Backlog: The Embiggening – June, 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/29/22 at 04:28 PM CT
June is nearly upon us, once again. And with the coming of the Summer season, we must all prepare ourselves mentally for the withering despair of the annual Summer Games Drought, in which the corporate troglodytes of the Games Industry refuse to release very many games during the three months of the year when the biggest proportion of the videogaming audience has significantly decreased amounts of responsibility and obligations and overwhelming amounts of free time – you know, school kids, and, increasingly, their Gen-X and Millennial teachers, who grew up with the NES. Well, it looks like this year, the Drought hasn’t arrived, just yet. There are gobs and gobs of ‘new’ releases coming in June, and it’s up to me to tell you, dear readers, which ones are worth getting out of bed for.
Not much shovelware is coming in June, which is good news. We’ve got all three major categories represented, though. In the category of “Licensed Swill,” we’ve got “MX vs. ATV …
Holy Crap! There’s a New DragonLance Novel Coming in August, 2022!
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/21/22 at 09:19 PM CT
The DragonLance High Fantasy campaign setting created by TSR in 1984 is near and dear to the hearts of most of us here on the MeltedJoystick Crew. While we were only 5 years old when the series launched, we all went through a school curriculum that promoted reading through unguided courses called “Reading Workshop,” in which students, from roughly 5th Grade through 8th Grade, were expected to choose their own books to read, and about which to write weekly short-form book reports in the form of letters to classmates and/or the teacher.
I found Reading Workshop to be a painful experience, initially. In spite of being a voracious reader of Little Golden Books – which I read aloud to my cat, Nommy Jr. – to the point of getting waaaay too much free Pizza Hut from the “Book It!” program, once it came time to transition from super-short children’s books to young-adult novels, I couldn’t find anything that could hold my interest for 100+ pages. In 5th Grade, I recall …
Woke Corporatism: Activision Introduces “Diversity Space Tool” Ahead of Microsoft Acquisition
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/15/22 at 04:27 PM CT
Remember when we could all hate on corporate Big Business for being greedy, unethical, and in-bed with the Far Right conservatives of the Republican Party – who, naturally, offered the corporations fat tax breaks through the magic of Trickle-Down Reaganomics? Well, ever since that Orange Clown bulldozed his way through American public discourse, corporations have been trying to distance themselves from the Right Wing as much as possible. They, of course, do this primarily by embracing – or making the appearance of embracing – the lunatic fringe of the other side’s politics. For years now, we’ve seen ‘Woke Capitalism’ pushing for diversity, casting the overwhelming majority of advertisements with non-European, non-male, non-hetero characters, and voicing support for Left Wing social movements, even as the corporations themselves don’t actually change their behavior in any way, and continue to suck as much profit out of the economy as possible.
This kind of nonsense …
Square-Enix Dumps Its Half-Dead Western Division
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/08/22 at 02:30 PM CT
We at MeltedJoystick have never truly understood what Square-Enix was thinking back in 2009 when it bought the dying carcasses of Eidos and Crystal Dynamics – the Interplay-era Western developers responsible for Leaden Age PC games the likes of ‘Tomb Raider,’ ‘Deus Ex,’ and ‘Thief’ – and grafted those studios and development philosophies onto a Japanese megacorporation that built its entire reputation on a foundation of 16-and-32-bit console RPGs.
Obviously Square-Enix has finally come around to our side of the argument, and doesn’t know why they did that either, because news broke this week that they are now selling-off Eidos and Crystal Dynamics (along with their homebrewed Western-style developer, Square-Enix Montreal) to Embracer Group, a Scandinavian holding company that used to go by the more-familiar name of THQ Nordic. Even more shocking, in this era of Sony and Microsoft spending BILLIONS of dollars to buy studios and IP, Square-Enix only asked Embracer …
Backlog: The Embiggening – May, 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/01/22 at 02:49 PM CT
April showers are supposed to bring May flowers, but with the drought affecting so much of the U.S., that’s kind of tough. Actually, as May rolls in, it’s finally starting to feel like it was supposed to in April, leading me to believe that, with climate change, we’re seeing the seasons shifting away from what’s traditionally been expected… Just like the Games Industry, which, thanks to the cataclysmic changes wrought during the 7th Generation, has changed from a monthly cycle of new releases to a predictable cycle of re-releases and ports. How big a proportion of this month’s release schedule with be consumed by the old instead of the new? Read on!
We’ve got an eclectic mix of shovelware coming in May. Of course, there’s licensed swill based on non-game IP: “My Little Pony: A Maretime Bay Adventure,” based on an IP that primarily appeals to middle-aged male Furries (dubbed “Bronies”), and “Evil Dead: The Game,” based on a hoary old horror movie …
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