Rundown (8/06/2023) Nothing Like the First Time
This Week’s Topics:
- The hunt for meaning through new experiences
- A TSF manga that should have been much better
- The dread of going back to older generations of Pokémon
- Musings about Nintendo’s second tablet
- A rema(ke)(ster) of Oblivion
- A semi-regular update on Natalie.TF projects
Rundown (7/23/2023) Dude, Whatever, It’s Summer!
This Week’s Topics:
- One of Natalie’s favorite music people dropped a HOT new mixtape!
- A transition related retrospective and analysis
- The return of Natalie’s weekly dose of TSF translated goodness
- TSF Showcase 2023: All You Can Eat! Summer 6 Comic Works Mix
- The power of worker solidarity
- The confusing pricing models for gaming subscription services
Rundown (7/09/2023) Jump! Back! Glock! Cock! Aim! Shoot!
This Week’s Topics:
- Political wafting and revolution promotion
- The legal battle for the future of gaming
- The impending death of Twitter (and the internet)
- A genre terminology diatribe
- Yuji Naka in… Prison Escape
- Getting into some TRUTHS about the Pokémon series
Rundown (7/02/2023) Thanks Cap, You Made Me Write a Novel of Lore!
This Week’s Topics:
- A VD2.0 progress update
- The ‘magic users as oppressed minority’ trope
- Complaining about Nintendo and Switch 2 discourse
- The idea that games should ‘let players be creative’
- A remaster that is doomed for disaster
Rundown (4/02/2023) Darcy’s Transformation Nightmare
This Week’s Topics:
- A Pokémon TF comic that’s WAY better than it should be
- Pouring gasoline on the corpse of a dead storefront
- Natalie’s latest data hoarding hyperfixation
- The final knife up E3’s tuchus
- Another Cygames Gacha DIES
Rundown (3/05/2023) Natalie Remembered SapphireFoxx
This week’s Topics:
- Natalie Rambles About another TSF content creator
- Natalie goes into frustrating detail about downloading files from the internet
- The continued dread of being a Pokémon fan
- The remaster/remake/revision of a classic visual novel trilogy
- The history of Final Fantasy XV (and Luminous Studios, I guess)
- Why Natalie barely got anything done this past week
Rundown (2/26/2023) Natalie Talks About Some TSF Critiques
This Week’s Topics:
- Natalie Rambles About Some TSF Critiques
- A double dose of acquisitions
- A voyage in subtitling hell
- The delisting (and relisting) of a famous game for SEO
- The director of Resident Evil 4 leaving his company
- A crisis of productivity and purpose
- My next novel becoming a trilogy
Rundown (12/18/2022) Natalie’s Going In For Bottom Surgery!
This Week’s Topics:
- Tencent bought 20% of that anime booty game.
- The continued purging of HBO Max to avoid residuals
- A ‘remaster’ of 2005’s Ys: The Oath in Felghana
- The next retroactive adventure of Adol Christin
- Amazon’s next Tomb Raider game
- The END of the Pokémon anime (as we know it)
Rundown (11/13-11/19) You Kids Have Fun With Your Pokémons
Rundown (11/28-12/04) Passionless Pits of Pseudo-Pleasure
Wherein I discuss my search for passion, the fall of a much heralded titan, a Sony streaming subscription successor, and the DOPE-tier TSF Bunny Boy!
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Rundown (6/21-6/27) Everything is Complicated!
Wherein I discuss a problematic power paradigm, Smash getting the win-win, a massive temporal rewrite, the end of a mixer, the continued battles fo the EDF, a new digital expo, China’s budding influence, and the Bandai Namcos.
(more…)Rundown (6/14-6/20) Ramble Hiatus!
Wherein I discuss a schedule change, a spacefaring VR motive, and a preposterous pile of Pokémon projects.
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Fan Fiction Funsies: Pokémon Mystery Dungeon – Rescue Team HOT MILK
That Time I Hacked Pokémon Mystery Dungeon Rescue Team DX and Got Isekai’d Into the World of Pokémon and Now I’m Trapped in an Existential Nightmare
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Rundown (1/26-2/01) The Questionable Box
Wherein I discuss the troubles plaguing Natalie’s precious Box, Okabe’s adaptation adventures, a new home for my 1,000 babies, the success of the Switch-makers, and another icy blunder.
(more…)Pokémon Shield Review
It’s a brand new world… and it’s a touch rough.
