H.A.R.D. is a 4-Letter Word
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/27/15 at 02:51 PM CT
Increasingly, I have noticed that when I climb down from my Ivory Tower to walk unseen amongst the unwashed gaming masses that there seems to be a building resentment toward “Easy” games. I don’t understand where these feelings came from, as someone who began gaming in the 8-bit 3rd Generation. I was desperate for some easier games back then, and barely played much of anything until the 4th Gen came along and the SNES provided a lessening of the cheapest, most masochistic elements from its predecessor’s games. I wouldn’t call the SNES’ games “Easy” – instead I would use glorifying terms such as “Balanced” or “Playable” (though there were still exceptions… like the abomination known as “Plok”).
Yet now that we are neck-deep in the 8th Generation, after suffering through a fairly dismal 7th Generation, “Easy” is being used as a slur against games in much the same way the letter “J” has been added to certain RPGs to designate them as inferior. …
<i>Quis spectat ipsos spectantes?</i> Jimmy Kimmel and the Art of Game Watching.
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/20/15 at 03:35 PM CT
Early this month, late night talk show host and former “The Man Show” buffoon, Jimmy Kimmel, ignited the billowing fumes of generalized angst and Internet stupidity surrounding the group of morons and illiterate children that now pass as the “Gaming Community” (the same brilliant community that thinks “J”RPGs and “W”RPGs are a thing, that PvP FPSes and MOBAs are the best genres ever, and that provoking militant feminists is a good way to accomplish anything). Kimmel produced a rather amusing little video poking fun at the particular strain of ‘gamer’ that enjoys watching other people play games on services such as YouTube Gaming and Twitch TV more than they enjoy actually playing games themselves.
I found this video to be right on the nose, taking a questionable concept and reducing it to absurdity via reduplication of the core premise. If watching other people play games is stupid, then watching other people watch other people play games is even moreso! …
No-Intro: Helping the Wayback Machine Become a Better Archive for Console Games.
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/13/15 at 05:29 PM CT
Back in January of this year, news of the Internet Archive’s appropriation of thousands of old DOS games pinged pretty hard on my radar for relevant happenings in the world of gaming. Just recently, however, I stumbled across another group that is providing a significant service in the preservation of the old games that built the industry as we know it today.
No-Intro started out with the simple goal of removing the sometimes-annoying headers, intros, and trainers hacked into ROM images of old games by pirates more interested in gaining fame from their ROM dumps than in preserving the game software in an unaltered state. As a hacking group, No-Intro has been working since 2002 to organize and document every ‘clean’ ROM for every console in the history of gaming (even the weird ones,like the LeapFrog educational handheld). Since hosting those ROMs can get a group in trouble with ‘The Man,’ No-Intro itself only hosts their own software, consisting of searchable .DAT files …
Review Round-Up: Summer 2015
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/05/15 at 01:54 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:
This Summer, I plowed ahead and completed the final episodes of Aldorlea’s ‘Millennium’ RPG series… and decided to be more careful about buying Aldorlea games in the future. I also cleared the final WiiU game out of my current backlog, so Nintendo needs to start releasing something (since third-parties won’t) before I’ll need to re-exhume the console we buried quite some time ago.
“Ironclad Tactics” – 3/5
“Child of Light” – 4/5
“Awesomenauts” – 2.5/5
“Death and the Fly” – 1.5/5
“Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition” – 4/5
“Millennium 5: The Battle of the Millennium” – 3/5
“Defiance” – 3.5/5
“Muffin Knight” – 4/5
“Millennium 4: Beyond Sunset” – 2.5/5
“Sonic: Lost World” – 4/5
Chris’ Reviews:
Chris posted his (late) “Trine 2” review and …
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