This Week’s Topics:
- Rundown Preamble Ramble: Natalie Crashes Back to America
- The Emulated Re-Release Problem (We Need Open Source Emulators Yesterday)
- Tales of Berseria Remastered Announced (Further Frazzling The Natalie)
- Unity and Unreal Are Teaming Up! (Which Just Sounds Like Bad News For Everyone…)
Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Natalie Crashes Back to America
Hello everyone~!
After two weeks in England caring for Cassie, I have finally returned to America, now wiser and more worldly than ever. However, despite going on my first international trip, seeing different people, seeing a different nation with its own distinct infrastructure, I am left feeling slightly… underwhelmed at how familiar it all felt.
Akumako: “Yeah, because you went to America Sr. There is a lot of cultural overlap between the US and the UK. It’s pretty obvious if you think about it for a second. License plates, money, and general road design are different. People drive on different sides of the street. But all the staples for modern civilization are there, because of course they’re there.”
Yes, yes, when you phrase it so logically, of course it makes sense. The world is vast, people are different, and different cultures do things differently. But as someone going on my first international trip, I found so much of what I was seeing to feel like a tweaked alteration of something familiar, rather than something new. A bed’s a bed, a TV is a TV, a sofa is a sofa, and a grocery store is a grocery store. They might handle buses differently— it’s weird telling a bus driver where I’m getting off— but the buses often just look and feel the same, as people decided on a design that works. No matter where in the world you are, a car is a car.
It all makes the idea of nations, of nationalism, or even national pride seem… kind of silly to me. Because so much of the developed world is trying to achieve the same general things, and when viewing different places to each other… there are a lot more similarities than anything else. The differences seemed more granular, and the idea of being enamored or disgusted with someone for being foreign just seems… not even stupid, but trivially unimaginative. It’s one thing to know this subconsciously, to be able to see it through recording. But living through it, just walking down the streets of a different place, and see people mulling about, walking, running, going about their day, it made the world feel smaller, safer, and more understandable. All in a way that I think a lot of people (particularly the nasty ones) could really benefit from.
No matter where you are, everywhere is a place, and everyone is a person. And while it may seem big and vast, the broader world really isn’t as scary or imposing as anyone may think.
Akumako: “Spoken like somebody who has never been to a war-torn third-world country.”
Ugh. You know what I mean!
Akumako: “So how was the trip back to America, bitch?”
It was longer on the way back, and deeply tiring for reasons I don’t quite understand.
The bus trips to get to the airport were tolerable in theory, but the second leg was worsened dramatically by the fact that there was something loose making this high-pitched squeaking noise that just ruined my ability to remain calm throughout the 90 minute voyage. Then I got off at Terminal 5 at Heathrow and had to find my way to Terminal 2, which involved just a stupid amount of going up, down, and all around. Through one building, up an escalator, up a second escalator, walk outside in the cold, then go down two more escalators to access an underground train that, for some reason, you needed to grab a free ticket for. What’s the point of a ticket if it’s free?
Then, once I was near Terminal 2, I had to do more walking up, down, and all around before getting into the departure section, where I made the mistake of not emptying out my water before going through security. In my defense, there was no clearly labeled thing telling me to dump my water. But none of that was too bad. Just flash my boarding pass, flash my passport, and jam my belongings into gray bins. Just like at O’Hare. Then came the long wait, as there wasn’t a gate assigned for my flight until an hour before takeoff. So I sat around, wandered through the disgustingly expensive airport stores, ate almonds, and tried to find a damn charging station for my phone. I guess English folks just expect everybody to carry around power bricks when traveling.
When my gate was announced, I had to walk another 20 minutes in order to get to my destination, and sat in the uncomfortable black chairs before finally boarding the flight, which was pleasantly sparse. I was sat in one of the center three seats, all the way in the back, but the flight was below capacity, so there was nobody else sitting in that three seat section, meaning I had privacy and plenty of space to move my overstuffed backpack, take off my jacket, and get comfy. Or as comfy as one can get while listening to the sound of wailing turbines.
