Hello Again! I finally got this out, and the difficulty until now was quite bluntly, because I had the paragraph at the end of this with political/real life matters go on for so darn long I basically axed most of it because a lot of it was ramblings I mostly did already, and because I think you’ll get my point without me making another Bible. That and I also wanted to attach it here, so my post about the Itch ICE bundle and another idea I have to promote it is centered on my love for Minnesota and not a rambling mess.
So yeah, early warning; once you hit the final section of this update, pre-conclusion, you’re free to not read anymore if you’re stressed out by stuff going on and don’t want to see yet another take/hear about it. I get it! But honestly, the more I get involved locally and do things, the more I realize my blind spots and how mad I am that others haven’t done so or think they have but just refuse to learn. I think once you read my ramble you’ll hopefully understand my frustrations and hope for the future. But first, gaming stuff, and fun ideas! There’s still fun to be had and cool stuff to cover, after all.
Back to Business
The Rayman review was a nice little warmup for me of a compilation style review again. I needed to do something like that before getting into the groove of things again, and thus I punted the next queue review I had to go back to (Broken Sword) to this week or early next week. I wanna cover more retro compilations/reissues I have in mind for free time purposes, but the only one I’m 100% sure I’m doing is the reissue of Pokemon Firered. I did it for Silver, Yellow and Crystal, so why stop there? With Firered I’ll have a Gen 3 game down, and Shining Pearl might count as gen 4 in spirit, so I’m making baby steps to covering all gens in some form!
Obviously I don’t think Nintendo or TPC will reissue all Pokemon games up to Sun/Moon or anything, but at the very least I enjoy covering these with a critical eye now that I’m older. I could do the usual countdown rankings other sites do, (I debate doing that, but I’d rather start them with smaller lists first) but that’s not a priority ATM. Either way, new retro reissue, something new for me to cover at some point here.
Article wise the only thing I feel confident on besides my No ICE Itch Bundle piece, (which will be out before the bundle ends, and I’ll recommend a couple of goodies when I do) is impressions of the Pokemon Direct on Feb 27th. People seemed to like my impressions of the last Direct, so I’ll do them anytime I find a cool thing that’s worth watching. I didn’t do one for the State of Play as I see zero reason to get a PS5 and they barely mention PS4 stuff now, sorry. Neither will I be covering Xbox stuff considering the whole mess made the past week there, (and the whole BDS thing that’s behind why I delay Evercade cart reviews for MS-owned IP) and I won’t give much of a toss towards anything from the Dorito Pope.
Hey, that means I don’t have to do them, except when I do. You’ll see them when they come and I think me enjoying writing these impressions is better than me forcing impressions on a thing I have zero interest in. Anyhow yeah, expect Pokemon Day reactions as I predict how the Pokemon fanbase do not realize who the base of the Pokemon buyers are for the millionth year in a row, and lord help us if Gen X is a Game Key Card like Poktopia. Yes, the 30th anniversary idea I had earlier is still a thing I wanna do, just not on Pokemon day now. I have all year! Other articles I mentioned before are still in the pipeline but with no ETA: I’m not kidding when I say this first part of Feb was overwhelming, and that was after being stressed out beyond belief in January due to the whole thing I’m making another article about later and why I’m promoting an Itch bundle more than just a reshare on some website or discord server.
So what about that Queue?
I mentioned Broken Sword is next, but as you can tell we’re a bit all over the place with the queues. My Legacy Queue is still on ice and my PS4 is still in storage until the day comes we catch up with the Switch stuff. Anytime I play Deadly Premonition I realize I actually don’t wanna, but I refuse to review based off the first half hour. I’ll need more, lots more, or at least enough for my usual “know all the mechanics” style. This isn’t a game I feel I can just dump early, it’s one I know has quirks to it people love and I want to try and find them. Key word being try.
