Hello again! We’re at the absolute end of the month and i had a bit of a rough past week. Still, I have some good news, more ETAs/delays, and a bit of a ramble/statement regarding a recent posting I did, and a future article.
You know the one.
Illness, but I’m OK!
I had a minor illness/health scare a week and a half ago. Had to go in for a scan for something due to sudden pains, but i found the cause, resolved it and the scan came back good.
Thankfully I managed to get the Cosmic Fantasy Collection 2 review out as a result of it all, and i’ve been bouncing between a few newer queue reviews that slipped past me. I’m nearing the end of a recent Ratalaika emulation port, and thus will be aiming to get a review out for it next. I’d like it to be my last review of April, but no promises. It’s good to feel better again, even if the aches i had for a while still make me a little nervous.
Next up after that, is Bubble Ghost Remake, while I also bounce toward Gumball in Trick or Treat Land for a GBC review. So a bit of new and old coming soon! No ETA, but I wanna still work through my small queue of newer games…
Hardware Hardware Hardware
Another thing I’m aiming to get to work on as I wittle my queue down… Hardware review! Several, in fact. Evercade EXP-R review got halted and messed up a bit due to my health annoyance, so I’m wanting to now get that done in May. Then I’d do a review of the technos super pocket i mentioned earlier in my MGC blog, and lastly, review the analogue pocket.
I did have a plan to do a 1 year later review of the analogue duo, but then they dropped an update that fixed most of my issues and led to me having little point in writing the article outside of one glaring omission, and well, since that also applies to the Pocket and I am not going to go into the pocket review with the same kind of shock and awe a lot of others have with the thing, I think a review of the pocket will be a good place to soapboax about DAC support. Yes, they still haven’t mentioned it. No, the tariffs won’t make it any easier. Still, I’m getting back into the groove with writing in general, and that also reminds me…
The Depression is Over… for now
You may remember a month ago I noted I had extreme depression and was generally fixed with too much anxiety to do anything. February was so bad I had to bail from most social media just to recover and avoid people who did nothing but panic about the world all day. Doesn’t help social media feeds just pour that stuff on you non-stop, day in and day out.
Well, I’m happy to say in general, my mood has been better despite me being a lot more cautious and still worried about a lot of things, but not to the point of panic. Remember, the internet makes it real damn easy to panic about scary things to the point of inaction, but the thing to do in times of struggle is to find a community, help them out and have one another back each other up. I have been in several and joined a few newer ones, and that has helped my mental health significantly. Please, do not hesitate to do so. I promise you if you’re in the US and worried sick about everything, you can stop that by joining a local community group.
It’ll help a ton. Also, if you are american, read up on what is/isn’t actually possible in the constitution. You’d be surprised in how some people will catastrophize about things that are literally impossible even if bad people wanted those things to happen. Do not listen to them. Do not let them drown you in anxieties and be unprepared to stand up for your friends, since scary things will keep happening, but rather than cower and obey in advance, be vocal and stand with your friends and be an ally. That’s what I’ll keep doing locally to help out those in need.
I guess on a side note about that, I’m also not resuming activity on my bluesky account outside of autoposting because shocker, the site still is filled with people in constant panic and I’d rather not log on and block most of the website. Still, if you wonder why I haven’t answered a ping or DM, it’s because the last login was in early March for me, so email me at the SFG email if you need anything in particular or just want to comment on my articles without commenting via wordpress.
Speaking of emails….
(Not) Fan Mail, and the whole LRG video thing + The Industry Needs To Reflect
A week ago I linked to a video I recommended pretty confidently, about Limited Run Games and allegations against CEO Josh Fairhurst.
I then got an email, from someone I will not name or disclose the contents of, basically upset at me for sharing the article and accusing me of “falling for lies”. It’s the first time I’ve gotten an email annoyed at an article I posted, and I didn’t reply to it because I had to do some investigation via my own sources and also just wait to see how the gaming industry would react to the allegations within the article. Whether we’d get good investigative journalism on the matter, (since again, LRG Part 3 isn’t gonna be that piece, it’s gonna be a “looking back and ending the book on LRG’s Quality Control” article to close out my limprint rambles for good) or maybe see someone big in the industry speak out and have the whole thing snowball further.
