Circles.Life controversial advertisement from 2024

Another local controversy coming from a different local telco, Circles.Life came under fire over the controversial advertisement that aired last year. It was about the boy who casted some explicit video from his phone to the TV and his mother then told him after waking up from the bed not to be embarrassed. Where's the discipline in the advertisement? Telling the video caster not to be embarrassed for his actions was not a reprimanding act at all. The worse thing was, that advertisement was aired on TV and available on Circles.Life official YouTube channel.

A few years prior to this controversy, Circles.Life made some defensive statement which didn't sound like they had intention to apologize that they were called out by the netizens again. The backlash was strong enough that they were forced to make an apologetic statement. However, in this controversy's case, there was none of that with no later news articles in sight. The indecent advertisement was part of the "Do Your Own Thing" positioning but there's no excuse to include malicious/indecent acts in the Do Your Own Thing category. They're more like they should belong in the Malicious/Dirty Acts category.

For the advertisement being explicit and indecent, it's outright inexcusable to normalize such stuff in general and it's scummy for any creep to defend that stuff by stating that anyone feeling disgusted from what they saw was whining about it. Unlike the M1 Fringe Festival 2017 which was nothing mandatory that you didn't have to attend, this controversial advertisement of last year from Circles.Life was aired on TV and shoved in the YouTube video player as an ad that would be played before the actual video. I don't know if they would dismiss your reports of that ad as some false and baseless report to silence critique or not but then again, if you see some indecent ad popping up on YouTube website, you should be able to report it. On the TV side, how would you avoid that ad in the middle of whatever show you're watching? What if that same ad was displayed in the public digital signage? Where were the brave complaints against that ad?

Lastly, like the M1 Fringe Festival 2017 controversy, switching ISP/telco due to the Circles.Life controversial advertisement wasn't going to be easy but in this case, you should be able to switch to a different provider without changing your mobile phone number at all.

Date Everything controversy

Passionate or not in making an indie visual novel game, what got in the developers' mind when making Date Everything? When the game was shown in Nintendo Direct some months ago, its trailer from Nintendo's official YouTube channel was bombarded with dislikes and there were people who hated it for wrong reasons that there were defensive tweets about the fact that the developers were fans of the visual novel genre and had passion in developing it no matter how weird it is. Even Goodbye Volcano High had the weird character hybrid but the bigger controversy in my opinion had to do with the fact that one of the former Ko_Op writers had come up with the disturbing Harry Potter and Pokemon materials. She had realized what she had done and moved on to writing articles for Nintendo Life and developing other indie games. I guess that she gained some redemption with later indie games she made that were quite good and I hope that the developers of Date Everything should gain the same redemption with later games that turn out to be good.

If you don't like the weird character hybrid in video games like what Date Everything has where household objects are date-able, stay away from those games. In Date Everything's case, how will you remake it from the ground up with proper human characters and writing, removing most of the degeneracy in the process? To me, it's not worth the effort and anyone else may agree with this fact. However, what's people reaction like should you fix the game unofficially with proper human characters and writing?

On the same month Date Everything was revealed in Nintendo Direct, the JP side had Tokimeki Memorial Emotional for Switch that will come out sometime this year and that is one of the well-known classic visual novel franchises many visual novel games are inspired by. Suffice to say, that franchise remains in Japan only and its dating concept is what attracts fans of visual novel genre globally.

Penda Beats rant

One of the realizations about Taito's Tetote Connect is that it didn't replicate the ballroom dancing like they planned it to as it's essentially a rhythm game where on-screen notes were interacted with touchscreen controls and most of the songs don't seem suited for ballroom dance whatsoever. Also, what kind of gamer would want to play that ever since it was announced and this question is going to be the same for the upcoming Penda Beats from Bandai Namco of all game companies? There was even a clone of Tetote Connect on mobile that's compatible with VRoid but the presentation during gameplay is unspeakably lame as it doesn't look like the avatar is dancing on screen at all.

Penda Beats from Bandai Namco is about the fan glow stick dance from the Japanese idol culture. Maybe there should be a warning from the arcade center or the game against anyone making obnoxious call & response during the song. The thing is, the dance can be done without it throughout the song. The song list is assumed to consist of the songs the nerds know of, including the modern J-Pop songs for instance.