Milano’s Odd Job Collection should have been reviewed by now, even disregarding my whole stress of the past month, but I hate to say I keep sitting on it over and over thinking maybe that Switch 2 upgrade will shadow drop and destroy any Switch 1 focused review I make. It seems pretty blatant that this upgrade pack ain’t ever coming out, and while a new update recently dropped that doesn’t seem to do much besides make a nice looking game keep looking nice on Switch 2, I don’t think there’s much of a difference between the two consoles besides loading times. So thus, I’m gonna just cover it as is and if the day I upload it they push out a Switch 2 Edition patch I ain’t covering it. I don’t like stalling on reviews so I am gonna get this out before Q1 ends.
That just leaves us with some of the harder/tougher games in the normal Switch queues (Clock Tower Rewind, Majogami) I will get to, but will take more time, but I’d divert attention to the Steam queue for a bit before I go back to those two, since the Deck got a bit of a rough neglect session during my whole month of stress and evacs. I wanna joke Bubsy almost made my home burn down, but I don’t wanna jinx myself if I do. Anyhow, Bubble Bobble Sugar Dungeons is the next Steam game I’m gonna cover; I was planning to do Bubble Symphony as an extra review but since it’s bundled with Dungeons I’m just gonna ignore that and focus solely on Dungeons. Should be reasonable to get done soon too.
I’m also gonna jump the line and review Marvel Cosmic Invasion on Steam Deck before Angeline Era, since I managed to get the OK from the PR of the latter to hold off and take more time on it. I always think I’m prepped for a good RPG review and then inevitably something comes from space to derail me a lil bit, which is why I seldom request this. Mark my words, this will get reviewed this year and I am still eager with what I played so far. Consider me dicking around playing Xak for PC88 a warmup. Hopefully it’ll be ready enough so when it inevitably gets ported to consoles my thoughts will help out.
Lastly, the misc/retro games. Microvaders I’m gonna cover before Gumball, since I’ve been holding that one off too to time with the actual full release of the game. I gave it a shoutout in my end of year roundup at least for some early thoughts, but with Microvaders being a game you can buy right now and a game I got a coupon for specifically to review, I wanna get that done soon. That might be a quick one to knock out if I struggle with writing a review during a week. Either way, I’m keeping real good at not requesting pretty much anything at all until I slim the queue down more, and the only thing I’m considering asking for now are retro reissues coming up very soon in the future. Those are the niche I enjoy the most, and the ones you seem to enjoy the most here, my readers. Thanks for that!
Fun Convention Plans? …Not this time.
The past two years I’ve gone to Midwest Gaming Classic and adored it. I really wanted to go again and do another impressions.
Alas, I won’t be this year. Various factors popped up but the biggest is lack of time, to be honest. Off of SFG I do IRL stuff like my usual daily routine and when I’m not doing that I’m out going to meetings every so often or doing community stuff or staying in touch with my local reps to try and help my own state through the mess we’re all in right now in the US. As the late Summer/Fall comes, I might unironically be busier knocking doors than writing here, and while I don’t like that idea, I’d rather live in a safe state where I can keep writing for you guys, than having another mess where I relocate or get cancer or some other dumb illness from a collapsing state budget. Your Local US Elections matter very, very much, every single year. Get involved as much as you can.
With that out of the way, let’s discuss my final, rambling (but not as much as it almost was) section and just general musings I have about… Well, everything. Feel free to click off now and just take my bolded message above as inspiration if you get stressed by current events being discussed, I am genuinely understanding with all that’s going on and how I feel.
Get a Grip
Multiple attempts to write this (before I realized most of it was restating thoughts from my July update) ended up rambling, so you’ll find this one to be rambling too, but I think it’s a needed discussion with the (small) platform I have, the stuff going on in the US, and stuff I’ve learned the past year by touching grass and getting involved locally in politics.
