Sony and the Cycle of Arrogance

 I won't likely finish this until it's no longer a timely topic, but I have opinions about the recently-announced decision by Sony to cease production of physical discs for Playstation games beginning in January of 2028.

 

You might think this is surprising coming from the company who effortlessly won the battle for consumer goodwill by clowning on Microsoft when they originally tried to make the Xbox One an online-only console, famously making a slide that read "how to share games on PS4" before one spokesperson simply handed the game to the other. I, however remember that Sony was the first major company to try a digital-only system with the PSP-Go (and the fact that you just now remember that existed, if you ever knew at all, is exactly how that went.) 

 

I guess if I had to sum up how I feel about it, I'd just say I'm disappointed, but not surprised. If you've followed the game industry for any length of time, you'll know this was always where we were headed. Particularly after Sony released a version of the PS5 without a disc drive, and notably, did not release a version of the PS5 Pro with one. They've wanted to not bother with physical releases since the PS3 days and I think the testing of the waters with the PSP-Go proves that. 

 

The reasons I, and others are upset about this should not need explaining, but I'm going to anyway, just in case it does. The lack of an option for physical games, means the death of the used game market (another thing the industry at large has wanted for the better part of two decades.) Videogames are expensive, £60 minimum is a lot of money for one of anything let alone an entertainment product specific to a system that already cost you hundreds up front. Many people buy their games used from stores, and trade in those they are done with to take down the cost. This option disappears with a digital-only system.

 That's the big one, but it's not the only one. I, personally, happen to like having a collection of physical games, trophies for the shelf, I'm not a collector by any means, but I do happen to have a collection, the volume of which fluctuates because I also trade in for new games sometimes and like the option of doing so. 

 

But okay, let's forget the collection thing for now, it's a first-world problem. The fact is, a lot of people simply cannot afford new games at full-price. A lot of children ask for games for birthdays and Christmas as their only means of getting them, and, strange as it may seem, some parents do like to see their children open their presents. This would of course require the presents to be...well, present. 

None of these things are options anymore without physical discs. The Playstation Store as yet does not have the functionality to gift games to others (which is doubly odd, because the PS5 implemented a wishlist feature without also giving us the ability to do the one thing a wishlist is useful for.)  

I'm going to assume you're not naive enough to think they'll lower the digital price-point because they're no longer paying production costs. Of course they won't, companies don't lower prices with costs. It is true that digital store-fronts run sales, in fact, the PS Store always has something on offer, but  you think it'll stay as good once it's your only option?

 All of this is not even mentioning the erosion of the concept of ownership. You don't own digital goods, you have a license to use them. The company can revoke that license at any time, for any, or no reason. Sony themselves recently delisted about 500 movies from people's accounts, meaning people couldn't watch movies they'd already bought and paid for. 

 

Licenses expire, this will happen again. 

 I'm not saying there aren't upsides to digital, obviously there are, people have always paid for convenience, and this is no different, but killing the option of physical ownership is bad for everyone whether you happen to choose that option yourself or not, monopolies are illegal for a reason.

 Thankfully, as I type this there has already surfaced a loud backlash against this announcement so there's hope. Vocally dissatisfied customers got Microsoft to back off on the aforementioned Xbox One policies, after all. There's a reason I keep bringing that up, and it's now time to get to the point of this post. 

 

It seems, that with every generation of consoles, one of the "big three" gets too big for their britches and makes a blatantly anti-consumer move. Invariably this is whichever one of the three has been doing the best of the last generation, and invariably they are humbled by the next one. 

 So, let's recap.

 about 20 years ago, the sixth generation of consoles was coming to an end. Sega's Dreamcast had underperformed to the point that it would be their final console (shame, I liked that one) They would be joined, and subsequently replaced in sales contest by Microsoft, with their debut console, the original Xbox, which appeared late in the game, and thus was left scrambling for an audience,which it found with the innovation of online play, which, for consoles was a new thing at the time. Nintendo's Gamecube, despite being the most powerful on the market at the time, never quite captured the global audience outside the Nintendo diehards (Like teenage me!)

 This battle of sales was ultimately won by Sony's Playstation 2. Which remains the bestselling console of all time to this day with 160 million units sold Back then, the fact of it also doubling as a DVD Player (a highly sought-after item of the time.) was a huge boost for potential custom. Even people who didn't play games wanted one in the house for the DVD functionality, and many of those people would've had kids they could distract with the games. 

So, with the PS2 sat firmly at the top of the mountain, Sony was the one to watch for the seventh generation of consoles.

 Enter the Playstation 3.

I still have one of those, I loved it in the end, but at the time, this monolithic slab of a console was announced to cost $600, or £400, in 2006, which, adjusted for inflation, is equivalent to $949 or £711 today (or 829 Euros) 

  That, is a frankly ridiculous amount of money to expect for a console, even if it had a strong launch library which, frankly, it didn't. The PS3 was also one of the first commercial Blu-Ray players on the market, but the jump between DVD and Blu-Ray was significantly smaller than that from VHS to DVD, and so had people proportionately less excited to try it. 

When the idea that the price tag was too high was floated, the suggestion made was to get a second job to afford one. 

 So, we have, a huge lump of a console, promising to be really good at some point in the future when something worth playing comes out on it, an obscenely high price tag, a multimedia gimmick that worked before, but was much less a selling point this time, and the arrogance to tell the peasants to work harder to own one. 

I'll give you one guess how that went down. Arguably Sony's greatest accomplishment here was boosting the sales of the Xbox 360, which had a year's head-start and a much more reasonable price. 

The PS3 would, eventually claw back the customer's goodwill, eventually marginally outselling the 360 by the time both were officially discontinued. But it was rough there for a good stretch of time, I think Sony had to sell them at a loss for a while. But they were both, ultimately, competing for 2nd place.

 The Gamecube, mentioned earlier, while a great console in its own right (I'd buy one again today if I had anywhere to put it) was the unfortunate also-ran of the sixth generation. It had neither the all-in-one media functionality of the PS2, nor the exciting lure of online multiplayer boasted by the Xbox. It did well among Nintendo fans for it's IP, but it was always going to. Nintendo then seemed to go the opposite route for their next outing, being the most powerful and a dedicated system for videogames hadn't helped them, they needed something to attract more casual audiences.

Yep, here comes the Wii.

  I hardly think I need to explain to anyone what a Nintendo Wii is, statistically there's probably one cluttering up your house. Suffice it to say, Nintendo abandoned cutting edge hardware to make a play for the casual living-room audience, and it paid off spectacularly. if I remember correctly, the Wii broke into the top 3 in all-time sales at one point.

 The Wii wasn't a traditional console, though it could work as one, and it didn't play DVDs or even CDs as most hardware was expected to be able to. It marketed itself much more like a toy than a piece of technology. The Wii motion-controls were front-and-center and made everyone want to try this new thing. "I can play games while exercising!" was the general flavour of excitement as I recall, and it worked. 

 

Everyone I knew had at least had a go on Wii Sports. I was lucky enough to get one for my birthday of that year when they were impossible to find, and I seldom got off it for the next few days. If I wasn't using it, someone else in my house was. This living room party vibe had served Nintendo very well where sales were concerned. The advent of the Wii, did however have a couple of unconventional effects on the wider game industry for the subsequent half decade. 

 Firstly. The Wii was not much more powerful than the Gamecube had been, it was the only contemporary console to still be using a SCART lead and not support HD. Also, while it did have, and support more conventional controllers, the "waggle-stick" motion controls had gained it a sort of eye-rolling scorn from the more 'hardcore' crowd. 

This comparative lack in raw power meant that 3rd-party games needed an entirely separate Wii Version to be developed because it couldn't handle a port from its contemporary consoles, further insulating it from them, and creating a bizarre situation where the Wii, despite being undoubtedly the most successful console on the market at the time, is somehow not considered to be in the same race. 

 And so the "console war" was silently reframed, at least by audiences, as a duel between Sony and Microsoft, with Nintendo off doing its own thing, however much more money it was raking in. The arrival of Playstation Move and Kinect was proof that from the industry side of things the other two were still very much chasing that Wii money.

 

The motion control craze eventually passed as such things do. Not even the Wii could ride high forever. Sitting pretty on over 100 million sales is great, but hardware was evolving, and so Nintendo decided to re-enter the console race proper, despite having essentially won it by not doing that. 

 Enter the Wii U. 

 I liked the Wii U, I still have mine in fact, it's about 5-feet away from me as I type this, on my windowsill collecting dust on the off chance I might want to play Wind Waker HD again. I had a copy of Twilight Princess HD too but that has gone missing, unfortunately. Anyway, the point being, those were the only two games I cared about that weren't later ported to the Switch, which should tell you all you need to know about how the Wii U sold. Did you happen to know that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was originally a Wii U game? Not even that could save it.

 

To this day, I'm not sure what was more responsible for the Wii U's underperformance. It worked much more like a traditional console, but the tablet-controller gimmick was nevertheless cumbersome and unnecessarily complicated. We're all used to controllers needing to be recharged at this point, and Nintendo experimenting with 2nd screens worked well for the DS, which sits at number 3 having, in it's unusually long production run outsold the Wii and Wii U combined and more than doubled the sales of its successor with 154 million units, but for some reason the talk of the industry is never about handhelds for some reason.

