Greetings everyone. I'm currently in the process of getting a Computer Science degree for two primary reasons. 1.) Because I want to get a stable development job where I'm currently employed, but most importantly to me 2) Because I want to make video games and have the educational credentials to confidently do so.

I know I know, you don't need a computer science degree to create video games, and my program doesn't even teach game development. So I have a long journey ahead learning game dev alongside my program in my own time. Also I have no intentions of working at an actual game company.

So my question today is,

What is a game that you are dying to play, that nobody has made yet?

I'm trying to get some inspiration. It's hard to think about something that truly doesn't exist, because there's so many amazing games already. I'm genuinely curious.

If you're struggling like I am, feel free to list a game that's been made exactly once but no ones been able to reproduce it's genius.

I'll start,

I am DYING to play a factory builder game, but with ARPG gameplay. So Factorio / Dyson Sphere Program meets Diablo 4 & Path Of Exile. I just think this would create such a dopamine addicting game that would be impossible to pull away from if done right. My idea would be to have the factory be the loot crafting mechanic for progressively better armos, while the ARPG is what you use to get the materials needed to craft truly insane gear. Idk, if done right I think this could have legs.

For this post I was thinking of games more along the lines of an early access title that was abandoned or had a 1.0 release announced when it was not feature complete or still had bugs/issues that were never addressed. If you feel like a live service/MMO game that has shut down should have kept going, feel free to share it as well.

Long story short, I'm making an everything arcade cabinet and soaring no expense. At this point, I have a racing wheel and plan to install wind sim receptacles on a custom pull-out wheel drawer.

My challenge now is that really want to build flip out armrests that have cockpit controls attached and give me a spot for the car gear shifter, so I'm thinking of buying two VKB Gladiator joysticks to mount into the armrests.

Most of all I want it to look awesome and fit the design I'm after. Second, I want to actually play sim games.

My issue is as stated. Is a purchase like this crazy? Should I be starting with a second hand hotas unit to see if I even like it?

And for those of you who do enjoy racing, flight or work sims, were you once a casual user who got hooked? Did you wish that you'd bought decent gear right away?

The survey has been closed and the results are in!

Thank you to all the 166 people that responded! Check out the dashboard for the full results!

I was initially thinking of making a custom visualization with all the game covers in a big collage together, but I ended up not having the time to do it. :'( If anyone is interested in trying to make that though, please do! I think it'd look really cool.

• ZIP download of the data

Thank you all again for participating! Hope to see you in the next survey! :)

As a kid and young teen I used to be the kind of smartass aspiring nerd that I assume some of you were as well and many of you encountered at some point: smart, interested in technology, cool music, and anything non-mainstream, but with less than stellar social skills, lacking the knowledge and wisdom that you get by actually doing things instead of talking about them, and with not many friends, because few people around me shared my interests.

I did have some friends in the offline world who were quite similar, but they each lived in a different town and we only saw each other a couple times per year. The upside of that was that we valued every meeting all the more, where we talked, listened to newly discovered music (this was pre-Spotify but also pre-Youtube), played video games either in splits-creen or just by taking turns in an interesting singleplayer game, rode bikes around and did lots of more or less dumb shit.

Most of us grew out of this phase and became... well, we became nerds, but ones who were more or less well-adjusted and social, with our own friend groups, girlfriends, interests and hobbies that we actually participated in and not just talked about.

Nick was less lucky. He was perhaps the most stereotypical of us all, both in the type and depth of his interests and in his inability to meaningfully participate in them or to participate in society in general, really. Looking back, many things about him make much more sense if I think of him as autistic - not something you grow out of. Perhaps a diagnosis would help him accept this and adapt, but he had a dislike of any kind of institutions and doctors specifically.

I didn't mind though. He understood some of the things I liked, much more than the average person, especially a person my age. I used to hate electronic music, and Nick was the guy who gave me a CD with some early jungle and drum'n'bass, which was my entry drug.

Of course, the file called something like "jungle <date> <author>.mp3" was actually terrible early drum'n'bass, and the file called "drum and bass mix.mp3" was actually a brilliant jungle set - I'm quite sure it was Kemistry & Storm, sounded something like this, only without the MC and even junglier.

He also introduced me to some instrumental hip-hop like DJ Krush, whose music I sometimes listen to to this day, and Art of Noise, which I'm frankly not a huge fan of these days, but it served as a great counter-argument in the early-to-mid days of online nerdom when many otherwise smart people thought that all electronic music is stupid.

Of course I gave him music that I discovered as well. And we also exchanged videogames, old DOS games, new releases, but also some great shareware and freeware games often meant for hot-seat multiplayer, with up to four kids sitting around one keyboard, which was amazing fun for many hours. Being twelve years old buys with access to a CD burner, we natually exchanged other things as well.

The interesting thing is that despite his in retrospect likely autism, he seemed quite socially resilient. When he was I think 8 years old, his parents travelled from a poor, only briefly free and democratic Czechia, to a large city in Texas for a year, where his mother was to teach at an inner city high school through an exchange programme.

That year brought a ton of interesting stories, it was a shock for all of them, but that's a different topic. He returned with drastically improved English skills, prejudice against obese people and mild racism towards black people. Hey, don't look at me, I'm just telling it how it is.

The interesting thing is that racism was very much alive and present in Czechia at that time, but not against black people. Our history is completely different in that regard, so it was very common for people to say "I hate Gypsies, but I have nothing against Black people, Black people are cool." This changed later as we basically imported American racism as a side effect of importing more and more American media, though we still neither commonly practice nor truly understand (likely applies to me as well) this kind of racism.

As we grew up and stopped meeting twice a year, for new year's eve and during summer vacation, we lost touch. The last good thing I did for him was sending him an invite to my favorite local discussion board, which is to this day the only general purpose discussion board I know of that is much better than Tildes.

I think I hadn't seen him for at least a decade when a friend of our parents', whom we also knew well, unexpectedly died. We all met at a memorial party some time after the funeral, talked and played board games. Nick was invited to play table football, but couldn't join because for some reason he was losing the ability to grip things firmly and accurately.

It was quite new, so he nervously joked about it. Some of the other people present tried to get him to a good neurologist early through their connections (and failed). It took I think about a year until he got his diagnosis: not a rare, aggressive type of multiple sclerosis, but ALS, the thing with the ice bucket challenge, the thing Stephen Hawking had. He was 32 years old.

To this day I have no idea if there's any medication that can at least slow it down, because his personality and "social resilience" meant that he rejected all institutional help. This made it quite hard for his aging parents too. He hated having his hair touched but also later couldn't really wash it or brush it himself. He hated getting help in general, so he dressed himself for as long as he could, even when it took him two hours to put on a t-shirt.

This is all irrational and stupid. It was also all granted to him untill the very end, and so untill the very end he was allowed to keep his dignity in that way.

The sad part is that I only know all of this from second-hand information. I can't say I was indifferent, but when he was diagnosed we hadn't been in any contact for a decade, we weren't friends anymore. And through all that time I have been battling a chronic illness of my own that is unlikely to kill me, but that limits my life a lot, and when it doesn't, I have so many things I want or need to do when I suddenly can. I also live on the opposite side of the country, however small it is.

That said, of course I could have messaged or visited him if I truly wanted to. By the time I thought about it, he was barely able to speak and at that point I frankly didn't have the balls to do it. Of course, he normally refused to see anyone, he did not want to be seen like that, but he did sometimes accept people he knew from childhood.

A few months ago, he started having breathing problems. It may not have been the ALS progression yet but an infection, so despite his hate of doctors and hospitals, his parents managed to convince him to get hospitalized. He was just barely able to swallow tiny bits of food at that point, so he still had something like a breakfast with his parents, very underweight but without a feeding tube.

