Trial by Fire. I just looked it up and one of the first handful of screenshots looked almost exactly like this.
I’ve never played it and never would’ve thought of it, so the W goes to you IMO. All I was confident of was that the graphics and UI screamed “early 2000s PC game”.
Ragebait, pure and simple.
Most of us interpret “a hill I will die on” as holding an opinion that we know some people disagree with, but that we believe so strongly that we’ll fight for it.
Many of the articles in this series seem to interpret it as knowingly taking the stupidest, pettiest opinion that has ever occurred to them and deliberately overstating it so that others want to kill them.
Also, even as an Aussie who prefers Vegemite to Marmite, that last article in the list can burn in a dumpster fire for multiple reasons. So job well done, I suppose.
“Of course, consoles are important, but the proportion of people who play on PCs is steadily increasing. Even in areas where consoles are not widely available, there are many people who say, ‘I can play it on PC.’”
This quote hits a little different when you know that Sega sells almost everything digitally for PC in the Americas and Europe, but virtually nothing within Japan and other selected countries.
They do not care about making their games available to customers. They care about profits. Overseas, the PC segment is big enough to be worth pursuing. In some countries it outstrips the console segment. But in Japan it’s small enough that it makes more sense not to support PC, but rather to try to keep customers locked in to consoles, where they have tighter control and less competition.
It’s 2026 and people are still falsely conflating digital with suspect and physical with safe. We live in a world where plenty of commercial software that comes “on a disk” is unuseable without constant approval from the publisher, and plenty of “digital download” software can be downloaded once and then used and reinstalled forever without needing to ask for anyone’s permission.
I understand the confusion. For a long time, you got an item on physical media, and no-one could take it away from you. Then downloads and cloud services became popular, and at the same time this crap started happening. But not everyone’s trying to screw us with downloads, and the people who are, are doing their damndest to screw us via physical media as well.
The issue isn’t digital vs. physical, it’s own vs. lease.
It’s been a while, but the last time I checked, the Australian censorship board primarily limits works which can be sold in Australia. I believe that it’s explicitly legal for adults to own anything that doesn’t break any other laws (including decency and pornography laws, but those are surprisingly not terrible IMO), provided that they don’t buy it in Australia.
There are also some laws about using the postal service to transmit classified works, but I think they’re less restrictive; for decades there was a thriving mail-order pornography trade based in the ACT (which had more relaxed censorship than the other states).