Rundown (8/23/2026) Stim to Stifel The Whims

  • Post category:Rundowns
  • Reading time:22 mins read
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This Week’s Topics:

Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Stim to Stifel The Whims

Seeing as how I just released TSF Series #019: An Exchange of Flesh last Wednesday (a week early!), I am left to stew over my next project, and decided to FINALLY go through the acclaimed Fate Stay Night. A behemoth of a game, a 100 hour visual novel with three distinct routes and oodles of endings, but something that I can chip at as I begin the long foray that is Tax Season with my geriatric boss. While I don’t love what I have played so far— I never really jived with the concepts of Fate— I am more concerned about the game’s ability to satiate my fussier desires. Because for as much as I love visual novels, they lack the same interactivity and player controlled actions that I crave.

Simply put, I tend to come to games for two things that are often interwoven depending on the game. I want a compelling story with likable characters and a premise I enjoy, executed with varying levels of audiovisual flourishes and medium unique pacing. Over the past, uh, decade, I have fulfilled this desire with visual novels and more story-driven games. Student Transfer, AI: The Somnium Files, Hundred Line, Doukyuusei. And per my review output, you may assume that’s all I really play, but that’s not necessarily true.

I also happen to like gameplay, and games that de-emphasize their story. Ones that focus more on action, strategy, puzzle solving, exploration, all that good shit as the primary draw. Some would just call these real games, but I’m not going to do that. This time. Most games are a spectrum between gameplay and narrative— we love it when games weave them together in a pertinent way— and despite having not reviewed many gameplay-y games as of late, I’ve still been playing them.

Over the past three years I’ve spent dozens of hours on PokéRogue, Vampire Survivors, Dead Cells, Vampire Crawlers, Ball X Pit, the GBA Castlevania games, and more.

I’ve futzed with a bunch of Pokémon fangames like the recent FRLG.IPS ROM hack (Played up to Lavender Town and saw very few changes) and Gamma Emerald (it’s rough and kinda ugly). I’ve played a copious amount of game demos, particularly around Steam Next Fest, because game demos are low commitment ways to engage with something. In addition, I have dipped my toes into offshoot experiments that I justified with “it’s for work,” such as Zenless Zone Zero, Neverness to Everness, and that DragonSword game.

All of this comes in addition to the fact that I was an avid player of Dragalia Lost (2018-2022), and as a gacha action RPG, it satiated the part of my brain that wanted to engage in focused action gameplay, as most of that game is either story mode, dungeon exploration, or boss battles. (I still think Enter the Kaleidoscape is one of the best roguelikes ever made due to the sheer variety of playable characters. Goldarn do I wish they just made that its own standalone thing.)

I bring this all up because for as much as I enjoy a good story, I really don’t want to sit down and read something after one of my staple 12 hour work days in the crypto mines or doing a particularly stressful return for a clusterfuck of a client. I just want something that I can comfortably go through, complete a task, do a bit of grinding, or clear another area. Something that requires my attention, but can easily be paired with a video on my other monitor, as I find that to be relaxing. I want something I can stim with, that provides me with a specific type of stimulation I desire, in order to help me re-center my mental and emotional state.

Now, this does not necessarily need to be a game. Dragalia Lost V3 Re;Works was an exercise in stimming that involved spreadsheet work, data analysis, oodles of formatting, image editing, PDF assembling, and looking at too many numbers. It was basically a video game, and kept me busy for 250+ hours in 2023. And I tried to replicate this with my big stupid Pokémon project where I tried redesigning the move pools of every Pokémon. I finished several steps. I redesigned the moves, consolidating and cutting them, conceptualized a few more, did the same with abilities, reworked all stats to be more standardized, and redistributed existing move pools to be more homogenized and, uh, better. …Then came to an impasse after being faced with the task of expanding the distribution of moves across over a thousand Pokémon.

I spend TOO MUCH time on these project, but I also love them, as they fulfill my same desire to grind away at something non-language-based at the end of a day, or when I am watching something.