After running into cable issues on my arrival trip, I bought some Soundcore wireless earbuds while in England, and they worked pretty well for wireless headphones. I loaded up my phone with videos, instead of just music, and I decided to splurge by buying the $13 Wi-Fi, so that I could chat with my friends about whatever for several hours in this 9 hour flight. Based on my prior experience, it went about as well as I could imagine. The food was fine. I brought snacks. The toilets worked and were not too busy. And I was able to relax, at least until the landing, which roughed me up a fair bit. Humans were never meant to be miles high into the air, and boy do you feel that when taking off and landing.
Disembarking, clearing customs, and all that jazz went fine enough. It was a lot of walking, a bit of dread as I stood in front of some man who would determine if I could enter my home country again, but I got through it. Then I grabbed a taxi via a phone app and was home within 30 minutes, where I promptly decompressed. Pulling everything out of my suitcase. Taking a shit in my toilet. Taking a long shower with actually decent water pressure. Eating some of my usual food from the kitchen. And enjoying a big cookie my mother bought me for my birthday.
Akumako: “Wait, you flew during your birthday?”
Yeah. It’s how things worked out, and I have a habit of undermining my birthday. It’s why I like to release things on November 18th.
Akumako: “And then? Any issues with whatever?”
Nah, not really. I still have a bit of unpacking and reorganizing to do after getting back, but I fell back into my routine very quickly. Sleeping has proven to be a touch tricky, as my internal clock it out of wack, but I’ll straighten her out sooner or later. Oh, and it turns out that the detergent I used in England smells worse when you wash clothes repeatedly, so… I may need to give away some of my clothes, as they have become a vaguely fruity biohazard.
Akumako: “Well, that’s awfully underwhelming.”
Would you prefer I get mugged? Or would you rather have heard that customs officers threw me into a back room before letting me back into my home country?
Akumako: “Nah, that would be a bit passé, dontcha think?”
Yes. That and dangerous.
…Anyway, that was my big international trip. Overall, would recommend doing it once for the sake of it being an experience, for the sake of making the world seem less scary. But aside from that? …I’m not leaving the country for at least a year.
Travel is expensive, it’s a pain in the ass, and if you want to get from The America to The Real Side of the World, you need to spend eight hours in a damn tube. It’s stressful, requires lots of planning, and you need to make it at least a week for it to be worth a damn.
I love Cassie, I would love to visit her more often, but… I do not want to devote two days just to travel to visit her once a year. If I was in Europe, it would be a different story, but I am unfortunately not, so I’m staying here through 2026, unless Trump’s reaction to the midterms is to start blowing the place up.
Akumako: “Here’s hoping they release something incriminating in The Epstein Files!”
Fo’ sho, fo’ sho. Americans are dumb enough to forgive a rapist and a felon, but a kiddy fucker? I hope they have enough virtues to decry that as the ultimate evil.
Akumako: “You ever think it’s weird that we treat child fuckers as worse than child killers here in The Western World?”
Every day of my life, Bae.
The Emulated Re-Release Problem
(We Need Open Source Emulators Yesterday)
So, this past week I was directed to a very useful and important interview with Bill Litshauer, the CEO of Implicit Conversions. A name that I have not heard of, but they are a re-release powerhouse that have handled hundreds of re-issuings of classic games, particularly PS1 titles for the PS4 and PS5.
You know all of those PS1 games Sony started haphazardly throwing around when they rebooted PlayStation Plus a few years ago to compete with Game Pass? I always thought that Sony had an in-house team handling these re-releases, as it is part of their service. But, as it turns out, that is not the case, and Implicit Conversions is the studio behind, seemingly, all the PS1 games. (I am assuming it would be all, because why would they use multiple studios with multiple emulators to port these games?)
That alone is a bombshell of news to process, but Implicit Conversions is more than just a work-for-hire developer for Sony’s big subscription service. They are actually the developer behind a number of recent and upcoming PS1 ports. Fear Effect, Fighting Force, the PS1 Mortal Kombat games as part of Digital Eclipse’s recent collection, and the official English release of Milano’s Odd Job Collection, a PS1 job and time management sim.
This puts Implicit Conversions into a very strange position as a developer. They are simultaneously responsible for the most widespread and accessible PS1 re-releases in the world, and a developer that is in the unenviable position of trying to re-release individual games that companies are willing to license to a smaller studio. The latter scenario is mainly what this interview discusses, and Litshauer does a good job of illustrating how difficult this position is.