In practice though, it wasn't the most comfortable thing to hold, jarring to look down to when the other screen is your TV, and not to mention bloody expensive. God forbid you wanted to play local multiplayer with someone, which, believe it or not, some still did, especially in Nintendo circles. Who among us hasn't sat in a room full of people destroying their friendships over Mario Kart? A more traditional pro controller did exist, but it was expensive, and felt cheaply made, as I recall. 

 The Wii U did feature backwards-compatibility with the previous console, making it unique in that regard as the PS4 and Xbox One both had abandoned that feature, but everyone already had a Wii. In fact I distinctly recall reading that many didn't realise the Wii U was a new console, assuming it was an upgrade like Wiimotion Plus.  

 

The Wii U was under-marketed and overcomplicated. It was more true to what the core audiences idea of a console was, but still a generation behind on hardware. (I would personally argue that this wasn't the problem others state it as, the games looked as good as they needed to, and scale was already sufficient, but that still doesn't compete on paper.)  The Wii U sold miserably for a Nintendo console, the worst-performing mainline console in the company's history, it failed to equal the lifetime sales of the Gamecube, never mind the Wii. 

Meanwhile , as Nintendo limped back to the drawing board, Microsoft and Sony switched places in the eyes of many customers. The PS3, despite it's rocky start, had managed to accrue a large following with its library of exclusive games, the God of War, Yakuza, and Infamous games are the ones that come to my mind, but there was also Killzone, and Ratchet & Clank. I remember LittleBigPlanet being popular too, though I never actually got around to those. I should also mention that most of these are no longer Sony exclusive, but they were then. Playstation Plus was a boon for me too, games included in your online subscription? If you must suddenly charge for online play, that is how you sweeten the deal.

 In the end, the PS3 managed to, by a narrow margin, actually outsell the Xbox 360. I had both, but I ended up pretty much exclusively on Playstation (and Wii for first-party only after being burned by the Wii version of Smackdown vs Raw 2008) since two separate 360s Red-Ringed on me and died. (The idea that your console could just stop working for no clear reason one day had never entered my mind until it happened.)

 

By the time my second Xbox died on me, my dad had bought me a PS3 for my birthday that year, which I wanted to play Metal Gear Solid 4 but then I found that all those other exclusives I mentioned were much more my thing than Halo and I honestly couldn't name another 360 exclusive without googling, so I stuck with that from then on. 

 

Anyway, it was a close race, but Sony had narrowly avoided disaster with the '3, and I think that lesson was still in their minds, because it would be Microsoft, who made the next blunder.

 

Who remembers the Xbox One announcement? 

 

So, Microsoft take the stage to announce their new console, successor to the 360, the Xbox One. not to be confused with the original Xbox which was also sometimes called that colloquially. The "One" in this case, was meant as a reference to how many machines you would need below your TV with this in your house, at least that was the idea. 

See, Microsoft went all-in on "all-in-one entertainment box" gimmick with the Xbox One. So much so that there exists a supercut on YouTube of the phrase "TV" being said no  less than 51 times during the reveal presentation. The emphasis on TV, and not games for this console didn't have to be a dealbreaker. Clearly, Microsoft were thinking of the boost that DVD functionality gave to the PS2, "Xbox One will be the next water cooler" they said. They wanted to replicate the universal appeal that the Wii enjoyed as the main living room entertainment device that people gathered around. 

 

As much as that presentation was clowned on back in 2013 for the neglect of games by this games console, there is an observable logic there that one can believe led them to think this would go down well...provided you completely ignore things like the wider context of the market at the time.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, that was not the worst of their decisions. If their failure to read the room was the only problem perhaps their all-in-one system idea might have worked. But I doubt it, for several reasons. Firstly, media functionality was already expected of consoles at the time, in fact, the PS3 is how I first got Blu-Ray and Netflix, which was on the rise at the time, and live TV was ceasing to be the draw that Microsoft assumed it was for their console, so I don't think there exists a timeline where the emphasis on TV has the desired effect. But even if it could, there was a much more sinister design philosophy at play. 

 If you were paying attention back then, you know exactly why the Xbox One would colloquially become known for a while as the 'Xbone'. If treating the videogames the core audience cared about as an afterthought was not enough, Microsoft also announced that the console would be online-only, and require daily check-ins on pain of losing all game functionality, which sounds excessive even today. 

This was to say nothing of restrictions placed on playing used games, which boil down to all games, physical and digital, being tied to a users' Xbox Live account, and therefore non-transferrable except at the discretion of the publishers and 'participating retailers.' digital ownership could be transferred to registered "family" accounts but only once per game. As I recall, resale would be the decision of the publisher, which was obviously just a way to open the door for refusal while weaselling out of responsibility for that decision. 

 

The backlash was faster, and more furious than Vin Diesel's entire filmography.

 

So intense was it, that Adam Orth left Microsoft due to the backlash to his tweet telling customers to "deal with it." and then-spokesman Don Mattrick, (who is listed on Wikipedia as being known for 'Developing Xbox Kinect' and the 'failed launch of the Xbox One) Had only to say to critics that if they disliked the always-online requirement, and wanted an offline console "we have a system for that, it's called Xbox 360." Effectively telling the critics to fuck off. 

Less than a month later these blatantly anti-consumer policies were categorically reversed, less than a month after that, Don Mattrick left Microsoft to become CEO of Zynga, for less than two years. 

 

I couldn't tell you whether or not the Xbox One eventually became worth buying, I never bought one. What I can tell you, as I mentioned at the top of this post, is that off the back of their blunder Sony walked into an open goal simply by not changing anything for the PS4, to the point that their abandonment of backwards compatibility wasn't even a deal-breaker, as salty as I remain about it. 

 

(I just think that should still be a standard, it was assumed right up until the PS3, I don't care how different the architecture is, as a customer that's not my problem and emulation exists.)

 

Sony scored a lot of points in 2013 by just keeping things largely as they were, and the "how to share games on PS4 shade" being legendary. That is not, however mentioning one of my favourite features on PS4, and eventually 5, that I use several times a week for streams, the Share-Play function, where you can let someone in a party with you take over control of your game for up to an hour. I've had a lot of fun with that feature, and friends of mine have got to experience games I had without having to buy them first, which I see as an absolute win for customers.

 

I know for a fact this has resulted in several friends of mine buying games they might otherwise not have because they got to try them properly first. There's also share-screen, which lets people watch in real-time, also great for virtual hang-outs.

 So yeah, unequivocal W for Sony there, I don't know whether or not any other console has this feature, but I use it all the time. The PS4 did really well, partly because they didn't try taking the piss, partly because Microsoft did.

 

But remember Nintendo? 

 

You'll remember of course, that Nintendo was beaten bloody in the last round by the poor sales of the Wii U. So back to the drawing board they went. It would be tempting to throw out the entire design of something that sold so poorly, but they didn't do that, they took what worked, ditched what didn't, and the result sits comfortably in the number 2 slot Right behind the PS2 with nearly 156 million sales 

Yep, it's the Switch.  I don't need to describe it, you know what a Nintendo Switch is, but just in case you don't;

Nintendo appeared to take the portability and touch-screen functionality of the DS, the Wii U's tablet control design, and make it the whole console that you could dock with your TV or take with you as you saw fit. Not only that, but the controls were flexible in a way I'd never seen before, they detached from the screen and could function as one or two controllers for local multiplayer. Also, apropos of nothing the Switch Pro controller is the most comfortable controller I've ever held and I wish I could use it with everything. 

 Was it as powerful as it's contemporaries? Still no, but that wasn't going to be a problem this time, it was powerful enough. It could handle 720p, and graphics had hit the point of diminishing returns a generation ago anyway. 

 

It was doubly a non-issue because this is Nintendo we're talking about and their in-house IP thrived on art direction that they were already more than powerful enough to utilise to better effect than any amount of raw power. The comparative lack of which also meant the Switch was noticeably cheaper, which, let me tell you, made a difference. A handheld that was also a console? Proof if proof be needed that the PS VITA WOULD'VE WORKED IF SONY INVESTED IN IT!

YOU HAD IT YOU FOOLS! 

 

Add to that the fact that it was just about strong enough to run ports, (less visually impressive, but well-handled more than not) and Nintendo was no longer a First-Party only console in the race. and with the advent of cloud gaming this generation that becomes less of an issue if you have good internet. Not everyone does, which is unfortunate, but the point is solutions exist.

But all of that pales next to the "take it out and play it with friends" marketing, Nintendo had done it again, the "Get everyone involved" console was reborn. I can personally attest that people I know who didn't give a crap about games came over asking to play Mario Kart 8. Such was the success of the Switch, that Nintendo waited the longest time in their history since the NES to release a successor. It had previously been every five years, like clockwork. 

 

The Switch reigned supreme for eight glorious years. (One of which, it must be said, was 2020, when the world broke, and everyone was stuck inside, right at the time Nintendo released Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which I have at least 250 hours in and I will not be the only one.) 