So, why am I bringing this up other than to present another Nat Fact™ for when I am inevitably replicated via a digital homunculus that can only pretend to imitate my ever-growing lineage of meat-based eccentricities? Well, because I have once again hit a point where I feel the desire to indulge in this activity, but find myself overburdened with options that least to the beloved choice paralysis.

Yes, this is Natalie is Afraid of Commitment! again, and much like back in March 2026, I still don’t have a good answer. The answer is probably picking one story heavy game and one gameplay heavy game and play them in parallel, but despite being a homebody, my days are too unpredictable for me to ever agree to any standard. I want normality, I want standardization, but I just don’t get it.

So, what is my current solution to this? Well, I am putting in several hours of Fate Stay Night, get my fill (3 hours of reading is plenty for a day), and then play Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana (2016). Why? Because it’s been too long since I played a Falcom game and I wanted to get back into Ys. Except this is modern Ys, where the game is trying to be more story driven. I have plenty of kind and petty things to say about that game, but who knows if I’ll beat it. Accordingly, was this a good choice? NO! I should just play some Metroidvania before going to bed, but I wanted to Ys it up! Ys it up! Ys it up!

Now, over the upcoming weeks, this format will not work as I will be busy with tax season, but like with everything else, I’ll play it by ear. Then, once it comes time to get things ready for 2027… it will be back into the mines for Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 Act IV and maybe Act V. I still need to map out what I want to do with IV and then figure out what concepts, pairings, and dilemmas I can do with the final act, as I scrapped the original plans for those. No giant robots, no fusion, no epic battles… actually, no, I NEED to pursue fusion. It has been 11 years.

Akumako: “You know what you should do? You should make that a part of the finale. Switching bodies is pretty dang intimate, so what if, in the wedding chapter, the One True Pairings cement their holy union by fusing together and enjoying a level of untold intimacy at the beach hotel.”

That’d be a LOT of futanari masturbation scenes…

Akumako: “And SEX! But it’d be all groovy. This is the end of these characters’ story, sex makes for a good climax. Besides, you gotta make Maxxie Flare’s Funky Fresh Futanari Fusion Fiasco a thing! Not like you could do anything involving The Robo Trigger, Project Sunshine, Verde’s Dusk, or Vincent’s Dawn.”

We are in WAY too deep, so I’m going to kill this topic and move onto a new worldline.

Akumako: “…Is THAT what happens when we transition to a new segment?”

It is this week!

The AI Grift Economy Is Ruining Retro Gaming
(I Hate It Here…)

I have made my status as an AI hater well known, as I do believe it has been a net negative for humanity for myriad reasons. (Environmental concerns, rise in misinformation and forgery, monetarily incentivized psychosis, shitty art, lost jobs, increased corporate controls, mental dependency, copyright infringement, the destruction of the internet, the RAM crisis, etc.) Sure, sure, you can always point at this or that project that benefitted from an AI, but the productivity has not been what was promised, and there are far more downsides than there are upsides per my purview. AI is a threat to basically everything I love. …And that includes the retro gaming scene.

A lot of people in the tech field have drank the AI Flavor Aid and now want to use these tools to make a contribution to the thriving scene of retro gaming. Like with many things, their efforts are only making the scene worse. When a new mod, port, or translation came out in this scene, it was normally a cause of celebration, and something representing a high level of passion and at least high aspirations of quality. But when generative AI is in the mix, such quality goes out the window.

AI has been used for translations, ranging from “good enough to cop the gist” to a genuinely abysmal butchering of the script that ruins someone’s first, and possibly only, time with a game. Language is a complex and tricky thing for anyone to understand, and I’ve schlepped through enough bad machine translations to view them as a compromised experience that makes any worse lesser. No matter how good you think it is, a machine simply lacks the linguistic understanding of a human being, and the creative voice needed to sustain a long story-driven game. It might write better than you, but that’s a YOU problem, dood.