During the night he died, aged 38. If you know about ALS, you know there is some mercy in this. Dying at home with your family is always preferable, but with ALS that commonly means gradually losing the ability to breathe and slowly suffocating.

The saddest thing about Nick is that his life was marked by unfulfilled potential. He was not very socially competent and very impractical, but also quite intelligent and undoubtedly capable... of something. But he never managed to find the something. Worked a basic tech job for which he was not overqualified exactly, but certainly sharper than the job required (though I'm not entirely sure how he felt about it). Didn't really build anything for himself. As far as I know he never was with a woman despite almost certainly wanting to. I don't think he was particularly happy with his life either. And he never got the chance to change that.

Seeing myself in the slideshow of photos from his life during the funeral only made it more apparent how important our group of friends was in his life. The funeral took place in a neighboring town because the town where he lived only has a church next to the graveyard, not a secular ceremonial building, and he wouldn't want to have his funeral in a church. We all came, his family came, and so did his work colleagues, some of whom cried as well.

After the funeral we talked and ate and drank in his parents' flat. One that they will be forced to leave soon after probably nearly 30 years, moving into a smaller one and getting rid of some of their stuff. Through a slit in the door I saw a glimpse of what I assume was furniture and/or machines designed to make care easier, obtained despite his hardheadedness.

Okay, wipe your tears.

When I was a kid, Pornhub didn't exist. At some point we got Shoutcast, online radios and TVs thanks to which you could literally watch porn in Winamp, but before that me and my classmates sometimes watched a porn VHS one of us found in their parents' bedroom, and we also swapped CDs with porn. Those were hard to come by (no, don't say it), so each was precious, and during breaks in school we would talk about who's hotter, whether Amanda or Natascha. We were probably 12 years old when this started and I think we all turned out fine despite that.

Well, the one thing I got from Nick and never returned is a CD with his handwriting saying "P.vids .mpg open". When the three videos he burned on the CD didn't fill it entirely, he didn't finalize the burning process so that more could be added later, he was practical like that.

After remembering that something like this probably exists, I went through a box of my old stuff at my parents' house and actually found it. I still own an old laptop with an optical drive, so I put the CD in, but it failed to read. I tried cleaning the laser lens with a q-tip just in case because it looked dusty, and it really worked. VLC, one of the best free applications ever, naturally came (no!!) through as well.

The "last modified" date on each of the three files said December 19th, 2003. Obviously I looked at the videos, and it turns out that we were completely normal heterosexual boys with completely normal tastes. Not surprising, but nice to have a confirmation. One of the girls had Garfield socks, something that I remembered and laughed when I saw it so many years later.

This CD truly is the only physical thing that I ever got from him, as far as I know. I mean, there may have been some small things we exchanged as kids, but those were lost to time, whereas the CD rested among CDs of 70s French avantgarde and old Manowar albums.

I really don't need to explain how sad the whole situation was. But this one stupid CD gave it a funny and honestly kind of cool twist, which also made it easier to share this whole situation with various friends of mine who never met him, and who very much appreciated the absurdity, wholesome and morbid at the same time.

So now you can too.

Kings of the losers

Incels imagine a world in which they can only lose. The result: no girlfriend, ever. We met them in the saddest places of the internet— and in real life.

A report by Philipp Daum: https://www.zeit.de/autoren/D/Philipp_Daum/index
Translation of the online version, last updated May 30, 2026 08:55 UTC+1 by @Grzmot.
Originally published in German in ZEIT am Wochenende, issue 22/2026.

Gifted link to the German original: https://www.zeit.de/digital/2026-05/incel-bewegung-internet-maenner-depression?freebie=84491b05

1. Rejection

The boy was new in class. A shy teenager, interested in hiking alone and watching anime. He had the telephone numbers of two classmates to talk over homework. No friends otherwise. One day, a girl asked him in front of the entire class if they wanted to do something together. He was immediately suspicious. He thought: if I say yes, everyone will laugh. Later, it turned out that the girl lost a bet.

He said no. The class laughed anyway.

This boy is a man today, 29 years old. To this day, he hasn’t forgotten this story with the girl. In this text I’ll call him sprixxles, by his username on Reddit. No one in his analog life knows,that he is an incel, and that shouldn’t change.

Sprixxles remembers when he came across the term incel online. He remembers thinking, “I hope that doesn’t describe me,” and how he slowly and painfully realized that it did.

Incel means involuntary celibate. Men who can’t find a woman and believe they never will because they are too shy, too ugly, not worth loving, but also because they believe that women today have way too high standards. In the past, men hid their virginity. From that the internet forged a collective identity.

Incels carry within them something shameful, apparently full self aware. They gather in online forums, Discord servers, and on reddit. They have usernames like subhumanDNA or invisiblebeta. Scroll a bit through those forums, join some discord servers, and soon you’ll see someone celebrating Adolf Hitler’s birthday. Someone posts a video where a woman is beaten up. The incels do everything they can to enrage the normies, which is what they call us.

But their world also contains surprising places. Essays and philosophical debates, where incels respectfully debate feminists. The American journalist Naama Kates once described the incel world as “multi-layered, eloquent, incredibly funny, enraging, and deeply heartbreaking.”

When I was a teenager, I let my hair grow down to my shoulders. I listened to sad music and played The Dark Eye with my other long-haired friends. We sat at big tables, imagining, in week-long planning sessions, dwarven warriors and elven mages, and rolled dice with twenty sides to play out their complex battles. The dark eye is the German variant of Dungeons & Dragons, on which the musician Marilyn Manson once commented: “If a cigarette shortens your lifespan by seven minutes, then every game of Dungeons & Dragons delays losing your virginity by seven hours.” We played every weekend, sometimes three parties spaced out across two days.

What exactly differentiated incels and me? At which crossroads of life did we take separate paths?

2. The revelation of FaceandLMS

In 2016 the user FaceandLMS uploaded a video to YouTube, that “changed the internet forever and which very few people ever realized.” At least, that’s what a comment under the video says.

Hailing from Britain and identifying as an incel, FaceandLMS disguised himself as an attractive man on the dating platform Plenty of Fish. He named this persona Carl. He used pictures of a male model. With this experiment he wanted to contradict what society tells shy men, and what my mom always told me too: women like someone who’s friendly and confident, someone with good character.

Quickly, Carl is overwhelmed with requests to talk. He chats with many women at the same time and tries his best to do everything wrong. He writes that he is on antidepressants, that he is incredibly insecure, that he’s broke. He is unfriendly, sometimes racist (”ching chong chang, do you want to bang?”)—and still successful. The lesson appears clear: women pretend that they care about character, but really they only value good looks.

At the end of the video, FaceandLMS reveals what makes a male face attractive, with drawn in lines, angles and squares that should show the ideal proportions of different parts of the face:

• Short philtrum (the tiny valley that connects the upper lip with the nose)
• Predator-animal-like eyes
• A high facial width-to-height ratio; the higher the value, the more attractive the man is
• Defined maxilla (upper jaw), mandibule (lower jaw), and chin
• Body fat percentage between 10 and 12 percent

A commenter under the video is impressed and writes: “The true godfather of the black pill.”

The black pill is the ideological core of the incel movement. Summarized, it means: forget status, forget money, forget confidence. Good looks are everything, and for those that aren’t attractive enough, the search for a partner is over before it’s even begun. The metaphor is a reference to the film The Matrix, where protagonist Neo has the choice between a blue and red pill. Blue means he keeps living his life, happy to be lied to and naive. Red is harsh. Brutal. It means looking reality in the eye.

Black is the pill of the incels, because black is the color of hopelessness. Destiny and your bone structure can’t be changed. Or can they?

The first who told me of the black pill was Luis. 23 years old, he was the first incel I talked to. I met him on the subreddit DebateIncelz. The interview was conducted via video chat. He lives in Southern California, in his parents’ house. The sun shone through the window; a cat prowled through the room behind him. Luis was one of the few incels who showed me his face. Most disable the camera.