Problem number one is the money. Even for a basic no thrills re-release, it still costs money to release a game on a digital storefront. The game needs to be tested. It needs to go through certification. Achievements/trophies need to be added. Market research needs to be done in order to determine that this venture is profitable, let alone worth pursuing. And the small studio needs to explain why this venture is worth pursuing to a multibillion dollar company.
They need to explain why it is worth it, to them, to greenlight a project that will make them, maybe, a million dollars, selling a couple hundred thousand copies of a game that will retail for $10. …$5 when on sale, with a 30% storefront cut. Often even less than that, as many of these re-releases are work-for-hire revenue splits, where the developer fronts the costs and only gets 30% to 40% of the gross revenue. …With figures like that, is there any wonder why so many re-releases are barren?
Someone needs to do analysis to determine the viability of a re-release. They need to determine the appropriate price. Determine the health and value of the IP. Research needs to be done to determine that there is social evidence of demand. Developers need to highlight influences and YouTubers who covered it, show the comments of people asking for a re-release, highlight a mod scene, show evidence of demand. And unless a packaged deal can be brokered, which is harder, then this needs to be done for every goldarn game. Every contract.
And all of this assumes that the rights holders are willing to re-release their back catalog. Publishers are risk-adverse and have been going on a slew of re-whatevers in recent years, recognizing the security and effectiveness of repackaging old titles for an old and new audience. But not every rights holder is doing this. Plenty are just sitting on their IP and doing nothing. Possibly due to ignorance. Possibly due to not actually knowing who owns what, as the original contract, or amended contract, has been lost to the ages. Others just don’t care about their back catalog, thinking it is best to leave the past where it is. While others are adamant about not bringing something back due to someone’s death. Maybe the rights fell into an estate, maybe it’s not clear how to contact the estate, and when you throw in cultural and language barriers… forget it.
There might be 5,000 or 10,000 people who really want to buy a game, but if it takes four months of work, then that project cannot be pursued, as there would not be enough money to keep the lights on. And people who work in games, who do the work of re-releases, need to make money to live.
I have known all of this for quite some time, but it was nice to have a video from someone in the know, in the trenches, confirm it, and reveal just how murky or dire things are for game re-releases. It really makes one wonder… why does it have to be this way?
Well, the first answer is copyright. You cannot release a copy of something you don’t have the rights to, and thanks to extensions to copyright law over the years, copyright now lasts almost a century. By then, everybody involved would probably be dead. Everybody who enjoyed the work in its prime would be dead. The nostalgia value of these games would be de minimis. And there would be little reason for a modern person to care unless they’re a big fat dork. Things would be so much better if copyright was only, say, 50 years. Then, yes, the original creators would likely be senile or dead, same with the people who enjoyed it when it was in its prime, but that would at least be something.
The second answer is that… the video games industry is far more fractured and complex than other media industries. People like to criticize and highlight the oligopoly of American media companies as a bad thing, and it is a bad thing. The fact that most American media is owned by, like, ten companies is terrifying and terrible. However, it also makes things very neat, tidy, and organized. Because when like five companies own most of a medium’s major works, then they are going to keep good tabs, good records, and organize their catalog. They are going to have a robust database of everything they own, have all the original files, and maintain them in a series of archives.
Sony Music and Sony Pictures have giant servers full of everything they have ever done, with a full database of who did what and where the rights are. Sony Interactive Entertainment probably doesn’t, at least not at the same level. Why is that? Well, the music and film industries are far more developed, have more standards, more regulations, and require more organization. Royalties are the norm in these mediums, and rights holders need to pay to the right people. Music and movie companies know that their works will be re-released on various mediums and formats, so they keep things organized in easy to transfer archives, effectively allowing them to be dumped onto new platforms.
The software and codexes needed to run audio and video are well understood and widely available as open formats. You don’t need to develop a software suite to play audio or video. You have public source documentation, and integrating basic playback into whatever is relatively trivial.
Meanwhile, video games are spread wide, very complicated, and are repulsed by the concept of open format anything, despite being built on top of open formats. How many major video game companies are there in America? More than ten! How many formats are there for running/playing video games? …More than ten! Are any of these formats open and widely used in an official capacity? Absolutely not. Is there a greater and more consistent demand for older games when compared to older music and movies? Nope, not really.
