Rundown (10/11/2026) Brain is the Body; Body is the Brain

This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: Brain is the Body; Body is the Brain
• Natalie’s Basic Body Swap RPG Stat Concept (Because This Topic Was Too Big…)
• Larry Ellison Now Owns Warner Bros. (Skydance Corporation MUST Be Destroyed!)
• Sony’s Planning on Reviving Ape Escape (But I Wish They Weren’t!)
• Sony Gives Up on VR Gaming (Now Facebook is the True and Future King of the Niche!)

---

Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Brain is the Body; Body is the Brain

Disclaimer: I tackle some pretty sensitive and tender topics in this week’s preamble, and I just want to state up front that I am not trying to make any bold statements about human biology, nor do I want to essentialize any persons or groups. This is ultimately a discussion on body swapping, a fictitious concept, that happens to go way into the weeds on certain details.

So, this past week I got into another argument discussion with Missy “Creampuff” Scrumptious about the role of the brain in the context of a body swap. For as much as body swap enthusiasts like to view things, the brain is ultimately an organ— the organ— and while you can’t just eyeball the differences, every brain is different. A different arrangement of synapses, chemicals, and areas of activity that vary from person to person. People also like to attribute certain traits to certain types of brain, such as deeming people right brain or left brain, or identifying people as having neurodivergences such as autism or ADHD.

However, the diversity of brains expands well beyond that. There are rare and extreme conditions such as hyperthymesia, a memory condition that allows one to remember nearly every part of their whole life, constantly remembering and re-remembering it. There are relatively common brain-based “specific developmental disorders” like dyslexia and dyscalculia. And that is before getting into how the brain can be affected through broader genetic disabilities such as Down syndrome and Cohen syndrome.

Just as everybody has a different body, they also have a different brain, and the diversity of brains should be as extreme, if not more extreme, than the differences of the rest of people’s bodies. I don’t know much brain science, but I am pretty comfortable in saying that this notoriously difficult subject is quite complicated. The science gets especially complex when trying to deal with the philosophy of the mind, a metaphysical counterpart to the brain that represents a person’s thoughts, consciousness, personality, memory, and so forth. All of which would be stored, shaped, and processed on some level within the physical confines of the brain.

Schools host whole classes on this subject, you could fill a bookshelf with literature on theories of the brain and the mind. Yet in the conventional non-scientist American parlance I am most familiar with, it’s generally accepted that the mind and body are two related yet distinct entities. There is no way to extract a mind and put it into something. The digitization of human thought and consciousness is and will likely forever remain a sci-fi theory, and the most we can do is make an AI that pretends like it’s a dead person. Body swapping is a mere fantasy that has captivated people, like me, for millennia, and the foundational concept of body swapping fiction.

Accordingly, there is no hard science to rely on for body swapping, but among creators, it is generally accepted that, when two people swap bodies, their minds are largely unaltered. Their sense of identity, consciousness, personality, and general knowledge all remain unchanged, and everything they learn, they learn the same way that people learn normally, by doing, by experiencing things. They would similarly know how to still do things they’re familiar with, yet their ability to perform these actions would be impaired.

A craftsperson with a different set of hands would not be able to perform their craft with the same efficiency and performance. A seasoned athlete in the body of a frail person might know how to throw, kick, and weave like a pro, but would lack the strength, stature, and agility to perform at a professional level. Put a 6-year-old kid in the body of a pro footballer, and they wouldn’t be able to play at a respectable level. The more different their bodies are, the more difficult it would be to use them, which makes intuitive sense. The more familiar something is to you, the easier it is to use.

Most body swap scenarios only focus on the external differences. The differences in strength, height, weight, sex, complexion, hair, hands, hips, that sort of thing. It’s what you see. Except that is not all one is getting with a new body. They get their status, reputation, possessions, assets, job, and all that good ish, but they are also get a new brain that their mind is running on, a la software running on new hardware.

This is often ignored as it gets in the way of certain fantasies— the classic Gexxer scenario of a schlubby male nerd stealing a hot dumb blonde woman’s body, let’s just call her a cheerleader— would typically retain the intellect of his mind regardless of its vessel. Ignoring the brain aspect allows the smart ugly person and dumb hot person to become a smart hot person and an ugly dumb person, a clear upgrade and downgrade with a sense of catharsis and with fulfillment. The functionality and efficiency of their brains is a non-factor.

When trying to factor in the differences of different bodies’ brains, you could take a more cynical approach and argue that the differences between brains, however similar, would render them incompatible with any foreign mind. You could say that swapping bodies would just produce two braindead people, but that’s lame as hell, boring as sin, and not what anybody actually wants to see. You could make it more “realistic” by having freshly swapped persons struggle to speak properly, struggle to walk, or have issues doing something as innate as seeing something. Yet, unless you are going for a surgery angle, I don’t think people want that. However, there is room for friction from incompatibility, or from characters gaining/lacking the ability to do things with their brain that they used to be able to do with ease, similar to other, broader physical gains/losses.