Luis has a fine, slightly feminine face and long, wavy hair. He reminded a bit of young Keanu Reeves, if Reeves had parents from middle America. A lot better than I imagined meeting my first incel.

He grew up in a working-class home. His mother comes from Mexico, his father from El Salvador. “I love my mom very much,” he says. “I love my sister very much. I do not despise women.” Luis didn’t appear hateful at all, a trait he shared with many incels I would later talk to. He appeared defeated.

He was an insecure, overweight child. He was bullied a lot in school for his looks. As a teenager he discovered FaceandLMS during the pandemic. Luis was fascinated by his clarity and logic. He told me: “It offers me a framework to understand how dating and life even work.” The well-meaning advice from his immediate surroundings (“go out and be around people,” “talk to a girl if you like her”) didn’t land. “I need numbers,” he says. “I need logic.”

Luis says that he spent a lot of time on Looksmax.org, a forum where men rate each other’s looks. There he was graded as a high low-tier normie. So fairly average, which surprised him in a positive way. He also learned that his philtrum was too long, that he had a receding chin, and that his upper incisor teeth covered his lower ones too much.

Incels really only see two ways to react to the revelations of the black pill. Either they accept that they have a low chance of success as unattractive or very average men, or they try to change their appearance.

Luis chose the latter. He started looksmaxxing. He lost weight. Bought medication against hair loss. Bleached his skin. “On one hand I couldn’t believe what I was doing to myself, but I knew that looked better afterward.”

Luis finished every step possible when softmaxxing. He took all the options of changing his appearance without surgery. Now hardmaxxing was supposed to begin. Luis had a whole list of planned surgeries: multiple jaw surgeries, hair transplants, transplants of his own fat, correcting his ears. And then? “Then I’ll look for a partner.”

Luis did what many women already do: he looked at his own appearance without mercy.

Why is Luis so convinced of his own bad appearance? I am fifteen years older than him and grew up at a time when beauty standards for girls were hard, but less so for boys. No boy from my school class went to the gym. I wasn’t on any social media that bombarded me with rock-hard abs daily. Back then it was impossible to inject Hyaluron into your jawline on your lunch break.

Like Luis, I was insecure; I didn’t feel pretty. But I was not reminded every single day, how much more beautiful other men were.

3. The scientist

For a long time, the public and academic researchers talked about incels, not with them. That changed a few years ago, when Andrew Thomas, an evolutionary psychologist from the University of Swansea in Wales, found a way to talk to them. Until that point, researchers had stuck to analyzing online forums where incels met. When I talked to Thomas, he said that approach is like looking only at the tip of the iceberg. A majority of the posts in forums stem from a few super-users. If you only base your research on those, you won’t understand what’s going on in the heads of most incels, only what their most extreme representatives write about.

Thomas interviewed 561 men from the United States and the United Kingdom for his study. He learned that incels are pretty diverse: some are working class, some upper class. About half of them are people of color: Latinos, Black Americans, Arabs. Politically they placed themselves slightly left of center. They were pro-gay equality. They supported a well-equipped welfare state. On one point they held similar views: the overwhelming majority of incels rejected feminism. Many made light of rape.

How dangerous are incels? Thomas says that the highest danger is in the digital space. Some incels abuse women online, sending them hateful emails or comments on social media. Most of them are so repressed, they rarely become violent outside the internet.

Deserts of love

There are exceptions. Incels have produced terrorists. The most infamous example was Elliot Rodger. He killed six people in 2014 in Santa Barbara, California. He left a manifesto behind, where he complained that he was still a virgin as a 22-year-old college student. He wrote: “I will punish all women for keeping sex away from me.” As if women owe men sex. It’s an ancient pattern: a man talks to a woman, is rejected, and feels ashamed and hurt. He channels those feelings into hatred against women.

But most incels, Thomas says, internalize their emotions: they develop immense hatred against themselves. Terrorists form a vanishingly small part of the community. Even men who commit sexual violence are rarely incels. “Many studies show: it’s the sexually most successful men that commit the majority of sexual violence,” says Thomas.

Then Thomas talks about the suicides. Incels who participated in his study were often deeply unhappy. Forty percent of them reached the threshold for a clinical depression in questionnaires. A fifth thought about suicide daily.

4. 80/20

I talked to a user called bright spring. An Indian man, 20 years old, he told me he studied English and lives at home to take care of his ill father. Bright spring is the name of his latest Reddit account; the previous were banned. In the past, he moderated some subreddits, which also got banned. It wasn’t easy to convince him to do an interview, but at some point he wanted to talk. He wanted to, he said, correct the record on “what most incels think.”

What he thinks: dating apps changed everything. An overwhelming amount of matches went to a few percent of the most attractive men. Those not attractive enough—too small, too dark, too autistic—had no chance. That’s not an opinion, he says, that’s a fact. The entire incel worldview is built on data. Statistics. “Brutal statistics.” He only hinted at his personal story in our conversation. Supposedly he’s very social; he just doesn’t fulfill the minimum standards to even be noticed by women.

At some point he complained. It’s a “softball interview.” He wished for more confrontational questions. We agree to a second round. I show him posts from the community that he supervised as a moderator. In them, men disparage women as “foids,” “female humanoids.” He says that it’s a loud minority and that I’m cherry-picking four cases out of thousands of posts. He overlooked those posts, or he would’ve deleted them. He is strictly against dehumanizing women in posts. It does nothing for the cause. Then I show him a post which he wrote himself. Women are incapable of loyalty. Romantic love is an invention of men to humanize women, like how many people humanize their pets. He laughed nervously when I read him the post. He said that he gender-swapped a misandrist post from a feminist subreddit. He couldn’t show me the original.

He was angry back then, he says, about the posts in which women complain about white men, about Indian men, about neurodivergent men, and are celebrated for it. He wanted revenge.

This dynamic rules many parts of Reddit. Many incel subs are dedicated to posting screenshots of women that denounce men on Instagram or TikTok. Places like inceltears in turn live off sharing the most hate-filled comments from incel forums. I ask him: you keep this vicious cycle going, right? He responds: “I try to avoid it. Sometimes I don’t succeed.”

All incels I talked to told me of their experiences with dating apps. The digital rejection seems to be a core building block of every incel biography. One tried it for one week only: “I got a single match, and she never responded. I guess she matched by accident.” Another one told me he needed years to get a match. “You swipe for hours and nothing happens. Dating apps are a wonderful way to hate yourself fast.”

In 2015 an anonymous author wrote a blog post detailing the spread of likes on dating apps. He described Tinder like a national economy based on attractiveness. He surmised that the most attractive 20 percent of men receive 80 percent of all likes of women, while barely anything is left for the remaining 80 percent of men.

The post’s factual basis is very narrow at 27 female profiles analyzed. But even more dependable studies show that attention is very unevenly divided on dating apps. According to a study from Queen Mary University of London (PDF), likes from women are seventeen times more likely to lead to a match than likes from men. An analysis by the dating app Hinge (which was later deleted off their own blog) came to the conclusion: if female Hinge were a national economy, then wealth there was divided about the same as Western Europe. Male Hinge would be among the top ten worst performers in regard to wealth parity. Put differently: dating apps are great for attractive men. For average or ugly men, they are deserts of love where nothing ever happens.

The Medium post was canonized into the 80/20 rule, made it into the Wikipedia article on inequality, and appeared in the Netflix incel drama Adolescence, a story of a student radicalizing on the internet and murdering a female class mate. Many incels believe in the 80/20 rule. They’ve constructed their entire belief system around it: a majority of women is into a minority of men, whom the incels call Chads. The less attractive men, the betas, can hope for a lukewarm relationship without real passion. Unattractive, shy, neurodivergent men are damned to a life as incels. There is no hope for them.