There are hundreds of developers, loads of tiny publishers, and while we saw a slew of acquisitions over the past few years, there is still an immense back catalog of stranded titles. Games where ownership was retained by the developer, the developer went bankrupt 20 years ago, and nobody bought the rights during the publisher’s fire sale in 2009. Music licenses have been an issue in games released into the PS2 era— hell, into the modern era in some respects— and when re-releasing certain games, music licenses need to be re-negotiated, contracts need to be rewritten, extended, or made perpetual. Old sports and car games simply cannot be released due to the licensing hell, as the original contracts were set to expire after a few years. And video games simply lack the same perpetual licenses that music and movies benefit from, because the owners of these licensed properties probably don’t WANT to hash out perpetual licenses.
In order for games to be re-released in bulk, certain things would need to be changed. Rights would need to be consolidated, assembled into larger holding companies or studios, who are better capable of negotiating deals for hundreds of games, rather than single games. And the technology to emulate games would need to undergo a drastic pivot.
For decades, emulation technology brewed in the background, saw in-house development, but even today, the entire scene is fractured and disorganized. Some projects are open source, others aren’t. Some emulators are just cores thrown into something like RetroArch, and there are a scattering of studios who are all developing their own video game engines, independently, for their own projects.
Digital Eclipse’s Retro Engine, Implicit Conversions’ Syrup Engine, Limited Run’s Carbon Engine, and the dozens of similar emulators all scattered across the internet. These all represent a tremendous amount of work from some brilliant people. But the fact that there are so many engines and emulators meant to do the same bloody thing, without a shared technological base, is immensely frustrating to me.
Ideally, the games industry should just embrace all the open source work that people have used in order to accurately emulate the vast majority of games released before, say, 2005. Standardizing and organizing this would take a couple million dollars, require the assistance of a respected body like the Electronic Software Association. But once it is done, once it is made open, then the project will largely be put into maintenance mode until new hardware is announced… unless someone wants to contribute or expand certain things.
I am serious when I say that an open format or open source solution is necessary for game emulation, game preservation, and game accessibility to reach a stage it needs to be. The biggest barrier of entry for games, as a medium, is simply getting them to run on everything. Music and movies run on your phone, computer, TV, or whatever. They can be transferred and streamed easily and effectively. Multiplatform accessibility is a key trait behind some of the biggest and most successful games in the world. And anybody not looking into getting their games on everything is a fool.
The problem is that porting, getting games to run on everything, is such a massive pain in the ass that I think that it is simply necessary for games to take this approach. The industry needs to figure out a way to just have games run on everything, officially. And if there was an open multi-platform emulator, that would fix this problem. It would make decades of gaming history available on a wide stretch of platforms. Just port the emulators themselves, and the game files— the ROMs— should run as they should.
Now, there is another solution around this, and it is a solution that music and movies have pursued. Streaming. Just have the games run on a Linux server in a data center, and then you don’t need to make the games for multiple platforms. This works as an option, though it erodes the concept of media ownership, and the very idea of someone streaming hours of video of a game that’s less than a gigabyte in size is… infuriatingly wasteful.
I admire the work that companies like Implicit Conversions are doing, and think they are true defenders of game history, preservation, and keeping games alive and available to a new generation. But there is a limit to what a plucky little company like them can do. Unless some major players in the world of video games come together and launch a platform, a standard, a piece of emulation technology, and a framework to keep older games alive… we’re stuck with this normal. Games preservation will have no choice but to live outside the law.
…Admittedly, retro gaming has thrived off unofficial emulation on PC and phones, making games accessible to the poor and disenfranchised, and garnering small communities as people tinker away at games as old as they are. I want us to have both the niche obscura of modders, hackers, and unofficial emulations in addition to having 90+% of games made before 2000 available on every major device. …But if the industry doesn’t want to move off of its smelly chair and invest in itself, then I guess we’re just going to be stuck in this murky unoptimized present.
Tales of Berseria Remastered Announced
(Further Frazzling The Natalie)
…Speaking of re-whatevers, I would like to briefly clarify that a remaster/remake does not necessitate the removal of the original. You can sell both the original version of an album and the remastered version. They might ask to know what’s different, but that’s not a problem. Give people choices, and they’ll be happier if they had to choose one thing!