 The Switch would go on to outsell even the Wii by over 50%. Think about that, think how ubiquitous the Wii was, I know you remember.  So once again, Sony and Microsoft were left battling it out for the silver medal. Won quite handily by the PS4 with approximately 117 million sales to the Xbox One's approximately 58 million. But now something interesting happens. Basically, they all lose the plot in their own unique ways. Sony arguably comes out the better, but only in hardware terms. They were the only console to not allow cross-play in Fortnight for example. 

The next, and current generation of consoles seems to have settled into the old ways of making, basically the same thing, but stronger. I think this was a good idea, though I also think we don't need another one because when it comes to raw power we're basically as good as we need to be. Maps are already ridiculous, graphics are as good as they're worth making, and loading times are basically gone, we're there, I think. 

 The only one I'd argue screwed up their actual console, was Microsoft, by releasing two of them, the Xbox One S, and the Xbox One X. I couldn't tell you the difference between them, I think one of them is cheaper and has a smaller hard drive? Either way, that's needlessly confusing, and to someone who isn't following, doesn't clearly communicate a generational upgrade, similar to the Wii U's unclear marketing. 

 The PS4-PS5 transition was a good deal smoother, as necessitated by scalpers buying them all up before anyone who wanted one could get their hands on them. I was lucky enough to find mine in a GAME shop, and lucky me, it happened to be one with a disc drive. Oh, yeah, remember, not all of them had disc drives. Sony subtly angling for all-digital again. 

 

A few years later, the PS5 Pro comes out. There is no disc-drive version, you can instead buy a bulky expensive add-on to this already PC-tower-sized, expensive console if you want to play disc-based media. Dick move Sony. 

 

At least it's backwards compatible with PS4. In fact, it took people so long to get a hold of PS5s that they kept releasing PS4 versions of games for years. Couldn't tell you about the Xboxes, never bought one, I didn't have to either, because in a rare pro-consumer move, Microsoft launched Xbox Game Pass, which allowed people with PCs to download and play their games on that. Until they tripled the price and lost a ton of subscribers, myself included (wasn't using it much anyway) 

 Nintendo rode high on the Switch, as mentioned, for eight years, before finally begrudgingly releasing a successor, the Switch 2, Which was basically, the Switch, but more, which was all I wanted, it has been stated to be comparable in power to the PS4 Pro, which I think is plenty. I don't have one yet, but I will by the time the generational Zelda game comes out. It's sold about 20 million so far.

Now, a couple of things Nintendo has done, I don't know whether to put at the feet of the cycle of arrogance I'm talking about today, or put down to Nintendo operating on moon logic, but there are some decisions I find quite baffling.  One story in particular has me questioning which it might be. 

 I read once of someone who's Nintendo account got banned, because he played a Switch game on it that he bought used. I looked into it, and here is, as best as I could find, what happened.

 

So, how Nintendo detects piracy, is with unique product codes that every copy of every game, physical or digital, is issued with. If they see the same code in two places at once, that means someone has pirated that copy, and they ban both accounts. (The fact that one of those accounts was the official code is, apparently, not important to that decision.) 

Soon after the launch of the Switch 2, there was released, a kind of data cartridge, that one could copy the data of their original Switch cartridges onto for the convenience of not having to swap cartridges to play a different game.

Yes, exactly that, incredibly predictable scenario, is the one that occurred.

 

Someone buys the data cartridge, copies a bunch of Switch games onto them, doesn't need the original copies, so sells them on eBay. Someone else picks one up, no idea it's been copied, plays it, their account gets banned. In fairness, as soon as they got in touch with Nintendo and provided proof of a second-hand purchase, the account was restored, but that doesn't alter the fact that they were banned for no wrongdoing in the first place.

Dick move Nintendo. Especially since it was your product that enabled this thing that somebody at some point was obviously going to do.  Add to that the fact that Nintendo as an entity has long held a certain aloofness that only they could get away with due to their owning much of the most beloved IP in gaming.

 

 Just to remind you, they haven't lowered prices on first-party games since the Gamecube if I remember correctly. A Switch copy of Super Mario Odyssey costs the same today as it did in 2017 give-or-take maybe a fiver at most. All fairness, it is a bloody good game, but no matter the quality, a nine-year old game should not still cost as near as damn it to full price. I bring that up, because, frankly, I can forgive this of Nintendo of 2017, I could've forgiven it of Nintendo of today, if not for one thing.

 

They were the first to raise game prices even higher. 

I don't want to get too fanboyish on you. But for me, part of the charm of Nintendo being about a generation behind the others, is that this frequently meant that they were also about a generation behind on the other's bullshit.  

They weren't supposed to be the ones to lower the bar! They were supposed to be the ones who only recently begrudgingly acknowledged the existence of the internet and kept making a game console like they always had! They released an instruction demo for the Switch 2 as a $10 game, and charged the same for upgrading to the Switch 2 version of Switch games.

 

I'll freely admit that I was more disappointed in Nintendo for those decisions than I would've been in either of the other companies for the same ones, I expect that kind of thing of them.

The late former CEO of Nintendo Satoru Iwata twice cut his own salary in half to avoid firing anybody when Nintendo fell on hard times. If you want to solve the world's energy crisis, attach jump-cables to the man's coffin, I'm fairly sure the rotational velocity thereof could power every home in the world for at least a generation! 

And yet, I'm going to end up buying a Switch 2, I might, for the first time in twenty years, end up going full-Nintendo if Sony's plans for a disc-less future are not changed. Despite their decline, Nintendo may end up being the least bad option. At least they're still entertaining physical sales, even if begrudgingly.

I've noticed Sony has scrubbed my play-time from the games I had on disc by the way. Oh, and also they were talking about enforcing a monthly online check-in on pain of losing access to your games. So they've just adopted a more forgiving version of the old Xbox One policy that they capitalised on the outrage of! 

 

Despite everything, I do have hope that they will reverse this decision. Since I started writing this post, several petitions have blown up asking Sony to reconsider, and many other brands are taking pot-shots at Sony on social media. The decision also seems to have taken a lot of game companies by surprise.

Basically no company is doing well for customer reception right now, but this move by Sony just smacks of it being their turn to be humbled. About 20 years later, here we are again. Even relative to all three of them making baffling decisions, Sony has taken the proverbial cake. 

 A question you might reasonably ask is, if this pattern of hubris and humbling is as consistent as I'm saying. If it is this reliable a pattern, this, dare I say, predictable...

 Then why do they keep doing it!?

 I don't think it is any one thing. I haven't kept track of executive turnover for the various companies, but I feel comfortable assuming one corporate exec is as much a short-sighted greedy moron as the next. I do think we've reached a point where it has become the norm to grasp at straws for any extra profit one can make regardless of long-term costs, this is observable across pretty much every business everywhere, so that will be part of it. 

 

But I think the larger point here is that all three companies, regardless of how much they dunk on whoever's turn it is to be incautious, are all pushing towards the same future, and all managing their own brand of enshittification. 

They all want this, they all agree with what Sony is doing long-term, they just happen to take turns getting cocky based on who is the most successful at the time. Even if true though, that doesn't explain why they keep forgetting what happened to the last one to try it less than a decade ago. 

Personally, I subscribe to the theory that, somehow, every time, without fail, the most successful company of any given generation gets it into their head that the value of their products has been assumed by their brand, and that brand is what the customer is paying for, or at the very least, will buffer them from the consequences of bad decisions. 

They believe this despite overstepping and being proven wrong every single time. Were I more conspiratorial, I might point out, that we are currently living in the always-online future that the Xbox One was lambasted for wanting to push on us, or as near as makes little difference. It started with the necessity of installing games onto a console. 

 

The last game I know to have been entirely contained on disc was the original release of Yakuza 0 on the PS4, for my money, a great game that went from uninstalled to playable in seconds, (not to mention of a reasonable file size) but even that required installation onto the console and wouldn't run from the disc. We're already all-digital in all-but name. But for now, physical copies still offer the option of borrowed games and resale, and that's what they don't want us to have. 

 This is why it's always worth pushing back. It's the classic "foot in the door" approach, we're going towards this future whether we want to or not, one creeping concession at a time. Sony's latest folly is just the most recent example of the industry at large wanting to know where the line is and see how much it can get away with. Even if they backpedal on this one (and I'm confident they will) it's coming eventually unless something fundamental changes. 

This year, it's discs, who's to say it won't one day be digital purchases? One day we could be entirely at the mercy of cloud-gaming subscription services at multiple times the price with no control over what we can or can't play on current hardware, don't think they're not thinking about it.

It's been good to see people pushing back against this, but these companies don't care beyond the next month or so, all they'll do is reduce the size of each step.

 

Give them nothing. 

Review: Avatar: The Last Airbender: Season 2 (Live Action)

 Seven episodes is not a season. I don't care, I don't care if each one is an hour long. Has it occurred to anyone that maybe we weren't supposed to be able to binge a season of television in a day? 

 

That opening complaint aside, it's been a while since I did a written review of anything, and I happened to binge this yesterday so...yeah let's do this. 