And, as it so often goes with viral things on the internet, sometimes they contain a grain of truth.

5. Men as office staplers

The scientist Andrew Thomas told me of the matching hypothesis. Men and women try, when it comes to long-term relationships, to find partners that are similar to them: similarly attractive, intelligent, similar sense of humor. Attractive long-term partners are friendly, potentially good parents, financially stable. Men and women look for identical things.

It’s different for flings. Thomas says: “Women become pickier and men the opposite.” Traits desirable in long-term partners are less important for one-night stands. It’s not that important how nice someone is, and completely irrelevant how good of a father he’d be. What matters: how attractive someone is.

Women, on average, are less into casual hookups than men. For them, casual sex is also less casual and more dangerous: they can get pregnant. They are often weaker than men and expose themselves due to that. They can also contract sexually transmittable diseases that lead to infertility much more often than in men.

Andrew Thomas told me: “Because casual sex is connected to more risks, the thought goes: I’ll only accept this risk for someone that is exceedingly attractive.”

The exact opposite happens for men. They lower their standards, because they’re more into casual sex on average. So they’re fine with sleeping with women they wouldn’t marry.

“The 80/20 rule has a grain of truth.” says Andrew Thomas, but the crucial mistake of incels is that from this strategy of selecting short-term partners they create an immutable psyche that all women supposedly possess, and in that one move exclude all women who did not meet their partners through apps. Who were friends first, who met them through mutual acquaintances, where they meet regularly and first impressions can change. That is also an important finding of psychology: attractiveness is not static. The more time people spend with another, the more attractive they find each other.

Dating apps complicate everything. They are, no matter what they try to market themselves as, apps for casual hook-ups because their basis is the optical first impression. Women there get so much attention from men, they have to radically filter. Andrew Thomas hints that this isn’t moral calculus; it’s not even a matter of taste; it’s simply a strategy to deal with an oversupply.

Andrew Thomas also works as a therapist. He has incels as patients. Sometimes he conducts an experiment with one. He asks him to search for office staplers on Amazon and narrate it step by step. Okay, says the patient, there are ten thousand results. So he filters; 4 or 5 stars, not too expensive, fits at least two hundred tacks, only in the color red. “And then I tell him: you picky bastard! What’s wrong with the blue staplers? How can you be so narcissistic and have such high standards?”

6. Digital cutting

The incels disappear. One user called fuckitall responds to my interview request: “Go fuck yourself.” Another does the same and appends that I should get a real job. Another posts a photo of me and calls me a soyboy: a man feminized by the overconsumption of soy products.

I had about the same experience as an average-looking man on a dating app. I sent a lot of messages, got few responses, and in the end got only one meeting in reality: with sprixxles.

I had huge expectations. Then I see him standing at the entrance gates to a park in Vienna and think again: that’s how an incel looks? (He had his camera off during the video interview.) He waits in front of the gate, in a shirt and sneakers, well dressed, a little grungy, a little hipster. He has a narrow chin. He wears designer glasses. He appears friendly.

We stroll through the park, and he narrates. He was a shy kid, a teenager with “nerd hobbies.” No friends in school. He moved for college, from the rural farmsteads into the big city, where it was equally difficult. He had time. A lot of time. A lot of time he spent on the internet.
It was, he explains, the peak of his inceldom. His days spent on the 4chan board r9k, where anonymous users share pictures and texts. It is one of the most culturally influential places on the internet. A favored way to express oneself there is so-called green texts, short stories about failing in social situations, filled with sarcasm and self-deprecation. The mood is extremely negative, but the place had a strange pull on him, says sprixxles. “This form of negativity can be addicting.”

One motto of r9k is: you are here forever. If you’re a young student reading posts from men in their 30s saying that it’s just not going to get better, you think, “Fuck, that could be me.” He felt something similar to an adrenaline rush, excitement over how pointless it all was.

“Sounds like digitally cutting yourself?” I ask.

“One way to put it.”

During those times he visited a therapist a few times, but she couldn’t really help him. Looking back, he likely was already severely depressed.

That’s behind him. He’s 29 now and works in a big company. He spends barely any time in the incel community. At some point the constant bemoaning and complaining became too much. “At some point it’s annoying.” He doesn’t have any time for it anymore. He rarely visits, mostly out of sentimentality. He never understood the hatred.

He lives in a small apartment in one of those old but well taken care of Vienna buildings. The center is a large kitchen. Against the wall, a vinyl record player. On a shelf, old game consoles he collects. On a large desk, filling out the entire wall, two computer screens.
He loves getting lost in details. He taught himself Japanese to better read manga. He also says that he has “autistic tendencies.” Sometimes it seems like our conversation tires him out a great deal. He swings his legs back and forth, runs his hands through his hair and wipes across his eyebrows. He never looks into my eyes for long. He yawns a lot.

Hope is vulnerable

He’s been living in this apartment for ten years. He can’t imagine living with someone else any more. Alone he doesn’t have to care about anything. He can cook at night, if he wants to. Freedom, it appears, is something he cares about a great deal. Maybe it’s also a shield.

Sometimes colleagues ask him if there is someone in his life. He responds with sentences that sound good in colloquial Austrian. Nothing right now. or You know how it is. Face-saving words making it sound like there was something, or that there could be something again.

I meet him three times, in the evening after work. He’s stressed and tired. Problems at work; he has to work overtime. I see him rush through his life, which he fills, like many of us, mainly with work. In the evening he quickly goes to the store, cooks, eats. If he has time, he plays some video games, reads, takes care of his Pokémon card collection. Then he sleeps.

Soon, he’s 30. If it keeps going like this, it’ll all be fine, he says. By now he’s noticed that life is more than missed-out-on relationships. He has his hobbies. He can travel. He makes money and doesn’t have any worries. He doesn’t plan on dating.

But sometimes, something flashes through. A life, how it could be. Eight years ago he kissed a woman; it was the first and so far last kiss of his life. She was a little smaller than him, dark hair, nose piercing, wearing a cardigan over a striped dress. They didn’t know each other; they started talking because she found his drinking choice of gin and tonic unconventional. She leaned against him. He was drunk. I’ll try, he thought. So he kissed her. “With tongue?”

“Yeah, like one does, first time round. Not very elegant.” He imagined his first kiss as a more romantic one. Not drunk in the club. “But it was beautiful.” He says, “It was great.” He went home without asking for her number, and was happy and relieved to have put this milestone behind him.

7. Crab bucket

I realize that dealing with incels and the black pill changes something within me. Within the editorial staff at work, I begin studying the faces of my male colleagues. Who has the most defined chin? Whose eyes look the most like a predator animal? At some point I uploaded a selfie to a website that determines the facial width-to-height ratio. It answers with a 1.7. My face is too long, like a horse.

I reduce men to their looks. What did Hamudi say, one of the most famous incel YouTubers? I don’t see people anymore, I only see genetics.

When you deal with the incel definition of attractiveness, you will develop an inferiority complex. You keep comparing and keep getting smaller and smaller.

There’s a discussion within the scene: who is a real incel? Who belongs? Is someone fucked enough to qualify? Multiple times my interviewees mentioned that they might not be “real” incels after all, because they have been on dates, for example. Because they don’t have an autism diagnosis, because they, god forbid, kissed a woman before. Online, men accuse each other of being fakecels or nearcels. Only who has tried everything without success is a real incel, a truecel. A subhuman.

Aside from this social Darwinism, there’s also surprisingly woke vocabulary in the community. Feminists are accused of gaslighting lonely men, talking them into believing that their solitude is their own fault. There is talk of “privilege,” like female privilege or sex-privileged men. Lonely women who want to belong to the community are accused of committing cultural appropriation. My culture is not your costume. I even discovered an inceldom pride flag. Lots of black and shades of gray.

