Backlog: The Embiggening – November, 2026
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/31/26 at 03:41 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Autumn is nearly over, and we’ve only got one more “lame” holiday left before the orgiastic end-of-year sales season that Industrial Gaming still has the unhealthy tendency to pin all of its hopes on. November is also when this year’s most stupidly-anticipated title is releasing, so the rest of the stuff coming this month is going to be from studios who are so brazenly overconfident that they think they can compete. Let’s see what’s what.
Sadly. the Shovelware publishers aren’t afraid of the elephant in the room, so we’re getting... plenty. Most of the Licensed Swill is old stuff being repackaged, so it overlaps with Noteworthy Ports (even if they aren’t actually noteworthy): “Barbie Rewind” and “Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Remastered.” The one new Licensed Swill title coming in November is “Unicorn Academy: Island of Magic,” based on an Intersectional Feminist series of children’s books which …
Bye-Bye BioWare
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/25/26 at 04:08 PM CT
Well, the long-expected has finally happened: Electronic Arts has shuttered BioWare, the Canadian development studio responsible for two of the best Dungeons & Dragons cRPGs ever... plus some... other stuff. Gamers have long observed the pattern of EA buying a successful studio, sticking their meddling fingers into that studios operations, resulting in a bungled game release or two, then EA shuttering said studio for not meeting expected sales numbers. Of course, this was the OLD EA, before the mega-publisher collapsed under the weight of its own debts and was purchased outright by Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammed Bin Salman’s Public Investment Fund.
The closure of BioWare is not, however, an example of “the new boss, same as the old boss” behavior on behalf of the Saudi Public Investment Fund, but is rather a long-overdue euthanasia of a studio that hasn’t produced anything of exemplary quality in nearly 20 years. But in order to see the pattern, it’s necessary to take …
The PS5 Could ALWAYS Read Every Generation of PlayStation Disc
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/18/26 at 04:20 PM CT
Yet more excellent information is coming to light in the aftermath of Sony’s announcement of the discontinuation of physical media in 2028 and the resultant backlash. It turns out that Sony’s insistence that PS5 owners re-buy their old favorite PS2 and PS3 games on the PlayStation Network due to the PS5’s inability to read any discs older than those printed for the PS4 was... bullsh!t.
Modders have forked the open source PlayStation 2 emulator and gotten it running on jailbroken PS5 consoles... and surprise, surprise, the emulator can play games directly off of PS2 discs inserted into the PS5’s optical drive. PlayStation 3 support is in the works, but the optical drive isn’t the cause behind the hold-up.
So, instead of giving long-term PlayStation supporters the all-in-one gaming box that will play their entire library of discs from 1994 through today, the company has intentionally implemented arbitrary cutoffs in order to re-sell older games as digital licenses that …
Sony Takes Another L with VR Sale
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/11/26 at 12:29 AM CT
Most of us at MeltedJoystick have been having a great time this Summer watching Sony sh!t the bed so hard and frequently that they’ve started sleeping in their toilet instead. This week we got another handful of sprinkles to throw on top of the Failure Cake that is Sony Interactive Entertainment.
It turns out that the PlayStation maker has decided to get out of the Virtual Reality space, and demonstrated this intention by selling all of their VR patents to Facebook. Ironically, Big Journalism outlets were eager to glaze the PlayStation VR2 headset when it launched, frequently claiming it was better than other headsets put out by the likes of Valve, Meta, or HTC. Yet in the three years since the PSVR2 launched in February 2023, Sony only released about 20 exclusive games for it, with nothing resembling a system seller. Meanwhile, the rest of the VR ports that hit the PSVR2 were a likewise milquetoast bunch that have still failed to really ignite Virtual Reality as the next big …
Backlog: The Embiggening – October, 2026
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/03/26 at 01:47 AM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Well, it’s October, so you know what that means: Time to break out the old Tannenbaum, festoon it with simulated viscera, and wait for a Heathen Solstice god to pass judgment upon your household... Oh, wait, maybe there’s that other Heathen holiday about conjuring the dead that we should celebrate first... that has had merchandise taking up space in stores since my birthday in August. Then I guess there’s something about turkeys in there too, but none of that’s important. We need to buy games to keep the Industry from collapsing! (Or, NOT buy games and encourage the collapse.)
Oh, shiite and sunni, there’s a bucking futtload of shovel-ready swill (I was calling it “swill” before “slop” became the cool new slang, and I ain’t stopping) coming in October, representing the Industry’s desperation to both squeeze everything out of its impacted colon before the November launch of “Grand Theft Retard 6” and to …
Sony’s Patents are ALSO Retarded
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/26/26 at 04:25 PM CT
Oh dear, just a couple weeks ago, we had to take a look at just how willfully stupid Sony’s legal arguments have been when it comes to the topic of digital games and product ownership. Well, Sony’s lawyers aren’t the only absolute sh!theads working at the company, as a new patent reveals.