The burgeoning field of decompilations and recompilations we have seen over the past few years has undergone a “boom” in new entries thanks to Claude and Copilot. Except these decomps and recomps are trash. These developers do not seek to understand a game, but rather throw a computer at it to try and suss out what might be going on well enough to produce something playable. However, these projects, such as the Pokémon Red and Blue “recomp,” Gen1Recomp, often have such overt problems that it’s amazing that anybody thought this was fit to release. If your tech cannot figure out how a damn Game Boy game is supposed to run, and you are not interested in learning, then maybe just stop.

The threat of an AI-based and shitty decomp or recomp is highly discouraging to developers doing this work the right way— with their hands in the same way AI imagesdiscourage artists. Plus, the existence of even a BAD decomp/recomp discourages others from doing anything with them. Let’s say you’re a freak who’s really into Drakgengard: The Drag-On Dragoon (2003). However, you see that someone else is working on the project. Are you going to risk doing years of work in bringing this game to several platforms, or are you going to let this guy handle it and hope it turns out okay? Prolly just the latter.

Also, people are just straight up stealing the ideas and designs seen in other projects, and that is just disgusting to me.

“You have an open source emulator? Not anymore, now I have the code and because I want to be the guy with the hot new PS2 emulator, I’m going to harass you until you give up the project, because then it will be mine.”

“What’s that? You have a paywalled emulator front-end that looks super cool and unlike anything else? Fuck you, I want to do something cool, so Imma have my AI copy what you’re doing and act like I’m the original, you’re the rip-off, and beg for some hot donations! Why? Because I can!”

Or, the worst case scenario, they try to make money off of their AI generated copycat program, pushing out the original creator by undercutting them with a worse product. You might call that basic thugonomics, I call that bullshit!

I cannot honestly say that AI has no place anywhere or for anything. It can be a great resource for accessing information and learning how something works and operate, so long as it cites its sources and lets you verify things. It’s hard for me to make an argument that someone having an AI explain a complex topic to them, or giving them programming pointers, is a vile action. Like, how different is that from hitting up Stack Overflow?

I hate using the work product from AIs. The way Claude formats Excel documents drives me nuts. I have nothing but utter contempt for AI generated images or music. But if I cannot see what AI code was made behind the scenes, and it just works, do I REALLY care? …Only on a broader, theoretical level.

Unfortunately, there is no true effort to police AI in the Western world. The technofeudalistfascistwhitesupremacistoligarchy of America is obsessed with this idea of beating China in the “AI race,” when many of their models are just open source, comparably efficient, and don’t require gutting a nation to make way for datacenters. It would be one thing if this was just like the Space Race and most regular people’s lives weren’t affected by the dick-measuring contest between superpowers. However, AI is unescapable, we are all living through it, and all it does is take, take, take away from the things that bring me joy.

…And now rights holders are looking to use AI to sell re-releases of classic Amiga games like James Pond. Greeeaaattt.

No, I’m not going to talk about James Pond. I’ve only been to Europe ONCE, and England is arguably not Europe.

Ninja Baseball League-Man: Bases Loaded Announced
(Because City Connection Can Do Anything)

So, this is an odd little nugget. During the retro gaming boom of the late 2000s, when people were able to share what these games looked and played like via video sites, there was a deluge of critical reassessments. People were trying these older games, via emulation, old hardware, MAME, and so forth, analyzing what they did well, and trying games they never heard of or couldn’t afford when they were little White boys. (The scene was terminally Caucasian and overwhelmingly AMAB.)

Many games that had low print runs or a less than stellar critical reception were being rebranded as all-time classics. The concept of hidden gems in a library became a point of great interest, with people highlighting games that time forgot to their peers and folks a decade younger than them. And if a game was obtuse, frustrating, or full of weird crap, it was lambasted by the angry reviewers that followed in the wake of The Angry Video Game Nerd.

…And I am also not talking about the Japanese equivalent of this phenomenon, which was different, and I didn’t pay attention to beyond dope music videos.

One of these hidden gems was Ninja Baseball Bat Man (1993), an Irem beat ’em up Belt Scroller arcade game that sold 50 units in the US and was only discovered after people found the ROM on MAME sites. There, people came to love this game for its absurd title, rendition of America through a Japanese lens, and general wackiness. Plus, it was a pretty fun button basher too. Great game to play with friends via the internet and voice chat over Skype or whatever people were using in 2009.