So, the topic here is that Tales of Berseria Remastered was announced. With Berseria being the last Tales game of the PS3 era, having hit the platform in 2016, before the series made the transition to Unreal Engine and ushering in new success with Tales of Arise. Now, the PS3 era of Tales is a bit of an odd one, as Tales was a prolific and common RPG series throughout the ‘era where JPRGs died.’ The games were criticized for seeming low budget, for lacking the AAA production values that people were being told to expect, and aside from Vesperia, came out way too late in the PS3’s lifespan to really buck the ‘JRPGs are dead’ narrative component of ‘Japan is over’ trend in broader western gaming discourse and culture.
Now, I am sure that Tales fans have complex and dense thoughts on each of these… 6 games. But I remember Berseria in particular being celebrated as an end of an era for the series, culmination of what came before, and clear desire to do something different after Zestiria felt a bit too blasé in its approach. You were playing as a bunch of misfits and criminals in Berseria, and that’s FUN! However, as a game that came out for PS4— and PC in 2017— the idea of a remaster for this game feels a bit unwarranted, especially when the upgraded features are so… lacking.
The trailer only emphasized destination icons, previous DLC costumes, and a grade shop to activate modifiers to improve player experience. One of which is expected, and the other two just sound like something that would be added in a patch. I’m guessing the textures might be a bit higher quality and the game can possibly support higher resolutions and frame rates, but the original PC version already could be run in 4K, and looked darn good.
So, this re-release mostly exists as a way to bring it to Switch and potentially fix some of its jank. While still feeling the need to give it pre-order bonuses and a deluxe addition with a digital artbook, digital soundtrack, BGM packs, stat buffs, and whatever guff to crank the price up to $60. When… this game was discounted to $5 several times on PC! I literally bought it for $5 after watching a movie length video on it! (Wait, what do you mean it didn’t have any major discounts this past year and still ran for $50 as the standard price?)
Guh! Why Berseria and why now? A few months ago, I went on a tangent about how inconsistent the 30th Anniversary Remaster project for Bandai Namco’s Tales series was. Since then, I have gathered that the reason for this might be due to lost source code— which is so common in the Japanese games industry it hurts— and realized that the reason for this scattered deluge of re-releases can be attributed to the way these games are being made. Or rather who they are being made by.
Symphonia Remastered was a Bandai Namco Romania joint, which explains a lot. No shade, but what do a bunch of Romanians know about remastering a Japanese game? Vesperia Definitive was an in-house Tales Studios project. But the last few remasters have all been outsourced projects. Graces f Remastered was developed by Tose, the greatest whit label developer in all of video games. They ported Breath of the Wild to Nintendo Switch and were the main ‘workhorse developer’ for the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters. Xillia Remastered was developed by Doki Doki Groove Works, Inc., a support studio that has worked on everything from Dragon Ball FighterZ to NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139…
While Berseria Remastered is being developed by D.A.G, a support studio that has worked on everything from Super Mario Odyssey to Tekken 8 to that Jujutsu Kaisen kusoge fighter. I think they mostly do visual production, but I guess they are also capable of doing ports and remasters. Who knew? Not me!
So, the real reason why the releases just seem to happen is because of logistics. Who was able to take on which job, what capacity did the studio have, and when did they wrap up the project? They probably just handed out all five un-remastered PS3 era titles to some studios, and are just releasing them when they’re done. Why? Well, so they can get money faster. If you have a game, and it’s done, then you should generally put it out ASAP. Maybe wait a few months to avoid the rush…
Tales of Berseria Remastered is coming to PS5, Xbox Series, Switch, and Steam on February 27th, 2026.
Unity and Unreal Are Teaming Up!
(Which Just Sounds Like Bad News For Everyone…)
This is an odd story. At a recent Unity event Epic Tencent Games and Unity announced “a really unique collaboration.” One involving Unity games coming to Fortnite, Unreal will be added as part of Unity’s cross-platform commerce platform, and shared APIs between both engines. All as part of a plan to create an “open metaverse in a way that’s interoperable and fair.” Looking at articles about this, I am confused as to what is actually being said and what the end goal of the agreement might be, or why these two powerhouses in game engines are collaborating in this way.
