Backlog: The Embiggening – December, 2021
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/28/21 at 12:45 AM CT
December is nearly upon us, and as the end of 2021 draws near, we can all take comfort in the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic is still raging on, with increasingly worse mutant variants that will likely render our vaccines irrelevant before too long. We can also revel in the fact that the microchip shortage hasn’t lessened up, and the supply-chain backlogs that make the MJ Crew’s gaming backlogs look miniscule, are still clogged as hard as a cancerous colon. But in the world of the Games Industry, somehow the poop factory just keeps chugging away, churning out another month’s worth of trash to sift through, in the vain hope that something good might be buried in there.
There’s plenty of shovel-ready junk created solely to make a quick buck, but not all three categories are represented. We do have licensed shovelware, mostly based on kid’s TV and movies, with a new ‘Smurfs’ game (which was supposed to come out last month), a compilation of old Disney games from the …
5 “Animaniacs” Sketches I’d Love to See (But Never Will)
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/21/21 at 02:13 PM CT
I just got done watching the second season of Hulu’s rebooted “Animaniacs” cartoon. It was one of my favorite shows in the ‘90s, and along with “DuckTales,” the new seasons came as a delightful and unexpected surprise. While “DuckTales” was never intended to be anything more than an adventure show, “Animaniacs,” on the other hand, frequently delved into political satire and social commentary, even during its original run.
Of course, with the two new seasons we got in 2020 and 2021, that didn’t change, and the Season 2 premier, in which the Warners make fun of Roman Emperor Nero whole opaquely comparing him to Trump, is one of the single greatest pieces of cartoon satire I’ve ever encountered. Unfortunately, as the second season went on, a bit of Left Fringe Wokeness started to push itself to the forefront. For the most part, the rebooted “Animaniacs” has been very even-keeled, mocking Trumpism, world dictators, and even Wokeness itself, such as the …
Ubisoft Goes Crypto-Crazy
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/14/21 at 01:38 PM CT
I feel like I’ve been a really forgiving person, lately. While I never gave Ubisoft the time of day during their early years of crap development, or their middle years of crap development… or their latter day years of crap development, when the company started to produce actual high-quality products for the first time in its history, I was right there to hand out the solid review scores. Heck, I’m not even critical of Ubisoft’s alleged intra-corporation “rape” culture, because they’re French, and everything I know about the French, I learned from Pepe LePew.
No, Ubisoft has been on a solid roll lately, with two rollicking entries in their oldest-currently-running franchise, ‘Rayman,’ a nice art-house Indie-style RPG in “Child of Light,” a thought-provoking entry in their ‘Far Cry’ series, and transitioning ‘Assassin’s Creed’ from a banal “Da Vinci Code”-esque conspiracy simulator to a set of sprawling historical Sandboxes, it seemed like the …
Game Releases in a Perfect World
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/07/21 at 05:58 PM CT
Regular readers of my column, here, will no doubt have noticed a trend. At the end of every month, I look at the upcoming game releases scheduled for the next month, and in doing so, criticize the Games Industry for its crushing lack of creativity and interest. I also lambast low-effort titles as ‘shovelware’ and express my ever-increasing disenchantment with the trend of re-releases of old games on new hardware. So what, pray-tell, would the monthly game release schedule look like in my perfect world?
Well, first of all, there would be no platform lock-in or lock-down. Games would simply be games, much like how movies on optical media were simply movies on optical media. Everyone could make players for the format, but the format was (mostly, and disregarding foreign regional DRM) universal. Thus, outside of a few outliers like the original “Star Wars” trilogy, movie fans didn’t get subjected to seeing “new release” lists that contain nothing but old titles (unless, …
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