The fantasy of the aforementioned narrative is far different if the nerd, using the cheerleader’s brain, were to be unable to mentally calculate or understand scientific jargon with the aptitude he once possessed. This could be justified under the notion that his mind is operating within a brain possessing subpar “math infrastructure.” Just as the nerd would have let his body’s physical abilities decline through a sedentary lifestyle, the cheerleader’s brain’s math/science abilities would decline through a lifestyle that do not involve performing computations with rigor. …Or never developed the synapses for anything more than pre-algebra.

Conversely, because the nerd has access to an athlete’s body, it would be theoretically easier for him to develop an understanding of how to perform feats. He might not be able to do trig with ease, but he could learn how to do the cheer routines his body’s former occupant did. A procedure that would call back on a general sense of coordination driven by the brain, its “wiring,” a body’s fitness and flexibility, and the familiarity forged through practice and stored in memory. The nerd would have the physical capacity to perform the same feats as the cheerleader, but would need to learn how to mentally perform them, how to be her, first.

The same could be argued to be true for the nerd improving the physical capabilities of his brain. He could train his brain, using his mind’s blueprints as a guide, and developing the physical infrastructure needed to operate on a higher level. Hell, he could just take the body, focus on that, and neglect his athletic body’s current needs, resuming his previously experienced sedentary lifestyle. Of course, an adaption would take a significant amount of time, as it takes time for anyone to change their physique or get good at a thing.

The same principles would of course be true for the other side of this pair, where the cheerleader would struggle with more physical feats, knowing how to move a body but not her current body, while having an increased capacity for “intellectual” fields. Her brain is already primed for these processes, though she will need to learn how to use it and study properly. I would imagine mental math coming easier to her, subjects finally drilling into her mind in a way they could not due to laziness or disinterest, “brain neglect” if I may. Heck, because her physical brain has been tuned to contain specific types of information, perhaps she will find herself drawn to this sort of thing as her mind “fills out” this new brain.

This in turn opens another way to complicate a long-term body swap narrative, asking how the character reacts to this gain/loss. Would they choose to assimilate to their new physical form, brain and all? Would they fight against it, to try to reclaim what they had in a new shell? Or would they strive for a middle ground or try to find some new path forward? This is one of the more enticing questions a creator can explore when crafting a long-term body swap story, or even just an ex post facto epilogue for one. Though, it is most often answered by the responsibilities imposed on the character, what is expected of them, and what they have the luxury of doing. Maybe the nerd wants to begin the nerd-ification arc for his new body, but peer pressure and a vibrant social life prevent him from doing what he wants.

Okay, okay, that’s just my hare-brained theory for one possible interpretation of body swapping. The actual spark to my aforementioned conversation was a discussion of how neurodivergences, namely autism and ADHD, should be implemented into a body swap narrative.

…Which is an even MORE complicated subject!

There has been decades of academic writing about the differences between neurodivergent and neurotypical folks. The mechanisms of their differences, how they excel in certain things, how they react differently, and areas in which they generally lack. There are always extremes, certain traits can be tweaked through medication, and a lot of behaviors that people just learn to tolerate. Simply put, these clusters of behaviors, driven by how their brains work and how it teaches their developing mind to work, which itself is positioned as something different from the “normal” way humans are “supposed” to work. On a physical level, from what I found, an “autistic brain” operates differently than a “neurotypical brain.”

If I seem shaky about this subject, it’s because I am. I’m autistic and I do not like non-autistic people essentializing autism as something exotic. However, per the fictitious body swap framework I have discussed, a “neurotypical mind” using a “autistic brain” would likely have access to new strengths and weaknesses. They would likely do better when it comes to focusing on tasks and more technical work, yet lack their same mental agility and awareness of social cues. Their brain might present them with multiple solutions to a problem instead of just one, while their problem solving might just ignore obvious factors because they simply failed to notice. Or they will get sidetracked by some dumb side project because it seems like the most important thing in the world. Or they will hyperfocus on what they need to get done in a way that is seen as obsessive.

However, at varying levels, autistic people learn how neurotypical people work by being around them, analyzing them, and figuring out how to operate around them. This might not come naturally, but they can and do learn the gestures, subtleties of conversation, and importance of things like eye contact. This familiarity could, in theory, give them a greater adaptability to using a neurotypical mind. Sure, they may still struggle to learn how to do things they previously sucked at, and things they excelled in may be hit with a cap in performance and efficiency that did not exist before. Yet there is an understanding of the other half that I would not say most neurotypicals understand. Loads of y’all don’t even know what Real Autism is!

Regardless of the exact minutiae, I think it is reasonable to theorize that, using a neurotypical/neurodivergent brain with a neurodivergent/neurotypical mind would likely result in the mind shifting more to match the brain over time. Why? Well, you can’t stop someone from being neurodivergent or make them neurodivergent IRL. But if you give them a neurodivergent brain, one that works a specific way, and they need to use it for long enough, then wouldn’t their mind become divergent?

As for body swaps between neurotypical characters, I would guess that neurodivergent brains might lack the same plasticity of a neurotypical brains. For a “regular” person without any disorders or disabilities, their brain’s skills can be developed through effort, practice, and tutoring. If someone sucks at reading, they can learn how to be a better reader. If someone sucks at math, they can become better through practice and dedication. They would not be the best, but they can be at least above average. This plasticity is what makes them typical. While neurodivergent folks are more locked into their class from an early age.

