Backlog: The Embiggening – October, 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/24/22 at 03:07 PM CT
As Fall wears on, we find ourselves, once again, right smack in the middle of Harvest Season, with the looming threat of ghoulish horror and Type 2 Diabetes waiting for us at the end of October. With the Summer Game Drought far behind us, we’re getting a second month in a row absolutely crammed with releases… and shockingly a second month in a row with more than one game I’d actually consider buying!
Ladies and gentlemen, get your shovels polished, sharpened, and ready to go, as there is a LOT of direct-to-dumpster gaming coming in October, representing all three major shovelware categories. First up, in the Licensed Swill category we’ve got a whole range of horrors. Least offensively, consoles are getting a physical release of the ‘TMNT’ game, “Shredder’s Revenge,” which is, by all accounts, one of the best licensed games released recently/ever. There are plenty of other rut-worn IPs getting new games, including ‘Batman’ with “Gotham Knights,” “Dragon …
Sony Takes a Dump on Backward Compatibility Yet Again
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/18/22 at 05:22 PM CT
Sony, once a champion of Backward Compatibility (BC) between then-current-gen PlayStation consoles and its predecessors, has been bending over backwards in recent decades to remove any and all such benefits from their ecosystems. Naturally, this happens because Sony loves to remaster (and re-remaster) old games in order to sell them again at full price, instead of allowing people who already bought licenses to first-party PlayStation games to play them across the entire hardware ecosystem. Sony isn’t the first outfit to change from a pro-BC position to an anti-BC position, as Nintendo previously went down that route with both consoles and handhelds, but in the present has come down on the side of making customers re-purchase games if they want the privilege of playing them on the company’s current hardware. Of course, Nintendo’s situation is slightly different from Sony’s, as Nintendo has continued to fool around with proprietary and generationally-different storage media for …
Upcoming DragonLance Worst Case Scenarios
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/11/22 at 04:50 PM CT
As I made clear in my review of the latest volume in the long-running and much-abused DragonLance series of Dungeons & Dragons-based novels, the setting hasn’t been in such a tenuous state since 1996, with the release of the novel, “Dragons of Summer Flame,” and the accompanying DragonLance 5th Age Boxed Set, which introduced the much-maligned SAGA System. While it is still unclear if Wizards of the Coast and their new commitment to Wokeness is behind the tonal shift in “Dragons of Deceit” or if Weis and Hickman have simply decided to shove real-world politics into their iconic Fantasy series for their own reasons (which could get even more bizarre, since Tracy Hickman is a lifelong Mormon), the time-traveling plot and the overall glorification of a boring character who is an overwhelming Mary-Sue and Strong Woman of Color leaves the door open for all sorts of terrible things to happen to the series at a foundational level.
Based on my impressions of the first volume in …
Review Round-Up: Summer 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/03/22 at 10:51 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 mediocre gaming quarter, and I actually spent quite a bit of time in August, specifically, doing things other than videogaming, since the mediocrity was so overwhelming. I painted my Bunkers & Badasses miniatures, I read a new DragonLance novel, and spent quite a bit of time poring over some new tabletop RPG rulebooks I’ve purchased. But there was videogaming in there, too. And it was mostly BLAH. I got into an ‘ActRaiser’ groove, and found that none of the new efforts can really match the original. Everything else I played was likewise disappointing.
“Earthlock” – 2.5/5
“Override: Mech City Brawl” – 3/5
“SolSeraph” – 3/5
“ActRaiser” – 4.5/5
“ActRaiser Renaissance” – 4/5
“The Outer Worlds” – 3.5/5
Chris’ Ennui:
THE Disgruntled Dwarf still has way too many irons in …
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