Boys find each other on the web, the boys that in their class are at the bottom of the hierarchy. What do they do? The same that groups always do: build a status pyramid. They just invert it. The guy on top is the king of the losers.

They protect this inverted hierarchy too. Occasionally there are stories of incels developing hope or believing in themselves, and they are kicked off the forums. This phenomena has a name: the crab bucket.

Throw a few live crabs into a bucket and they begin to crawl up the walls. They step on each other. In their attempt to climb, the lower crabs pull the upper ones down. The same thing happens in incel forums. Those who hope are ridiculed, those who develop a strategy insulted, and those who make progress banned.

Incel culture is growing. Its engine is hopelessness.

I once talked with an incel that embodied this well. He lives in the north of Germany, his user name on Reddit is remarkable box. It was a joy to talk to him. He didn’t mention any studies; he talked of his “boys”: his friends, his sisters, college sports, loving parents.

I noted: “Happy incel?”

Then he said that if you put a thousand men into a room and him next to them, he’d surely be the ugliest.

Remarkable, 23, has stopped talking to his parents or friends about his relationships with women. They’d only encourage him. They’d tell him that he’ll find someone, that he’s attractive enough. He says it hurts him.

Hurts?

Remarkable fights with himself a little. If someone encourages him, it only causes the opposite. He could grow hopeful, which in turn leads to trying again—and getting disappointed again. To be sure of the future, that’s got a worth of its own.

He explains with an example. “The winner of the silver medal always looks sadder than the guy with bronze on the photos, right? I’m the guy with bronze. I’ve accepted how my life is.” With “his life” he means his friends, his sport, the good relationship with his family, and the fact he’ll never have a girlfriend. “If I start believing now that I could truly win gold and fail in the attempt, then I would be the guy with the silver medal. I’d be less happy than now.” So he doesn’t try. He keeps his bronze medal.

Remarkable exchanged hope for security. That’s the promise of the black pill. It protects: who doesn’t try can’t fail. Incel scientist Andrew Thomas told me that incels share a psychological disposition. They posses, what psychologists call “external control conviction”: the idea that what happens to you in life doesn’t have anything to do with you, but that outside forces are responsible, immutable forces: your own ugly bone structure. The impossible-to-fulfill standards of modern dating culture. That’s why incels collect hoards of studies. That’s why they built their own wiki, with an entry titled “The scientific black pill.” If you copy it into a Microsoft Word document, it’s nearly 300 pages.

All this work just to prove that they will fail, no matter what they do.

The black pill isn’t really a collection of studies. It’s not science; it’s not even ideology. It’s just the conviction that it’s safest at home. It’s depression, disguised as a way to view the world.

8. Intelligent, empathetic and cute

In Vienna, while meeting sprixxles, I started talking to a Russian woman on Reddit called pristine cost. Months back she dove into the incel world, seeking to understand these weird, unhappy men living in the privileged West. They are a puzzle her: how can intelligent men believe such a thing?

The smart and empathetic posts from sprixxles impressed her. She messaged him. They chatted. They became friends.

I wanted to talk to her, so we called on Discord. She told me she really likes sprixxles, that there are a lot of good things about him. His biggest problem is that he’s locked up emotionally. “He doesn’t show anyone how great he is.” It’s really difficult to break out of this pattern. He needs a helping hand. A shove. In the conversation it became clear that she understands herself as the woman to shove him. She encouraged him to buy new clothes. She’s gradually encouraging him to follow his dream of a doctorate thesis.

Believing in yourself doesn’t happen through thought, but through experience. By leaving your room and doing things that are hard and wonderful. By achieving things that could also fail and learning that you are stronger and more attractive than originally believed.

My roleplay friends and I, we once were crabs in a bucket. We tried for a long time to climb out of it. We even started a band; I was the bass player, because everyone knows how to play bass. A friend taught me the guitar and told me that I have a beautiful voice. On some weekends we no longer played role-playing games, but guitar. We sat around camp fires, in large groups that weren’t just boys. With one of my friends, we went on holiday, where we met two women, nearly thirty, both telling us how they had had enough of men. The hotel was otherwise full of old pensioners, and we had brought our guitars, so we helped make their evenings more interesting. After one such drunken guitar evening we both lost, as elderly men at the start of our 20s, our virginities. As if we had agreed to a pact to make it all appear like the plot of a high school comedy.

We climbed out of the bucket, but we offered each other our shears.

After my conversation with pristine, I met sprixxles a last time. I told him that pristine finds him intelligent and empathetic and nice. “She also said that you’re cute.”

“Okay,” he says and laughs in a shy fashion.

“And that it’s insane that a woman hasn’t snagged you yet.”

“Okay,” he says again.

Recently he hung up a full-length mirror in his living room. Pristine told him to work on his style. Could this perchance be a careful small step back into dating?

“Probably,” he says.

“Maybe,” he says.

“Let’s see,” he says.

In the near future he has to solve problems at work.

Of course, pristine said, one can live life without romantic love, and be even satisfied with it. But with sprixxles, she says, it’s just a question of time till he finds a woman. “It’s just impossible not to, with him,” she says.

Let’s wish him luck.

I still think it is effectively the best possible version of a mainstream game platform that can realistically exist under current conditions and I think it is better that it exists than if it didn't. In particular their desire to not be reliant on Windows means the Linux gaming is in significantly better place than it would have been otherwise. They simply constantly remind me how low absolute bar the best possible version of the worst possible kind of game store platform is.

My non exhaustive list of problems in no particular order is

• Inability to filter by addtional EULA/DRM/account needed. Steam is already about all of what I am willing to tolerate. Not letting me hide these products is only wasting my time.
• Review system heavily biases towards positive and kills nuance.
• Inability to turn off game updates. For me personally this is the single biggest problem I have with the platform
• Related is inability to go back to previous game version.
• Refund window is a bad joke. For some kinds of games it is fine, for others it does not even allow to get out of tutorial. Sadly it is still better than a lot of other platforms
• I'm seeing more helpful recommendation features that are not possible to turn off - Calendar
• The wishlist/sale feature is extremely effective in enticing impulse purchases. Features that would limit this are of course not implemented. For example setting wishlist alerts only for below a certain price

Edit: Just bought NSO + Expansion Pack. 39.99 EUR/year to celebrate the console’s first anniversary. 💸

Edit 2: The Direct is scheduled to 7 AM PT / 10 AM ET. Here’s the YouTube link.

It’s a me, your resident die-hard, hopeless, Nintendo fanboy normie.

In this post, we’ll discuss four tangentially-related topics:

1. What are your predictions and wishes for the upcoming Nintendo Direct? What are you hoping for? Make a list and then edit it after the fact to see what you got right.
2. What is a Nintendo franchise that you think is in dire need of a change, and what would that look like for you?
3. How would you rate the Nintendo Switch 2’s first year, and what Nintendo games did you enjoy playing the most?
4. Give us your thoughts on the Direct after you’ve watched it.

What are your predictions and wishes for the upcoming Nintendo Direct?

I’ll say right up front that my experience with Nintendo Directs over the years has been that whatever I want the most is always what I don’t get.

This time around, that’s news on the Zelda movie and the Ocarina of Time remake. In fact, I’m fairly certainly they’ll reveal more on those in September instead.

I’m leaning on that certainty for three reasons:

(1) If I’m wrong, then I’ll be pleasantly surprised, and if I’m right, then I won’t be sorely disappointed.

(2) I only really care about these two because I do know a little bit about them. Whatever else I don’t know about, doesn’t bother me. So, other announcements, even very big ones that might positively shock me, aren’t really what I’m worried about. This is also the reason why I’d much prefer it if no information ever leaked at all. I want to be surprised. I can’t isolate myself from leaks if I “surf on the web” at all. It’s impossible. So, Nintendo’s ninjas need to step up their game and silence the leakers.