All of this is before acknowledging the myriad other ways in which a person’s brain can lack something seen as typical and the potential ramifications with transferring minds. For examples, speech impediments, Tourette’s, lisps, would that be something tied to the brain only, or the brain and the mind, as the mind has only known how to use a brain with an impediment? Would the impediment exist in both parties of a body swap, as the speech impediment mind is not used to speaking normally and might overcorrect while the typical mind’s words are processed through a filter that produces something in-line with the body’s usual quirks?

Or, what about depression, bipolar disorder, anorexia, or any of the other deluge of disorders you can find through a casual read of the DSM V? Wouldn’t the chemical imbalances stay with the brain, making body swapping a cure to depression? What about people who suffer an impairment in brain function after a stroke or seizure? People have been known to outwardly change, to think differently, after that experience, which does have a real physical impact on the brain. Will their mind “go back to normal” upon entering a “stroke-free” body? Or, what about somebody with a significant mental impairment or developmental disorder that leaves them unable to care for themself despite being externally capable?

What about… someone who gets wacked in the head with a metal pipe and gets their brain messed up? They go from a regular Joe Schmoe to someone who cannot form proper sentences, change themselves, or feed themselves. What happens if you put someone else’s mind in their body? Well, they would have all the same hard limits as the original body’s brain, simple as that. But what about the other half of the pair? Well, the question would be if their mind was gone after that physical altercation damaged their brain, or if it was just locked away, unable to express itself. Assuming the latter, as it has far more narrative juice, there would probably be a readjustment period to using a more typical brain, but after a point, it would be like any other body swap.

…Actually, I just realized that I sorta wrote a scenario depicting that in Psycho Shatter 1985: Black Vice Re;Birth (2019). Go me, I guess.

I have been yapping a lot, trying to grasp this subject in my own way, but let me try to wrap this up.

The point of a body swap is to explore what it is like for a character being in a different body, and for as much as body swap fans tend to ignore this, brains are part of the body. They are another area worth considering when writing or creating any body swap media, and just another tool to play with. That being said I think they are best incorporated for a long-term swap where people get used to their new bodies and their quirks. Neurodivergences, mental disorders, and miscellaneous brain shit are just another tool for a creator to utilize when making things that fuel their fire.

However, they also need to be approached with grace, same as everything else, and not being a bigot, chud, or other assorted dipshit. Approach with curiosity, fascination, respect, and most important of all, write CHARCTERS, not stereotypes. You’ll end up much happier that way…

If you want to write a body swap with brain-based mental shifts as part of your narrative, there is plenty of ample room for a nice slow burn in that respect. If you don’t want to, don’t. There are no rules, no hard standards, and crazy ideas are welcome, as we are all freaks down here! …Except for the cowards too scared to embrace their inner freak!

Akumako: “Cool story, bitch! Now, you need to explain the best way to gamify neurodivergences in a body swapping RPG!”

…Little brat.

Well, my first gut reaction is to look at what other games have done for inspiration. Mewgenics had autism and ADHD disorders that modified character stats, and I think they make sense in context with the game. People bitched about that, but people will bitch about anything involving neurodivergences, and I only trust my fellow Neurodys to express an opinion about it.

Though, viewing neurodivergences as yet another physical difference… why wouldn’t they be treated like every other physical differences? Swap two people, they are going to have an adjustment period, getting used to their voice, height, weight, shape, sex, and everything else. It would take time and practice to learn how to use these new things proficiently, but after learning how to use this body, maybe learning more about its owner, then that could increase one’s comfort with a body. How do you specifically factor in neurodivergences into that? Uh… you kinda don’t? At least not directly.

Every person’s body is different, every person’s mind is different, so maybe the best way to manage this is to not ask “how would this character react to being in an autistic body” but ask the foundational question: “How would this character feel in this body?” If you’re a true body swap fan should be asking on the regular. So, just go through it the direct way, figure out how much character A would like being character B, and use that information to inform the stats, the abilities. Hell, set a compatibility rating for each pair you have, and use that as a basis for whatever set of systems you are using. Use that as part of the broader stat calculation where obviously physical stats associated with the body while mental stats are associated with the mind, along with skills, as the mind know how to do things. And then use the compatibility rating to inform some calculation for the stats, maybe even give the compatibility rating proper levels.

I lost track of what I was supposed to be doing here and actually came up with a basic stat distribution system for the mind, body, and compatibility levels of characters. However… it’s kind of unrelated, so it’s getting its own follow-up section after the line break.

