Backlog: The Embiggening – July, 2024
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/29/24 at 02:36 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! As July rolls in, most of the MJ Crew is on vacation… except for me, because I never take vacations, since my life is just one long Summer Break as it is. We’re smack in the middle of the Summer Games Drought, and while there might appear to be a lot of games for me to sift through and condemn for your delight, dear reader, that appearance is only due to the ongoing scourge of ports. The Industrial Gaming big-wigs are quite literally showering us with used water (a.k.a., piss) and telling us to enjoy it.
We’ve got a light shovel-load coming in July, since not even shovelware publishers want to release games during the drought… which is so counter-intuitive and ignorant of basic economics, it’s hard to know where to start with it… anyway… We’ve got all three shovel-ready categories represented in July, with a port of a Licensed ‘One Piece’ game and a port of a Licensed ‘Agatha Christi’ game in the Licensed …
What Motivates Your Gaming? Find Out with Help from Quantic Foundry
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/23/24 at 02:09 PM CT
I remember back in primary school when the administration was desperate to figure out what made students tick. Instead of allowing students to “self-identify” and filter ourselves into increasingly-bizarre social Identity groups, as is happening today, we were, instead, given two different Personality Tests, one of which was the perennially popular Myers-Briggs 16 Types test.
Back then, I typed-out as an INTP, but upon taking the test again 30 years later, I’ve turned into an INTJ – ironically the same as my Troll-Dad, with whom I constantly butted heads – with the key difference being that, as a kid I was disorganized and erratic, but as an adult I meticulously keep track of things and make lists because I no longer have a parent to do that kind of mundane stuff for me, and if something isn’t written down somewhere, I WILL forget about it.
Recently I learned that, back in the halcyon pre-plague days of 2019, a company called Quantic Foundry started doing …
Grind is Ground
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/15/24 at 01:56 PM CT
In a SHOCKING revelation during a recent interview, Rod Fergusson, the General Manager of the ‘Diablo’ series, let slip the STUNNING and UNPREDICTABLE fact that videogame players – even those who ostensibly ‘loved’ “Diablo 2” back on the halcyon days of the early ‘00s – don’t like so-called ‘long-chase grinding.’ The definition of ‘long-chase’ being that it can take YEARS of daily play sessions to acquire a single desired piece of loot as a random drop.
Naturally, the sarcasm dripping off of the preceding paragraph is intentional, since I NEVER actually enjoyed the ‘long-chase’ style of grinding, or, generally, random grinding at all. And it turns out that I was just – as usual – ahead of the curve, with modern Gamers making no bones about the fact that they like a quicker, streamlined grind, preferably with guaranteed rewards for time invested, with capped potential for greater rewards based on more time spent grinding.
I’ve been critical …
Windows Recall Gets Recalled, Reveals Microsoft Back Up to Old Tricks
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/09/24 at 02:23 PM CT
When erstwhile MeltedJoystick photog, Matt, asked me what I thought of Windows Recall, I said I’d never heard of it. When he described it as an AI-powered search function that obsessively screencaps and monitors everything you do on your Windows PC in order to “help” you find files or websites you may have “misplaced,” my response was immediate, without any need to pause and think about it:
“That sounds like an enormous invasion of privacy and an equally enormous waste of system resources.”
And I guess my knee-jerk reaction to Windows Recall was spot-on, since Microsoft has recently backtracked (or maybe “recalled”) their decision to turn this feature on by default in the face of massive backlash.
Yup, good old Microsoft, whose Xbox Division has been bending over backwards in recent years in an attempt to seem customer friendly when compared to the likes of Sony, Nintendo, and Apple, just let the mask slip. What a “surprise,” then, that the same …
Review Round-Up: Spring 2024
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/02/24 at 02:07 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:
My Spring quarter started off fairly strong with 4 reviews of big games. But then I got engrossed in the gamified activities of “Get Rid of All My Late Parents’ Junk” and “Redecorating,” and really dropped off toward the end of the quarter. I even bought a bunch of new releases, expecting to get engaged and invigorated by the new hotness, but my first taste of “Eiyuden Chronicle” was so bland and uninteresting that I would literally rather clean and play Dailies in “Warframe” than actively play new releases. Maybe if I can get the cleaning and redecorating done this Summer, I can pick up more gaming to reward myself.
“Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag” – 2.5/5
“Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince” – 4/5
“No Man’s Sky” – 4/5
“Pikmin 4” – 4/5
Chris’ Reviews:
Wow, for the first …
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