026-07-29: Class of ’09 – Puzzle Challenge 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-??-??: re:Dreamer Review #6
- 2026-??-??: Coffee Buns Review (TSF Game)
- 2026-??-??: Fate Stay Night Remastered Review (Shiba & Rain 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)
- 2026-11-18: TSF Series #020: Chateau del Bitz
- 2026-12-29: Natalie Rambles About 2026