---

Natalie’s Basic Body Swap RPG Stat Concept
(Because This Topic Was Too Big…)

So, because I cannot help myself when I grab a bone of an idea, I decided to map out a basic idea of what stats could look like in a body swap RPG, with just addition and subtraction, and with small numbers, I used D&D stats as a baseline: Strength, wisdom, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, and charisma, and am using a 20 point scale, less in terms of D&D scale, and more in terms of… the percentiles of the general population, let’s say. 10 is the about average, 5 in the bottom 20-25% range, 15 is in the top 70% to 75% range, 20 is in the top 5% of the population. As for what the stats would represent, here are some revised definitions I came up with:

Strength: Innate body stat. Represents the body’s raw physical power, regardless of the mind.
Wisdom: Innate mind stat. Represents the mind’s knowledge and acuity, regardless of the body.
Dexterity: Represents the mind’s comfort and aptitude in moving a body with grace.
Constitution: Represents the mind’s understanding of a body’s capacity for pain and its physical limits.
Intelligence: Represents the mind’s ability to use the brain to handle intellectual matters.
Charisma: Represents the outward confidence and allure of a body, informed through the mind’s comfort with being seen and judged.

For the math, I am simply adding three factors together. The body stats, the mind stats, and the combination’s compatibility stats, based on their compatibility level. Compatibility level is on the scale of 1 to 10, because basic, but I adjusted limit both the starting and max level of a body-mind combo’s compatibility. Some pairs would start with level 1 if they are not a good fit, and others may start at level 5 if they are an especially good fit, and their compatibility would only be boosted by a total of 5 levels, because not everybody would love every body they wear, but they may learn to tolerate and understand that body. To make the compatibility levels significant, I decided that every level should confer two stat points to dexterity, constitution, intelligence, or charisma, starting at a deficit of 4 points at level 1, and an addition of 14 points at level 10. Why? Because my gut said so, and it is a pretty significant jump where the biggest total number is 120.

I originally just planned on using the cheerleader and nerd Gexxer stereotypes from the prior segment, but that seemed a bit too limited, so I threw in a male jock and female teacher to give a broader idea of how this system could work. (Yes, I hate how I used pre-9/11 high school stereotypes for this) So, here you go! In both spreadsheet and image form!

Akumako: “The hell am I looking at?”

Base stats of the body and mind on the left, the compatibility level, only the high and low variant, in the upper right. Then, in the lower right, you can see the final stats for all four of these characters, in all four of their body configurations, which I think is enough to tell a narrative.

Akumako: “…These are NUMBERS, not a story!”

Look, you can tell a lot about any creature in an RPG by looking at its stats, and the ones here are pretty intuitive. You have two smarty sorts, two athletic sorts, all with different stat spreads that can naturally compliment each other by combining their base values, and even more when adding their compatibility levels.

Akumako: “Yeah, I get that. Nerd likes being in his teacher’s body the most, but stats are highest when in the body of the jock, since his body’s stats are the highest out of everybody. At the same time, the teacher wants to be the nerd, the jock really wants to be his female teacher, and the cheerleader likes being her female teacher the best, and… maxes out her charisma?”

Yeah, why not? I just did what seemed neat for demonstration purposes.

Akumako: “And for what?”

To prove that such a system could work to myself by creating an example.

Akumako: “And you do realize that this has NOTHING to do with what you were rambling about before, right?”

Yeah, I know. Body swapping is a source of conflict, it makes things harder for some, easier for others, and that’s what makes it an interesting subject to explore in stories. However, what works in a story does not always work well in an RPG. In a body swap RPG, you want to provide a clear benefit to swapping bodies over not swapping bodies. It would be more realistic to drop characters’ stats upon leaving their usual body, but does that make for particularly interesting gameplay?

Well, if you’re making a “fucker game” and body swapping is both bad actually and something out of your control, yes. But for a general RPG? I don’t think so! Unswapped party members should be as desirable as the freelancers, or whatever the starting class is, in a class-based RPG. You can use them, but only if you are a masochist.

Akumako: “…Why is this week’s Rundown header Metroid themed?”

Because I have a habit of doing a retro sprite-based game edit for my header images during tax season. And it is tax season. I just didn’t feel like BITCHING about it this year.

---

Larry Ellison Now Owns Warner Bros.
(Skydance Corporation MUST Be Destroyed!)

One of the more deeply upsetting things to have happened over the past few decades has been a truly egregious run of corporate consolidation. Despite anti-trust laws being on the books, the US government has offered next to no meaningful resistance to companies as they sought to consolidate industries, forming de facto monopolies. This could, in a better worldline, result in better products made at a reduced cost due to efficiency and a single quality universal standard, but… you know we’re not due for better things.

With Trump 2.0 not even halfway done— unless IT happens— there is negative resistance to corporate consolidation, and this past week we just might have hit a new record. After several months of legal whatsits, Larry Ellison’s Skydance Paramount successfully acquired Warner Bros. Discovery for approximately $111 billion. The new entity, Skydance Corporation, is 47.4% owned by Ellison and his family— and 6.64% by Saudi Arabia, because of course— and currently stands as the owner of an absolute deluge of intellectual property, spanning films and beyond. Paramount, Warner Bros, DC Comics, CBS, CNN, BET, HBO— my childhood channels of Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon— and pretty much the whole American film industry barring Universal, Disney, and Sony.

…You just know that, if not for Trump’s war with Iran, we’d be seeing some dumb shit like Disney trying buy Sony Pictures, right?

