Apple Gaming Hands-On: It Sucks as Much as Expected
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/26/20 at 03:33 PM CT
I have never owned an Apple product, not even an iPod MP3 player back in the day when iPods were all the rage and a new model was released every couple years (like iPhones nowadays). However, I have used plenty of Apple products, and this use exposure is why I never actually bought any: I just don’t enjoy the experience they provide.
However, if one were to dig deep into my own personal past relationships with technology, one would find that there was indeed a time and place where I actually liked Mac computers. That time and place was middle-school, on the cusp of the turnover between the 1980s and 1990s. “IBM Compatible” PCs still ran DOS, that esoteric command line OS that required secret wizard knowledge in order to make it do anything useful. By comparison, the greenscale/grayscale all-in-one Macintosh computers in my school library, with their point-and-click graphical user interfaces and WYSIWYG word processing (my first book reports were written in WordPerfect for …
Could Compelling Console Capabilities Come in the 9th Generation?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/18/20 at 04:30 PM CT
At MeltedJoystick, we’ve been aware of the death of console gaming since 2017. Sure, we may occasionally partake in some brief necromantic dalliances – Chris with his PlayStation 4 and me with my dusty, offline Switch – but for the most part, we’ve been quite happy with modern era PC gaming.
However, recently the rumormill has produced some material that is incredibly compelling: Allegedly, the upcoming Xbox SeX will include a ‘Windows Mode,’ allowing it to act more like the commodity PC it and its ancestors dating back to 2001 have always wanted to be. On the other side of the aisle, the PlayStation 5 will, again allegedly, include full Backward Compatibility for the full breadth of the PlayStation ecosystem.
The PlayStation 5 including full Backward Compatibility would be a huge boon to PlayStation loyalists, as it would provide a simple all-in-one box for playing everything from “Tomba!” and “Suikoden 2” to… “Bloodborne” (*dry heave*) and “Dad of …
“Done Right?” GameFreak Completes Nintendo’s Transition to Scummy “AAA” Corporate Publisher
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/12/20 at 02:33 PM CT
When the newest entries in the ‘Pokemon’ franchise of beginner/casual RPGs were released in November 2019, there was a major fan uproar. In a decision that could only be described as “questionable,” perpetual ‘Pokemon’ developer, GameFreak, released “Pokemon Sword Version” and “Pokemon Shield Version” with a gutted National Pokedex, leaving hundreds of pocket monsters on the cutting room floor and making the series’ tag line, “Gotta Catch ‘Em All!” into an impossibility. Long-time ‘Pokemon’ fans were incredibly upset, with numerous pro/con arguments made on both sides of the decision, while GameFreak itself stood by its decision to release a ‘Pokemon’ game missing most of the actual pokemon.
This past week, we have learned why GameFreak was so proud of itself for releasing an unfinished, incomplete ‘Pokemon’ experience as the franchise’s debut in the 9th Generation and on a not-explicitly-handheld platform. Sometime in Summer 2020, …
100… err 50… err 10… err 5? Yes, Five Games to Look Forward to in 2020.
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/04/20 at 03:35 PM CT
The monthly ‘Backlog: The Embiggening’ articles I assemble for MeltedJoystick are usually depressing enough. But I received a special request from a reader to ring in the new year with a list of ‘kinda-sorta-confirmed-we’ll-get-back-to-you-on-that’ game releases coming over the entirety of 2020. The big games journalism sites would just dump everything in a big pile and point excitedly, kinda like Nintendo Power Magazine used to do when EVERY trash NES game got coverage and generally-positive reviews (I’m still traumatized by the fact that “Bayou Billy” got a WHOLE ISSUE dedicated to it). Or, at bare minimum, they’d gather together all the “AAA” swill and Sony-produced ‘Is-This-a-Movie-or-a-Game?’ titles that mainstream trough-feeders can’t get enough of and tell us to get excited about spending our hard-earned cash on those.
At MeltedJoystick, though, some of us have higher standards and something resembling a curator’s eye. Thus it was difficult to …
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