Or so I assumed/thought when I saw a location test video from some tweet from Bean93449015. What were they thinking when making a brand new rhythm game for arcades like that? The VR concert simulation games including the Idolmaster one replicated the live concert experience correctly. The Kinect and VR dance games are still the craze when it comes to full body tracking. Nowadays, there are games that use webcam and AI-powered body tracking technology in addition to VR dance games since the Kinect line of devices was discontinued years ago. A glow stick dance game on VR would have been a better idea since the idea of replicating that dance was done wrongly for Penda Beats in many areas. The cabinet uses the sensors and some area where you tap with glow stick controller and that seems lame in multiple levels. It's like the game's trying to be an unhinged answer to Future Tom Tom where you have to raise up and wave at times during the song or maybe some other Sega rhythm games like Ongeki & Chunithm.

Dance Around from Konami happens to be another dance arcade game similar to Dance Evolution but with different technology that does full body tracking. When it came out in the arcades, the presentation and gameplay impressed the players with motion controls comparable to the ones in Kinect dance games. There's also Starri which uses webcam and AI-powered body tracking so that VR is not needed. Other games on Nex Playground, the family-friendly system Starri is also released on besides PC and mobile have some games you may be familiar with like the Fruit Ninja game for instance which is played a lot like Fruit Ninja Kinect. If there's going to be a proper glow stick dance game for arcades, they could have utilized the webcam and AI-powered full body tracking tool.

So, who is Penda Beats for after you see some location test video circulating on the net? Oh, about the location test video from some tweet, I hate to show links to whatever tweet I mentioned here after the amount of damage done to Twitter that I'll rather show links to posts from other social media sites with proper reputation. I guess that this is some arcade rhythm game you should steer clear once it comes out.

Honey, Pie Shopping & Pie Adblock extensions

Honey web browser extension is suspicious and fraudulent that many people have been aware of its unethical purpose such as exploitation of trust, false promises of best coupons and stealing revenue from influencers by hijacking and swapping affiliate links with the ones from the extension creators. Like other fraudulent products that have their shills, the Honey extension has its own defenders, making baseless and cult-ish claims that:

1. They don't find any problem
2. People have no idea how to use it
3. People and content creators are whining about it

The people who are vocal about the extension realized how fraudulent and unethical it is and it's the same for other extensions from its same creators like Pie Shopping & Pie Adblock. MegaLag made a content exposing the unethical business practice from those behind the extension and the amount of red flags. The worse thing coming out of a disowned bastard behavior I saw on Twitter was a miserable interpretation of what MegaLag said. That person misinterpreting in a terminally ill online way must be a professional Twitter attention seeker in my opinion as proven by the account with the blue check. That's not passionate nor creative at all. It's not just influencers whose revenue was stolen by those behind the Honey extension. Even the consumers with that extension installed were cheated with false promises.

About Pie Adblock, it claims that you will get rewarded from the ads you want while it blocks other ads and that is way too good to be true. As suspicious and fraudulent as this extension is from the same creators of Honey extension, the companies behind their respective web browsers should take action to get the Honey and its similar extensions taken down.

SuperSega Scam

Frankly, the project leader behind the SuperSega scam had gone to the newest low recently by sending a screenshot to Lain Lee of the refunding customers' private information which constituted a privacy violation and was against the GDPR law in Europe. Last time before entering the new year which is this year, it looked like we went past the Intellivision Amico roadmap with no new information/update whatsoever like the content creators critical of that product posted one last video about it as if there will be nothing else to rant about due to the saga's inactivity. The SuperSega FPGA saga, it's FILLED with multiple red flags to begin with ranging from the prototype board design being outright questionable on every level to stupid stunts from the fraudulent project leader. A good FPGA designer would design something highly competent and functional with uniqueness and effort in mind.

In the past times, the SuperSega project leader ran his own previous company and scammed the customers who pre-ordered the camera which didn't come out due to the company's bankruptcy. It wasn't a legal business from his actions back then and it isn't a legal business in the present time with SuperSega FPGA.

The worse thing is, the SuperSega project leader had the audacity to ask the refunding customers to go to the bank to ask for charge back. It's kind of like how the scammer would ask the victim to pay the amount in order for the "technical issue" to be resolved for instance which can make the bank suspicious. Anyone with a good brain and an easy look at a counterfeit technical issue can tell the amount of red flags like the UI and the message looking suspicious for instance that they know well that a tech company wouldn't come up with a message box like that. Boldly involving the victims' banks in this had essentially made the SuperSega project leader a mentally ill fraud and I bet that Sega couldn't be anymore furious than that. At this point, there's no way he's going to get away with his criminal acts that they should be investigated.