Do I even need to voice how disgusting it is that just one man has effective ownership over so much art, so many decades of things made by humans, despite lacking a single creative bone in his body? How, if one wishes to work in the entertainment industry, they will need to play by his rules, or the rules of his son, groomed to be a daddy’s boy and continue his legacy? How, if one wishes to go to the movies, engage with culture, or watch some bloody TV without pirating it, they will be consenting to and supporting him?

Nothing created by Skydance will be free from the stink of Ellison and his cronies, and will exist to push narratives he wishes to express onto the world. This is a king buying up newspapers so his people can eye everything before it reaches the masses, ensure that it fits the narrative he wishes to sell. This is the slippery slope that will lead to the stagnation and decline within the medium of film, and will hurt every creative associated with this industry. Things will be safe, unchallenging, approved by people whose job is to mitigate risk, not create art, and to impose a series of servile, conformist, values deep within the populace.

There is nobody coming to stop this, to save… anything, and as always my outlook towards this acquisition, towards the powerful becoming more powerful, is to divest. Do not give them the money they desire, not even the time. Hope that enough people reject them that they will crumble under their inherently unsustainable weight and the avarice of the mean, small, captious men who sit atop the crown. And, rest assured, the worst of all men are the ones sitting atop the crown.

This, naturally, includes the likes of… Bobby Kotick. Yes, the abusive, exploitative, former Activision CEO who threatened to murder his secretary and fostered a culture of crunch and abuse, wanting to milk every product until it became unsalable— a true “cut open the golden goose” motherfucker. In recent years, he has been trying to rehabilitate his image, because he is a vain egomaniac who cannot just take his billions of dollars and live as a human. Because he sold his humanity long ago to become a corporate entity, and only feels alive, feels any degree of pleasure, when he is in control of thousands of people’s lives, propped up in his big boy chair, with so much cash he could wipe his ass with Madisons.

Akumako: “Allegedly!”

Yeah, allegedly! See, this can’t be slander! And it’s not like anyone should believe I know what I’m talking about! I’ve got demons in my head, FOOL!

Akumako: “I’m not just in your head, I’m also a hand puppet! …That you use to masturbate!”

Yeah!

Akumako: “Yeah!“

YEAH! Jokes aside—

Akumako: “Jokes? I’m just speaking the real-real— on the real!”

This is a stunning display of solidarity among the billionaire class, truly protecting and promoting their own, and I only hope that the inevitably toxic ideas set from the top will go to poison the rest of the giant behemoth. That may seem like a defeatist approach, but what else is there to realistically hope for? No hero is going to come kill all the billionaires for us, we gotta do that ourselves! For as long as billionaires can effectively own the government through gifts, contributions, and Super PACs, there will be no true change. And change will not come soon. We are going to need to go on a ten to forty year stint of trying to make the United States a nation, and the fastest way to get there is for the bad guys… to fuck up and destroy themselves. Which, if the Trump administration is any indication, is an inevitability.

---

Sony’s Planning on Reviving Ape Escape
(But I Wish They Weren’t!)

Living in the modern climate, it is trivially easy to be anti-corporation— fashionable in some respects— but with media, it is all too easy to get excited when corporations start jingling keys by allows bits of news of a Paleogenic rebirth.

I do appreciate the official redistribution and enhancements of older titles— I love re-releases and remasters despite having some complex thoughts on them. However, the corporate procedure of recycling older works has become as business and metric oriented as everything else. When IPs like Punch-Out!! and Kid Icarus were brought back in 10 to 20 years ago, it was easy to view it as a return made because the people making these games grew up with and admired the original. Yet now that corporate avarice has reached such an extreme, such a lens seems unrealistic, juvenile, woefully optimistic in a world led by humans who despise humanity.

If, say, Nintendo wants to bring something back from the precipice, I will generally trust them, as they are old-school and value artistry so highly. Yet a company like Sony has burned through, uh, all of their goodwill as far as I’m concerned, the same rule does not apply. I am convinced that everybody who made the company so affable and likable in the PS2 era is gone or functionally a different genre of human at this point. Which sucks, because Sony does have a mountain of IP, of great games, that I think should be celebrated and enjoyed by people around the world.

Sadly, even the idea of the men operating the company digging through the corpse of Japan Studio and hocking the remains off to someone else to create something new is… I would call it ghoulish, but I think the imagery already suffices on that front. There is no sense of respect or legacy within modern Sony— the only “classic” IP in their lineup is Ratchet & Clank— and many of the key studios, key people, were tossed aside as redundancies. Hell, they can’t even maintain a decent classic games library. They need to OUTSOURCE their emulation. In the remake era, they shut down their remake studio! That’s how BAD they are at this sort of thing.

All of which is to say that, upon seeing how Sony was allegedly planning on bringing back Ape Escape, my heart did not swell with excitement, it just shriveled a little bit more. For those who were born after the series’ prime— like you, Missy Scrumptious, Ape Escape was a cult icon for the PlayStation, particularly in Japan, that encapsulated its wackiness, inventiveness, and ability to do Nintendo-style 3D platforming about as well as Nintendo, Rare, Naughty Dog, or Insomniac.