No, I’m not running for anything and I never will. But I wanted to help my town/community and thus joined an Indivisible group to do so, and it’s been the best choice I’ve made in my adult life. This combined with my Appblocking saved me from the pit of despair I was in last year, partly due to my constant death phobia anxiety I’ve had for 20 years now, and partly due to me being so used to social media and having friends in spaces I admired or who were dealing with all the chaos starting last year be understandably worried, that I ended up absorbing their doom and nearly not being able to take being around anymore. I mentioned more of that before and explained why I barely touch my Bsky now besides autoposting or calling out something that irks me.
But the more I listen to people, the more I follow content creators who actually know shit they’re talking about instead of being the loudest or most debate-bro like, the more I realize I really did take a lot of things for granted. My scare this month was further reenforcement of that. Now duh, you might be going “well we learn about the corruption of billionaires and working class and blah blah blah, more are aware than ever before” and I am not talking about that exclusively.
If anything, I’m more aware of not just systemic problems in the country (And how it ties to the failure of reconstruction from ages and ages ago), but the fact we can honestly, well-intentioned think we know everything about a certain topic or angle or people’s point of view and be proven wrong and find something new, helpful info to learn or realize you’ve been played. Celebs you looked up to that are actually pretty terrible people. People thought to be geniuses who are really, really, stupid (Hi Silicon Valley), and in a case I realize, popular social media accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers that are Ordinary People. I mean this not in a snooty “urgh i hate popular people” way, but a genuine realization/frustration I have with pretty much all social media sites; I think we give people who have higher follower counts a stronger image of them than they actually are in reality, and sometimes these very accounts can get a huge ego and end up being beyond insufferable, to the point I’m convinced it’s a huge rot of all the social media platforms.
Yes, even Bluesky. I’m glad people are increasingly calling out the loudest accounts for being annoying or posting doomer takes/misinformation as if fact, but more than once, especially last year when I got roped into following some people I no longer trust, the more I get mad at people who seem to have inherited the Twitter Brain effect of needing a higher # to feel special, and if they do have hundreds of thousands of followers, they feel like god, even if they don’t intend to act as such. Their takes become the ones debated on the entire site for days or weeks on end. Their posts get quoted and then those quotes get quoted. If it’s a doomer take people actually believe in, lord help your timeline, muting can only do so much, especially if you’re like me and want to follow people who also talk about world events.
I ain’t surprised Twitter/Threads explicitly exploits this and pay people money who get high engagement, which encourages them to do more engagement seeking stuff but on purpose and thus makes the whole mood of those sites bad, especially when they have an algorithm shoving garbage into your face 24/7. But even on the site that tries to avoid that crud, a lot of people still act that way I think by instinct; So much of us have been terminally online too long, not many people have tried an extended break to the extent I have, and that break is what made me realize stuff about life that yelling or loud words on the internet never will. While I’m glad Bluesky seems to discourage that behavior and not pay people for ragebait or anything, I can’t help but worry it too will fall to that rot, or the userbase will grow and gain a lot of people from some other site that has a fit and get worse. (I still maintain early-mid 2024 was peak Bluesky)
But man, the fact you could have 100K followers on well, any social media really, understand what might just be a minor ramble to you could easily spread like wildfire, and then you end up doing something like dooming or going “we’re all going to die” or “the apocalypse will happen”, it just doesn’t fucking help at all. Again, I’m glad I see this getting called out more too, (especially around the US Midterms, since people who don’t know civics keep thinking the elections are ran differently than they actually are, and someone who followed me worried about them… and didn’t like me telling him to be a poll worker if he was.) but I’m not kidding when I say it is immensely irresponsible to spread nihilism if you have a gargantuan following. Anxiety is OK, as is worry about stuff that is really horrifying; there’s a lot of that to worry about.
I think the one thing that helps keep me calm besides following some content creators who actually know their shit, is realizing even the dude bro with millions of followers who’s beyond annoying is just an Ordinary Person behind that computer screen. Pretty much all of us are, and I think the fact I’m small enough that I know most of my followers and readers are too is enough to keep me going and like the scale of SFG. But man, you can tell when someone who’s super popular or influential gets reckless with that influence and says something real dumb that either causes insufferable internet discourse for weeks, scares the shit out of everyone to the point of paralysis, or deliberately tries to grift off that high follower number.
