Backlog: The Embiggening – June, 2023
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/28/23 at 03:19 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Summer is on its way, and after decades of precedent, gamers everywhere are preparing to dig-in for the annual Summer Games Drought, wherein, despite the largest portion of gaming’s marketing demographic being off of school for 3 months with nothing better to do than spend time and money on new gaming purchases to keep them out of trouble, the Games Industry publishes nothing new or of value. Let’s see if the Drought is going to come-on in-force all at once, or if it will be a bit more gentle this year.
There’s a healthy dose of Shovelware coming in June, with all three major categories represented. In Licensed Swill based on non-game IPs, we’ve got “Aliens: Dark Descent” based on the movie franchise, as well as “AEW: Fight Forever” based on the third-rate pro-wrestling franchise. In Casual Non-Game Swill, there’s quite a variety: “Powerwash Simulator,” “Charade Maniacs,” “Pretty Princess Magical Garden …
GOG’s Customer Friendly Façade is Failing
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/21/23 at 02:32 PM CT
While nowadays I consider myself to be among Steam’s biggest fans, a little over a decade ago, I had heard of the service but never tried it. In fact, my first experience with “modern”-style PC gaming (i.e., PC gaming that actually works) was with GOG, back when they were officially known as Good Old Games.
Over the years I’ve spent blogging about the Games Industry and its countless terrible trends, GOG has always tried to buck the new normal. The company started life as an emphatically DRM-free store that would allow PC Gaming Neckbeards to purchase clean, functional copies of OLD games that would work without fuss on modern operating systems, either through GOG’s official modding of the game files or via pre-packaged emulation in DOSbox. This seemed like a strong basis on which to build a business, but, unfortunately, GOG has largely alienated most game publishers with its DRM-free stance.
Small, independent game developers, however, don’t seem bothered by …
Vaguely Related Review: Bunkers & Badasses – The Tabletop Game
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/14/23 at 04:35 PM CT
When the MeltedJoystick Crew first encountered Gearbox and Nerdvana Games’ D&D knock-off, Bunkers & Badasses, during the “Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep” DLC pack for “Borderlands 2,” we all quickly agreed that it was hilarious and one of the best pieces of ‘Borderlands’ content ever created. That was way back in 2014.
Thus it was with great surprise and delight that I learned of a planned release of a genuine tabletop Bunkers & Badasses game in 2020, and pre-ordered two copies – one for MJ’s most obsessive ‘Borderlands’ fanatic, Chris, and one for myself – of the Deluxe Edition. It was with some surprise and significantly less delight that I learned that the final product would not, in fact, ship in time for our annual Yuletide gift exchange that year. And it was with great irritation and annoyance that I learned that Bunkers & Badasses would not grace us with its presence until the bitter end of 2021.
Thanks to a large combination of factors, we …
“The Super Mario Bros. Movie” is a Massive Hit?!
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/07/23 at 02:41 PM CT
Back in 1993, Nintendo partnered with Disney to bring a film adaptation of their signature videogame franchise and mascot platform, “Super Mario Bros.” to theaters. The result was so disastrous and completely unlike the source material that it not only bombed at the box office, but also scared Nintendo away from movie collaborations for decades.
While times have changed over the last 30 years, some things have remained the same: Such as the fact that Disney is bending over backwards to mutilate movies into abominations that hardly resemble their source material… even when that source material is a movie that Disney themselves made decades ago. Nintendo, for their part, finally cooled off enough to give a Western movie studio a second chance at adapting their ‘Super Mario’ franchise – now with decades of canonical videogame story behind it that it never had in 1993 – to the Big Screen. Of course, this time, the Japanese console-maker opted to go with Universal instead …
Backlog: The Embiggening – May, 2023
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/30/23 at 03:00 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Spring is winding down, and as May comes upon us, the Games Industry has its last gasp in releasing solid Q1 titles to build operating revenue for the rest of the year. Unfortunately for the gamers on the receiving end of the corporate machine, those “solid titles” are more like “solid turds,” dropping from the Industry’s collective rectum and giving us all concussions if we aren’t wise enough to move out of the way. Will we see anything with actual merit released this Spring? Read on as we sift through the sludge together!
In the shovelware category, we’ve got all three varieties represented, once again. In the ‘Licensed Swill’ category, we’ve got a LEGO-themes Racing game, “LEGO 2K Drive,” with such a vague title that the only things we know about it are that it features LEGO bricks and is published by 2K games. There’s also the last-gen backport of “Hogwarts Legacy” coming to the PS4 and XBONE, in …
Netflix to End Discs-by-Mail Service in September 2023 – I Miss it Already
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/23/23 at 10:01 PM CT
This week, Netflix, the company that revolutionized the way we watch movies not once, but twice, announced that after 25 years, the iconic red envelopes and DVDs/Blu-Rays-by-mail inside them will be going away for good come Autumn.
