Backlog: The Embiggening – October, 2018
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/30/18 at 04:20 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! October will be here in the blink of an eye, and since October is traditionally associated with horror thanks to the Pagan holiday of Samhain, upon which Halloween is based, we should all be well and truly prepared for the horrors the Games Industry will heap upon us in the coming month.
No, NO WAIT! I’m not ready for this much shovelware! After becoming complacent that perhaps intentionally-terrible garbage might be falling out of favor with publishers, October is bringing a downpour of no less than 20 shovelware releases, and in all of the major categories. We’ve got games based on other IPs, including anime/manga games like “Punchline,” “My Hero One’s Justice,” and a new game based on a very old anime “Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise.” Also in licensed crap, we’ve got “PAW Patrol: On a Roll” for the pre-school crowd (and whenever I hear people say the name of that IP aloud, I look around for a …
Telltale is Done For: Narrative Minus Cinematics Apparently Can’t Turn a Profit
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/23/18 at 02:52 PM CT
This past week, Telltale Games, the Indie start-up Adventure game developer that worked closely with popular IP holders, revealed that they had fired 90% of their staff and cancelled all of their remaining game development projects except for “Minecraft: Story Mode.” Once that last project is finished, it is almost guaranteed that Telltale Games will be done for good.
Perhaps the company, which was founded in 2004 and which I constantly confused with the completely unrelated British game developer Traveller’s Tales, will find its fate the same as so many other failed small-time game developers within the colon of a huge “AAA” conglomerate like Electronic Arts – Microsoft seems to be in the mood to buy failures lately, so maybe they’ll try to acquire Telltale’s remains.
Regardless of what happens to the last dregs of Telltale once “Minecraft: Story Mode” is out the door, it’s bad news for any gamer who loved narrative-driven games, and worse news for anyone …
Something Worse than Hitler is Now Threatening to Conquer Europe
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/16/18 at 02:27 PM CT
*sigh* Meh. Videogame news has been pretty dead lately. Nothing to get excited about or enraged by.
On the other hand, those crazy kids in European government are trying to destroy the online world as we know it. Articles 11 and 13 have successfully passed the first of a handful of hurdles required to become continent-wide law.
Article 11 is intended to limit how much material content aggregators can display without forcing the reader to visit the actual originating site. Apparently the attention span of the average Internet user has degraded to the point where they can’t even be bothered to click on the links they find in Google, but merely read Google’s summary before walking away. Publishers are naturally upset about this because users who don’t click-through don’t get to view their tasty, tasty ads or bump into their friendly, friendly paywalls.
Article 13 is intended to hold platform owners responsible for user-generated content. So when Joe Schmoe uses his …
Confessions of a Square-Enix Enabler
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/09/18 at 03:14 PM CT
Those who follow this blog or interact with me regularly via other online media know that I am vehemently opposed to the corrupt practices that have begun to infest the Games Industry over the last decade or so. The gold-digging behavior of big, corporate “AAA” publishers makes me sick, and when I look back on the truly classic games that emerged during the 16-bit Golden Age, I can’t help but think that the Golden Age never could have happened if game publishers then were as greedy and profit-mongering as game publishers now.
Square-Enix has been the subject of my ire for a long time as well. Not only has the merger of my two former favorite dev/pubs continued to poop all over its flagship franchises with the likes of THREE undesirable ‘Final Fantasy 13’ games and wasting several flagship sequel slots on subscription MMORPGs (“Final Fantasy 11,” “Final Fantasy 14,” and “Dragon Quest 10” for those who haven’t been paying attention), but after buying the …
Review Round-Up: Summer 2018
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/01/18 at 02:11 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 wasn’t as productive as usual this Summer, largely because I spent the bulk of July and August enjoying (!) the “Dungeon Defenders II – Protean Shift” patch, endeavoring to get as much pleasure out of the game as possible before Trendy Trendies it up again in a different patch. Aside from that, the MJ Crew managed to touch upon a lot of really terrible coop games, and I got to play a great RPG, a good FPS compilation, and a handful of ecchi games about boobs.
“The Yawhg” – 3.5/5
“Dungeon Defenders II – Protean Shift” – 4/5
“Spelunky” – 0.5/5
“Hard Reset Redux” – 2.5/5
“Girls and Dungeons” – 4/5
“Time Tenshi 2” – 3.5/5
“Time Tenshi” – 2.5/5
“We Are the Dwarves” – 1/5
“Shadow Warrior (2013)” – 3.5/5
“Torment: Tides of Numenera” – …
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