 

Okay, let's get the big questions out of the way first, before elaborating. Is it great? No. Is it at least better than season 1? Mostly. Does it at least look good? In places! That being out of the way, let's get to the meat of the matter. I am, unclear on the need for this show to exist. It feels very "Disney live-action remake" to me, and that's not a compliment.  If you aren't a fan of the original show or otherwise don't have that to compare it to, you might find this entertaining, or at the very least, nice to look at now and then, but "it's entertaining as long as you're not the target audience" is damning by about as faint praise as faint gets. 

 

I've never understood this fascination with live-action adaptations of properties that clearly weren't designed for live-action. Imagine if someone talking to you said, "Hey, remember that thing we loved as kids? Here it is again, with 50% more compromise and 80% lifelessness!" That's what these pitches feel like to me. I find it baffling that the only Netflix live-action adaptation to work really well has been One Piece of all things! 

 

So I guess that sums up where I'm at, Netflix's live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender adaptation is, in my opinion, a series of compromise. The first season felt, to me like it was embarrassed to be what it was, which, in my opinion is always one of the worst forms of compromise because it's insulting to the target audience and comes off as insecure to people who have even a passing familiarity. 

 

Season 2 is much better in that regard. I must say, I believe the source material may have done more to win the showrunners over this time around. That said, I think the show definitely could've done with at least ten episodes, and not just to spend more time in the world, which is, in places, beautifully realised (in other places it looks like they could've done with another pass or two, but let's not dwell on that.) 

 To explain my main issue with the series' runtime to anyone not familiar, I'll have to explain why people are still so enamoured with a 20 year-old Nickelodeon cartoon. The simple reason is, that 20 year-old Nickelodeon cartoon features some of the best character-writing ever contained within 23-minute episodes of television. Personal aside incoming so if you already know what I'm talking about, or just have little patience for rambling and don't want to hear part of my life-story, skip the next few paragraphs, I'll put some bold lettering where you can skip to. 

 

I never caught Airbender on TV back then, I was more of a Cartoon Network kid. I typically had an hour and a half of TV time after school and I spent it with Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy followed by two episodes of Dragon Ball Z before I retreated to my room to play videogames and not do homework. 

 I did happen to put Avatar on once, one day, and do you know which episode was on? The Great Divide. The universally agreed-upon singular episode we don't talk about. It wasn't terrible to be fair, it just didn't sell me on the show. It came across as a generic kids adventure series and I didn't think much about it after that. 

 I've always wanted to be a writer, so a decade or so later I got (and remain) quite into writing videos on YouTube. My favourites are Overly Sarcastic Productions and Hello Future Me both of whom frequently referenced Avatar so I thought "I should probably watch this show." With all due apologies to the friends who recommended it to me for my not giving it a chance when they said to, you were right, all of you were right. 

 

Yeah, it ended up being really good, even to my 25+ year-old self. It was still kids media, so certain preset parameters must exist. But it was kids media that respects its audience, in the vein of something like Star Wars: The Clone Wars or Animorphs (which I'm currently going through with my friend Dan every other week for Tome Raider, our book club series plug plug plug.) If you can keep in mind the target audience, and tolerate a bit of childishness in the main characters, who after all, are children, you'll find characters in here whose journeys will stick with you. A series building on foundations episode by episode until that wonderfully sad moment when it's over and you don't know what to do with yourself. That's the kind of show this was. 

 

Okay, aside over, skip to here if you already knew all that stuff

  So, season 2. For the most part, they have the aesthetic down, and I even like at least one of the changes made, but I do have to say that, even at an hour an episode, seven episodes leaves us with only half the runtime of the original that this is trying to tell the same story as, which means cuts have to be made. That didn't have to be a problem, it can be done, but unfortunately, season 2 falls a bit short. I'll get to that later but I want to talk a little more positively about it first. 

 As I mentioned, they've got the look down pat when it counts, the casting is incredible and some of the establishing shots are great. This season feels much less ashamed of the source material and some scenes are adapted beat-for-beat, line-for-line. 

One of the big changes is the timeline. The original story takes place over a year or two, I think. Obviously, that's not workable in a live-action format where the cast ages in real time, so they incorporated time-skips to account for that. Good change, you'd be surprised how often people don't account for child actors ageing. 

Unfortunately that's about the only change that enhances immersion rather than detracting. There is one that is fun, but in their haste to get through the story they omit important character moments. Even some of the ones they keep in are either muted or outright uncharacteristic. 

 The one spoiler I will give is that they cut out the Avatar State training with the Guru, the part where, in the original, Aang is told to let go of his attachment to Katara, he chooses not to, even at the cost of never being able to use his greatest weapon as long as he holds on. I understand that it was cut for time, but without it, his decision to use the Avatar state later carries much less weight than it originally did. 

I bring that example up specifically, because A), technically telling you something that doesn't happen is a much less egregious spoiler, and B), it's a microcosm of this show's compromises to fit a reduced runtime. 

 

So many of the moments we remember fondly from the show are in here, but they don't carry the same weight because important context is changed or outright missing. It's not always in aid of pacing either, important decisions are simply not made. Also, minor spoiler, Aang is uncharacteristically unkind to his friends towards the end. I get that they're arguing in that scene but no version of him, including this one, would've believably gone that far before he did. That moment really took me out of it, what can I say? 

 

There are improvements made over season one in characterisation (particularly early on) but unfortunately not in dialogue, it's...I don't know what to call it. I'm thinking of one scene in particular I'll say "the metalbending scene" and if you haven't seen it that should probably be vague enough, that seems like it was going for grandiose but just came off...well...

 

I'm reminded of hearing once that entertainment executives suggested that characters should state aloud what they're doing in dialogue in case "someone is making spaghetti or something" (apparently ignoring that they would need to turn on the show and deliberately ignore it for that to happen, and the fact that audio-description has been an option since streaming began) at least that's how I remember it. 

 

That particular moment strikes me as the writers having been worried that the audience wouldn't understand what was going on, and had the character just...announce it to camera. It's presented as a moment of triumph but feels like one of exposition. That's probably the main offender but he dialogue, while generally not as bad as that is still fairly clunky throughout. That said, there isn't a single actor involved in this that isn't doing their damnedest to make it work, the performances are unquestionable. 

 I didn't want to fixate on the negatives, but I find myself with little else to actually say, as even the good parts of this show are muted versions of the original. There is enough good to be going on with though, I did enjoy it despite my misgivings, and if you don't have the attachment to the original source that I do, I can see the uninitiated having a good time with this. 

 

 Overall, season 2 represents a big improvement, but leaves a lot of room for more. If you didn't rage-quit season one, you might actually enjoy this one, and if it's the only version you've seen, you might even be taken in by it. 

What could've been though. 

Art, and why you should still do it yourself.

I just finished working on another post whinging about A.I. and you might well be wondering why I care so much about this specific issue, I don't enjoy whining about things that are pissing me off as much as others seem to. Bizarrely motivating though a good rant often is, it's not something I particularly enjoy doing or want to be known for. 

 

Instead then, with this post I'm going to try and approach it from the other side, talking about the positives of human endeavour rather than the negatives of A.I. As Sir Terry Pratchett once wrote, "Real stupidity beats Artificial Intelligence every time." (Incidentally, he came up with Hex, something extremely similar to modern A.I chatbots, in a book released in 1994.) 

 

When I say "Art" I don't mean just pictures, I mean the umbrella term that means any form of artistic expression. Anything at all, whatever medium speaks to you. Incidentally, I suppose performance art is the one I got two degrees in, but in terms of practice (due largely to opportunity to practice) writing is my main one lately, but I've dabbled in others too. 

 

This speaks less to my being in any way multi-talented than it does to me being indecisive and easily distracted by shiny new ideas. This is the main reason I've never managed to finish a novel despite having at least six works in progress at any given time.

Well, I used a word there I don't like to throw around, "talented." In my experience, when people use that word, they treat the concept of talent as a god-given gift that one either has, or doesn't. You know where I'm going with the next part, this is not the case. Talent, or skill, or whatever you want to call it, is not a gift. It is a reward.

 

Sure, some things come easier to some people, we're all wired towards different things, and where on any given aptitude scale we start out does seem pretty random, But anything you practice, you'll get good at, mobility on that scale is not just possible, it's inevitable. Any given artistic skill you may be honing needs practice like your body needs exercise, 

 

I think people in general are pretty bad at understanding the concept of granular progression, or how quickly improvement can build. It's not exactly an artistic endeavour in itself, but in aid of one day being able to write faster, I am practicing touch-typing as I write this, trying to use all ten fingers on the correct keys. Muscle memory still isn't quite there, but trouble with numbers and using the pinkies aside, I flatter myself I've got to be decent at it. Until last year I was a habitual "claw" typer. index, middle, and thumb for spaces was all I used. my then-max speed of roughly 40 words a minute, is now something I can comfortably match and exceed without really trying. (But good lord was the early going frustrating.) 

 

Thing about that is, I was of the age where this was taught in school, which apparently it no longer is, but I slacked off, fell behind, and while I was still looking down at the keyboard and hunting and pecking with my index fingers, I'd look to my left, and one of my school friends (visually impaired I might add) had a black cardboard covering over his hands to prevent looking down and  words were materialising on his screen at speeds incomprehensible to a tween who hadn't got his head around the concept of practice yet. 