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Natalie Rambles About Gacha Games
Because crack is wack, coke ain’t woke, ya don’t need weed, and generally speaking drugs are for thugs. But indulging in regulated vices is good for the economy and government, so gamble to your heart’s content!
Rundown (9/15-9/21) Spoil Age
In this age where people are encouraged to constantly do things live, to stream, react, and offer spicy hot takes to the current going-ons lest they be forgotten and falter into designed irrelevance, spoilers have become an interesting topic. Some think that all major spoilers should be prefaced as spoilers. Others think that an arbitrary amount of time needs to pass before something may be openly spoiled. While a groundswell of people just stopped caring about the prospect of being surprised by works and think it’s perfectly a-okay to spoil anything, citing that there was this or that study done and it showed that one’s enjoyment of a work was not necessarily impacted by spoilers.
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Pokémon Masters Review
To be a master… you need to do a lot better than this.
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Rundown (6/23-6/29) Art Is Hard!
For years I have contemplated posting my novels in their entirety on Nigma Box rather than hosting them via Google Docs, but have not done so because I like having a header image associated with each of my posts and, well, I don’t have any visual assets to represent these works. I thought about commissioning art for each chapter, or just the novel overall, but that could get expensive, and would require me working with an artist, which kinda scares me. So I said screw it, I’ll make my own headers. But I cannot draw, barely know how to use Photoshop, and lack visual artistic sensibilities, so what can I do? I know! I made crummy sprite edits of 8-bit Danganronpa character sprites for my cover of A Vile Doohickey back in 2014, so I’ll just do that again! So I tested this idea by making a header for Random #001: Grandpappy Pyra, and… it took me like 3 hours to make in total… Art is hard!
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Rundown (5/26-6/01) Everything is Dirty!
I personally am not a germaphobe or neat freak by any means, but there are two things that generally speaking freak me out whenever I see, and I see them frequently. People eating food with unwashed hands and people lounging around in their home in “outside clothes”. My reasoning for this stems from the fact that the outside world is filthy, everything is dirty, and while people lack the ability to fully control the unclean, they should take care to not ingest vile germs or bring them into their home. I have not gotten sick in a decade and want to continue that streak, and the idea of bringing germs into the home makes me want to immediately jump into the shower when I get home after work. Sure, I change my clothes and wash my hands, but my hair may as well have been dumped into a garbage bin.
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Rundown (5/19-5/25) The Future Is Random!
This past week I finished up the first iteration of what I hope to be a new segment to go alongside my Reviews, Rundowns, and Rambles, which I’m dubbing Randoms. Randoms are short stories based on various ideas, concepts, and prompts that I either stumble across or pop into my weird brain. A segment meant to contrast my novels and novellas, which take me forever to write, and require me to commit to an idea and characters and make everything part of one big continuous multiverse. The first Random will debut on May 31st, but I am not committing to a more specific schedule going forward. Could be monthly, could be quarterly, could be whenever the hell I feel like it. Remember kids: Die Zukunft ist Zufällig.
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Rundown (2/24-3/02) Petty Platinums, Predictable Pokémon, and Prosperous Positions
About two weeks ago I started playing through Bayonetta, a title that I have tried multiple times in the past, yet struggled to get into due to my ineptitude when it comes to ‘real’ action games and obsessive personality traits that are triggered based on hyper specific criteria. Or in other words, I positively suck at the game, but also wanted to go through the game while doing two very specific things. Get high rankings from every encounter and get all of the collectibles. While I believe that the former is very possible if I were to play through the game on easy, difficulties below normal automatically give the player all the health and magic upgrades from the get-go, and that approach deeply bothers me. These are two incredibly petty things to hold against a game, but it left me unable to truly enjoy myself with the game, so for the fourth time in my life, I’ve given up on Bayonetta. Though if someone were to make an ‘auto-platinum’ mod, I would probably give it a proper playthrough.
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Rundown (5/27-6/02) Much Ado About Pokemon and Info Dumps
I mentioned before that I utterly love gaming history, and all of the odd bits that come attached with it, and one of the greatest fascinations for me as a child was the development of the second Pokemon game, originally entitled Pokemon 2, before being renamed Gold and Silver. Basically, the game was extensively delayed, reworked, and refined over three years before it finally came out, and a lot of things changed in that time, with said changes being evident thanks to a 1997 Space World demo. Well, said demo founds its way onto the internet… 21 years later, and a lot of details about the original rendition of the game were made available, including map data and many unused Pokemon designs.
