Review Round-Up: Spring 2021
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/30/21 at 02:54 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:
Remember last quarter when I reassured you, dear readers, that all the numbers besides ‘3’ on my keyboard weren’t broken? Well, this quarter, I assure you that all the numbers besides ‘2’ aren’t broken. Yes, somehow my bad luck streak of mediocre games has gotten worse, with several sub-par games making it out of my crushing backlog this Spring. *sigh* I guess playing lots of crap makes the great experiences stand out even more…
“Avadon: The Black Fortress” – 2/5
“The Vagrant” – 4/5
“The Deep Paths: Labyrinth of Andokost” – 3/5
“Greedfall” – 4.5/5
“Front Mission Evolved” – 2/5
“Victor Vran” – 3/5
“Pine” – 2/5
Chris’ Reviews:
THE Disgruntled Dwarf has every reason to be disgruntled. He – foolishly, and against my counsel – bought the last “Destiny 2” season …
Backlog: The Embiggening – June, 2021
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/24/21 at 12:07 AM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! June is right around the corner, and gamers everywhere are huddling in their makeshift shelters, awaiting the annual coming of the Summer Games Drought: That dreaded multi-month stretch where the big “AAA” publishers barely manage to poop out anything, while smaller “A,” “B,” and Indie developers still haven’t figured out that a large swatch of time in which the big competition is dormant and the largest sector of the target audience (school kids) has nothing better to do that buy and play a bunch of new games…
…
…
But wait! What’s this?! Some strange, supernatural phenomenon – also known as the COVID-19 Coronavirus – has caused a great disturbance in The Farce, and June of 2021 is positively jam-packed with releases. Should gamers everywhere start running through the streets, throwing our hats into the air in celebration of the shattering of the hobby’s longest and most enduring …
Let’s Play: “Guess What Lord GabeN is Rambling About!”
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/16/21 at 01:07 AM CT
New Zealand is home to a number of elusive, quirky, rotund forms of life: The Kiwi Bird, the Kakapo, Gabe Newell…
Yes, our favorite expatriate to the land down-under Down-Under, has opened his beard-bedecked mouth again, and, as usual, cryptic, idiosyncratic prophecies about the future of Gaming have flown out. Answering a question from a Kiwi schoolkid about whether Steam would start to do more with consoles, Newell replied that, by the end of the year (2021), we will receive an “unexpected” answer and say, “Aha!” to ourselves.
So let’s play a game of “Guess What Lord GabeN is Rambling About!”
Guess 1: Steam Machines are Coming Back
Back in 2013, Lord GabeN promised to take the console world by storm with the release of a line of small-form-factor gaming PCs with a Linux-based custom OS designed for couch gaming. Alongside the Steam Machines initiative, which left the development of the actual console/PC hybrid hardware in the hands of disinterested …
I Really Want a DecaGear…
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/08/21 at 10:42 PM CT
Late last year, I was excited about the prospect of finally pulling the trigger on a VR setup to usher in the new 9th Generation of consoles… devices I will continue to steadfastly ignore unless something drastic changes. Of course, last year, we didn’t know there was going to be an earthshattering silicon chip shortage, causing the newgen consoles, new PC hardware, cars, and, yes, VR headsets to become somewhat scarce.
However, while reading up on VR a bit to see what the best 2021 options for the tech happened to be, I learned of a new contender in the VR headset space: Deca.
While Valve, HTC, and Facebook’s Oculus are the established names in the young VR space (with PlayStation VR and Microsoft’s Hololens coming across more as afterthoughts), in such a new technological space, there’s plenty of room for new contenders to appear, and so far, Deca seems to be quite impressive.
First, the company itself is a multi-national group with facilities in Thailand, …
The Never-Ending Chip Shortage
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/02/21 at 03:40 PM CT
If you haven’t managed to snag a 9th Gen console or a new PC graphics card for anywhere close to the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, you might be SoL at this point. According to numerous big players in the silicon microchip industry, things don’t look like they’ll improve until sometime in 2023. Yes, that’s TWO YEARS away!
I managed to snag the new hardware I needed to refresh my 9-year-old gaming PC for a mix of prices. While I was able to get the CPU and all the other components for the MSRP (No sales, rebates, or discounts to be found, alas!), I ended up paying triple-MSRP for my graphics card, much to my annoyance. If I had pulled the trigger a couple months earlier, I could have had it for merely DOUBLE the MSRP, which at this point feels like a huge savings. Of course, learning that the chip supply, and thus the prices of hardware, would continue to be out-of-whack until the Summer or Autumn of 2021 was what ultimately spurred me into action instead of …
View Archive