The company started in 1998 with an unprecedented business model: Unlimited movie rentals for a reasonable monthly fee. Even more unprecedented was the fact that these movie rental transactions would be handled via the Internet, and the movies themselves would arrive via mail. Anyone who grew up in the ‘80s like the MJ Crew would naturally be dubious about such a proposition: We lived in a world where every mail-order transaction required “six to eight weeks for delivery” and had a distressingly expensive “shipping and handling” cost tacked-on for good measure. Somehow, Netflix managed to flip the paradigm and beat our old, terrible United States Postal Service into submission, as not only was the turn-around for movie rentals incredibly …
Building a Better Boycott
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/15/23 at 02:20 PM CT
2023 has been an astounding year for boycotts, kicked off by the Fringe Leftist attempt to Cancel “Hogwarts Legacy,” which ultimately backfired and saw the game breaking sales records. Hot on the heels of that dismal failure have been two more boycotts coming from places other than the fringiest fringe of crazy politics, with decidedly different outcomes.
First, there was the organized effort to show disapproval for Wizards of the Coast and their attempts to gut and replace the Open Game License with not one, but two potential revisions, which were so draconian that they really put the ‘dragons’ in Dungeons & Dragons. D&D players cancelled their D&D Beyond subscriptions en masse to the point of crashing the service’s website. In a further attempt to hit Wizards of the Coast and parent company, Hasbro, where it hurts – that is, the corporate wallet – there has been a less-well-organized push to boycott the just-released Dungeons & Dragons movie, “Honor Among …
Sony’s Legal Shenanigans Against the Microsoft-Activision/Blizzard/King Merger Backfire
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/08/23 at 03:01 PM CT
Sony has been losing its mind ever since Microsoft first announced its intention to purchase Activision (along with subsidiaries Blizzard and King) for $69 billion. This announcement first dropped in January of 2022, and Sony has been acting out, like a spoiled child, ever since. First they attempted to show that they are just as capable of buying development studios and publishers by paying a drop-in-the-bucket for former Microsoft studio, Bungie, then proceeded to behave so cravenly and wantonly for the rest of the year that the company topped the 2022 list of MeltedJoystick Fails.
It was, thus, with a great sense of schadenfreude that I received the news that Sony’s legal and financial pot-stirring against the MS-Activision merger has backfired, bringing Sony itself under closer scrutiny by governmental and regulatory bodies. Gamers have long known that Sony has outright paid for games to be exclusive to the PlayStation platform for as long as there has been a PlayStation …
Backlog: The Embiggening – April, 2023
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/02/23 at 04:06 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! The old saying is that “April Showers bring May Flowers,” but when it comes to the Games Industry, it’s either a torrential downpour of liquid fecal matter or a withering drought of nothing. It looks like we’re in for an April downpour, once again… though I doubt there’s anything in here that’s worth seining out.
Classifiable shovelware is fairly light on the ground for April. There are only two of the major categories present, in Licensed Swill and Annualized Releases. Chris will be happy about the Licensed Swill, since most of it’s in IPs he’s obsessed with: “Star Wars: Survivors,” “The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners Chapter 2,” and … “DNF Duel,” which Chris doesn’t obsess over, likely because the anime that inspired the games was released after he had aged-out of his most marketable period. The only Annualized Release is a ‘PGA Golf’ game by EA… what a surprise!
You know, that …
RPG Writer, Chris Avellone, Strikes a Righteous Blow Against #MeToo
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/26/23 at 03:22 PM CT
It seems like everything terrible that could happen did happen in 2020. In addition to the pandemic and race riots, there was a major uptick in the usage of the hashtag #MeToo to, allegedly, give women a voice they didn’t have to speak out against those who had sexually assaulted them. Unsurprisingly, accusations came crawling out of the woodwork, flying gratuitously across the warped, surrealist landscape of Twitter.
Of course, even though we really just want to be left alone to enjoy our nerdy hobbies, gamers – specifically Role-Playing gamers – were dragged into the #MeToo debacle due to the accusations of sexual misconduct leveled at Chris Avellone, a long-time writer in both the cRPG and tabletop RPG spaces, giving him a legendary curriculum vitae featuring some of the biggest titles and IPs in gaming (plus a few blunders, but nobody’s perfect).
In 2021, Avellone was forced to respond to the increased pressure and Cancellation attempts placed on him by the public …
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