(3) It seems to me that Nintendo is working hard to move away from the “big Direct” model of making announcements. It might be difficult for them because at least once a year they need to communicate through that medium in order to give investors and shareholders a heads-up (who would otherwise not know about anything because they don’t care about the industry and don’t follow it closely). However, for us, the customers, they’d much rather operate with more flexibility, showcasing games and products individually, spacing out announcements to keep the Nintendo brand fresh in people’s minds, and reveal new titles close to launch to create as much buzz around them as possible. That’s my guess. I could be wrong.

As for my list, I’ll put all the items in a single one. Some of them I think are more plausible than others. Some are entirely wishful thinking.

• Ocarina of Time remake gets a teaser... ⭕️
  • ...and a release date in November... ❌
  • ...on the same day as GTA VI (would be fun for me). ❌
• Zelda movie gets a trailer. ❌
• Zelda 40th anniversary is kicked off. ❌
• We get Wind Waker HD and Twilight Princess HD bundles together and sold separately like they did for the Super Mario Galaxies. ❌
• Some more announcements for Star Fox. ⭕️
• Some more announcements for Splatoon Raiders. ⭕️
• Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave gets a release date... ⭕️
  • ...in August. ❌
• Two new first-party titles to fill out September and October are announced... [I got October right ⭕️]
  • ...one of which could be a Switch 2 edition game... ❌
  • ...or a game for all Switch systems... ❌
  • ...or an entirely new Switch 2 exclusive... ⭕️
    • ...from one of their bigger IPs... ⭕️
      • ...potentially a 2D Mario... ❌
    • ...or an entirely new IP. ❌
• A Switch 2 edition game could be...
  • Pikmin 4, ❌
  • Luigi’s Mansion 3 ❌
    • (for October),
  • but not my beloved Pokémon Legends: Arceus. 💔
• An entirely new Switch 2 exclusive from one of their bigger IPs could be...
  • ...a new Paper Mario... ❌
  • ...or Mario Maker 3. ❌
• One new Switch 2 exclusive announced for 2027, which could be...
  • ...based on a big Nintendo IP... ⭕️
    • ...potentially a 3D Mario. ❌
  • ...or be an entirely new IP. ❌
• New DLC for...
  • ...Mario Kart World (leaning on this one)... ❌
  • ...or Pokémon Pokopia. ⭕️
• Two more GCN games for NSO... ❌
  • ...one of them being Twilight Princess... ❌
  • ...I wish it was the Viewtiful Joe series though.
• There might be absolutely zero Pokémon news. [I’m not sure if I count Pokopia, because I meant everything but that, so maybe ⭕️]
• Wii or NDS announced for NSO... ❌
  • ...with Wii remote being sold again... ❌
  • ...or an accessory to hold the Switch 2 sideways, so it stands vertically and you can see both DS screens. ❌
• New Amiibo. ❌
• One completely wacky new game or product that people will find weird. ❌
• One very divisive announcement... ❌
  • ...which could be the Ocarina of Time remake... ❌
  • ...or the Zelda movie, if they do them wrong. ❌

What is a Nintendo franchise that you think is in dire need of a change, and what would that look like for you?

(1) The Legend of Zelda

My hope is that the Ocarina of Time remake is not just a recreation with better graphics. The 3DS version already did that. I hope that it is a reimagening. As big as Hyrule felt in 1998, it feels small enough today that I could see it being the perfect size for Nintendo to add to. They could make it half as big as Breath of the Wild, and it would still feel pretty sizeable, for me at least (I never even gave 100%ind Breath of the Wild a try for how big it was).

The point of the remake for Nintendo, I think, is two-fold:

(A) Introduce a larger, fresh audience to the franchise, by giving them the gold-standard of what it has to offer, while wasting minimal resources developing it (so, kind of what they’re doing with Star Fox) and in time for the big release of the movie next year, so the two products can cross-promote each other. We’ve seen them do this with the two Mario movies.

(B) Flex those “linear Zelda” muscles a bit, which have become extremely atrophied during the long “era of the wild”, so that the next major title, becomes something that is more of a compromise, something that has that large open world for one group of players to sink hundreds of hours into, but also that highly curated puzzle-solving experience with a meaningful story that the group of players that I am in personally love the series for. The last two major titles were a feast for people who like checklists. For me, they were frustrating. I still loved them. I loved the gameplay. I loved the breadth (of the wild). I didn’t like the “dungeons”, and I absolutely hated the stories. The latter of these had me fuming. They had zero substance for me. They even “soft-rebooted” the series if you think about it. They just placed the games in an entirely new “era”, completely detached from the rest of the franchise. I honestly hope we never return to this era, unless it adds something meaningful to the story. I wanna go back to the wacky timeline from the previous era and make it wackier.

(2) Animal Crossing

Zelda and Animal Crossing were my favorite video game franchises of all time. In fact, I played every mainline Animal Crossing title extensively. I say “were” though, because Pokopium, as I endearingly like to refer to it, has dethroned Animal Crossing. New Horizons was such a disappointment for me. The series became a decorating sim. My favorite is still the GCN entry, if you can believe it. It’s the one game I love returning to.

It seems that Tomodachi Life is Nintendo’s answer to people like me. Nintendo has heard us. I haven’t played the most recent entry in that series because it released on the Switch 1, and I have this weird (I know) rule that I only buy Switch 2 exclusives so as to not overwhelm myself with my options. Pokopium also happened to release shortly before and to say that I got very busy with it would be an understatement (cough cough 160+ hours in and counting). If they release a Switch 2 edition of that though, then I’ll jump in. I am in dire need of that proper, funky social sim, where the characters say and do weird stuff.

This is to say that I don’t know what Nintendo could do to make me want to return to this series. If the next entry is just more of the same, more decoration, even if it’s a “bigger world”, then... it might be time to say goodbye to this franchise. I really don’t know what they could do though. I have heard people suggest an MMO take, where there is one big world and everyone is playing in it simultaneously... yeah. Except that Nintendo would never do that.

Tomodachi Life allows you to do some really out there stuff with your characters, and guess what? It has no online multiplayer of any kind (at least that I’m aware of). That’s how Nintendo “worked around” having to monitor player interactions 24/7. Nintendo is never doing an MMO. They know that degenerates would immediately flood it. Even so, that wouldn’t be enough for me. I just don’t like decoration sims, MMOs or otherwise.

Tell you what, Nintendo: The people deserve their decoration sim. That’s fair. If you want my money though, release a new Tomodachi Life or a Switch 2 edition of the current one, and I’ll buy that. I think that’s also fair, right?

(3) Super Smash Bros.

I had so much fun with the N64 entry, Melee, and Brawl. The first two I played a ton with friends, locally. I actually had that experience. Crazy, am I right? Every time I think about it, it feels like a bygone era. I actually had friends over (and many at that), and also visited friends, and we all played Smash with each other, and it was a lot of fun. I had enough online friends to play Brawl with as well, but far less so.

These days I just don’t care about multiplayer games at all. There are two reasons for that:

(A) I don’t have the time. I could make time to play with other people between 7 PM and 9 PM on most days, but I live in one of the least convenient time zones: UTC+2. Most of the Nintendo world is either asleep or waking up at that time.

(B) I’d just simply rather... experience great single player games? I don’t know. My taste has changed. I’ve also come to hate competitive games more and more. I can’t imagine dedicating myself to one game to become good enough at it so that I don’t get rounded up while playing online and actually get some enjoyment out of the experience. The time that I would waste to git gud, I could be experiencing an epic adventure with instead.

Super Smash Bros. could still bring me back if (and that’s a big if) they included a revamped single-player experience (“Subspace Emissary” was kind of fun for me), and also significantly changed up the formula. I get that it’s a platform fighter, but it’s starting to get ridiculous. Are there seriously any significant gameplay experiences between Brawl and Ultimate? Real ones? Major ones? I played Ultimate, and my mains, Peach and Zelda, felt like they hadn’t changed at all.