A little while ago, Nintendo got into trouble by trying to patent an incredibly basic game mechanic that has been part of gaming since it was done with pencils and paper instead of microprocessors. Well, it seems that the Big 3 of Nintendo, Sony, and XBOX are in a determined competition to see who can offer the WORST products, while still retaining the largest proportion of their locked-in user-base.
Sony recently filed a new patent for a feature they plan to implement into PlayStation controllers at some undetermined point in the future: A credit card reader. Yes, you read that right. Sony has completely pulled off the mask and are no longer even pretending to be anything but …
Microsoft to Resurrect Metered Billing with Gamepass Changes
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/20/26 at 01:01 PM CT
If you’re a Millennial or Zoomer, you’ve probably never heard of metered billing. Thanks to commodities of scale and a race to the bottom among corporate competitors, nearly all of the Web 3.0 subscription services have been “all you can eat” deals,where you pay a flat fee each month and can use the service as much as you want.
For those of us older than Pepperidge Farms... well we DO remember metered billing for everything, including stuff that nobody would even think about metering now, like long-distance phone calls. What were long-distance phone calls? Any phone call made to a number outside of your local 3-digit prefix. If I wanted to call home from school during the day, I had to get permission from the principal in order to make a long-distance call on the school’s dime. Even worse, if my Troll Dad wanted to talk to his Even Trollier Mother, he had to pay long-distance fees... by the MINUTE.
Well, our favorite punching bag, Microsoft’s XBOX Games Division, is …
Sony’s Lawyers are Retarded
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/13/26 at 03:27 PM CT
The recent backlash and attempted boycott of Sony’s digital PlayStation features wasn’t the only thing customers have done in an attempt to fight back against Sony’s latest hubristic moves toward totalitarian control of everything PlayStation. There was also a class-action lawsuit, arguing that Sony’s terminology on their digital stores was misleading.
Sony brought their best crack-team of lawyers to fight back against the class-action suit... and it would seem that the crack-team might just flat-out be smoking crack, since their arguments as to why PlayStation customers have no legal rights to the products they buy digitally are so incredibly stupid they go beyond the mere “bad faith” that we have come to expect of our corrupt lawyers in the 20th and 21st Centuries, all the way to what the classic (?) comedy, “Tropic Thunder,” dubbed “full retard.”
First, Sony attempted to argue that no reasonable customer would click on the word “buy” or “purchase” …
There is Nothing New Under the Sun: The Erosion of Digital Rights
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/06/26 at 12:06 AM CT
There has been a big backlash against Sony’s recent announcement of the end of PlayStation discs in 2028. There was even a week-long PlayStation Blackout movement that... I’ve been participating in since 2014. The entire debacle, including its implications for PlayStation players’ (I almost typed “owners” there, but that’s the crux of the whole issue) rights in an ecosystem where the Company owns the platform, the store, and, ultimately, the things you “license” (again, I almost typed “buy” there) from the store, are chilling. Indeed, it’s highly reminiscent of the kind of corrupt slavery-adjacent behavior foisted on low-wage, low-skill workers in the era of Company Stores and Scrip Currency.
Penny Arcade, the Gaming webcomic that has been around for nearly 30 (!) years at this point, recently had a similar notion, calling out the current trends in Industrial Gaming as less of a new, terrible thing being foisted upon customers, and more of a return to the …
Review Round-Up: Summer 2026
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/01/26 at 03:59 PM CT
Welcome back to another installment of the MeltedJoystick Review Round-Up. Here’s what our staff has reviewed since last time:
Nelson’s Reviews:
I finally broke out of my “Warframe” rut, thanks in large part to diving into a new “Fortnite: Save the World” rut, dealing with daily missions and the seasonal Venture Zones. I still managed to force myself to finish “Lost Odyssey,” then tried to enjoy some other RPG-adjacent things, but, sadly, didn’t. I was actually expecting to have the lowest number of reviews this quarter, but it turns out that everyone else was having an even worse time with our collective hobby than I.
Lost Odyssey – 3/5
Granblue Fantasy: Relink – 3/5
Dragon Quest Treasures – 3.5/5
Chris’ Reviews:
I don’t know what Chris has been doing, but it certainly hasn’t been working on his backlog, ablutions or otherwise. He has jumped into that same “Fortnite: Save the World” rut with me – he was also the one who informed the …
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