Google’s Gemini AI is Woke and Regurgitates DEI Manuals When Questioned
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/25/24 at 02:12 PM CT
After last year, seeing all forms of media, from movies, to TV, to comics, to tabletop RPGs feeling the sting of Getting Woke and Going Broke, it seemed like we had reached the peak of insanity and were prepared to start coming down the other side. Normies and Free Thinkers alike had become so fed up with the constant Woke messaging coming from all angles and the Cultural Vandalism of some of the most beloved IPs in the history of Pop Culture, that they simply stopped buying. Some Corporate Executives, like Disney’s Bob Eiger, even went so far as acknowledging the problem publicly.
Unfortunately, this is Cultural Marxism we’re dealing with, here, and if there’s one thing Marxists seem to thrive on, it’s being the underdog, and being forced to play the Long Game. As an aside, I find it intellectually incongruous for the people who push DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and Wokeness to align themselves with Marxism at all, considering that Karl Marx, himself, was a …
Backlog: The Embiggening – March, 2024
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/18/24 at 04:08 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Spring is here, and I have personally confirmed that MeltedJoystick’s in-house small, furry creature did NOT, in fact, see his shadow… probably because his eyes were glued to his phone. So let’s all look forward to yet another terrible docket of videogame releases so we can spend time outside without worrying about missing out on anything!
We’ve got a moderate amount of shovelware coming in March. Not a ton, but still too much for me. We’ve got Licensed Swill in the form of a new game based on the “PJ Masks” kid’s show, a new “South Park” game that is diverging from the turn-based RPG model that was actually pretty decent, and another “House Flipper” game. In the Super Cazual Swill category, we’ve got a port of “Lawn Mowing Simulator” hitting the Switch and an abomination of a Party game called “Atari (Delenda Est) Mania,” which you’d have to truly be manic to consider buying. Lastly, in the …
Ubisoft is Setting-Up a Year of Fails
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/11/24 at 03:27 PM CT
As the once-great critic of Corporate Gaming, Jim Sterling, used to say, “Oh, Ubisoft!”
That’s really all I can think to say in response to the French member of the Big Three Two Evil Videogame Publishers, as it is seemingly intent on setting itself up for a full year of failure, barely two months into 2024. Back in 2022, in the midst of the hubbub surrounding the flurry of acquisitions, mergers, and buyouts within Industrial Gaming, Ubisoft started off proud of its independence from even bigger corporations, then said it would be interested in reviewing any potential acquisition offers, before becoming seemingly perplexed and defensive when asked why they hadn’t been acquired yet.
Meanwhile, the tech sector, and especially the Games Industry, has faced steep cost-cutting measures, declining revenues from the Live Service model (to which Ubisoft has hitched all of its metaphorical wagons), and the evaporation of the “free money” known as venture capital.
Thus we …
Microsoft Starts Cleaning House in the Merger-Bloated Xbox Division
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/04/24 at 02:19 PM CT
Last year, the epic-scale merger of Microsoft’s Xbox Division and former Big Three member of the Triumvirate of Evil Publishers, Activision, finally went through, after years of legal challenges (mostly from Sony). The MeltedJoystick Crew wasn’t 100% sure of what to think of this merger, as it could have gone one of two ways: Either the Xbox Division would become even worse as it assimilated the toxic corporate culture of Activision (and subsidiaries Blizzard and King), or Microsoft’s non-gaming, straight-laced, no-nonsense corporate culture would hold firm and they’d force some much-needed baseline standards upon some of the worst-of-the-worst actors in Industrial Gaming.
Last year’s news that Bobby Kotick was getting the boot was a positive sign of things to come. However, the other shoe has really dropped as of late January, 2024, not even an entire month into the first year of the merger. It turns out that Microsoft has made the decision to absolutely gut Activision, …
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