I know that if they do something other than a 2D platform fighter, there will be riots, but they’re also going to get a lot of complaints from people saying that it’s just “more of the same”.

Also, I think that 20 to 30 characters is a good sweet spot. You can reduce the Fire Emblem characters to Ike and Marth as well, and while we’re at it, maybe invite some Western characters to the roster? I know that Japan has a lot to offer, but Lara Croft and the Master Chief, for example, make 100% sense in Smash Bros.. If Duck Hunt and Game & Watch can be on the roster, so can Lara and John. Heck, Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon should be in the roster. Don’t give me any excuses. If you’re going to get characters from non-Nintendo IPs into the game at all, then I don’t know what’s holding you back from getting more of the ones that everyone wants.

(4) Everything else

Whatever new 3D Super Mario, Paper Mario, Zelda, Metroid, or Metroid Prime they release in the future though, I’m fairly confident that it’ll be good, and that I’ll buy it even if its more of the same.

How would you rate the Nintendo Switch 2’s first year, and what Nintendo games did you enjoy playing the most?

I think I’d give it an B+.

I’m a Nintendo fanboy, so it would be difficult for me to give them a lower score, but I think that the case can be made that this first year was actually quite good.

The releases may have seemed slow in the first half, but there was a brand new Mario Kart World (for those who liked it, not me) from the start, as well as Donkey Kong Bananza not long after that, which I loved so much, I 100%ed it in 50+ hours.

Pokémon fans got that Z-A title that I skipped on, mostly because it just looked boring and gray (though I heard good things about the gameplay).

Kirby Air Riders turned out to be an amazing game that I didn’t play, and very few other people did. It’s just too niche.

Metroid Prime 4 I loved to bits, but most people hated it, because of the desert, the characters, the pacing, and how similar to Prime 1 it was. I didn’t like how the story ended, and I didn’t like that it was a Prime title that didn’t include, well... Metroid Prime/Dark Samus. I guess the point of them being called “Prime” now is that they’re first-person adventure games. It’s whatever. Just make another one and forget about the open world thing. Make a Metroid game, you know? Not a Halo-inspired game featuring Samus Aran.

I also had a ton of fun with Hyrule Warriors, which was the story-driven Zelda I didn’t know I longed for. Excited for more Warriors spinoffs in general, and not just in the Zelda franchise...

Third parties eventually picked up, and they gave us a ton of games that somehow run amazing on this little boy. I’m thinking Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata (the latter of which I played and loved), though there were others, some of which were Switch 2 ports, like Cyberpunk 2077 and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. There were many others, but these four seemed to have dominated the Switch 2 third-party discussion, at least this half of the year. I should add that Capcom is hitting it out of the park. Now please go and give me some news about that Okami sequel, will you?

It may have felt like there were some lulls, but it was actually a packed year, and that’s not to mention all the NSO stuff and the Switch 1 games that run the Switch 2.

As I have told you all a million times before though, my absolute darling, without which I would have given this year a C+, was Pokopium.

Animal Crossing + Minecraft + Pokémon made by the guys behind Dragon Quest Builders. Who would’ve thought that this could be worse than opium? I’ll tell you what: I did! Right from the moment the game was announced in September, everyone I talked to about this told me that they weren’t sure or even seemed disinterested. I felt very vindicated when the game released to such an acclaim, that it became the highest rated Pokémon title ever, and it isn’t even a mainline one!

To the people who worked on Pokopium, thank you very much for your hard work. It paid off. Now please go and make a sequel or DLC so I can give you more money.

To Nintendo: Outstanding work on the Switch 2’s first year. Some bumps along the ride, but in general, you did well. You delivered is the goods. Now go and give us this generation’s heavy hitters. Also, stop being so secretive, and clog up the leaks!

Give us your thoughts on the Direct after you’ve watched it.

First of all, this was an absolutely wild ride of a rollercoaster. It had many extremely slow moments, punctuated by announcements that had me literally clapping in my studio apartment.

My highlights were as follows (in the order that they appeared during the Direct):

• Pokémon Pokopia update and paid DLC
• Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave (Sep 17)
• Xenoblade Chronicles 1, 2, and 3, Switch 2 editions
  • 1 - Out today!
  • 2 - Jul 30
  • 3 - Dec 3
• Xenoblade Genesis (2027)
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (2026)

I would have given the direct a B if it wasn’t for Ocarina of Time. It was a real slog at times, even though the Pokopium DLC and the insane drop of all three Xenoblade entries had me going nuts.

I feel as though Nintendo felt forced to tease Ocarina of Time because the entire planet was asking for it. They showed us so little though because, as I have explained before, they want to say a lot more about it at a later point, when they are also ready to show us the first teaser/trailer of the movie, alongside the kickoff for the 40th anniversary. If I had to bet, I’d say that we’ll hear more in September at worst, late August at best.

I think that the art direction for the game will be divisive. It will retain some of its charming fantasy features, but will be realistic in tone. I was divided in my head between that and an adaptation of the art work for the original game. I’m glad they went with this. It feels cinematic to the nth degree. I think that I will love it. I’m not sure that everyone will though.

“““Little””” details I noticed: Voice acting. The Triforce of courage appears on Links’ hand before he pulls the Master Sword. The Triforce glows on his LEFT hand.

So, my game plan for the rest of this year is:

1. I want to finish Tales of Arise in time for Adventures of Elliot on the 18th this month.
2. On July 23rd I’ll get Splatoon Raiders.
3. In August I’ll be fully immersed (pun intended) in the Pokopium DLC.
4. I’ll get Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave on September 17.
5. Nothing of interest to me seems to be releasing in October, so that’s the month for the first Xenoblade, so I can finally get into that. I’ve been waiting years for this moment.
6. If I had to guess, Ocarina of Time releases in late November.

Hi tilderinos! We all love a good relationship drama thread, so I wanted to add my own. I'm posting from my main account because all this dirty laundry is already open and out between both my partner and all my friends and family. Thank you for any advice or support you can offer <3

The current problem

My partner and I are going through a very difficult point in our relationship, and I would really appreciate some outside perspectives.

The short version is: my partner of nearly four years recently told me that our relationship has always felt suffocating to her. She said she has tried to look for positives from the last few years and cannot find any. At the same time, she cried heavily while saying this, has booked herself into therapy, and says she does want a partner eventually. She just does not know whether that partner is me, or whether she can be in this relationship as it currently exists.

I love her deeply, but I also feel ignored, pushed away, and emotionally starved. I am trying to decide whether I should stay and give her space, leave, or take a formal break by moving out for a few months.

Background / how we got here

For context, I have had three serious long-term relationships before this one, and I think I have become much more emotionally mature through them, though I’m sure I still have plenty to learn. This is my partner’s first serious relationship. She has not dated much before, and in my opinion, she has also not had many deep, emotionally close friendships. She is also strongly suspected to be somewhere on the autistic spectrum, though she has never been officially diagnosed.

We met online and were extremely into each other. When we met in person, the chemistry was great, and afterwards we missed each other constantly. After almost a year, I started asking how we could make the relationship work long-term. She said it felt like a big jump, but we talked about it a lot and she eventually seemed fine with the idea.

Not long after, I moved in with her, which also meant moving country. To her credit, she was extremely helpful and considerate during that process.

Just before I moved in, she broke her leg badly and spent over a week in hospital. I helped as much as I could, but it was a very stressful start. I was moving country, taking on more chores, and trying to care for her at the same time. I did it because I love her, and I knew she would physically recover eventually.

What we did not expect was how much the recovery would affect her mentally. She became quite depressed, which is understandable, and it really took the wind out of the first year and a half of us living together. She had very little energy for me or the relationship, and intimacy was limited. I was not getting my needs met either, but we talked a lot and I felt like I understood what she was going through.