Some people, I think, have trouble getting their heads around learning a skill as opposed to having one, and those that don't universally underestimate how much there is to anything. Separate even from that is the challenge of being mindful of your own progress when surrounded by people to whom you compare inferior. I never cared enough about touch-typing to want to get good at it back at school, and it's only a year or so ago it occurred to me to try. But do you know what taught me the value of putting in the time as well as the creeping nature of gradual improvement? It was Kingdom Hearts.

 I am being 100% sincere. The Disney/Final Fantasy crossover PS2 game about using the power of friendship and a massive key to twat the concept of darkness over the head while Donald Duck refuses to heal you. That Kingdom Hearts. I did write the story under this, but it ended up being really long, so I think I'm just gonna make that its own post. The point of it being though, being denied the ability to cheat my way to beating Ansem, and subsequently, Sephiroth, and having nothing else I felt like doing, I discovered the simple joy of actually putting in the time to make things happen, which, bizarrely for a fan of JRPGs, I had not yet internalised. 

Beating a video game might seem trivial, and it is. But that was the first time I accomplished a goal that took any amount of commitment and continuous effort. (no, I didn't do particularly well in school to that point.) 

 

But this is the point. If all you're interested in, is the result, the product, then I understand why things like generative AI appeal to you, and, with all due respect, I don't think you'd even comprehend how people would see the difference, but the difference is there, and people do see it. 

 If you look at things in, what I've come to refer to as a mechanical way, then the difference between a hand-drawn image and an AI generated one may be very little at first glance, (assuming the AI didn't warp it, which I've seen happen a lot, you can't really get away from this stuff on social media these days.)  But, I've come to realise something about people and specialisation. There's always more to it. I'll repeat that for emphasis. There is always more to it. 

I'm not just talking about art anymore, I could be talking about any area of expertise you could think of. Anything anyone could specialise in. I've also observed that people tend to think anything except their specific specialisation can be automated by AI, and I've come to believe, that they are all wrong. 

 During the 2020 lockdown, I saw this anecdote about Chess floating about that also made me think about this, and I'm gonna paraphrase it for brevity. 

Basically, all else being equal, an adult will beat a 5 year-old at chess, 100% of the time, that same adult will lose 100% of games to an experienced amateur, who will lose 100% of games to a Chess grandmaster. To that Chess grandmaster, that experienced amateur stands the same chance of winning as the 5 year-old: 0. To them, they are the same.

Those layers of expertise can exist in any field. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a real thing, it is entirely possible to not even know enough about a thing, to know how little you know. Would you listen to a five year-old who barged into your office, telling you how to do your job? No? What if that same five year-old told you your job could be done with AI? 

 How the hell would they know, right? 

If you need a different example, former professional basketballer Brian "White Mamba" Scalabrine who, as I understand it (I don't follow basketball, I just heard a story, so forgive me if any of this is wrong.) was one of the lower-tier players in the NBA. He famously did a show called "The Scallenge" where he would go one-on-one with volunteers, who were fairly confident due to his relatively low performance (I stress, for the NBA, which is the point here.) he won all four times, letting only 3 baskets past, and scoring 22 throughout the challenge, coining the immortal line "I'm closer to LeBron than you are to me."

So if you wouldn't listen to the five year-old, what about the adult? The one who doesn't play chess, but would still beat them every time? I'm betting, if they're not in your field, the answer is still no. Because even if you're the experienced amateur in this story, you're closer to that grandmaster than they are to you. 

So the next time you think something is doable by AI (which, famously, is wrong about everything anyway.) Remember that, like ogres, areas of expertise, have layers. 

 Even apart from that though, if I have a wider point to make, it is that the process is the point. No Chess grandmaster thought they'd be one from day one, no expert in any field had it fall into their lap, and it's not a bad thing if you don't understand something,  none of us, know what we don't know. All of us are the 5 year-old in most fields, and the only functional difference between the 5 year-old and the inexperienced adult is knowing that those layers exist. 

 The difference between AI Generated artwork and human-made, may be very little to those who don't care, But to anyone who does, even a little, it's obvious when something was made with care and commitment to craft. Machine learning is impressive, but humans are still undefeated in intuition. Let's not give that up. 

Author Brandon Sanderson (Who I will get around to reading one of these days) gave a talk that he titled "We are the art." He made the point better than I can, or indeed, am currently, that the point of becoming an artist is not to sell art, the point of art, is to turn you into the artist you want to be. 

 The product is incidental, the process is the point. You will be amazed how far you go with practice, and what kind of artist you can become. It's worth the effort. 

How Kingdom Hearts taught me work ethic

So, at time of writing, I'm also writing a separate post called "Art, and why you should do it yourself." and I got into the anecdote you're about to see to make a point about the value of putting in the time. The tale grew in the telling and an aside became a tangent, became the vast majority of the post. I do still think there's value in the story but it was quite a grievous diatribe to be an aside in aid of making a wider point, so I'm giving it its own post, for anyone who doesn't want to read a lengthy anecdote in the last one, as well as anyone who would like to read how I came to appreciate incremental progress.  

 So, without further ado, here's how Kingdom Hearts taught me the value of putting in the time. 

See, when I was but a lad, of the tender age of...I don't remember...not important I guess, I was stuck on the last boss in the story of the original Kingdom Hearts. It was frustrating me, so I went to the Olympus Coliseum to do the last tournament in the hope of getting a level-up or a new weapon to make this a little easier.  

I did indeed acquire both of those things, but what I also gained was access to the gold and platinum matches. (I think, I may have had them before, it's been a while.) I did the gold one without much trouble, so when I hit that last row of question marks in the fight menu, I did so with reasonable confidence, and anyone who has played this game knows exactly what happened next.  

 

The match in question is against Sephiroth, who you may remember from Super Smash Bros Ultimate (and I think he's a Glup Shitto in a Final Fantasy or something, I don't know I don't really follow Sega games)

Poe's law being a thing I feel compelled to clarify that that was of course, a joke. I know Sephiroth is the iconic villain of Final Fantasy VII and I was as awestruck by that fight's intro cutscene as anybody, and when his equally iconic theme music hit, I felt my adrenaline spike. "All right! Let's fuckin' do this!" I said aloud as he slowly approached. 

Then I blinked, and my health was at one. I hadn't expected my newly acquired "Second Chance" ability (that lets you keep a hit point if an attack would otherwise kill you) to come into play so soon after getting it. As soon as I realise what's happened, he's hit me again and I'm out.

 After recovering from the short-circuit that immediate loss had shocked my brain into, I tried again, I lasted exactly as long, even without the element of surprise against me. I don't remember what level Sora was at this point, but I seem to remember it being below 50. I never bothered grinding because new weapons and equipment had always given much more noticeable increases. Following that logic, I went to the internet to seek out the best equipment.

 'Twas there I learned, that the best equipment was only available via item synthesis, a mechanic I had all-but ignored, unless I happened to have the materials on-hand at the time. I then found, that the "ultimate weapons" only become available once you have synthesised at least one of every other thing in the shop. I immediately discounted that as an option, because it would've taken forever.

Two days later at school I borrowed a cheat disc from a friend (remember those?) to cheat my way there on his recommendation after I told him of my humiliation, only to find, that it was one of those PS2 discs that was blue at the back instead of a clear reflective surface. This wouldn't be a problem, but my PS2 of the time was on its way out and no longer read those particular discs for some reason, so that was out. 

 By then it was the weekend and I'd been looking forward to beating Sephiroth and finishing the game, and didn't feel like doing anything else. So I went to the internet, found a guide for where to find the raw materials for each synthesis item, and made use of my PC's DVD drive for background noise. 

By the end of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I'd gained some useful new equipment, but the list was still far from complete. I had, however, started to become invested in the task, there was something oddly calming about the repetitive gameplay with movies in the background. 

After Dodgeball and both Kill Bill movies had run their course, I realised something. Hunting down all of these raw materials, some of which were rare drops, meant going through a lot of heartless, which meant gaining a lot of EXP, I had gone from under level 50, to somewhere approaching 80, and I'd barely noticed. I think I also had better accessories synthesised as well, but can't quite recall. The point being I'd become a good deal stronger.

 I decided to take a break from the synthesis quest in order to see how I did against Ansem, the final boss, who, as mentioned above, I originally went to the arena in frustration after failing to defeat, I once again sat through the now tediously familiar cutscene preceeding the fight, and, to my surprise, swept the beach with his face with relative ease. 

There was another phase or two after that I hadn't seen before, but the following too, was almost anticlimactically easy. I watched the ending cutscenes with a sense of pride and accomplishment the likes of which I was not used to feeling. I thought perhaps I'd call that done, but no, I couldn't just let it end here, I owed someone a rematch.

So, armed with my new appreciation for the value of putting in the time, tempered in good honest grinding and decked out in better gear with a good 30 extra levels, I went back to the arena and...yeah, no, he still dogwalked me, trying to fight him was like trying to wrestle a tornado made of knives.  BUT! I lasted a lot longer that time, it now took him 4 hits to get my health down, 5 to kill me with Second Chance. (I think) Nevertheless though, I was bewildered, at a loss at what precisely I was expected to do.

