The biggest piece of video gaming news this past week was Sony's announcement that it would end production of physical game discs in January of 2028. This won't just affect any potential upcoming PS6 console. This decision will affect future PS5 games as well, which as of 2028, will no longer be available in physical disc formats.

If it were just a simple matter of transitioning from ownership of physical media to ownership of digital media, I would be all for it!

Games being digital only would mean that publishers wouldn't have to mine for materials, pollute the environment with manufacturing discs, or burn gasoline (and emit greenhouse gases) from having to transport those discs across oceans and continents to retailers. It also means they won't end up in landfills. These would all be positive changes for the environment, which I think would outweigh the downfalls of physical discs being un-available. The biggest problem with digital-only ownership would probably be distribution for people with limited (or no) internet access. I do think that is a problem which should be addressed. Poor rural gamers deserve to be able to play new games too. But a digital-only ownership model would be, I think, a net positive.

The problem, of course, is that Sony (and other media companies) are not switching to a "digital ownership" model; they are forcing consumers into a license-leasing model. They are stripping away consumers' right to own the media we purchase. All digital purchases can be revoked from our libraries at any time, for any reason (or for no reason at all), completely at the whims of our wannabe corporate overlords. Worse yet, as far as I can recall, courts have generally upheld that "buying" a digital good is, in fact, a temporary lease of a license. I did a quick Google search for a case precedent, but couldn't find anything specific. So take that with a grain of salt, but I remember reading about some case in which Amazon (or somebody) won a lawsuit involving the revocation of digital purchases.

In fact, California is further codifying this with a consumer protection law that requires retailers to clearly disclose that the customer does not own the media they are buying. This sort of disclosure is good, but I think what the laws should be doing is codifying that the consumer does, in fact, own the purchases media, and that the retailer cannot prohibit the consumer from copying or preserving the media for personal use. But we live in a corporate dystopia that only cares about protecting corporate profits instead of the rights of the public.

I may have posted a written review of Return To Silent Hill, but there were still other things that I wanted to expound upon that I did not feel were appropriate (or in the scope of) a simple movie review. So I decided to adapt my extended thoughts into a video critique. I was planning on doing after having seen the movie in theaters and writing the review, but things kept coming up, and I kept pushing it back until eventually it got to the point that the movie was already available on DVD and streaming.

I decided to split the critique up into 2 separate videos. The first video is already available on YouTube. It is specifically about the sexist and chauvinistic attitudes and biases that I felt underlined many of the creative decisions that went into butchering Silent Hill 2's stories. More specifically, I compared and contrasted how Christophe Gans chose to adapt the characters of Harry Mason (from the first game) and James, and how these adaptation decisions seem to reveal those underlying sexist attitudes and biases. I used this video to vent some long-standing frustrations that I had with the first Silent Hill movie, and its gender-swap of single father Harry into married mother Rose.

Obviously, I don't have a problem with gender or race-swapping in adaptations of media. But, as I explain in the video, I felt that the character of Harry Mason presented a golden opportunity to present a competent single father character in a medium that is largely devoid of such examples. The gender-swap from male-to-female, in this particular case, and the reasons that director Christophe Gans cites for having made the casting decision, only serve to reinforce out-dated gender stereotypes, while also missing out on an opportunity to present a particular demographic that is under-represented in popular media.

The second video is about the other characters in the movie, with an emphasis on Mary -- considering that she is basically the only other character in the movie.

It looks like Star Trek video games might be having a bit of a renaissance. As soon as I finished a video about how there's been a dearth of Star Trek games in the past decade or so, multiple studios announced new Star Trek games.

As I was finishing up the editing of that video series, both Star Trek: Voyager: Across the Unknown and Star Trek: Infection were announced. And now, not even a year later, 2 new Star Trek games have been announced: Shadow Frontier and Outposts Unknown.

I had specifically talked in my video about how there haven't really been any true Star Trek-themed RPGs. Yeah, sure, there had been the point-and-clicks, which fill a similar niche. Across the Unknown might be the closest to an RPG so far, with quests and characters who gain experience and level up skills. But more strange is that 2 of my favorite game genres are horror and city-building. 2 of these new games are horror games (one of which is in VR!), and the other is a city-builder. Well, more technically, it's a "colony-builder"

This isn't to say that there haven't been any Star Trek games at all. It's just that most of the Star Trek video games in recent memory have been mobile games or console versions of mobile games. This includes the likes of Legends and Fleet Command. Arguably, Voyager: Across the Unknown also fits this description.

