Black Box

Everybody seems to have a take on where things went wrong for BioWare.

Everybody’s always saying graphics have barely changed, especially since we’re getting all these remakes and remasters now, and especially the way things have been going since this console generation started.

Whatever you wanna say about the state of the game industry lately, retro folks have been eating good.

Resident Evil has kind of been in beast mode for the past nine years, but now that I think about it, it might be more confusing than ever now for anybody who isn’t into it yet.

A couple of games getting the option to drop the combat difficulty way down started another big discussion about difficulty and accessibility in games.

Apple releasing iOS 27 on every iPhone that can run iOS 26 was a little bit of a surprise to me.

Nintendo might never have been able to please everyone with the visual direction it took with the remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time they just showed off.

Modders promptly taking those leaked DLSS 5 files and throwing them into every single game has given everybody a real good look at Nvidia’s new “AI slop” filter.

It feels like the one game that has overshadowed a lot of Gamescom 2026 (other than Grand Theft Auto VI) is a surprise remaster of The Witcher 3, a game that came out 11 years ago.

It feels like the immersive sim is just about dead outside of indie games (a bunch of which I have listed below).

Modern gaming seems to be getting less affordable by the day, and everybody seems to want the industry to put technological progress on pause for a while.

The whole situation with Xbox, Sony’s impending abandonment of physical discs, increasingly chaotic reports about AAA game development, and rising prices because of the memory crisis seem to have everybody worried that another market crash is coming.

I don’t know if Xbox Mode is out on all Windows 11 PCs yet, but I just noticed it showed up on both my systems, so I messed around with it a little bit.

Xbox’s “reset,” that is, laying off thousands of people, letting go of five studios, and canceling the PlayStation versions of a couple of games, has people wondering if Microsoft also “reset” its plans for the next console.

That petition for Sony to reverse its decision to stop manufacturing PlayStation discs isn’t gonna do anything.

Xbox’s new strategy actually makes sense on paper, but those 3,200 layoffs, the extent of the damage from which we won’t know for months, might defeat the point of that whole strategy.

Ending the production of physical PlayStation discs starting in 2028 seriously raises the likelihood that the PlayStation 5 will be my last PlayStation.