Millions heard of this game through videos or word of mouth, and it developed a minor cult following, but never saw a re-release of any sort. …Then bloody City Connection, a retro gaming workhorse of a company, went an announced a remastered version of the game. Ninja Baseball League-Man: Bases Loaded! (Do I need to explain the name change?)

This version retains the original sprite art but expands the game to a far comfier 16:9 aspect ratio, features online play, and adds a new playable character in the form of Pink, a cheerleader. This is in addition to a new arranged soundtrack, new high difficulty mode with revised spawns, and a minigame mode based on diversions from the original game along with some brand-new ones for good measure.

It all sounds peachy keen with a magazine… but the dev team behind this remaster tried a bit too hard to make the game look modern. Per what I could tell, the game features new real-time shadows, lighting effects, and blurred backgrounds. None of which I think look good.

Admittedly, I do use shadow, lighting, and blurring effects when making my pixel art diorama headers. But, one, the rules I’d apply for a header image are not the rules I would apply to a game. They are different, prima facia. And two, I am not remastering something. They distract from and obscure the pixel art through fairly cheap visual effects that don’t mesh with the mostly preserved or expanded sprite art.

Anyhow, Ninja Baseball League-Man: Bases Loaded will be released for PS5, Xbox Series, Switch 2, and PC on December 10, 2026. Surprised they are skipping the Switch so soon, but whatevs!

P.S. I think it’s funny that this game had a reprisal 16 or so years after its release and is getting a remaster 16 years after that. Nostalgia sure is a cycle.

Horizon Hunters Gathering Scraps Last Service Angle
(You Love To See It!)

Earlier this year, Sony announced Horizon Hunters Gathering, a co-op live service with bespoke characters you would play as in encounters against various bosses and enemies. It also featured a remarkably different aesthetic, being brighter, more anime/cartoon influenced, and with wacky characters that were designed in a lab to hit various boxes. It looked more like Marvel Rivals to me than the games preceding it. Which was weird as this was developed by the same studio as those games, Guerrilla Games, and not as some farmed out offshoot spin-off or anything. I guess between this and that aight Lego spin-off, Sony really wants this series to be an “all-ages” affair.

I didn’t report on it when it was announced, as I just don’t have much to say about the IP, and all I would have done is dunk on it for not being my tang. That’s not really fun for me! Especially not from a “yeah, that’s a good one” franchise like Horizon, something I have no emotional connection to, but can respect as the robot dinosaur game.

Hunters Gathering was also a strange choice due to the simple fact that Sony had another online Horizon game in the oven with Horizon Steel Frontiers by NC, née NCSoft. They do Guild Wars, Blade & Soul, and oodles of other MMOs. Now, you might argue that an MMO is inherently different from a live service, but I would argue that MMO walked so Live Service could run, and they are intrinsically related. It is more fantastical and flashier than the series has been up until this point, and… the game looks Korean. I don’t even know what that means, and am not trying to be rude, but I have seen enough Korean online games to see a style to them.

However, Steel Frontiers has been presented as a mobile and PC title, without even announcing a PS5 release, for some reason.

I half-expected Sony to shamble through with this curious decision and launch two competing live services in the same year. It sounds like a very NuSony thing to do. However, after public playtests of Hunters Gathering, Sony has reassessed their plans for this game. Per Jason Schrier, the guy in games journalism, Sony is “strip[ping] out the live-service component and turn it into more of a traditional cooperative multiplayer game with a story mode and a far smaller scope.”

Hearing that is… surprising to me, as a decision like this is not made lightly, and indicates that things went really badly with the playtests. However, as Schrier points out, this type of pivot is in-line with Sony’s prior live service fumblings this past generation. The Last of Us, Spider-Man, God of War, and more were all supposed to get live services out the door by now, but all projects have been scrapped. Despite their grand ambitions, the only success story to come from this push was Helldivers II (2024), and I don’t think that was worth it.

