Are You Prepared for Dungeons X Dragons?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/14/24 at 07:24 PM CT
The social downfall of Hasbro Wizards of the Coasts continues. Not merely satisfied with filling its last 4 years of book releases with enough DEI pandering to choke a hippogriff and purposefully alienating its core audience, the corporation recently released a 50th anniversary coffee table book with a foreword that included disparaging comments about the game’s co-creator and community folk hero, Gary Gygax. These comments weren’t anything surprising, of course: Simply more 2020’s accusations of misogyny, and the like… The types of basic insults the Woke crowd has leveled at pretty much EVERYONE in the last decade (including each other). However, something about these Social Justice platitudes appearing in an official product that was supposed to be a celebration of half-a-century of tabletop roleplaying really shook the hornets’ nest.
And when you shake a hornets’ nest hard enough, eventually the Queen will show up. In this case the “queen” in question is a …
Review Round-Up: Fall 2024
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/07/24 at 09:56 PM CT
Welcome back to another installment of the MeltedJoystick Review Round-Up. Here’s what our staff has reviewed since last time:
Nelson’s Reviews:
Ugh. None of us really did much gaming this Fall. After my distasteful Summer filled with mediocrity and disappointment, I found myself avoiding starting a new game for well over a month. I fiddled around with some mobile games, which were all crap… except one, which has an identical PC version, so I went ahead and reviewed it. With the logjam broken, I played one of my most recent acquisitions and actually enjoyed it. Plus Chris and I finally finished a 12-hour coop game after more than half a year.
“Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel” – 4/5
“It Takes Two” – 4.5/5
“Unicorn Overlord” – 4.5/5
Chris’ Reviews:
Chris has, once again, had plenty of free time to play games, and finally tore himself away from zombie-schlock to play… some ‘Star Wars’ schlock… before going straight back to zombie-schlock with what …
Backlog: The Embiggening – December, 2024
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/01/24 at 09:20 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! It’s time to toll the ancient Yuletide carol once again, as the end of the year stares us in the face. Let’s take a look at what the constipated factories of Industrial Gaming are trying to squeeze out in a desperate attempts at generating a last-minute profit.
There are only half-a-dozen shovelware titles coming in December, and all of them are part of the Licensed Swill category. We’ve got games coming based on the ‘Indiana Jones’ movies, the ‘Fairy Tail’ anime, the ‘Rugrats’ cartoon, Funko-pop toys, and ‘Predator’ movie(s), and the scheduled holiday movie release of ‘Dog Man,’ based on the children’s comic books.
Some of that shovelware was old, but in the grand sorting scheme, being some form of Swill outranks being some form of port… and yes, there are ports. Thankfully, there are significantly fewer ports than usual, and, as a year-end twist, the Nintendo Switch is NOT the primary dumping …
GOG is Blowing Smoke Again, This Time “Games Preservation”
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/24/24 at 03:04 PM CT
As much as I would love to love the Polish videogame publisher formerly known as Good Old Games, I’ve been finding it incredibly difficult to overlook the fact that their audacious soapbox pontificating has never actually resulted in significant positive changes in Industrial Gaming. Little more than a week ago GOG launched their latest round of favor-currying directly into users’ inboxes with a mass email detailing their latest initiative: The GOG Preservation Program.
“Games Preservation” has been quite the buzzword in the gaming community for quite a few years, typically as the purview of noble pirates who hack the DRM out of discontinued, unsupported games or upload cartridge ROM or disc ISO images of console titles that have never received a modern re-release. However, what GOG’s so-called “new” initiative is actually doing isn’t actually “new” at all, but is rather just a slight re-wording of GOG’s DRM-free and guaranteed compatibility promises that …
What’s Going on at Kotaku?!
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/16/24 at 02:58 PM CT
Kotaku used to be the definitive place for Games Journalism in the 20- ‘00s. Every game, every discussion, every gaming tangential subject – you name it, if you Google’d it, all roads lead to Kotaku, and they were – with heavy emphasis on the past tense part of the statement – a comprehensive and good place to read about videogames. Kotaku’s ability, as a digital-only platform, to react to rapidly emerging and changing environment of the Games Industry effectively dealt the death blow to print gaming magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly. But as we’ve been seeing in the Post-Dot-Com-Bubble era, tech monopolies are fertile fields for corruption and decadence.
