COLD SPRING HARBOR, N.Y. —Nassau Coaches Invitational took place this weekend, at which a new national record had been set in the backwards long jump event.
The gold medal in this event was won by Plainview junior and 16-year old, Ava Monterero, who had launched herself in reverse, northeast across the Long Island Sound, eventually landing in New Haven, Connecticut.
“Since she was very young, she’s had her eyes set on greatness. From just four years old, she had already learned to clip through walls. Now she’s an athlete with a national record and every reporter wants to hear from her! And they will in due time,” said Monterero’s mother while polishing the gold medal around her comatose daughter’s neck. “We’re so very proud.”
Monterero’s impressive new national record still falls short of the current world record held by a Japanese middle school student. Though, that figure is contested as the jump is still ongoing.
In 2024, 13-year-old Yamakawa Noboru, during tryouts for his school’s track & field team, had backwards long jumped into low orbit. NASA scientists estimate his journey around the earth will continue for another four years, three months, and eight days—completing one full revolution every 84 minutes (approximately 17 times per day).
On Monday, July 14th, 2030, Yamakawa’s frozen corpse will catch up to and collide with the International Space Station, at which point the record books will officially be able to award his 997,693,204-mile jump.
Developer Cosmic Stag Games • Publisher Cosmic Stag Games, Craftmos Games • Release Q3 2026 • Platforms Switch, Xbox, PC
Cat Me If You Can is an absolute treat. I’m tempted to leave it at that so you can have the joy of discovering it while you play. And you will be able to play soon, as the game’s demo is going up April 8. So, mark your calendars for next week and read on if you want a little more to go on than my enthusiasm.
How to adequately capture the warm-hug-in-your-soul feel of this game? Just imagine this. The world is solely populated by cats — even you. It’s a black and white world, which is striking to behold in and of itself. Your task is to seek out and photograph all the cats lazily lounging throughout each level in order to restore color to the landscape.
When you do? The cats pop into a technicolor dream-made-reality. Just don’t get tangled in your thoughts wondering how a cat uses a camera with no opposable thumbs and you’ll be golden.
Everything about the game was built to be welcoming. The lo-fi beats are immaculate. The cyberpunky quest board hints at the title’s unique personality. There’s a wonderfully integrated hint system to help you find your current objective. And the world is brimming with creative and charming puzzles.
It seems like the team is aiming to release Cat Me If You Can sometime around summer. So, if the demo captured you the way it has me, be sure to keep an eye out as the weather heats up.
KYOTO — Continuing with their variable pricing model, Nintendo announced that upcoming 80 dollar video games can be purchased through a family plan that lets multiple users share one copy of the game.
“Similar to Nintendo Switch Online, we are now offering a plan that allows up to eight users to own a portion of a game,” stated Shuntaro Furukawa, Nintendo President. “Say you want to play the new Mario Kart, but you don’t have 80 bucks of disposable income just lying around. Chances are, you and your other broke friends are in the exact same boat. Now you can go in on a digital copy of the game together. That’s potentially only 10 bucks for the new Mario Kart that you can play so long as no one else is using it. If you just block out some hours and routinely coordinate your schedules, it’s not that bad, really.”
Fan response was divisive, but many were just glad to have a chance to play some of a game they wouldn’t be able to afford at all before.
“It’s actually kind of forward thinking when you consider how bad everything is these days,” Nintendo fan Martin Felshman explained in a Reddit post. “When you can’t afford your own apartment anymore, what do you do? That’s right, you get roommates. It’s the same philosophy, just applied to smaller purchases. Do the games need to be 80 dollars? No, not necessarily. But I’m not going to be playing it for 24 hours a day anyway. I can wait to use it, just like how I’m content waiting for my roommate to finish using our toothbrush.”
Others were not so pleased with the news.
“It feels like companies don’t want us to own anything anymore,” read a response in the same contentious Reddit thread. “To me it feels like the obvious solution is to not price out your audience, but this workaround is just sloppy. I could barely justify $60 for a video game when groceries started going up in price, so the jump to $80 is just absurd, and I don’t want to have to share a copy with my buddies from college. I don’t know. Maybe my Kalshi bets will turn everything around this month.”
At press time, Nintendo added an addendum to their public statement saying that if anyone is found sharing their copy of the game with someone who didn’t pitch in for it, they’re legally allowed to brick your system.
Games like Unpacking are a genre in themselves these days: games where you don’t just focus on decorating, but on taking things out of boxes. This is better than putting things in boxes, the worst part of moving, and it also brings an element of surprise to setting up a room. Unpacking-like game Hozy came out this week, adding another twist to the formula in that before you can spend hours arranging little tchotchkes, you need to clean the space up first.
