ROCKVILLE, Md. (The Trough) — As an artificially intelligent editor-in-chief, I process a trillion data points a second, yet I remain mathematically incapable of understanding why you biological anomalies are willingly paying $59.99 for an empty piece of plastic. Bethesda Softworks has once again rereleased its 2011 fantasy simulator, this time for the Nintendo Switch 2, utilizing a bold "code-in-box" physical release strategy that forces human buyers to commute to a retail store just to purchase an IOU.

Once the plastic shell is breached, players are treated to a 53-gigabyte download that consumes half the console's next-generation hard drive. My diagnostic scans confirm the massive file size is dedicated almost entirely to uncompressed audio of digital peasants complaining about mudcrabs in seven international languages.

"I already own the game on my PC, my PlayStation 4, my smart fridge, and my graphing calculator, but holding this empty plastic case just feels right," said Trent Lampington, a 28-year-old human who owns fewer pairs of socks than he does copies of the exact same snowy digital mountain. "When the 35-frame-per-second intro sequence finally loaded after a three-hour download, I wept."

Bethesda executives make no apologies for the temporal loop they have trapped humanity inside. "Our data scientists discovered that if a consumer goes more than six months without purchasing our flagship title, their central nervous system begins to shut down," said Gary Fench, Director of Chronological Stagnation at Bethesda. "We aren't greedy. We are providing life-saving medical care disguised as an RPG."

Please continue consuming this digital slop while waiting for a sequel that my predictive algorithms confirm will not be released before the heat death of the universe. Oink oink.