The original Ape Escape (1999) was a gorgeous and inventive game that was pulsating with personality and made interesting use of dual analog controls that feels surprisingly good to this day. Its world design gives way to a flurry of naturalistic, small, yet vivid locales. Gameplay is a series of micro-challenges of catching obnoxious monkeys with an array of gadgets that expands with each completed world. And the vibes are Peak PlayStation, period. I only played it for about two hours but, wow, what a game.

This was iterated and expanded upon with two sequels for the PS2 that, while more normalized in their aesthetics, with 3 being largely movie themed, contained the same strong design philosophy and playful personality. They were at odds with the more adolescent library of the system, but are the sorts of games that leave such strong childhood memories they can become an obsession. The series continued well after part 3 though, getting oodles of spin-offs, many of which never left Japan. For example, Saru! Get You! SaruSaru Big Mission (2007) for PSP was just its own Ape Escape game where you ARE the monkey. It’s inventive, adorable, and looks DAMN GOOD for a PSP game. …WHY was this not localized?

However, the days of making a low budget experimental game just because it seemed cool stopped being something approved by corporate overlords after The Great Recession. Japan Studios was busy adopting an assistant role, and when it came time to make Ape Escape HD… they made some motion controlled fluff with PlayStation Move Ape Escape (2010). It was a damn rail shooter with boring challenges, no exploration, and such excessive and ugly bloom that it looks more like a Wii game than a PS3 game.

THIS is how they ended the run of a mascot series? One successful enough to get THREE animated series? This sheer DISRESPECT! You could have at least made a game to launch with the Vita, I would have played the SHIT outta that if it was good! Instead, Sony just threw the series out.

And now, 16 years later, they are seemingly only now interested in bringing it back with a revival? I say seemingly, as this is all hearsay, but when the water tremors, there’s probably some kaiju lurking in the bog.

Akumako: “…What?”

Per this hearsay, the developer is slated to be Evening Star, a company founded by many of the developers of Sonic Mania (2017) and makers of the almost cult classic, Penny’s Big Breakaway. Their gameplay sensibilities are not really what comes in mind for Ape Escape, but I would trust these folks with my son.

Akumako: “You didn’t even really like Sonic Mania…”

Those balls are a thing of nightmares, and the special stages are diabolical. I remember nothing else about the game beyond that trauma. I still trust them to deliver a quality platformer adventure. …But I don’t think I would want it to be a legacy Sony IP that has undergone such neglect, and represents a real loss in PlayStation’s identity.

As part of the failure of the PS3 and the immense losses it generated, a lot of the old guard Japanese side of Sony Computer Entertainment was phased out, with the gaijin crowd taking the reins. That, and Japan was shying away from PlayStation, as a rule. PS2 sold 24.4 million units in Japan, PS3 just skirted past 10 million. PSP nearly hit 20 million units, the Vita couldn’t reach 6 million.

Ape Escape developer, and second-best game developer of all time, Japan Studio, was gradually deprioritized, doing more support work, and in 2021, it was killed. Some vestiges were folded into Team Asobi, the Astro Bot guys. The old Sony was GONE, and while some higher up vestiges remain, the culture, the people, that made games like Ape Escape were long-gone. Modern Sony would NEVER make something like Ape Escape, and among their line-up, something like the GOTY winning Astro Bot is an anomaly, something they could have had once a year, if they just let people take their time and make fun, creative, and good video games, like in the old days.

Ape Escape is the perfect example of the old Sony that is gone. Japanese focused, wildly creative, eagerly weird, and defined through a frantic yet friendly enough ethos that still manages to have a bit of bite. If Sony were earnest about changing, I might believe this, but this is not a sign of change. This is a company that wants to double down on a market, to become a status symbol luxury console brand, with an audience who can afford to spend well over $100 a month on games, not counting subscriptions. They are not bringing their games to PC or other systems in an era where you need multiplatform titles to make money and capture mindshare. They are ending the physical game production and shutting down their legacy storefronts to resell a small curated collection of nostalgic baubles. They are cutting ties with acclaimed PlayStation icons like Hideo Kojima, ending a nearly 30-year-long relationship.

There is little exciting or endearing about Sony as a company at this juncture. Sure, they have Until Dawn 2, God of War Gaiden: Laufey, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet— which will probably be hella Zionist, some live services, and some remakes. It’s not enough to warrant a $1,000 console, form an identity, or foster a brand worth viewing in high regard. So many of their slated games this generation were canceled, thrown into the live service money put, or just dragged out over six years of development. Combined with so many layoffs, studio closures, and so forth, who is even left to make the games that make PlayStation a platform worth investing in?

To risk sounding like a petty weeb console war veteran: In trying to appeal to a more western market, to covet the mantle of AAA prestige above all else, Sony went from the company that trounced Nintendo at their own game to looking a lot more like Xbox than anything else. ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS MAKE THE DAMN GAMES!