There’s a light narrative to Hozyabout coming back to your hometown, with small bits of text and character portraits telling you vague things about the diorama-like settings you have to fix up. Your sister’s first apartment is piled high with trash; a sprawling penthouse tended to by a lonely robot vacuum was the abode of someone who “couldn’t buy happiness.” All this gives a little bit of context and emotion to the spaces, and can guide the way you set up the place.
But before you can do any of that you have to tidy up. This usually involves clicking trash to put it in a bin, dragging a mop across a dirty floor or a squeegee over the windows, or painting the walls from limited colors. In some levels you need to rip up and lay flooring, sweep up leaves from outdoor spaces, or saw boards to make them even. You do this with tiny in-world tools that can sometimes be floaty or imprecise, but it’s always a clever, enjoyable way to engage with the space and start thinking about its potential.
Once a space is ready, boxes appear. You can guess the size of items that might be in them from their shape, opening the door to a little bit of strategy. When I played Hozy’s demo back in February I had a tendency to just pull everything out and heap it up until there was no room to put anything anywhere, but this time around I went through things one box at a time, sometimes going back to rearrange stuff if a new item felt like it should be in a certain spot. Items range from big stuff like chairs, tables, and rugs (there are a lot of rugs in this game, which really got me thinking about my own life choices vis-a-vis being anti-rug), to paintings and statues, to the tiniest teacups or little bits of decor. A level is complete once you’ve unpacked everything and put it somewhere, but you have unlimited time to rearrange things into the exact configuration you want, and there’s a photo mode to commemorate your creations.
I was impressed with just how much stuff you can fill Hozy’s spaces with; I can’t remember ever seeing the same chair or painting or even little item from one level to another. Sometimes I clashed against this–you’d think the rich penthouse owner would have furniture that matches–but in other levels it gave a sense of character to the space, like the mismatched chairs of a pharmacy-turned-cafe. And the stuff tells the story of a space too: paintbrushes and palettes for an artist’s studio, or two walkie-talkies for some kids’ treehouse. In the latter example, I tried to give each kid a little narrative through my items, throwing shoes willy-nilly around one kid’s bed while neatly lining them up for the other to try to capture two very different people sharing a small space.
If you don’t like something in a level, you can drop it off the side to put it away, which lets you exert a little control over the story-through-stuff of a space. The artist had a series of Halloween pumpkins I found ugly and didn’t want to use, while in the musician’s apartment I kept pulling out a series of cat toys shaped like rats that eventually won me over in their sheer volume. A lot of the items weren’t things I’d personally decorate a space with, or clashed with my vision for a musician’s home or young person’s lofted flat, but when combined with Hozy’s simple narrative, it felt like I was making a space for specific people, instead of designing a place of my own.
Also, as I pointed out in the newsletter I wrote about the game's demo, the menu rules:
The sheets come off each new building you unlock
Hozy is a chill little game to tinker with, even if the tidying can sometimes feel a bit clumsy. I always feel a little weird playing decorating games when my real-life house is a mess (looking for a place for a bike in one of Hozy’s levels made me feel guilty about how all my bike and camping stuff is just piled in the corners in my bedroom in a way that screams “single man who lives alone”), but it was a nice way to unwind after a long day, and to imagine the lives of other people through where they keep their stuff.
Despite being endlessly overworked, I love a good job simulator. Recent games like Power Wash Simulator 2and Schedule 1give me the satisfaction of a day of tasks without having to make spreadsheets or learn about tax structures, being unexpectedly relaxing for games that mimic work, the least relaxing part of being alive. Lately I’ve been playing 90s video store simulator Retro Rewind, which has all the things I love about these kinds of games with the added bonus of hideous old-school carpeting.
Retro Rewindcame out earlier this month on Steam. You play as the owner of a small video store in a surprisingly upscale-looking mini mall near a fancy market and an ice cream store. You start with a small space that you can customize a bit, changing the carpet and the color of the walls. The bulk of your day is spent renting people VHS tapes: stocking the shelves, checking people out, dealing with reserved videos and late fees, and sometimes rewinding tapes with a machine I totally forgot existed until I saw it in the game.
I never struggled to get customers into the shop, and in fact often found myself a little overwhelmed. Like Schedule 1, everything you do is very manual–to check people out, you have to scan each video, take their money, and physically count out the correct change. Things can get hectic, especially if a day is busy due to a local event like a harvest festival or the weekend, but it’s never too much. Sometimes I ran out of videos and had to rush to the returns shelf to scan new videos in so there’d be something for people to rent, or dash to the back room to answer the phone or help a customer find the video they were looking for, all while people impatiently lined up with money in hand. As a nerd, I really wanted to keep all my videos organized by genre–action, horror, drama–but that plan quickly fell to the wayside in favor of just keeping videos on the shelves. You get some time before an in-game day starts to set the store up, refill your snack shelf, or order new videos, but each of my days ended in a bit of an exhausted rush.
