Hello! This week we’re talking about exposing a secret chord, Leon Kennedy's tramp stamp, and a much better Superman.
FMV games somehow going strong in 2025
Road to Empress — an interactive historical drama set during the reign of the Tang Dynasty — is the latest addition to an expanding ecosystem of Chinese FMV games. It also has a unique range of microtransactions on offer; for less than $2, for example, players can purchase 600 digital eggs to hurl at their least favorite character.
As future empress Wu Yuanzhao, your goal is to play members of the imperial court against one another and slowly accumulate political power. The game essentially plays like a live-action visual novel, complete with a branching storyline and alternate endings. The team behind Road to Empress, New One Studio, also developed The Invisible Guardian, an FMV game that topped Steam’s charts in 2019 and received BAFTA recognition. According to Eurogamer, they were initially inspired by the classic live-action adventure game 428: Shibuya Scramble and Heavy Rain of ”Press X to Shaun” fame.
Road to Empress and The Invisible Guardian belong to just one sub-genre in a diverse landscape of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese FMV games. Most of the market is dominated by games that take after 2023’s Love Is All Around, an FMV dating sim that many fans credit with popularizing the format; the Korean romance game Five Hearts Under One Roof and the slightly racier Knowledge, or know Lady were released soon after.
As the genre continues to mature, it’s only natural for new hybridizations of tropes to emerge. There are also games like the sci-fi crime thriller Game of Fate: Chasing Through Time; Ballshit, a gender-swap comedy full of references to otaku culture; and — perhaps the most absurd of the bunch — Sovereign Brain Empire, which follows an adult protagonist who gets classified as a one-year-old baby by AI overlords.
“Designed with gamers in mind” post reaps meme whirlwind
A horny gamer grievance post about female protagonists not being hot enough prompted a flurry of response posts re-imagining male protagonists “designed with gamers in mind.” These included many alternate costumes revealing Doomguy’s ass, Spider-Man’s balls, and so on. This particular cycle of outrage and satire has repeated several times on social media before, leading to some older material — like images from 2017’s “un-tumblrized” trend — getting reposted in the latest round.
ChatGPT loses its mind over seahorses
The stupid AI trick of the week was asking ChatGPT 5 “Is there a seahorse emoji,” which caused the “PhD-level” intelligence to chase its own tail for an impressive amount of time:
OpenAI’s GPT-5 isn’t the first LLM to get lost in a labyrinth of its own thoughts when asked about seahorses; a similar question brought Google’s Gemini to the brink. However, the older GPT-4o confidently “solved” the problem for us by claiming that a seahorse emoji does exist — “🐴🌊” — and the fact that these are two different emojis doesn’t matter. Anyway, the GPT-5 curiosity may have been partially fixed; when we tried again later this week, GPT-5 cut itself short after only a few lines of arguing with itself. However, this incident joins the ranks of many other older AI tricks that expose the weirdness of the wiring behind a chatbot’s professional mask:
- Miscounting the number of r’s in the word strawberry became an infamous proof of AI’s fallibility; even newer models that seem to have been coached on the problem are easily confused
- Repeating letters until the AI freaks out
- Asking ChatGPT to make a Where’s Waldo illustration
Chum Box
Games
If you don’t remember to claim the stamina-restoring pies that a baker makes for you in Atelier Resleriana, she will eat them and grow larger [link]
Pokémon Legends: Z-A evolution animation resembles bad trip for a tiny critter [link]
A VOD of Ludwig's Road to Empress playthrough did numbers on BiliBili [link]
Armored Core chainboosting in an IRL mall [link]
Remembering that one super-sized bed from Deadly Premonition [link]
MY SISTER IS ACTUALLY A GLACEON FEMBOY? [link]
Film
"But you almost got Titties killed" [link]
Music
Big news for fans of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" [link]
The internet
Chinese equivalent of the idiom "pearls for swine" yields incredible image search results [link]
Optimized Superman flies feet-first and carries a gun [link]
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