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 …
View Archive