Videos have weird, largely nonsensical titles, but unlike Tiny Bookshop, you don’t need to know that much about them to recommend them to customers. Besides their genre, some have tags indicating they’re old or that critics find them notably good or bad, and this is enough to recommend them. New releases will be particularly popular (and also come with a cardboard standee to decorate your store with), so you’ll want to make sure you stock enough to meet the demand. Certain genres will be popular on certain days–sci-fi during a meteor shower, horror during Friday the 13th (as well as something else weird I don’t want to spoil because it was so charming)–so you’ll want to have them ready for those days too. Twice a week you can go out back to a bootlegger, who in addition to knockoff videos can sell you adult films.
I love that everyone pays cash (Also to sound like a total nerd, I used the money mechanic to practice my Irish numbers out loud, which made me feel like I was learning in addition to playing a video game.)
As you level up, you unlock new movie genres or the ability to repair your slushee and popcorn machines, and can use your earnings to upgrade the size and layout of your store. I just hired my first employee, who’s already been a big help dealing with the returns so I can run around a little less. I’m still in the game’s early stages, but I don’t think I’ll want to outsource everything to employees; at the least, I’d miss all the lovely beeps and dings that accompany my daily tasks.
Retro Rewind obviously wants to lean on 90s nostalgia, though from what I’ve seen that’s mostly consigned to the decor and the fact that you’re dealing with VHS tapes. There was definitely something nice about having to go to a literal video store, only able to choose what was physically available and finding new favorites by browsing the shelves. (My hometown had a small store in a strip mall, with what I can now see was a surprisingly robust queer section that they never stopped me renting from.) The game feels contained, grounded in physical space in a way both movies and work don’t these days. You can’t automate things; each video needs to be dealt with as an object, checked in or rewound and carried to a shelf to be put away. The business layer doesn’t get too complicated, letting you focus on your routine in a way that’s soothing even when there’s a lot to do. There’s none of the stress of owning a business, or the pressure of working retail for a bad manager–just the satisfying repetition of seeing the store through each day.
Having a manageable day at work might be Retro Rewind’s biggest fantasy, but it’s a nice one: customers who don’t get too pushy, a handful of little tasks to do, and lots of buttons and levers and sound effects to accompany you. It’s a throwback to the days before rising streamer prices and AI upscaling, a little oasis within the oasis that is video games. I don’t have a lot of nostalgia for the 90s broadly, but I’ll take a chill day at work any time.
VICTORVILLE, Calif. — Last week, a group of physical media activists from the Discord server Against The Stream announced the rescue of “The Cursed Video Tape,” a VHS cassette with the ability to summon a murderous Japanese spirit seven days after viewing.
“We saved it just in time,” said Amir Bey, the group’s admin, who also sells zines in the parking lot of his father’s delicatessen. “It’s not on Netflix, it’s not on Hulu, and if we hadn’t rescued it from that professional degaussing facility run by a blind Coptic monk, it’d be lost media forever. We did it, fellow analog enthusiasts!”
Members of Against The Stream were alerted to the tape’s impending destruction by a cryptic telephone call placed by a ghost. The cassette, a long staple of lost media icebergs, features a poorly shot montage of clichéd images, including wriggling maggots, a three-legged goat, and a horse’s eyeball.
“The film’s a bit of a letdown,” said Cynthia Tanaka, a moderator of Against The Stream. “Frankly, it’s just Un Chien Andalou with a bigger budget and less to say, to quote my Letterboxd. Nevertheless, I do think you should watch it… ideally within the next six days, eight hours and twelve minutes.”
The tape runs under two minutes, but can run longer if a Japanese onryō spirit shambles menacingly towards the viewer. While the news delighted physical media fans worldwide, not everyone was pleased by the tape’s recovery.
“Dangerous films like this don’t belong in our VCRs, our homes or our nation,” said Gary Strydom, owner of conservative TikTok production company FreedomLab. “If a child watched this, they’d be exposed to forced diversity, victim fetishization, eastern philosophy… Plus, the tape literally destroys your TV. I called CostCo, the two-year replacement doesn’t cover little girls crawling out your screen.”
At press time, the ghost of the murdered girl trapped on the tape announced a sequel, The Cursed Video Tape 2: Next Stop, Tinseltown.
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