OUYA Suffers Second Death as Forge TV Goes Away Next Month
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/26/19 at 03:48 PM CT
MeltedJoystick has been covering the life and times of the ill-fated OUYA Android microconsole since before it launched, optimistically expecting it to usher in a new era of Indie games. Unfortunately, the OUYA proved to be one big failure after the next, as the Android ecosystem continued to cement itself as an exclusively-smartphone platform, riddled with predatory mobile games, and with no developers willing to rock the boat and even try to turn it into something better.
After OUYA started begging people to use its platform and gave away free money (which I never did spend), the company sold out to Razer, the PC peripherals company that was the one-time maker of one of my favorite things ever, the Razer Hydra. Razer re-branded the OUYA storefront into the Cortex TV storefront, and plopped it into the company’s Forge TV microconsoles, released in 2016, which had the added feature of being Steam Link-style in-home streaming devices (a feature shared by the Nvidia Shield line of …
Epic (Store) Fail
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/19/19 at 12:22 AM CT
At the end of 2018, the MJ Crew was tentatively excited about the prospect of a new competitor in the increasingly-crowded digital PC games ecosystem, with the transformation of Epic Games’ Epic Launcher into the Epic Store. Unfortunately for gamers everywhere, the Epic Store has spent the first half of 2019 proving to be the exact opposite of what we wanted. Let us count the four ways in which Epic failed.
4. Feature Incomplete
Despite existing as a Publisher-centric launcher for Epic Games… err… games, for quite a few years already, going into its inaugural year as an actual store, the Epic Games Store is a brittle skeleton of barely-present functionality and non-existent features. The store organization is simplistic to the point of hilarity – if they actually had a large number of games available, nobody would be able to find anything. The damned thing doesn’t even have a shopping cart or wishlist! Some shoppers have even been auto-flagged as fraudulent because the …
On the Properties of Backlog Strata
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/12/19 at 02:58 PM CT
At the end of every month, I write up a little feature called “Backlog: The Embiggening,” in which I typically eviscerate the coming month’s game release docket for being awful, while occasionally adding one or two (or rarely three) new games to that looming monster known only as my Backlog. Like assholes and opinions, everyone has a Backlog. Even people who don’t play videogames have Backlogs, as any form of planned, yet unfinished, activity is Backloggable. Throughout history, Backlogs have tormented all manner of people, and even the 1970’s folk song, “Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin is ultimately about the sadness caused by putting ‘playing with your kid’ on the Backlog and never finding time to get it taken off.
However, for modern gamers in particular, the Backlog has become an omnipresent plague. Folks who gamed in the 1st through 6th Generations would easily be able to find the time to experience everything of quality and personal interest that the …
Dreamcast Retrospective
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/05/19 at 04:31 PM CT
As regular readers know, the MeltedJoystick Crew gets together in person (nearly) every week to play some local coop games at the MJHQ. Unfortunately for us (and our review output), the rise of the Network Wars has put a damper on the number of game releases with local multi-player, and an even bigger damper on such games with a primarily cooperative modus operandi (which are the only ones we bother with).
Thus, we decided it would be a good idea to mine the past for some local coop games that we may have missed back in the day (or just played so long ago that we’d be up for a new run). I decided to blow the dust off my old Dreamcast and fire-up that platform’s definitive cooperative game, “Armada.” This activity got me thinking about the Dreamcast as a whole.
The Dreamcast was the last console developed by Sega, a hardware developer that had been playing second fiddle to Nintendo since the post-crash recovery in the mid-1980s. I never really cared much about Sega back …
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