Hello! Welcome to this week’s Geeky Brummie Gaming Roundup!

This week, a cute anime girl wants to help you do taxes, and game preservation

File Your Taxes with a Cute Anime Girl

Visual novels are a strange genre. I’m personally not a fan of watching text scroll by while static characters stare at the player for several hours, with little other interactivity. But they still have their audience who is happy to do that, and the genre has become so significant that it’s attracted its own parodies and deconstructions.

From Hatoful Boyfriend presenting pigeons as handsome anime high school boys to Doki Doki Literature Club turning the entire genre into Eldritch horror, there are no shortage of quirky dating sim visual novels that mess with the genre in brilliant ways. The latest of these is Tax Heaven 3000.

Tax Heaven 3000 is a dating sim where the player is tasked with dating a girl named Iris. She’s your standard anime high school girl, with one key difference: she is really interested in your personal finances and is ready to help you file your tax returns. But only in the US, in case Iris’ name wasn’t already a clue (say the name of the US federal tax office out loud if you still don’t get it).

Tax Heaven 3000 is the product of the art group MSCHF, who have previously been involved in a number of wacky projects. The first of these was The Persistence of Chaos, a laptop loaded with six malware packages, all of which had previously caused huge damage to the global economy. Since then they have collaborated with Lil Nas X to release a pair of “Satanic” shoes and resold an Andy Warhol painting in amongst a crowd of forgeries.

This latest stunt is supposed to be a critique of the United States federal tax system. They have taken particularly interest in the TurboTax software, one of the many programs designed to help people understand the complexities of the tax system. MSCHF’s argument is that the IRS is deliberately complicating the system so people will invest in software such as this, resulting in them spending more money.

Tax Heaven 3000 is designed to be the opposite of TurboTax and its harsh complexities. Instead, it’s a cute and gentle visual novel that guides you through the filing process while fulfilling the need for parasocial interaction for “single filers without dependents”. It’s also free, which helps their point about deceptive pricing strategies.

It was originally listed for release through Steam, but Valve have pulled the game without explanation. The game will still be released through itch.io and the game’s website, however. The website also boasts a Collector’s Edition (comes with a body pillow, obvs) and an “X-Rated Patch” which I won’t spoil the contents of.

As someone who recently became formally self-employed, I encourage MSCHF to make a UK version where an anime girl named Marcie helps you fill in your self-assessment forms. For…uh…a friend. Obviously.

Battlefield Games Being Pulled from Sale

EA have announced that they will soon be delisting various games developed by DICE. This due to online services for these games being shut down.

We already knew that EA would be shuttering online services for some older games, but this is the first time we’ve learned that the games will simply be taken off sale too. The games are Battlefield 1943 along with Bad Company 1&2.

The initial announcement also stated that Mirror’s Edge would also be taken down, but EA have since issued a correction that states it will remain on sale. Which is good because it makes no sense to delist a whole single player game because the time trial leaderboards won’t upload to the internet anymore. Genuinely, I’ve played the game – it’s an all-time favourite of mine – and when the server closure was announced, I had to seriously stop and think what online elements the game even has. It’s that minor.

But it sucks that the games are being removed entirely. I always argue that games such as these should open themselves up to fan servers instead of being shut down, but it never happens. It’s extremely bad for preservation.

Anyway speaking of preservation…

The Completionist Completes the eShop

With the Wii U and 3DS eShops on the way to imminent closure next week, the industry is about to be dealt another blow for video game preservation. This is especially terrible as 1,000 of these are only available this way, meaning they will soon all be gone. And one man decided that wasn’t good enough.

Jirard Khalil, better known as The Completionist on YouTube, decided to truly live up to his name and complete the entire eShop. And by that I mean purchase every game and DLC on both the Wii U and 3DS and store them all somewhere.

In a video on his YouTube channel, Khalil detailed that the entire library cost him and his team $22,791 (roughly £18,000). This is a total of 866 Wii U games taking up 1.2TB of space, plus 1547 3DS games taking up 267GB of space.

Most of these was achieved through slowly inputting hundreds of eShop cards into the store, and painstakingly downloading each one onto a series of external hard drives and SD cards. The process took a year. And let me tell you, as someone who also spent a year making a video about preservation, I know how much of a pain that would have been (and I didn’t even spend eighteen grand on mine).

It’s an impressive feat, and end result will be donated to the Video Game History Foundation, an organisation dedicated to video game preservation. It’s definitely worth a watch as discussions around preservation are only likely to increase in coming months.

New Releases

Deceive Inc (PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S) is a multiplayer FPS where the objective is to take your opponents out as sneakily as possible.

Storyteller (PC, Switch) is a cute little puzzle game that’s been developed by a solo developer since 2009. It’s all about crafting stories based on prompts and story elements you can drag into a series of comic panels.

The Crown of Wu (PC, PlayStation) is a Soulslike based heavily on The Journey to the West, the iconic Chinese novel about Monkey and pals.

Atelier Ryza 3: Alchemist of the End and the Secret Key (PC, PlayStation, Switch) is an anime-styled RPG about alchemy, the third in its subseries. Here’s an excellent preview about it for more information. I hear the writer is very handsome and cool so you should definitely listen to him.

The big release of the week is, of course, Resident Evil 4 Remake (PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S). Unsurprisingly it is a big fancy reworking of the iconic Gamecube classic. You know the deal. Leon Kennedy. Spanish village full of horrors and chainsaw men. The president’s daughter yelling LEEEOOOOON a lot. Now built on the grime of the RE Engine (this is a compliment, I love how that engine makes the series look). I don’t need to say anything else, you’re probably already playing it.

Game of the Week

Game of the Week this week is Tchia (PC, PlayStation), a cute open world game inspired by the culture of New Caledonia.

You play as the title character, a young girl trying to rescue her father from a cruel ruler. The island is fully explorable and Tchia has the ability to control animals and objects. It looks like a super chill time, with some really cool gameplay additions. The game uses a physics engine for much of its movement, and most footage suggests this gives the game a bunch of fun movement options. Also you can play the ukulele.