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Rundown (6/14-6/17) E3 2017: The Psycho Wars Shall Return
Well, the week has passed and E3 2017 has ended, and before I know it, it will be E3 2018 and I will be doing this whole shebang all over again, except then I will be further along in my transition and be far more pretty. Normally not much news comes outside of the press conferences, but there were enough stories to justify a traditional rundown, so I’ll just get started. (more…)
Rundown (6/04-6/10) PRE3 2017: Lower Your Expectations for Maximum Happiness!
Well, it’s the middle of June, and you know what that means. It’s time for the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Yes, an event full of announcements, dubious trailers, and manufactured hype. I could be cynical about the whole thing, as it is ultimately one big commercial, but I always have a good time zealously devoting my attention to the event and working hours on end to provide write-ups on just about everything announced, while giving my own opinion on them and each conference. Yet as is always the case, pre-E3, or PRE3 as I like to call it, is in full effect, so let’s just go for it! (more…)
Rundown (3/19-3/25) Work Quantity is How Humans Should Be Judged
Over this past week, I’ve been working full time for the… well, I’ve worked full time before in my life, but this is the first time I spent my spring break doing it, and I have been far more strapped for time because of it. How people can manage to get home at 18:00, do some housework and eating until 19:00 and get everything they want done before 23:00 while simultaneously unwinding from work is kind of beyond me. But I guess I’ll just get used to it as, while some people can fight against the 40 hour work week, I’ll likely be in a profession where it approaches 50 during busier points of the year. So yay for that. (more…)
Pokemon Moon Review
After several months of anticipation and near weekly coverage on my weekly news segment, Pokemon Sun and Moon finally arrived to mark the 20th anniversary of this series. One that I hold very closely to myself and ultimately love, but have become incredibly critical of, as the shortcomings of a series become excruciatingly evident after playing every game in the mainline series (except for Platinum). But I’m not going to talk about those right now. For now, it’s time to talk about Pokemon Moon. (more…)
Rundown (7/31-8/06) Special Surprise Coming Soon!
I mentioned last week how I’m going to revise some of my earlier novels? Well, I’m still doing that, and I have to say that I’m surprised how happy I still am with Verde’s Doohickey. I did spend a lot of time at it, but I normally hate my work right after I finish it and always think that it can be done better. It’s actually been quite the confidence booster to reread it and edit a few minor elements. Heck, I would officially publish it if I had a cover, and I think I’ll start pursuing that fairly soon. Possibly from the artist who drew this week’s header image (more…)
Rundown (3/06-3/12) The Final… ?
I’ve been doing this, a weekly rundown of the happenings in video game news, for about three years at this point. I used the segment as a way to interject my own petulant thoughts about the banal happenings in the video game industry and make use of hundreds of anime screenshots I was collecting. You know, back when I still watching and reviewing anime. It gradually descended into bitching in many respects, and despite my efforts to improve this over the past few weeks, I’ve become tired of the weekly rigmarole. This may be the last Nigmabox Rundown for a while, or I may come running back next week like nothing’s changed. (more…)
Rundown (2/14-2/20) Somebody Be My Friend and Be My Side!
…Yeah, not much to talk about this week. Yes, Kojima teased some fans by appearing at DICE 2016, and the launch of Street Fighter V upset a lot of people who did not expect the bare minimum from a game that will be built over the next four or five years. XCOM 2, which apparently is set after a failed run of Enemy Unknown, is apparently really buggy, and Sega gave away a bunch of Steam games because they felt like it. The Division had a beta that some people really enjoyed, even though I see little to no appeal in its general gameplay loop, and some other stuff happened, not much of it very interesting. (more…)
Rundown (11/08-11/14) Growing Up is Hard
Neptunia Re;Birth3 is taking forever because it is a Neptunia game and twice as long as it needs to be. Meanwhile, I have yet to touch Student Transfer, and now Higurashi Chapter 2 is out. I would start binging, but I have two papers due next week, and I need to work on a group project in addition to my next novel, so I’m a busy little buckeroo. I also want to buy my new computer parts soon, build it, and get my new PC all ready, but that may need to wait until after this semester… when I’m working full time for a month. I also want to come out as transgender, but am so terrified of worrying my poor mother that I feel I can’t. Also, I’m turning 21 on Wednesday. Growing up is hard! (more…)
Rundown (9/13-9/19) TGS 2015: Darkest Despair!