Other content creators had similar contents discussing the countless amount of red flags SuperSega possessed and that amount kept rising quickly and if there's more news about it, the said amount will increase more. If not, I may have some thoughts and/or answers about how scrapped the SuperSega FPGA console is. It's wrong for its project leader to mess with Sega with the amount of stupid stunts. That console should be functional and well-made even at the prototype/proof of concept stage to begin with, not act like a toy like the disc drive in one of his videos did.

Lastly, where's the Dreamcast FPGA core? It doesn't look like there's one in existence for SuperSega yet. There's already official emulation for Playstation 2, Gamecube & original Xbox as part of backwards compatibility feature and this year, there will be a new compilation from Capcom that emulates the NAOMI/Dreamcast fighting games. As Capcom Fighting Collection 2 isn't out yet, there's no telling if they are arcade or Dreamcast version. So far, the Dreamcast emulation is already good enough for the most part but when it comes to FPGA scene, there still needs to be a piece of hardware that can emulate the 6th-gen consoles well.

Microsoft Recall controversy

If being desperate enough to force users to build trust between them and the company is what Microsoft and various game and tech companies do recently, it's about injecting whatever irrelevant stuff users don't give a damn about with the earlier example being the pre-bundling of Candy Crush Saga which is the kind of the game with no end to it with endless level progression path and further levels being extremely tedious for non-paying players and that ruins the purpose of fun and challenge to begin with. The biggest matter of the recent time has to be Microsoft Recall for Copilot+ PCs. It is notorious for being a big security and privacy issue but remember, it applies to Copilot+ PCs that there's no need to panic.

There are open-source alternatives to Recall but I don't know if even they can be trusted or not despite the fact that they would address some of the issues the actual Recall had initially. Even if Microsoft backtracked and addressed some issues from the severe backlash, the damage to the trust was already done with users already threatening to switch to Linux which is fear-mongering in my opinion. In fact, you're already better off without open-source Recall clones if that's the case when switching to Mac or Linux.

The real concern about Microsoft Recall was that it could be a perfect gift for cyber criminals, control freaks and domestic abusers. In the case of the latter, there could be concerns of victims being forced to re-enable Recall feature. Another problem is that the feature takes screenshots every time, wasting tons of disk space like it's a home surveillance camera.

If parental controls and home surveillance cameras are not enough, what else do you want? Also, if only there's a child account for the children linked to their parents' for the game consoles, PCs and mobile devices in which certain features like credit card/debit card and digital wallet features are not available. Lastly, if the child uses their personal account on their device, not their parent's, for gaming, that's fine.

Recently, Microsoft had delayed the Recall feature and the Copilot+ PCs will come out without it. Another piece of good news is that the said feature will be disabled by default but you have the option to enable it or keep it disabled in the OOBE. But still, a new feature that decreases the security level is already unacceptable. I wonder what kind of weird idiot would be excited for and protective of something like that.

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Konami's Bombergirl controversy (Definitive Rant?)

By today's standards, Konami's game development actions regarding the highly disturbing Bomberman spinoff game, Bombergirl, might have landed themselves in hot water over the seriously disturbing gameplay elements when the characters take damage for instance. Some of the characters with such profiles I won't mention here combined with the indecent gameplay elements I just mentioned are super obvious by today's standards that Konami could risk crossing the line of going too far. The risk of Konami crossing the line sort of existed starting 4 years ago when I ranted about some highly disturbing Netflix dance movie certain content creators like Sidalpha made some videos of. Suffice to say, their opinions of that movie were highly negative. By that time I knew how disturbing and selfish that movie was, I could have redone a rant on Konami's Bombergirl much earlier than the time the disturbing Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid shmup game was released, and here it is, a proper way to rant.

Konami's Bombergirl was released in arcades way back in 2018 with the Konami Game Station version being released a few years later on PC. There happened to be some sequel but even then, I'm already better off with decent and non-disturbing games from Konami and other game companies. If the hot water wasn't dodged and dismissed enough as some whiny rubbish, they even had a spinoff of Mahjong Fight Club series with a similar concept.

Spinoff or not, this had gone way too far and what kind of creep would want to ask for the release of Konami's Bombergirl in the arcades outside Japan? I wouldn't be surprised if the content creators I know of made a gaming news video of the game sparking controversy for having a western arcade release.