Well, a week later, and after getting the email, I gotta say… I’m pretty damn disappointed in the gaming industry. I shouldn’t be surprised since the industry has a lot of people/companies/etc known for confirmed bad behavior or alleged bad behavior, that just continue working as per usual, with outlets or certain content creators still covering their games despite knowing better, and while I don’t think it’s an absolute lock that nobody will write an article digging into the video’s allegations deeper to find more solid backup for the points in it, or get more statements and the like, I have seen a lot of sites that should have been on top of this and have been news tipped extensively about it just… stay quiet about the whole thing. No comment, no remarks, no “i’ll look into this”, nothing.
The closest to any rumblings I’ve heard of any journalistic investigation on the video in question and trying to get a statement, is Time Extension writer Damien Mcferran’s comment about how he’ll ask Josh himself for remarks on the video.
He made no further mention of if that’ll be in an article, interview or showing the video himself, but honestly, this is the same journalist who openly shilled for the Intellivision Amico without hardly any criticism toward it until it was proven to be absolutely untenable, and has a track record I and other journalists in the industry can describe as pretty damn soft when it comes to asking questions.
Yes, I namedropped a fellow writer in my article. No, I don’t care if this sounds a little harsh. If you’re in the industry, and you write constant puff pieces about anyone who sends you a nice comment or interview responses, then you aren’t doing your damn job of pushing hard and breaking through the PR speak. I’m not the only one who has this issue with Damien, and while I’d like to see him push a bit harder and just try to outright find out himself if he can also back up the allegations in the video or not, I’m seriously doubting it.
That being said, before I finish responding to the core point of the email, I do wanna respond to a question I’ve seen in some discord servers and other circles I’m in, with people wondering about why XYZ person at Limited Run or some other company that worked with them won’t comment one way or another, or how if the allegations end up being credible, why won’t they step away.
I regret to inform you pal, that as much as I hate using this term and sounding like a typical Gen Z edgelord, that capitalism is why your favorite retro youtuber people working for Limited Run won’t say anything about the company remotely negative. Like, let’s delete the video from existence and just go off of what we know about LRG and their QC history; did the guy with a big techie youtube channel call out their own major issues on the carbon engine’s QC and promise to fix it promptly? Maybe when a NES game had broken sound emulation that never ever got fixed? No? Well, why do you think that is? Hint; they don’t give a shit, they like their cushy job, and aren’t exactly the person you think they are.
but oh oh what about the book guy who has been a long time, proud anti-fascist publicly and seems like such a nice smart guy in the industry? Surely he’d comment on the video or the company’s QC or warehouse troubles or literally anything? Well, maybe the fact that he never finished a book i wrote some reviews for him on because he went off to join the company he works for now (i did get paid well though, kudos for that i guess) and never reached out once to apologize for the Shiren fuckup years ago after privately asking me if I wanted a free copy and I said no due to my well documented love of the IP, and never ever responded to anyone who asked him for thoughts on the ordeal because he had no dignity to simply say “No, this is not right, that shouldn’t happen ever again”?
Yeah, maybe these people are more concerned about their jobs than moral values, and maybe because they’re friends of friends of friends, their friends of friends of friends won’t say anything naughty about the company they work for to not get their feelings hurt. The fact I see peers gobsmacked why they don’t say anything about the video one way or another is amusing when concrete evidence of other things they could have said no to publicly has happened and… they’ve both been crickets.
If it sounds like I’m letting out my inner Ed Zitron, (a great reading recommendation for those who are also anti GenAI, btw) I kinda am. But case in point; disregarding the video’s existence with factual stuff we know from our own eyes, people in the industry won’t generally say anything too mean about LRG because their friends, or friends of friends have helped out/worked for them and they don’t want to be mean to friends. That’s just a general thing in all industries with plenty of connections. After all, a nice guy working for a shitty company doesn’t mean the nice guy can just snap finger and make it change overnight. But all of that just means when QC issues just popping up publicly, or they do an even bigger fuckup and nobody who knows about it calls it out, it makes everyone look bad.