Around a year ago, things started to improve. Her mood was better more often, she seemed more present, and when we were intimate, she seemed to put in more effort. I was still the one initiating anything physical, which bothered me, but I hoped that would improve over time. Dates, time together, and our general friendship also seemed to be getting better. I felt like she was slowly trusting me more and letting me in.

Our living situation probably has not helped. I work from home all day, every day, in a room next to the living room. It is a very public space, and I think neither of us has really felt alone. Sometimes I would also play video games after work in that same area, which meant I was still in her space.

Her emotional difficulties

One of the hardest parts is that my partner has extreme difficulty understanding her own emotions. She talks openly about this. She often says she bottles everything up and does not really understand what she feels or why. She has also said she used to feel a lot more when she was younger, but at some point her difficult relationship with her parents caused her to start repressing things.

She often cannot answer direct questions about what she wants. Most of the time, her answer is “I don’t know.”

Sometimes, if we sit down and talk through it slowly, I can help her get to a clearer answer. But it takes a long time, and it is obviously hard work for her. I am also worried that this dynamic can become almost like therapy, where I am trying to guide her into understanding herself. I do not think that is healthy for either of us.

Another thing that scares me is that she seems unable to hold onto positive emotional experiences. We have had romantic dates and close moments where I know she felt something. I could see love, warmth, energy, and joy in her. But if I ask her about those moments a day, week, or month later, it is like the feeling is gone. She will just say, “It was fine.”

That makes the situation very confusing. When she lets her guard down, the relationship can feel genuinely loving and connected. That is part of why I am struggling to walk away. But she often makes an effort to avoid these moments.

I also have a strong suspicion that I might be the first supportive relationship with anyone she's had in her life before. Her family and her close friends (the same friends all the way from high school) do not offer any kind of emotional support or affection. They are the kind of people who don't say "well done!" but "...You could have done this better." There's been lots of instances during the relationship where she's reacted with confusion or surprise at what I would consider basic levels of kindness and support. 

The recent breaking point

This past winter, her mood dropped again. She became increasingly cold and shut me out. We went a long time with no physical contact, not even cuddling. She did not seem interested in anything I had to say, whether it was important or not, and she had very little to share with me either.

After a few weeks, I sat her down and asked what was going on.

That is when she told me the relationship was too much for her, and that it always had been. She said it felt suffocating and that she did not know how to “come up for air.” She said she had tried to find positive things in the relationship but could not find any, not even one, from the last three years.

At the same time, she was looking me in the eyes and crying extremely hard. We talked for hours, and I think she got a lot of catharsis from finally saying it.

After that conversation, she immediately booked herself into therapy because she said she needed someone to help her understand herself. I think that is a good step. But it also feels very much like an “I need help now” decision, rather than her having any clear long-term idea of what she wants.

She has admitted, through tears, that she thinks she would be lonely and unhappy alone. She does want a partner. She just does not know if that partner is me, or if she can be with me in the version of the relationship we have had so far. Honestly, I agree that the relationship as it has been is not sustainable.

What has changed since

Since that conversation, we have drifted apart. I am sad about it and I miss my girlfriend, but right now it feels like we are two separate people living in the same building.

The first practical thing I did was move my office outside the house, because I thought that would give us both more breathing room. I think that was a good step, but it has not fixed the deeper issue.

She has also become completely glued to her phone in a way I have never seen before. She still uses her usual apps, but she also downloaded a random stranger-chat app, similar to Omegle, where she talks to people about their lives. She seems fascinated by it, almost like it is a real-life sitcom.

I was obviously concerned by that. I challenged her on whether it was appropriate to be using an app like that while our relationship was in such a bad place, especially when those apps can easily become sexual. She said she deletes anyone who gets sexual and that she just wants to talk to people, but does not know how to do that any other way.

She offered me her phone, and from what I saw, the conversations were shallow and non-sexual. I do not think she is cheating on me. What it looks like to me is that she is seeking low-pressure connection with strangers while avoiding the pressure and emotional weight of our actual relationship.

She does not seem able to tell me what she wants from me or the relationship. When I ask whether she wants to stay together, move apart, take a break, reduce contact, stop physical affection completely, or work on things, the answer is usually “I don’t know.”

For my part, I want to support her, but she is not really accepting support from me. In fact, I think my care may sometimes make her feel more pressured, upset, or resentful. I have stopped being romantic and I am not initiating physical touch. I am trying to give her as much space as possible. But even small thoughtful gestures, like making her a cup of tea, can be met with coldness or irritation. I understand why she might feel overwhelmed, but it still hurts.

What I am considering

The practical side is not a major barrier. I have a good financial buffer, my job is secure and remote, and I could rent an apartment or potentially move in with someone we know. I have options, and moving out would be reasonably low-risk for me.

So I think my options are:

1. Stay, give her space, and support her when she asks for it.

   This might give therapy a chance to help. But it could also leave me waiting indefinitely for someone who may never be ready, or who may eventually decide I am not her person.

2. Leave.

   This would hurt both of us, and she would lose a major source of support. But it might also be the cleanest option if she genuinely cannot be in the relationship and I am only prolonging the pain.

3. Take a formal break by moving out for a few months.

   This feels like a possible middle ground. It would give her space to understand herself without the daily pressure of living with me, and it would give me some emotional distance too. The idea would be to check in after a set period and keep only light contact in the meantime.

What I need advice on

What would you do in my position?

More specifically:

• How much space is reasonable to give someone who says the relationship feels suffocating but cannot say whether they want to leave?
• At what point does being patient and supportive become abandoning my own needs?
• Is it appropriate to push her, even gently, when I feel like I know how to help?
• Is there a better option I am not seeing?

I love her, and when things are good between us, the connection feels rare and real. But those moments are not happening enough, and I am struggling with how cold and uncertain things have become.

COLOSSAL GAME ADVENTURES PRESENTS: 🦇🧛‍♀️🔥 Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow

Yarrr! Now it be me... [ahem] Sorry, we're out of Pirates!. Now it's ACTUALLY my time to post! Let's set the scene. Looking for a nice summary last month, I found this one from TCRF:

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow is a Castlevania game that, shock, isn't about one of the Belmonts! Instead, we get some white-haired emo kid that happens to have the ability to absorb souls.

... Thanks, TCRF. I'll spoiler the writeup for the sake of scrolling through twice.

As always, mark ya spoilers as such with the following text block:

<details>
<summary>Spoilers</summary>

Spoiler text goes here.
</details>

Game Setup

A couple years ago, Konami released the Castlevania Advanced Collection with Circle, Harmony, the SNES version of Dracula X, and Aria. This is pretty much the only way to legally obtain Aria nowadays - and if I'm not mistaken, it includes the .gba ROM in case you'd like to play it in a way other than the official emulator. (Someone fact check me on that...)

The main purpose of this topic is to get people up and running with the game. As such, it's recommended that you:

• Share which version of the game you're playing
• Share what hardware you're playing it on
• Share if there are any tools/mods that you recommend
• Share anything you think is important for people to know before they start the game
• Share if you ever cosplay as Soma Cruz
• Ask questions if you need help

Another purpose of this topic is to revisit the game and its time period:

Do you have any memories or associations with this game itself?
What about its system or era?
What aspects of retro gaming were common at the time?
What other games from the same time period are you familiar with?
What are you expecting from this game in particular?
Which Castlevania game has the best Death fight? 

FAQ

The survey has been closed and the results are in!

Thank you to all the 213 people that responded! Check out the dashboard for the full results!

I'd like to thank @TaylorSwiftsPickles and @DefinitelyNotAFae once again for helping out with this survey! <3

• ZIP download of the data

Thank you all again for participating! Hope to see you in the next survey! :)