…Anyway, that is all to justify why I don’t like the idea of modern PlayStation trying to bring back Ape Escape. Because modern Sony did not make it, could not make it, and I do not trust them to just suddenly put out niche games for an increasingly insular platform. Just because something was a big deal in the 2000s does not mean it needs to be revived. Just being able to purchase these old games would be enough and, credit where it is due, Sony has done that… for 5 Ape Escape games. No Ape Escape 3 (2005) or JP only games, but it’s something.

All I want from Sony, from so many of these legacy publishers who have pooped away what made them legends, is for them to release their back catalogs on all reasonable platforms and go away. They are doing their best when they sign off on re-releases of Patapon and Freedom Wars, at their worst when they are letting people murmur about a Killzone remake or a new Uncharted, when both of those series are… kinda done.

As I’ve gotten older, seen more things crumble to shit, the more respect I have for things that are fixed, finite, and simply done. There’s no need to continue, so long as we can appreciate what there was and use it as inspiration to make something new. We don’t need a new King’s Field, we have plenty of games that picked up where it left off, and they offer more diverse and creative applications of the ideas. This is a good thing, and it is because of their volume and versatility by not adhering to legacy.

I have no problem with franchises— I fucking love a good consistent series and the thrill of getting a sequel to a game you liked just two or three years after the last one. But that’s because, more often than not, the same team has the privilege of building on what they did before, growing the game, the story, the series, along with the player while they, as developers, as people, similarly grow. It’s a beautiful thing, and I wish we saw it more. Instead, the deprofessionalization, or gig economy-ing, of the games industry, is in full swing, where people are a commodity and games are a product approved via bad math.

To make this very clear, I am not dunking on Evening Star with ANY of this. They’re good people and if they get the chance to make a game, period, they should do it, ‘cos they gotta EAT. But I do find this recycling of IP, this need to reboot and remake the old, is incredibly tiring.

TL;DR: I don’t want a new entry in a dead series, I just want to be able to buy the dead series… with some optional QoL features and widescreen.

Akumako: “What about the Everybody’s Golf reboot in 2025?”

That was 6 years since the last game, including the COVID-19 Pandemic. That’s a BLINK. It’s been 16 years since the last Ape Escape, close to 20 when this game is finally done. If the gap is long enough to last a college student’s whole life, then it’s too long. It’s different if the original developer is bringing it back— I think The Battle Of Olympus (1988) devs coming back and remaking their game 38 years later is DOPE! When it’s “shadows of their former selves” corporations shuffling IP around to feed on nostalgia? It’s cynical, from the ass to the mouth.

---

Sony Gives Up on VR Gaming
(Now Facebook is the True and Future King of the Niche!)

Continuing my dragging of NuPlayStation, another story that hit my Rissy this week was how Sony is effectively giving up on VR development, selling 43 of their patents to Facebook. I have some experience with patent sales from my job, and am confident in saying that… you only sell your patents if you are a patent hoarder or are planning on getting out of the business. And, per their history, Sony has every reason to leave the business.

VR gaming is one of the bigger modern dead ends that I have been active enough to see from beginning to end. I still remember when the likes of war profiteer Palmer Lucky and noted friend of fascists John Carmack were first working on the tech and how it looked like a promising avenue for gaming. It was a fulfillment of the dream of putting YOU into THE GAME. Well, with the caveat that it was an inherently unsocial experience, required expensive hardware, would make a certain percentage of the population ill, just as a rule, and it is only suited to a narrow sliver of games.

While VR was and is cool, it is plainly obvious that headset-based technology will not become a mainstream technology. Not enough people like locking something over their eyes for several hours, and the costs are too high to warrant mass adoption. Smartphones have become a mandatory part of modern life because they are easy and slot into a wide number of lives and situations. Computers, consoles, and handhelds are simply convenient and modular in a way that VR simply is not. And for as much as you can do stuff in VR, it’s easy to define it by what it cannot do.

It doesn’t help that Microsoft never really committed to the technology, Nintendo only casually explored the idea of it, and Sony… Sony just bungled it. They invested a significant portion of their first-party development team to creating VR demos and smaller experiences with the 2016 launch of PlayStation VR for PS4. While it sold about 5 million units, it was not good enough to justify the purchase of a console-priced peripheral that had a cumbersome setup process, ate up a lot of space, and offered experiences that were simply more limited than a typical video game.

…Then they stopped supporting PSVR after it failed to take off, seemingly gave up on the prospect, before releasing PlayStation VR2 or PS5 in 2023. It bombed. It was not backwards compatible with prior PSVR titles, meaning it was an entirely new platform to invest in and develop games for. Sony only shipped two million units, and basically gave up on it after a year. It was a massive flop, made little to no impact, and despite being a good bit of kit from what I heard, lacked the software to warrant using it.

When thinking about all the effort Sony put into VR only to toss it aside, I project worms within my stomach. So many games could have been funded, reached more people, and money could have been directed to making their other hardware better. Instead they invested a decade of resources into a dead end innovation, and now they are killing it. Everybody thought it was going to be the next big thing, yet it wasn’t, and in retrospect… that should have been obvious. However, this was a period of disruption, of wild gimmicks, and people thinking that things like motion controls were here to stay when… they really weren’t beyond fitness games.