Lots of people that could call out the sort of culture that would lead to rushed QC and unhappy customers, who just don’t unless it gets really, really untenable. You saw this with the D incident, where that got major IGN coverage because the notion of it being put on a CD-R was just too absurd to ignore. Yet you also didn’t hear from those youtuber guys working at the company during all that, probably because they didn’t want to lose their jobs or because they don’t care! There are certain forums out there boasting progressive values and claim to support game workers/devs/unions, but one of them had the video shared, and almost nobody cared! In fact, a moderator of the site continues to post LRG news and announcements as new threads regularly, despite them being friends with someone who has worked for the company! Astroturfing, or just blindly supporting them due to liking physical games just that much? what do they think about the video, and should they investigate it too?
Now let’s step back, take everything that video I recommended allegations into account, and come to two conclusions.
1: If The video is mostly true/credible: if this is the first most in the industry legit know about it, then we’ll find out in the coming months if anything will be done about it and other websites/outlets will do their own investigations. Again, Embracer should open a prompt investigation and dive into it themselves, and that’ll be a big step. But other sites who have or get tips on the matter should do so. As for me, I’m not gonna break into each bit of the video nor even make it a big part of my LRG article outside of if it backs up anything I heard of before the video went live. I’m not even gonna dig in deeper or give my own extensive thoughts besides me continuing to recommend it with “yes, I can back up a few of things by myself”, so you watch it and decide.
And uh, yeah, some of what I had drafted or had known about for years, plural, was restated in that video. I had no prior knowledge of the video contents before the upload. It goes into way more detail about the rumblings I heard so I can’t confirm much, but some of the details I heard of 1/2+ years ago are also in the video. And some of my sources have doubled down on key aspects of the video as well. If this ends up being true for most of the allegations, then I think a lot of the industry/people in the know about LRG need to do some soul searching. There’s no god damn way you can tell me all of that, if real, was kept under wraps so perfectly well anyone puffing up LRG at some point didn’t get a rumor drop about that stuff. Then again, I didn’t even get personal info about the most extreme accusations in the video, so I’d give some leeway to those who are genuinely caught off guard if most who asked around just got a basic answer of “Oh Josh is stubborn/an asshole” and not much more. Still, those two other people I see getting tagged because they’re well liked youtubers working for them, are 100% complicit in not blowing the whistle on any of this if any bit of the video’s accusations are right. Fully. Complicit.
2: If the vid is bunk/sourced from a known bad faith person i shall not name: One of the first things I did before sharing the video with my readers was make absolute sure he who shall not be named wasn’t the only one who would know about stuff in the video. If he was the primary or only source even, then it would be incredibly easy for me to discredit and not take 100% seriously since well, I do not like the guy who wouldn’t stop DMing me with apologies for a while. Of course, you saw my piece go up last monday, and that means I did hear from some of my sources, unrelated to the known bad faith actor, some credible backup of the details.
But let’s pretend I didn’t do that or they’re all 100% wrong. The video is bunk. LRG still has a major quality control issue. They’re still getting major partnerships for games that should not be direct to order, but instead retail releases. They still are flubbing QC with a lot of items despite promising to improve them. A lot of outlets still partner with them or shill their products due to knowing some staff personally or just out of hope they’re the ultimate saviors of physical gaming media. LRG has still handled multiple, multiple QC incidents really poorly with them not acknowledging many issues until it gets too loud for them to ignore, and then they always try to resolve it quietly and hope the PR nightmare goes away. No pre-emptive “Sorry we fucked up!” or any attempt to be fully transparent, just consistent “eh if it’s a small enough thing and people don’t notice we’re in the clear.” That ain’t a way to run a business.
But yeah, I gotta stop here before I ramble all night. Sorry for this update being a mini limprint ramble/industry callout, but seeing some of my peers get concerned or even confused to why certain people weren’t bad mouthing their own company or what if anything was being done in the industry to look into it… Well, I hope this provides insight. And a bit of a reply to the email I got, insisting that the video is 100% filled with lies. I do not think it is and I have reason to believe some of the info within is credible. But i am not the ultimate investigator and there are plenty of great journalists who have done excellent work investigating big companies and the complexities behind them.
I can just only hope one of them does the right thing, and we will know 100% for certain once and for all. And if it does end up being proven that LRG is a very toxic culture that has been built on lies for a decade now, a lot of people are indirectly complicit in that, even if it’s a conversation some of us may not like having. This also counts as my conclusion, so… Uh, I’ll see you with a SNES game tomorrow! Or Thursday, maybe, sorta.