If you were THIS BAD at your job in any reasonable industry, your name would be Mud Crappington and you would be a pariah. Alas, in the games industry, the capitalist, and managers thrive and get millions while the workers don’t even get a termination notice until they are fired for other people’s mistakes.

At least they seem to recognize that their ventures resulted in widespread failure and Horizon Rivals, or whatever it’s called—

Akumako: “You literally can copy/paste the name.”

No.

At least this game of an unknown name will not be subjected to the same server dependency curse as others. Hopefully it will be designed less around an MAU engagement loop and more around having fun with one or two friends à la Elden Ring Nightreign (2025) or something, I dunno what kids play with their friends these days.

Progress Report 2026-08-23

I have no idea who made this, because information atrophy is all the rage on the modern internet. But it is a marvelous edit.

Movie night with Cassie, Shiba, and Cassie’s boyfriend was another movie night. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish was a good time, and it actually WAS enhanced by watching the first movie, as it’s plainly obvious how much better the film is over its predecessors. Stronger characterization all around, better pathos, and excellent animation high on personality and striking scenes. Good animated adventure, but I’d hesitate to call it great. Prolly should watch the Spider-Verse movies sometime. Would make for a fun Rundown preamble topic.

Cassie also requested that we watch Kung Fu Panda, which I distinctly remember being anti-interested in as a 13-year-old, so I was going into the movie with some baggage, and I did not really care for it, as it was among the more paint-by-numbers movies we’ve watched. Great hero with a great destiny needs to be erected, and they get an American chronic underachiever who only knows of fighting through movies or the cultural equivalent. He is terrible at doing his duties, failing even basic training, and right when he gives up, he is thrown back into the fire with a new perspective to save the whatever. The gimmick, beyond the animals and China is that the protagonist is a funny fat guy who can only perform if food is involved, or he is really motivated, and in that instance he is better than five fighters who have trained their entire lives to be the best of the best. …No.

It’s a familiar set up, I don’t like how they gussy it up, but it’s still fine. Really made me feel like an aunt sitting and watching a movie with their kid though. Not that Cassie is my kid. She’s my little sister. I guess that would make Missy Creampuff Scrumptious my niece? Shiba would be the dog.

2026-08-16: Watched movies with Cassie and friends, then edited… 30,000 words of TSF Series #019. I would have done more, but friends kept DMing me!

2026-08-17: Wrapped the final 7,000 words for TSF Series #019, tried making something based on the trans Peter/Petra Parker trend, but failed to find a good through line. Started on an AI redomp/decomp thing, wrote 500 words, got tired doing that, decided to start Fate Stay Night. The damn prologue is three hours long, and I’m going to miss Rin being the protagonist.

2026-08-18: Blew up at my boss for shoving AI shit in my face, made obvious allusions to suicide that freaked him out, because if I cannot live my life the way I want to, I will just kill myself. I would rather die with my integrity than live doing something I hate, because life is fickle and of little meaning, unlike art, which is more valuable because it is immortal. Played 4 hours of Fate Stay Night, got to Saber’s introduction, and I really like the characters, but not the way the game is constructed. Wrote 2,500 words for the first three sections.

2026-08-19: Wrote 600 words, played 4 hours of Fate Stay Night, got through February 3.

2026-08-20: Edited this HOT MILK. Got to the GALES in Fate Stay Night.

2026-08-21: Played more Fate Stay Night, got past the school genocide zone. Spent way too much time with Cassie and Creampuff, separately of course.

2026-08-22: Wrote 1,000 words for the next Preamble Ramble. Played a lot more Fate Servant’s Knight.

Natalie.TF 2026 Progress Report

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This Post Has 2 Comments

  1. rainliquidation 08/24/2026 Reply

    i wouldn’t really classify fate as something to be played, more that whatever exists of the gameplay allows it to not be simply be a choose-your-own-adventure book

    1. Natalie Neumann 08/24/2026 Reply

      It’s a visual novel, it’s a game, and you play games. This discourse was had over a decade ago, and this is the conclusion I came to. :P