What followed was several days of headbutting a brick wall. I happened across some strategies to hang in there, and I even managed to damage him enough that it started to show on his health bar, but once he started running instead of walking I just couldn't keep out of reach of his sword. YouTube wasn't something I spent time on at this point, if it existed at all, I'm not sure, if it did it was very new. In any case I wouldn't have thought to look up the fight to see how somebody else did it. GameFAQs was my oracle of choice, but, at least for now, but at this point, looking up a guide felt like admitting defeat. Happily, I never did end up resorting to that, but for now, this fight was beyond me. I returned to the synthesis list, even then I knew that I wasn't closing the stat gap in another 20 levels even if I got there, but perhaps the extra attack power and MP the Ultima Weapon keyblade would give me would allow me a little more versatility in battle. 

 Another Saturday and three Karate Kid movies later, I hit level 100, there was officially no more that EXP could do for me. But there was also another hard limit I'd noticed. I hadn't been doing noticeably more damage for several level-ups now, so just for the sake of comparison, I switched back from the Lionheart Keyblade, to the starting weapon, the Kingdom Key. It seemed to be doing the same physical damage.

 It appeared that there was a hard cap for how much damage one can do in one hit, and I had reached it. How strong the weapon I was using happened to be was no longer relevant. I switched to the Spellbinder Keyblade, which gave me the same 2 extra MP the Ultima weapon would have, and knowing that I was as physically strong as I could be no matter the weapon, I functionally had the same power I would have had I bothered to make the final weapon anyway. 

 

This was it, I was as strong as I was getting with or without the weapon, if I couldn't beat him now, I couldn't beat him. That in mind, I returned to the arena. What followed, was a few more hours of brick-wall headbutting before I developed muscle memory and habits that worked. Even then, he has this attack where he teleports to the other side of the ring, and if you don't get to him and smack him in time, he'll just cast a spell on you that automatically reduces your HP to 1 (rendering second chance pointless) and your MP to 0 so you can't cast magic to heal. Items have a longer use window, and by the time you get hit by it, it's too late to effectively use them because he'll kill you before they take effect. This was often the thing that was undoing me, but then I had an idea.

I'd observed that when one used a recovery item, there would be a short animation where Sora would throw the item up into the air a split second before it takes effect. I had been hit by this spell (which he signals by saying "descend, heartless angel") enough times that I had an idea of the sequence, he teleports, casts the spell, and if you don't hit him before an aura surrounds you, there's no getting out of it, but there is a window of time between that point, and taking the hit. 

 I had just been giving up if that aura got me, because I figured there was nothing I could do about it, but then, once when I tried to use an item to regain health, Sora threw the item up into the air, but he killed me before it took effect. I wondered if I could time an item-use, just right, so that the spell would hit me in that split-second window between use and effect, allowing me to recover. (I would later learn that guides recommend you do exactly this.)

As this was the hardest fight in the game, and the last thing I wanted to do, I saved outside, so as to reload to avoid wasting them, and loaded sora up with every Elixir (very rare healing item that restores you completely) we'd gathered throughout the game, it wasn't many, but it was enough to fill his item slots. It was quite motivating to know that there was a potential way back even if that bullshit spell hit me.

 Over the next several attempts I failed to pre-empt the spell and subsequently failed to get the timing right for the Elixir and died. I was starting to doubt it would work, but then it did. On that attempt, for the first time, I got to phase...3 I think? When he says "I'll lead you to the promised land." (Side note, I don't know who thought that voice suited the character, but Lance Bass from NSYNC gave Sephiroth a very different voice to the one he would have from then on.) and then he proceeded to rock my shit and kill me, everything happened so fast that to this day, I'm not sure what the everything that happened was.

 Attempts during which I lasted long enough to get to that point were rare, but it didn't take me by surprise again. I'd taken to the "Strike Raid" cheese, locking myself into a long animation of repeated throwing attacks during which I could not take damage, this, coupled with Aeroga, allowed me to survive things like Octoslash, and also damage him from a distance. (though as the fight went on, hitting him for damage became less reliable.)  

I don't even know how many attempts it took, over how long a time, that particular context has faded from memory, it was 20+ years ago (Jesus Christ, time is terrifying,) But eventually, after many, many failed attempts, by a sliver of health and a lucky 4-hit combo, I got him.  (the memory of which, as well as the adrenaline I was feeling, seems permanently seared into my brain.) The next few days I experienced another new phenomenon that anyone who's ever finished a really good book will be intimately familiar with. After the comedown, I felt bereft, and didn't know what to do with my free time. I occasionally feel this when I finish a really good book, or any other media that pulls me in.

From that day forward, I've been much less hesitant to put one foot in front of the other, so to speak. It was too late to salvage my schoolwork, but, I did go on to get a BTEC and two degrees, (rawdogging unmedicated ADHD made that a challenge, but I made it) due largely to understanding the one lesson this taught me;

 

There are no shortcuts, if there were, they wouldn't be shortcuts, they'd be the taught method, and there is value in the journey, the process is the point. I've never again shied away from a good grind in a game, in fact, I relish the opportunity to throw on an audiobook, or a podcast, and grind some levels. 

Make time for your art, or hobbies, whatever your medium of choice, and enjoy the process, and the result will be all the sweeter. Don't let life take that joy from you.

5 Ways of Spotting GenAI slop in the wild.

 Regular readers of this page, (if there are, or ever come to be any) will know that I recently became slightly re-obsessed with the Mortal Kombat series of fighting games. that particular hyperfixation is still present, though I feel I might be on the receding end of it. So how is this relevant to the title? I am so glad I imagined you asking that as I type this. 

 

So one night, I was having trouble falling asleep, so I reached to the shelf above my bed and pulled down the Kindle Mum bought me for my upcoming birthday (Bookshelf real-estate is an ongoing problem.) my eyes drifted to the copy of The Legend of Final Fantasy 7 my brother bought me one year which I really should get around to reading, and I then wonder if there's a book anywhere about Mortal Kombat. I see on Kindle Unlimited, there is a beginners user guide, and I think "Ooh, there's probably some tips here I can use to maybe get a bit better in online matches." I'm not a beginner by any means but the fundamentals are, well, fundamental.

 

So right off the bat, this book is obviously written by an A.I, not just that, it pretends to be written by a ten-year fan of MK that doesn't know which is the block button, and proceeds on a foundation of incorrect information that I was not keen to follow the developments of. Aside from being A.I generated, it wasn't even proofread. There were tells and signs that I'll get to, but this was making me actually angry, so I stopped reading and returned the ebook. Then I saw the option to buy it, for actual money. I looked at the author, and they (if they are an actual person) had not disclosed that A.I was used in the creation of these materials, so I suppose I cannot prove it, for that reason, and also not wanting to give this slop farm the oxygen of attention, I'm leaving the name out. 

 

That said, I looked on Amazon and this "author" has 38 books to their name, the first published in late August of 2025 and the latest published on the 25th of November 2025. A little over a month apart, Basically around one book per day. So, either this "author" is the nom de plume of The Flash, or they don't actually author these books. (I'm fairly certain they weren't proof-read either.) And again, the use of AI to write this, incorrect-on-the-basics book, was not disclosed, and these books are available for purchase, for real money.

 

In any other line of work, that would be called fraud. In fact, given how A.I works, in That line of work it's called "plagiarism." I was aware that this was happening, and this particular story is definitely on the more harmless end of A.I Slop horror stories. I heard once of an A.I-generated outdoor survival guide that resulted in someone eating poisonous mushrooms. But it's one thing to know something is happening, it's quite another to see it with your own eyes. 

 

 As someone who wants, and has always wanted, to be a writer. As someone who has in one way or another made effort to hone the skill of the written word since I was old enough to spell, seeing this with my own eyes made me apocalyptically angry. I actually don't think I've ever been this angry while reading a book and I've scoured entire university textbooks that seemed like they'd be helpful to an assignment for hours at a time only to find nothing of practical use. 

 It isn't even just the undisclosed A.I generation itself, though that is bad enough, it's the disrespect for the very act of writing a book. An insult to anyone who read, and especially bought it. You prompt a generator, 

 and have the nerve to call yourself an author? You have the unmitigated gall to charge money for it?! 

 

I have no idea how well this works as a grift but that doesn't change that A.I is everywhere, so I think it's time more people started talking about ways to spot it. So here's a handy beginners guide to recognising A.I-generated writing on the internet, just a few things to look out for that don't necessarily mean something is written by an AI, but taken together can add up to, at the very least, a bad look. 

 Disclaimer, I'm talking specifically about writing here, I assume visual AI-generation is still obvious enough if you know what to look for, extra fingers, that telltale sheen over everything, etc. Also, I acknowledge that a lot of these tells are things many human writers do, the fact that they are kind of ubiquitous is how they end up in A.I writing patterns in the first place. 

 

1. "That isn't (just) X, it's Y." 

 

This is the big one for me. A version of this sentence popped up every paragraph or two in that AI-generated book, I also saw an animated short on Facebook that was a minute long and used it three different times, two of them back to back. (The short also had one  character refer to the other as "manager." Which may or may not have been an A.I decision but it speaks to a similar laziness either way.) 

