Backlog: The Embiggening – July, 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/26/22 at 02:09 PM CT
July is nearly upon us, and the Summer Games Drought has finally arrived in full force. There are less than 10 titles coming in the middle of Summer, so it shouldn’t take too much time to determine whether any of them are worth getting excited about.
Sadly, out of our tiny July release slate, 3 of them must be shoveled directly into the trash. There’s a ‘Digimon’ TRPG and the first part of an *episodic* (*dryheave*) Adventure game based on the ‘Cyanide and Happiness’ webcomic (yikes, there’s so much barrel bottom in that bit of scraping, I got splinters just reading about it). There are, however, no painfully Casual non-games polluting the July shovelware category, so that’s something, at least. There is, however, an annualized title, “F1 2022,” which was supposed to come out last month, but didn’t.
Will the Summer Games Drought stem the unrelenting tide of ports, remasters, remakes, and other rehashes that have been drowning us – particularly Switch …
Not-E3 Impressions 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/18/22 at 04:43 PM CT
As mentioned a couple weeks ago, E3 has been cancelled for 2022, without even an all-digital event like E3 2021 to fill the empty space in June’s Gaming Media coverage. Nature abhors a vacuum, though, and something else has arisen to fill the E3-shaped hole in our gaming lives: Enter Summer Games Fest, produced by The Game Awards – a completely useless outfit that wants to be the Oscars of gaming, yet only succeeds at being as out-of-touch and flakey as the Oscars. Other typical E3 participants decided to release digital presentations around the Summer Games Fest presentation, so, guess what? We’ve got E3, just with a different name.
Summer Games Fest:
Want: “Warframe” Duviri Paradox expansion, “TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge”
Not Sure if Want: “Witchfire,” “Stormgate,” “Goat Simulator 3,” “Neon White,” “Honkai Starrail,” “Nightingale”
Do Not Want: “Street Fighter 6,” “Aliens: Dark Descent,” “The Callisto Protocol,” “Call of …
Guess Who Owns SNK
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/12/22 at 12:24 AM CT
There has been a lot of buying and selling and merging of videogame studios as of late, what with both Microsoft and Sony spending Billions (with a “B”) of dollars on studios and publishers, Square-Enix dumping its under-performing Western division, and – as always – the Chinese Communist Party extending its reach and influence through Tencent. Just when we thought Chinese meddling or Woke idiocy in North America were the worst influences on gaming we had to worry about, a once-big(ish)-name in Japanese game development has been bought out by an unexpected benefactor.
SNK, known for its stable of Golden Age fighting games and overpriced also-ran consoles in the NeoGeo line, has always been a publicly-traded corporation. As such, after struggling to penetrate the home videogaming market, the collapse of arcades worldwide saw SNK fall on hard times, leading to a buyout by Playmore to form SNK-Playmore. This hyphenated version of the company continued to flail away at the …
Review Round-Up: Spring 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/04/22 at 07:53 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:
I had a pretty good gaming quarter, which looks magnificent compared to my last quarter. Chris and I finished the second ‘Boot Hill’ game, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I got to dig into another high-quality Ubisoft Sandbox, which is THE definitive “Break of the Weapons” killer. We also started a new Live Service to replace “Destiny 2” (for some of us, at least), which turned out to be an interesting and engrossing time-sink, if not particularly cooperative. I managed to squeeze in an Epic Store freebie at the last minute (and found out why it was a freebie in the process). And I adopted a new dog.
“Boot Hill Bounties” – 4/5
“Immortals: Fenyx Rising” – 4.5/5“
“Warframe” – 3.5/5
“Cris Tales” – 3/5
Chris’ Reviews:
THE Disgruntled Dwarf appears to have given-up on his dreams of becoming a …
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