I’m not sure how often I’ve brought this up, but I think that Free to Play games were among the worst things to happen to the industry in recent years, and there have been a lot since I got in this industry’s intestines, mostly the large one, where poop is dried out, around 2006. But after reading this little piece by somebody who has been getting neck deep in whale blood as his employers tried to manipulate individuals with mental problems for the sexiest thing in the mortal world, Kentucky granola, also known as USD, I feel I have an opportunity that I shall not waste, if only because I love the line and it is mostly true. Free to play games were a mistake; they’re nothing but trash. I hope they are outlawed by 2033, when the Great African War begins and half of it is destroyed by a nuclear explosion. Buy War Bonds in preparation of the war to end all wars! (more…)
Rundown (8/23-8/29) pornography_is_destructive.mp3
So some Japanese company made an Oculus Rift game where you fuck a balloon in a schoolgirl uniform to simulate sex. Yeah. That’s honestly perfectly fine in my book. I’d rather have pronography be very clearly labeled as such while having next to no artistic merit, and simply be shameless in fulfilling the sexual urges of humans. It’s better than any eroge that dares to have any artistic value, as it is being made for masturbatiory purposes. I’d much rather have sex scenes in visual novels that you can censor if you enter a code, so it is clear you are playing it for the story… Yeah, this is a complicated issue I should not be addressing in the opening like this. (more…)
Rundown (7/26-8/01) Set Gamindustri on Fire and Beat Off on the Flames
I know that it would be really hard, and the framerate would constantly plummet to 20 fps if one is lucky, but I really want to see a game where you can destroy all the buildings in it. Sure, there was Red Faction Guerrilla, but I want something like that set in a big modern city, as I get bored seeing the same darn sights when commuting every week and want there to be a game where you can cause collateral damage to millions and cost the city trillions as you destroy national monuments for the lolz. Instead the closest thing to what I want is No Man’s Sky, but I’m pretty sure the space cops will kill you if you try to dig a hole through the other side of the planet just to see how the game handles this. (more…)
Rundown (5/24-5/30) Old Tech Can Kiss My Butt!
So, Kung Fury came out and everybody was happy with it. I personally thought it was an energetic and slightly disorganized little romp that knew what it wanted to be, and managed to be just that. It was an intensive labor of love that will likely not age all that well as the 80s children start dying out, and people wonder why the video quality can be so shitty at points. I get that it is a throwback to times of old, but while I think VHS tapes are cool and had quite a collection as a youngster, they are pretty crap when it comes to image quality. (more…)
Rundown (3/29-4/04) Fetal Position
So, there is very clearly something going on with Zero Escape 3. I did not bring up the countdown website as nothing had happened, but it has recently updated and Kotaro Uchikoshi tweeted out some cryptic numbers, which when gven their letter value turn into FNJANUUVNWXOXDAFXAM and KYVCFEXVJKEZXYKNZCCYRMVREVEU. When put through a Caesar Cipher decryption, which involves the letter value being shifted by a set amount, 17 for the first one, 9 for the second one, you get the messages WE ARE ALL MEN OF OUR WORD and THE LONGEST NIGHT WILL HAVE AN END. You know what that means? Ever 17’s getting a re-release, and the previous two Zero Escape titles are coming to PC along with part 3… I know I got that wrong, but a girl can dream, can’t they? (more…)
Rundown (1/11-1/17) Let Nintendo’s Train Penetrate Your Butthole, Dummy!
I honestly forgot about this post until the last minute, and did not prepare any sort of pseudo-witty banter. As such, I am just going to jump into this week’s Nigmabox Rundown, which I have titled “Let Nintendo’s Train Penetrate Your Butthole, Dummy!” I’m glad that I’ve been doing this for about two years now… (more…)
Pokemon Alpha Sapphire Review
Man do I have a lot of little things to say for this pre-review thingie. Pokemon X was evil and consumed 300 hours in the game itself, and about 25 more because spreadsheets. I originally was not going to play this remake until the New 3DS came out, but I did not have anything that pressing to play. Ruby and Sapphire were the first Pokemon games I really got into, and they terrified the hell out of me, because I did not understand how to video game. Pokemon being annualized is something I dislike conceptually as the base needs a lot of refinement that I could write out if requested, and will mention in this review. (more…)