 

 2. Talking in circles

 The "That isn't X it's Y" thing alone isn't enough to confirm something was written by an A.I, and as something of a writer myself, I hate how knee-jerky I myself have become at that particular sentence. Some things become cliché for a reason, and sometimes that reason is because they're useful shorthand for comparisons. I've probably used it myself a time or two, though I can't call a specific example to memory.

If however, it comes up once every paragraph or two, you might have AI-slop on your hands. A.I is repetitive, it works on patterns, and it doesn't have a sense of style unless specifically instructed to ape the style of another, and even then it will be a surface-level imitation, and won't be free of clichés. A.I doesn't do length well, and it won't be long before you start seeing the same wording repeated to match the subject.

 

3. Corporate Yes-manese

Whenever someone has showed me anything an A.I has said to them, it reads to me like one of those mealy-mouthed corporate social media posts. The kind that tries to soften the blow of anything bad and verbally fellate anything good. Put simply, it's a sycophant by design when you talk to it, so everything it writes follows a similar bent to whatever you happen to be talking about more than not, at least from what I've seen. A.I writes like it's angling for a promotion. 

I suspect, and this is just my conjecture, that being trained on social media as you know it must be on some level, and geared towards engagement as we know that stuff is, that A.I has inherited a tendency to fish for positive reactions. I've said before and I'll say again, there is no intelligence there, artificial or otherwise. Think of it like a parrot that can say "Hello" but a tad more advanced. 

 

4. Inconsistency

 Pretty self-explanatory on this one, the talking in circles I mentioned earlier speaks to...well, I don't want to say "a short attention span" but something that looks like one, and with each iteration things can get lost, or just outright fabricated like a game of telephone that isn't being taken seriously by every player. A short memory and habit for what they call "hallucinations" doesn't bode well for a written piece any longer than your average social media post. Which leads me, finally, to...

 

5. Being wrong about basic things

 

You've all seen those Google A.I overviews, right? The ones that say things like Willem DeFoe was in Star Wars or that it's safe to use gasoline in cooking, or glue cheese to pizza? Those happen for a few reasons but I think the two main ones are that, firstly, A.I is built, not to provide answers, but to predict the next part of a conversation, and to that end, the accuracy of anything it's saying is not a priority, and secondly. A.I has trouble rejecting premises. Sometimes it can, but it's not designed to, it's a predictive text engine meant to "Yes and" anyone using it, and crucially, can't verify information, and can only assume a rough facsimile of the next part of a conversation based largely on algorithmic probability. 

The most concisely I ever heard it put, and I'm sorry I don't know the name of the poster who said this, and I am paraphrasing, but the gist of it was that the only question A.I can answer is "what would an answer to this question look like?" If you were to ask it to write an essay for you (frankly, if you ever did this, you deserved to fail the assignment) it will show you a pretty good example of essay formatting, but the sources will be made up quotes from books that don't exist. But it doesn't matter to the A.I because that's what an essay basically looks like, so job done. 

I need people to understand that, and to also understand, that it is literally, not an A.I's job, to care whether or not anything it says is true, or accurate. It's job is to keep the conversation going. They call these errors "hallucinations." I'm sure on some level they're trying to iron them out to a point, but I have to wonder if the powers that be consider it in their best interests to do so. 

 I'm reminded of some advice I was once given for Reddit. I was told that if I ever wanted to get a question answered there, I shouldn't ask a question, but make an incorrect claim about whatever I wanted to know, because statistically, people were far more likely to jump in to correct someone than they were to help them. 

I don't know and cannot prove, that A.I errors are not a priority to fix by this same logic, but I do believe it. Algorithms have been ruining everything good about the internet for years, why should this be different? 

Yeah, basically, google something you already know the answer to sometime, watch the A.I overview be confidently wrong and cite, as it's source, someone on Reddit 5 years ago who was clearly joking. 

 

 Y'know, when I started writing this, I was angry. But now, I'm just sad. I long for the days of the pre-A.I internet. Not because I think the internet not being flooded with that shit would make a material difference to me. I'm a complete failure as an internet creator, I came to terms with that long ago, I've been putting out whatever I write or make without being willing to do what it takes to get eyes on it for over a decade, and I have, like, maybe a 100 people who know my name for it, if that. But I don't mind, because I'm doing something I want to do, and that's the point. 

 

I was content with obscurity when the competiton was human creativity. There is honour in, to paraphrase Hello Future Me, "drowning in the dreams of others." But not this makerless sludge that clogs up the airways in 2026. I hate that whenever I see something on the internet, I now feel the need to look for telltale signs of A.I like I'm trying to spot an evil spirit. I hate that that's now just something we all must learn to do, and that it's getting worse. It's so invasive. my laptop has copilot on it, y'know. I didn't ask, or make any move to install copilot on it, but it's there. Update put it there...I don't seem to be able to get rid of it either. 

 if A.I is so good, why can't it do anything good? For that matter, why do A.I companies work so hard to force their shit on you?

But yeah, back onto the original point, I hope you found something in this post helpful, thanks for reading, and keep using your brains!

Mortal Kombat and commitment to the bit.

 So, I was scrolling YouTube for way too long for no clear reason, as one often does, and my recommendations delivered to me a video called The Insane Lore of Mortal Kombat by a channel called 'ClementJ64,'. The video is three hours long.

I'm pretty fond of and familiar with that particular franchise, so I figure I'll throw it on for some comforting background noise while I try and write something. Long story short, guy goes deep into this veritable mountain of backstory for a series of fighting games on a level I didn't know about. Three hours later I haven't written a word because I've been watching too intently, which I can almost never manage to do for something that long anymore. 

Thanks to that, I currently have Mortal Kombat on the brain and I've replayed the tenth one (not touched since pretty much release) and thrown on the 1995 movie (R.IP Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa) while I'm writing this to  try and unpack what it is I find so compelling about this, when examined objectively, extremely silly franchise. 

If you're not familiar, Mortal Kombat is a series of fighting videogames that began in 1992 (almost as old as me) It has since spawned twelve mainline entries, a bunch of side-games and spinoffs, three movies, one a reboot with a sequel this year, and two TV series' one animated, one a live-action serial in the vein of something like Xena back in the day. There was also a short web series in the early 2010s. 

If you're a fossil like me, you might remember the series being a figure of some controversy in the early days because of the cartoonish levels of blood and gore in the games, which, I believe was what caused the Videogame industry to form the Entertainment Software Rating Board and give games age ratings like other visual media (that books are still not subject to age-ratings to this day is wild to me, by the way.) 

That controversy didn't stop Mortal Kombat from becoming a popular multimedia franchise, in fact it probably helped. I believe that's called 'The Streisand Effect.' The controversy only piqued people's curiosity, and the developers, I assume probably felt they had a reputation to uphold, because they did not change a thing in respose. 

 The games have done a bit of growing up in their presentation for recent entries. In some ways at least, the gore remains comically excessive, but character designs are more realistic, and outfits less...obviously geared towards teenage boys. (Quick aside, this has become a pattern observable across the entire medium, and, I have to say, whatever else one might say about videogames today, I would no longer be embarrassed to show them to somebody, at the very least.) 

 More realistic outfits aside, which I think is a good change anyway, Mortal Kombat has, to a tee, maintained everything about the series that brought it to the dance, so to speak. The over-the-top violence is visceral and intentionally disgusting, yes, but it can also be comical and downright goofy in places. Whatever the series may do, the one thing it has never once even entertained doing, is apologizing for any of it. 

Thinking about it, I think that might be what keeps me coming back to the series, and what has kept it interesting through the years. Maybe not of a consistent quality all the time but each entry oozes with palpable enthusiasm. Co-creators Ed Boon and John Tobias started something in 1992, and Ed Boon serves as creative director and team leader to this day. 

That consistency in direction, coupled with obvious earnestness, and commitment to the premise does a lot to carry the more ridiculous aspects of the series. I'm reminded of my early days studying Performing Arts at BTEC level, I had a small voice and confidence issues, my director at the time would always tell me the same thing. He'd say "Don't apologise for your performance." Better advice, I have never heard, and I think it bears out here.  

 Confidence is important sure, but I'd argue that sincerity is just as important. People can absolutely tell when someone isn't behind something they make, and sincerity can save the life of a bad piece of art. Conversely, a lack of such can hamper even technically better things. I'll happily sit through Mortal Kombat: Anihilation a thousand times before I ever watch Batman v. Superman again. 

I guess I do gravitate to the unabashed as a rule. I've touched on how much I like sincerity in my media a whole bunch of times, so I won't retread here, but basically, if you don't care, why should I? This, I think is the essence of what I'm talking about here. Silly, gory, and goofy as Mortal Kombat often is, everything it does, it does with its whole damn chest, and I can't help but be drawn in by that. 

 The games have technically rebooted twice now, but even the reboots are not only soft, they're straight-up diegetic. The continuity has reset twice in the last four games, but those resets are part of the same ongoing story.  I don't like every decision the last reboot (which incidentally is the latest game) made, but the same focus on fun and love for the characters is still very much there. 