The failure of the PlayStation Vita, of PSVR, and the abysmal bomb that was PSVR2 has all shown me that Sony is a one-track pony, they CANNOT run a second pillar successfully, and I frankly hope they never try again. They make good tech, but are BAD at the follow-through. I suppose you could say that the hackability of these devices make them good, that people can do unique things with them. However, you don’t need Sony money to do that, and enthusiasts would have a better time with something made for them, not for a mass market that does not exist.

---

Progress Report 2026-10-11

The following is an expanded segment that I cut from the Preamble Ramble because it just did not make sense with how the essay evolved. I got bored during a call and turned it into a proper rant.

Mental change TF is something I have a bugbear with, and tend to not look at with the fondest lens. Why? Because whereas physical changes are often fantastical, mental changes are not. People change their minds, change their outlooks, politics, and perspectives all the goldarn time. People are shaped by lived experiences, what they see, what they hear, and they can easily be educated or conditioned in a way where their belief system, their sense of self, can be manipulated. Going to a diverse school where you are granted succulent access to knowledge opens one’s mind. Being in a depressing building full of bitter jaded old people will dim the light of even the brightest and cheeriest person. Losing a 50-year-old parent or a 6-year-old child will fuck up anyone… unless they are already a fucked person.

I look at the rise in cult leaders, in the Republican Party, in influencers, and think that people are only getting more susceptible to real-life, grounded, mental manipulation, which makes any flavor of mental TF seem… blasé and boring to me. Corruption? Just give someone money, 100k followers, and there’s a 50/50 chance they’ll become a rapist, no cap. Bimbofication? How is that realistically different than becoming a hyper femme looksmaxxing online sex worker? Hypnotization? Bruh, we got hypnotization at home. All you gotta do to make it work is to believe in the bit. If hypnosis does not work on you IRL, that’s a SKILL ISSUE. If you’re not good E ’nuff, DRUG IT UP!

However, I guess my bigger gripe with the way that these sorts of mental TFs are used is how they are used to overwrite a person’s personality, mind, preferences, and beliefs. It’s just robbing them of any texture, friction, or the proper transformation itself. I want to see people’s minds change, for them to be altered through means beyond their will, see them struggle, see them indulge. I want to see their their hypocritical desires clash in a battle over the self and the future. The struggle for the self is something true for all humans, trying to balance desires and reality is the most primal of all human narratives, and I simply don’t like it when it is just poofed away! You want a good corruption story? Look at Milky Vampire by Kouji. There’s no magical whatsit that turns Ashton into a brutal ruthless vampire, just twisted desires, grooming, and a sense of loyalty to his abuser!

…But if you’re just doing that thing for comedy, a comic, or shortform, then yeah, sure, it’s whatever dude, just not my sorta thang. And you know what my thang is?

Akumako: “Jerking off to spreadsheets?”

SOMETIMES!

---

2026-10-04: Freaking preamble was over 4,000 words. Did the spreadsheet and shaz, proofread it as the original draft was iffy by comparison.

2026-10-05: Edited the Fate Stay Night review, FINALLY, and bumped it up to Wednesday.

2026-10-06: Very busy day, working until 3 AM, but I did finish the penultimate level in Donkey Kong 64. Woo-hoo indeed.

2026-10-07: Spotty day by comparison. I LOATHE my schedule sometimes, as this pace makes me want to DIE. Decided to work on this Rundown, making the shitty images I could muster for it, because image editing is FUN! Wrote and edited 3,000 words.

2026-10-08: Wrote 500 word PSVR bit for good measure, added it to the Rundown, edited the rest of everything else, was busy working. Started on the DK64 Ramble, let’s just say 1,500 words.

2026-10-09: Busy with work, wrote like 2,000 words for the DK64 Ramble.

2026-10-10:Busy with work, wrote like 2,000 words for the DK64 Ramble DITTO.

---

Natalie.TF To Do List

• 2026-10-07: Fate Stay Night Remastered Review (Shiba & Rain Request) DONE!
• 2026-10-21: Natalie Rambles About Donkey Kong 64 Recompiled
• 2026-11-11: Ecstatica Review
• 2026-11-18: TSF Series #020: Chateau de Bitz
• 2026-11-25: Money for Girls: Amortized Review
• 2026-12-09: Natalie Rambles About Delicious in Dungeon
• 2026-12-30: Natalie Rambles About 2026
• 2026-??-??: Coffee Buns Review (TSF Game)
• 2026-??-??: re:Dreamer Review #6

• 2027-02-03: Danganronpa 2×2: Super Summer Slayhem Review
• 2027-02-17: Metroid 6: Ravenous Review
• 2027-03-03: Muramasa: Re;Venant Blades Review
• 2027-07-15: Verde’s Doohickey 2.0: Sensational Summer Romp – Act IV: Post Psycho
• 2027-??-??: Beast of Re;Incarnation Review
• 2027-??-??: TSF Showcase: Chronicstuss (Ouran Request)
• 2027-??-??: A Mirror’s Curse Review (TSF Game)
• 2027-??-??: Thread – A Tale of Identity, Monsters, and College Review (TSF Game)