In the last decade, Kotaku has gone from the de-facto source for information about videogames to a punchline after many years of creeping activism that saw the site’s focus shift dramatically from covering every tidbit of gaming news before any other outlet could produce an article about it, to berating and …
Nintendo’s Draconian IP Enforcement Just Got Worse
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/10/24 at 02:20 PM CT
Oh, Nintendo. We love Nintendo, don’t we folks? Yeah, they were the company that rebuilt console gaming after the 1983 Crash. They were the company whose developers, led by the likes of Shigeru Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata, created some of the best, brightest, and most memorable IPs in gaming, frequently carving out whole new genres, but always, at least, iterating on what came before in novel and positive ways.
That Nintendo is a relic of the past, however. Today’s Nintendo isn’t a Good Guy or a company that produces great games out of a passion for entertaining. Rather, it’s just another corporate monolith, fussing over money and possessed by an insane obsession with wringing every nickel possible out of the things created by its most passionate (and frequently ex- or late) employees.
Thus we come to the latest news out of Nintendoland that the company is introducing a music streaming app to its already bloated, poorly-designed, and overpriced stable of subscription …
Vaguely Related Review: DragonLance Destinies Vol. 3 “Dragons of Eternity”
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/03/24 at 02:13 PM CT
It’s hard to believe that it has already been two years since we first learned that the DragonLance Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting wasn’t permanently dead. Rather, we learned that the series progenitors, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, were coming back to the series, perhaps in a cynical and legalistic attempt to maintain copyright and trademark ownership of their original IP, perhaps in a genuine effort to rekindle the light of THE definitive Fantasy series of the 1980s.
Volume 1 of the new DragonLance Destinies left me cold, as it appeared that Weis and Hickman were bending the knee to Woke influences in tabletop gaming and pop media in general. However, in hindsight, I think that may have been some deadpan satire played a bit too closely to the chest. After all, Volume 2 completely redeemed the shortcomings of Volume 1 while also fleshing out the details of one of the series’ most famous historical battles… which didn’t previously have a lot of narrative …
Backlog: The Embiggening – November, 2024
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/26/24 at 04:07 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! November is upon us, and our thoughts return to our obligation to be thankful for what we have and to exercise our American right to vote. Neither of those things is particularly compelling in 2024.
The Earth is still spinning, and its core is still molten, so of course there is shovelware. We’ve got all three major subcategories coming at us too. In the Licensed Swill category, there’s “LEGO Horizon Adventures,” which combines LEGO with Sony’s ‘Horizon’ IP, delving to new depths of horror. There are also a new ‘Totally Spies!’ game and a new ‘Harry Potter’ game, along with a compilation of old ‘Marvel vs. Capcom’ Fighting games, which are Licensed Swill due to the Marvel part, not the Capcom part. In the 2Cazual2Liv subcategory, we’ve got “Zero to Hero Dance,” “MySims: Cozy Bundle,” and… “Needy Streamer Overload.” Lastly, we come to the Annualized Swill subcategory, which, shockingly …
5 Essential Dungeons and Dragons Supplements Regardless of Edition
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/20/24 at 02:51 PM CT
Well, Hasbro Wizards of the Coast recently released the 5.Woke Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, which they are calling “2024 Edition” apparently. While it allegedly maintains compatibility with the 2014 release of 5th Edition, there are already enough minor changes being reported that it will drive Dungeon Masters and experienced players insane trying to keep track of them.
That got me thinking: I have D&D books on my shelf that date all the way back to 1st Edition and were originally released in the early 1980s… and I still refer to these books all the time when looking for a way to spice-up the increasingly-bland and “for everyone, a.k.a., modern audiences, a.k.a., the most sensitive wieners in the world who should be sitting under their security blankets in their safe spaces instead of playing D&D” version of the game we have today. So let’s take a quick look at the 5 most-consulted books of ancient and arcane dungeonometry in my library!
1. Encyclopedia Magica …
Are Gamers Considerably More Culturally Aware than the Mainstream?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/13/24 at 02:37 PM CT
It seems like ever since the Orange Retard, Trollnald J. Dump, was elected President in 2016, the Culture Wars have been enflamed – as he might say – “like never before.” Seemingly in reaction to the MAGA movement, every single Marxist Sleeper Agent activated simultaneously… and prematurely.
While the Long March Through the Institutions has been partially successful in that it has captured both corporate Human Resources and the Ivory Towers of academia, the rest of the culture in the West was largely ignored. Obviously, the plan was to abruptly replace the existing culture with a Marxist worldview and hope that the Normies were so placated by their Bread and Circuses (e.g., welfare and professional sports) that they wouldn’t notice.
And, honestly, it almost worked. Normies are completely blind to the Culture Wars and mindlessly drift along, consuming whatever media or culture they happen to bump into, like NPC jellyfish. Gamers, on the other hand, have been …
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