Not everything out of that franchise has been good, in fact some parts of it have been pretty damn terrible, but you can never accuse them of going through the motions, and enthusiasm is contageous. I can never be too mad about any story decision this series makes, because I'm never in-doubt that the creators are loving what they do. 

 Mortal Kombat endures, not because of a consistent quality, but unfaltering commitment to the bit. If there is a lesson to be learned there, it's that no one will ever care about your own art more than you, so show them why, and lean into it hard Irony is a crutch that punishes your audience for caring, don't fear the cringe, detachment is for the weak! 

Which is to say, if you care, and you show it, others will too. 

There does not need to be a tenth generation of consoles.

 Title says it all really, but as I tend to do, just in case you do not enter the videogaming space (in which case I envy you the peace of your existence.) a "console generation" refers to each time the major console manufacturers release the next in their line of hardware. the 7th generation came in the mid-to-late 2000s with Sony's Playstation 3, Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii. 

 We're now in the 9th, with the PS5 and PS5 Pro, Xbox Series X and Series S, I don't even fucking know which one of those is supposed to be which, or what the difference is, and the Nintendo Switch 2.  which is the only one I thought needed to exist. Reason being, basically, in terms of raw hardware, Nintendo has been lagging behind since the Wii, but fortunately, the others hit the point of diminishing returns around the same time.

You've already guessed what I'm getting at with this post. 

I have a Switch, no Switch 2 yet, and a lifelong fondness for Nintendo IP, but I've mainly been on Playstation since the...well the Playstation. Everyone had a PS2, it's the best-selling console of all time to this day, I believe. Growing up with siblings, we usually ended up with all 3 of the major consoles in the house eventually. But after my second 360 Red-Ringed and died on me, as my dad had bought be a PS3 for my birthday that year, I didn't bother to replace it. (I wanted one for Metal Gear Solid 4 and God of War 3, and later discovered the Yakuza series, and never went back.) 

Fairly sure that only one of the aforementioned is still Sony exclusive, and that's only until volume 2 of the Metal Gear Master Collection comes out, but the death of that particular reason to buy things is not what I'm here to talk about today. 

 

I still have my old PS3, it sits ready and waiting in the cabinet atop which sits the monolithic slab that is the PS5, and...well, I wanna talk to you all for just a second about a very particular phenomenon that I'm not sure there's a name for. In fact, fuck it, let's name it. How about...the "Retro Beer Goggles" or, RBG effect?

in previous console generations, it was not uncommon to load up an old game on old hardware, and be taken aback by how...bad it looks. I have many old favourites that I'd be prepared to swear looked better than they did. My memory had applied Retro Beer Goggles, and given the visuals an upscale in my mind. I could usually adjust once I got into the game and immersion took hold, but that initial shock would be there no matter how many times I revisited the same game if enough time had passed since I last did.

I say in previous generations because, as I mentioned above, consoles hit the point of diminishing returns on visuals at least fifteen years ago. I regularly fire up my old PS3, and not only is the RBG effect not really present, things still look, at worst fine, and at best, pretty damn good. 

 In fact, if anything, pushing higher and higher resolution has come at a cost that I question was worth it. 

 So, my PS3 is the slim model that has 300-odd gigabytes of storage. Never needed more, honestly, the only time I needed to make space was redownloding God of War: Ascension and that was only because the way the PS3 downloads and installs things is ass-backwards in a way that requires you to have double the free space you actually need. The biggest game on my hard drive on the PS3 takes up 35GB. 

A much smaller, but more substantial one that I had on there, is Batman: Arkham City. which occupied less than 8GB on that hard drive. For comparison's sake, I checked the PS4 version of that same game, which requires 49GB to install. That's six times the hard drive space, six. 

But surely the amount of space in the new consoles is bigger to compensate right? No, no it's not, the standard is 1TB now. I believe there was a PS3 model that could hold 500GB unless I'm mistaken, so, double the storage size, but roughly six times the file size. 

 This wouldn't be so much of a problem if games were still contained on disc, like they were back then, but they're not. With the exception of Yakuza 0 on the PS4, which takes up maybe 23GB and goes from uninstalled to playable in seconds, (it's also a really good game, just by the way)  the discs basically serve as something to keep on your shelf and let your console know it's allowed to download and install the game without you needing to buy it on the digital storefront. 

 So if you want to keep your library of games at the ready, you have no option, but to keep bloated files on your system, limiting your available options to about...maybe 10 games depending on scale, because you don't get the full terrabyte for installs, the system software takes a fair chunk of it. Unless of course you spend half again the price of the console to buy extended storage, or subscribe to cloud gaming services and hope that A) your internet connection can handle streaming the game to you, and B) the game you want to play is even on there in the first place, neither of which are guaranteed. Cloud Gaming is nice, but it's not a solution to those who can't get good internet like say, anyone who lives in an even remotely rural area. Point being, depending on online elements simply isn't an option for a lot of people.

The last game I finished, Death Stranding 2, admittedly one of the most ambitious games in terms of scale I've seen of late, took up 93GB of storage space. Red Dead Redemption 2 infamously took up over 100. There are smaller ones, sure, indie games especially can be tiny on the ol' hard drive, Balatro takes up about 150mb, I've got more hours than that logged on that one. But those are very much the exception and indie games are not what people buy consoles for. 

 Which, of course, prompts the question. What Do people buy consoles for in 2025? 

 This is a question the manufacturers have struggled to answer, with the exception of the Switch 2 because Nintendo finally has a console on the market that can handle third-party games without much compromise to the port, which, frankly, they could've done with making happen a couple of years sooner.

 Since the days of the NES, console manufacturers have pushed visuals to the forefront as a way to sell the capabilities of their new console. The reason for this is pretty simple, it's the easiest kind of upgrade to communicate, and understand, you only have to look at it. But with the 7th, and especially 8th generations we reached the point where graphics weren't going to get much better. In fact, I have yet to see a PS5 game that I couldn't imagine running just fine on the 4...Maybe Death Stranding 2 but even that's a maybe, and I'm conscious of the fact that I am a layman here, and there may be a whole host of things I'm not considering or even aware of, but as a customer, none of that is my problem. 

So what then? The PS5 pushed it's advanced processing power and something called Ray Tracing, which, to be honest with you, I know the name of, and nothing else, it's been five years and I still couldn't tell you what that does, or the difference it's supposed to make. I basically never have it turned on and can't tell much of a difference when it is. 

I do notice one improvement between the 4 and 5, and it's loading times, or more specifically, the lack thereof. Loading times are all but gone, everything happens seemlessly. In Insomniac's Spider-Man 2 the fast travel system (which I seldom used anyway because traversal in that game is fun on it's own) simply zooms out from where you are, and back in on where you want to be, and there you are, no loading time at all, or sufficiently short loading time that it can be disguised by a quick zoom-out, either way, for a game of that scale with near-photorealistic visuals that is impressive speed. 

 So, okay, we've found one thing the PS5 brings to the table to justify it's existence. But of course that promts another question.

 

Now what? 

The PS5 Pro, is a thing that exists, a sort of, allegedly upgraded version of the PS5. I don't have one, nor do I want one really. The only sales pitch I've heard about it is that you no longer have to choose between "quality" and "performance" mode for your games. There doesn't appear to be much of a visual difference between the two to me and performance mode's higher framerate feels better nigh-universally. I've also heard some things actively look worse on the Pro, add to that the fact that there is no version of it that comes with a disc-drive, forcing you to go digital only unless you buy and expensive (and not to mention, fucking massive, if the one I saw in CeX is anyhting to go by) external disc drive to play any physical games you might own, or if you use yours as a blu-ray or DVD player. So to me it just seems like a worse, and also more expensive version of a thing I already own. 

But let's look past the halfway point of this gen, and ask, what even could a tenth generation of consoles bring to the table? In terms of raw graphical horsepower, we're there. I'm not convinced we needed this generation for that milestone, let alone another. Processing power was a boon but we have that now, loading times are all but gone, the in-game worlds are already too big to effectively explore in many cases. hell, No Man's Sky, a game that came out nine years ago sold itself on being so vast you'd never experience all of it. (That turned out to be a lie, but Hello Games did eventually give truth to it after launch following fan backlash, the game is procedurally-generated and literally infinite in scope) So potential for scale isn't really a selling-point anymore. 

What else is there? The way games are played and developed is standardised enough at this point that any console relying on a gimmick would inevitably lock itself out of the vast majority of the market. That's only really an option for Nintendo and they're finally opting not to do that with the Switch 2. 

 I genuinely don't have an answer for this question. Graphics? We're there, Scale? We're there. Loading times? Gone. What more could consoles possibly need to do that they don't already? One of the selling points was the plug-and-play simplicity of consoles as opposed to PCs, but one could argue that even that's not true of them anymore. I'd still say it is, but less so than I'd like. 

So yeah, in leiu of such an answer I am forced to conclude, that there simply does not need to be a tenth generation of consoles, feel free to tell me I'm wrong, I'd love a reason to get excited for new ones as opposed to just dreading the expense of continued access to new releases, but that's where I'm at with them.