It just comes off as real sad how high popularity can warp your mind and make you think you’re doing the right thing, even if you have blind spots or have an actually L needed to be taken. But some people are so adamant with no seeing their blind spots on systemic parts of society or the way Black Women are treated despite being the base of the Democratic Party who decide primaries, that it takes them finally getting offline to realize “oh shit, that’s how that works” in person rather than reading someone online talk about activism and justice for the billionth time without any evidence they did much besides post from their sofa.
So yeah, I dunno, forgive me if I roll my eyes at people doing discourse over an anxiety stemming from something possible two years from now, that’s a worry stemming more from an event in 2032, which is so far away I can’t even imagine what I’ll be covering on SFG at that point in time. I’m more focused on my local IRL stuff, keeping my friends, family and people I know safe, happy, healthy and protected, and focusing on the now. And how I’ll have to be doing this for my community in 2026, 2027, and so on until the end of time. I think a lot of people act the way they do about The Discourse because they can’t fathom a world in which they have to pay attention to what’s going on around them forever and ever, when that’s pretty much what minorities have had to do for their own survival going back centuries. They want some ideal outcome where they can tune out more easily, even though it will always continue, and being vigilant/protecting your community will always be needed. The events that led to the mess of now, took 40 years to set in motion, and that’s how you can let your guard down for too long only to realize the mess made by doing so.
It’s partly the same reason why you see a certain subset of people online complain about how they hate when things “get political” even if it’s as tame as letting you pick an LGBT option in a video game or a character being a person of color in a video game. They don’t want to ever get involved or even think about that stuff; they want to use their privilege to stay ignorant forever because they know they’ll be fine, and they hate hearing about the people who aren’t and not being able to ignore it.
If me saying I want Gaza to be safe since 2021, supporting Trans rights since 2017, Supporting the safety of Sudan since 2014, and hating the stuff SNK’s current owners have done with human rights abuse since SNK’s current owners took over is “too political” and drives you insane when I don’t even say it as every other word or whatnot, that’s on you. You don’t have to read my stuff. I just want everyone to be safe and protected. That shouldn’t be controversial. Yet here we are, and have been since 2014.
And I don’t think most reading this or my Bsky followers are the kind of people I get annoyed with; more or less, it’s the people who want to give up all their agency. Pretend everything is fine and nothing bad could happen to them specifically. The kind who use nostalgia as their means to try and recreate their past where they were insulated and safe from the outside, and continually get mad them playing Pokemon on their GBA doesn’t feel the same as when they were an eight year old not knowing what a Patriot Act was.
Anyhow that’s my ramble, really. Not even directed at anyone in particular, just general frustrations I notice the more I touch grass and get involved in my efforts to help make stuff suck less, and how I feel some people my age haven’t had that epiphany of “oh, that’s how this all works” because they’re too busy yelling on the internet 24/7 and have never door knocked or lit dropped in their life, even for something as easy to do as a school board.
But hey, that’s why I want people to stay safe, and will keep doing my part, even if the internet gets in stupid bickering matches online while me and millions of others do so to help make our part of the word more sane, while hoping others on the planet don’t let the same shadow of Populism sneak up on them when they let their guard down…
Conclusion
So yeah, that ramble was something I needed to get off my chest. Sorry if it got a bit weird/nonsensical at points or seemed like a repeat of that July update, but it really does irk me the more I do IRL and notice when people online clearly don’t ever do that but post like they have or know as much as the people who have, and then just use their big ass follower numbers to doom post or be a dweeb. Learn some civics, it’ll help you regardless of where you are.
But hey, I’m back in the game now, I feel like I have a routine getting back to me, and I am more than confident I should be able to get some fun stuff written this next month. Obviously the future is unknowable, but I will do my best to keep up the good work, and think of fun interviews I have in mind to pick back up…