I finally had a few hours to play some VR while the kids were out of the house a few weekends ago. I only had a limited amount of time though, so I decided to go with a short game that I could hopefully finish in a single sitting, instead of trying Aces of Thunder again. I was looking forward to Aces of Thunder (literally counting down the days till its release), but after a couple days of playing it after release, frustrations with the controls and lack of any tutorials put me off of playing it. I decided to put it off to the side in the hopes that it would be updated with a tutorial or more accessibility options.

Not having the time to learn Aces of Thunder, I settled on a game that's been in my back-log for quite a while: the slice-of-life, BAFTA-award-winning indie game Before Your Eyes. This is a novel VR experience that is controlled entirely through eye-motion and blinking. No controller needed! The core conceit is that the game is made up of a series of slice-of-life vignettes, and when you blink your eyes, the game advances to the next vignette. As such, the protagonist's life literally "flashes before your eyes".

Maybe I'll be able to come back to Aces of Thunder next week, when my 4-year-old is with his grandparents visiting my sister out of state?

Life moves quickly, and often feels like a series of "blink-and-you-miss-it" events.

Blink and you miss it

I was expecting a game about witnessing a person's entire life, seeing relationships come and go, children grow up, pets and loved ones growing old and dying, and so forth. It was pitched to me as emphasizing the idea that life happens fast, and that there are moments that feel like you "blink and you miss them". Like one minute I'd witnessing the birth of a child, and 2 blinks later, that child would be going to the first day of school, and then a couple blinks later, graduating high school and going off to college. Before I know it, I'd be seeing the birth of grand children. I'd be left wondering what happened to all the time in between. It would supposedly be about living in the moment and trying to treasure the time you have as you're experiencing it, because that time will be fleeting and gone before you know it. And maybe there would be branching plots based on unconscious decisions such as whether your gaze lingers on certain things, or how long you stay in a particular vignette.

I was expecting something along the lines of a VR version of The Inner Light.

How would life be different if you studied instead of playing video games all day? (Or vice-versa?)

The game is still about these things, to some extent, but it goes in a direction that I totally did not expect. I was expecting a story that is sentimental and maybe nostalgic, and just a general vision of the highs and lows of life in general. What I got instead was something that was a lot more specific and a lot more heartbreaking.

As frequent readers should be aware, I love turtles and tortoises. They are my favorite family of animals. I've had pet tortoises for almost my entire life. On top of that, my next door neighbors have a pet tortoise, my daughter's former schools have tortoises, and the local utility office (which I visit occasionally for work) has a tortoise enclosure. So I'm acquainted with a lot of tortoises.

I went for a morning hike at Red Rock.

But despite having lived in Las Vegas my entire life (40 years now), I have never seen a wild tortoise.

Or at least, not until a couple weekends ago.

A couple Sundays ago, my partner and I went with one of her colleagues on a morning nature hike at Red Rock canyon. Several times during the hike, I had joked that I wanted all the tortoises to come to me so that I can give them butt scratches. Pet desert tortoises often enjoy having the seam between the back of their shell and the skirt scratched. They'll often lean into and shake their butt back and forth as you run your finger nails along the seam. Obviously, I wasn't serious about giving scratches to the wild tortoises, as I know they are a Threatened Species, and touching them or interfering with them in their natural habitat is against the law.

Anyway, as we were finishing up the looping trail, approaching the parking lot, I mentioned that I was disappointed that I didn't get to give any butt scratches to any tortoises. Ironically, just as I had finished saying that, a juvenile tortoise climbed out from a ditch next to the hiking trail and approached us. So we stopped to take a look and admire the adorable little fella (without touching him, of course). They looked to be a healthy tortoise, maybe 8 or 10 years old, with a nice round shell. They were also surprisingly clean. I'm used to tortoises in captivity always being more of a muted gray color due to being covered in dust from their enclosures. But this little fella was a dark brown color.

The tortoise also seemed to like me, and sort of followed me around as I moved around them. Maybe the tortoise somehow sensed my fondness for tortoises?

I saw my first wild desert tortoise during this Red Rock hike, and it seemed to like me!