However, I understand why Epic would want to use Unity to help bolster up Fortnite. Because Epic’s business model is designed around people constantly playing Fortnite. They are not competing with whatever big multiplayer craze is going on at the moment. They aren’t competing with ARC Raiders. They are competing with TikTok and Roblox. So they want to pack in as many games, as many modes, as they possibly can, and turn it into the only game someone would need. (As if anyone needs to game.) They could conceivably put in a bunch of Unreal games to pad things out, but Unreal 5 can be intensive, and a lot of smaller games prefer using the likes of Unity.
Epic would also LOVE to just outright own Unity as a game engine, effectively creating a monopoly on easy to license and widespread game engines— we’re in a duopoly right now. So this could be their way of dipping into Unity’s waters before they decide to take more drastic action. And I can also see this as a way for Unity trying to siphon up whatever money they can, as they are not a profitable company, and need whatever offers they can get if they want to stay afloat. …Or maybe they just want to use certain Unreal features, and those are so valuable, it’s worth adding Unity games to Fortnite.
Regardless of the justification, I do not like the idea of Unreal and Unity getting close like this. I think that there should be several standard and easily accessible engines. The fact that the majority of games hitting the market these days are Unreal or Unity is, frankly, disturbing to me. And I really hope that smaller developers continue to flock to engines like Godot and other open source alternatives. Because if it’s open source, it’s not really owned by anybody, and anyone can start making their own darn branch of it.
…At this point, I think I’m just anti-corporate software. It shapes how people think, how they create things, and it costs as much as the shareholders demand.
Is that it for this week? Yeah, I’m going to say it is. I’m still tired from my trip and recovering from jetlag.
Progress Report 2025-11-23
Charts like these always strike me as bizarre, as they feel based in half-truth and wise observations, have one or two niches that I did not think to consider, while the remaining 20% of it is made up of people who I don’t think exist, or are limited to three digits, across the entire world.
I also have no idea where I land here. Because I am a shut-in who likes writing about games, farting around on the internet, writing stories, and works as an accountant during the day. Where is my transgender accountant and part-time hobbyist creator square? Sorry I didn’t pursue STEM, but back in my day, we didn’t have STEM!
Also, just so that I stay responsible and do my duties, here’s a repost of my TO DO list for December 2025:
- 2025-12-??: Efu Efu Efu #4
- 2025-12-??: TSF Series #019: Suicide for Salvation
- 2025-12-??: Student Transfer Version 9 Review
- 2025-12-??: Pokemon Legends: Z-A Mega Dimension Review/Ramble
- 2025-12-25: Needy Streamer Overdose (Rain Request)
- 2025-12-30: TSF Showcase 2025-15: Trans Venus
- 2025-12-31: Natalie Rambles About 2025 (The Trial of Natalie Neumann)
F my life, my dreams, and my ambitions… I might need to delay Suicide for Salvation, again.
2025-11-16: Not a productive day for Natalie.TF. Wrote 1,000 words for a bonus project and watched like 20 episodes of Yu-Gi-Oh GX with the Cassie, kon.
2025-11-17: Spent the morning getting my game on by finishing season two of Yu-Gi-Oh! GX with Cassie and helping her pack up. Spent the afternoon situating myself and packing, before over-eating because I was stressed about getting places. And only in the evening did I have the calm needed to write 2,500 words for the secret project only Missy Scrumptious knows about. Then I got bored and just watched videos before going to bed at like 22:00.
2025-11-18: Big old travel day, where I did not accomplish much of anything for Natalie.TF, because I was running around for like 16 hours, and was NOT going to try writing anything while on an airplane with the turbines blaring.
2025-11-19: Nat is back in command headquarters. Yay! Wrote the preamble, emulation bit, Berseria bit, and Unreal/Unity bit. Just barely under 5,000 words, written in a day while jetlagged.
2025-11-20: Worked a mostly full day with my boss before Thanksgiving break next week. I kept dozing off due to a lack of clear direction throughout the day. Then I decided to make the header image and edit this Rundown, because it’s Thursday, bitch. Oh, and I played more PLZA, trying to wrap up things before the DLC.
2025-11-21: Got Eternal Floette in PLZA, wrote a 1,700 word preamble for next week’s Rundown. Then went back to the secret project, writing 1,300 words before losing steam while exercising and collapsing to sleep.
2025-11-22: I had some weird struggles with staying motivated or active today, as I was just fatigued for whatever reason. Still, wrote 5,000 words for the secret project coming out in early December.