Hooray, it’s April! We’ve finally gotten some much-needed rain here and now that I’ve said that it’s gonna start storming crazy style. But I like that, too! If it could hold off just enough to not muck up my personal plans for this month, we’re gucci. A lot of stuff falls in April for me, and this year’s even busier than usual: there’s a few birthdays, including mine, bird season, and the start of baseball as always, plus a handful of new or new-to-me events that I’d like to make. This is why I’ll unfortunately be gone for the next two episodes of VGBees! I did consider recording on the road because it’d be kinda funny, but my mic can barely handle my unique vocal tone as it is, and I shan’t subject y’all nor my cohosts to hotel wi-fi. So I’ll be around, and we may even get April’s K-YOS out pretty soon here, but you won’t be seeing much of me for the next couple weeks!
New From Me
I’ve only got one piece of writing for y’all this week, and it’s not video game-related in the slightest. As you may already know (especially ‘cause I mentioned it in the opening graph there), I’m a big baseball fan! My passive viewing of baseball’s preseason spring training was interrupted by the World Baseball Classic, an international tournament severely hamstrung by American business interests, and which the USA manages to embarrass itself in every year with the players’ and fans’ persistent corny ass chickenhawk austerity. It was hard to watch for a number of reasons, only some of which I get into. Even if you’re not into baseball, I hope you give it a read!
Another thing I mentioned briefly in the intro is K-YOS, which is officially back as of March! You can find all our podcast links here and watch/subscribe on YouTube. I’ve said this a few times but ooonce more, as an intro: K-YOS was originally a k-pop music review podcast I started with my friends Dani and Azalea, joining them in what was supposed to be a one-off episode. But, we liked doing it a lot, and y’all were tuning in, so Dani and I just kept it going (with Azalea joining us on occasion). K-pop has gotten less and less robust with each passing year, though, and 2025 was particularly weak — so much so that we didn’t do our normal year-end favorites podcast, and trimmed our lists from 25 down to 10. So! Especially considering the positive feedback to an episode we did in the summer of 2024, K-YOS is now an all music podcast with some k-pop sprinkled in as we see fit. We both listen to quite a bit of music and are always interested in broadening our horizons, but as far as our “home genres” go: Dani has just about anything in the “man yells over guitar in garage” family covered, be that emo, screamo, rock, or pop punk, while my natural purview is EDM, house, pop divas, and indietronica et al.
And now for what will just about always be the beefiest section of the newsletter: VGBees!
At Long Last, Nintendo Gets Litigous: Finally, a Nintendo lawsuit we can really get behind: against the U.S. government, over the tariffs. We briefly touch on the ways that the Japanese game industry exploits and, yes, fires its workers; contrary to popular maxims about how great Japanese labor laws are and how much the Japanese industry respects its employees. Unity has bungled things again, this time due to regional differences with the Chinese branch of Unity. And, speaking of China, sinophobia rears its ugly head again as the U.S. government eyes Tencent and its American investments, as it did ByteDance and TikTok. Also, Sony has realized it doesn’t wanna port games to PC anymore. Alright. John and Niki have gotten super into Pokopia and the goodness of a Pokémon world, while I’ve gotten back into Terraria in a big way, playing (and occasionally streaming) it with two of my good friends. There’s also a bit of discussion on Resident Evil 9 and Marathon before we get into the Hive questions!
The Battle of Yerba Buena: Sony secretly started a dynamic pricing test! Niki’s on-the-ground impressions of GDC, which is voluntarily returning to San Francisco for some reason! PEGI is revising its ratings system to include guidance for lootboxes and dark patterns, and we learned some of the reasoning behind Jeff Kaplan’s sudden departure from Blizzard and Overwatch back in 2021. Niki and John have gotten into Slay the Spire 2 and are having a blast learning its intricacies and getting into some different characters/builds, and (you’ll keep hearing this) are really liking Pokopia! I played and finished one of the games I was really looking forward to this year, Lost and Found Co., and am pleased to report that I loved it! It has some little quibbles here and there but is ultimately an excellent hidden object game with a super cute style and a great sense of visual storytelling.
Deep Learning Super Sampling Five: Wow, this already feels like an eternity ago. DLSS5 AI-filtered Resident Evil 9 nastiness. We all hate it. We all hated on Nvidia’s Jensen Huang. That was a fun moment of camaraderie on the internet. Industry icons Red Storm Entertainment, a subsidiary of Ubisoft and shepherd of the Tom Clancy series (and cofounded by Clancy himself), will no longer be developing games and are facing large layoffs as they shrink to a support studio. We got into some good games this week at least, with John dipping his toes into the wonderfully weird and Newgrounds-y Rubato. Both John and Niki continue to update us on their Pokopia exploits — and Niki on Slay the Spire 2 — while I bring to you Funi Raccoon Game, a very goofy, mile-a-minute comedy platformer that’s more than worth the price of entry.
Nintendo’s Slice of Life Spring: John and Niki took a look at the latest Tomodachi Life demo, and contemplate its release coming so close with Pokopia’s as well as Animal Crossing’s big update. Epic laid off 1,000 people and claimed it was because Fortnite was underperforming. Yeah, like, Fortnite? That’s crazy. Anyways, Alex Street Fighter married his sister-cousin, OpenAI and Disney had an awkward breakup as the former shitcanned Sora (yippee!), and, hoo boy, pricing is gonna keep getting worse and weirder. Nintendo will be pricing physical and digital games differently, while PlayStation will be pricing all their hardware… more. Nintendo is also allegedly planning another Ocarina of Time remake as well as a new Star Fox game; this same story broke the sad news to John that there’s forreal forreal not a 3D Mario game coming this year. I finished Funi Raccoon Game and came to find out it’s more Irish than I initially realized! Neat!
Garry’s Mod II: Electric Boogaloo: With Niki on the International Space Station coaching the Artemis II astronauts through their Outlook issues, John and I hold down the fort for a lighter episode, and one in which we answer every single Hive question we got! Eidos-Montreal gets hit with another large round of layoffs, Shift Up (Stellar Blade) acquired Shinji Mikami’s new studio Unbound, Stormgate’s gotta get an offline mode going ‘cause their server provider got bought out by some AI schmucks, Nintendo got one of their American patents revoked, s&box, the follow-up to Garry’s Mod, is out soon, and the Gaming Historian is retiring from his YouTube channel! Also don’t buy those classic Capcom games on Steam they’re literally just the GOG versions but with DRM. John gives a quick and spoiler-free review of Project Hail Mary and his reality TV minute on Bravo’s Summer House, while I’ve gotten DEEP into incremental game The Perfect Tower II and am still sussing out my mixed feelings on Lucid Blocks.
Song of the Newsletter
There’s been a lot of good music lately, but that’s for K-YOS to discuss. I’m here to tell you about The Pussycat Dolls’ underrated hit, “Hush Hush; Hush Hush,” a house remix of the breakup ballad “Hush Hush” from their 2008 album Doll Domination. While Nicole Scherzinger doesn’t have the diva-level vocals associated with house, her performance and the natural 90s body of her voice made “Hush Hush” ripe for this kind of remix. And, sure, throw in a mini cover of “I Will Survive” at the end there. Why not? I’d love a longer mix to really let it build to the chorus, but damn if that piano doesn’t hit you like a truck when it first comes in.
News & Recommendations
Go look at a bird and report back to me!