Year in Review: 2014
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/28/14 at 01:41 PM CT
2014 was a long and painful road to travel. While normally I like to look at five spectacular wins and five epic fails during my end-of-year retrospective, 2014 didn’t actually have any wins. Instead, it was a year of epic failures, topped-off with a sugary coating of missed deadlines and unmet expectations. It has been one of the most dire years for gaming since 1983!
Fails
5. Facebook Buys Oculus Rift, Kickstarters Kicked to the Curb
For a while there, it looked like virtual reality was going to be the 8th Generation’s gimmick, what with Sony working on Project Morpheus and the Oculus Rift getting huge Kickstarter support to bring VR to the PC. Unfortunately, instead of sticking with their Kickstarter backers, Oculus decided to take some Big Evil Corporate money when Mark Zuckerberg’s Lovecraftian tentacle monster, Facebook, bought the VR startup. Now, not only did all of that Kickstarter money, which was ostensibly going to Oculus, end up in Facebook’s pockets, but …
Sony: Letting the Terrorists Win
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/20/14 at 04:04 PM CT
The news has exploded recently with the revelation that Sony Pictures had their online infrastructure infiltrated by a group of hackers working on behalf of North Korea. The hack came in response to Sony’s formerly-upcoming release of “The Interview” in theatres, which has been canceled in the wake of the cyber-attacks.
This most recent hit against Sony Pictures is just part of a long history of shoddy cyber-security and network infrastructure on Sony’s behalf. Gamers will recall in particular when PlayStation Network was hacked offline for weeks back in 2011. Coupled with PSN’s generally sluggish nature and frequent outages, one wonders if Sony really has any business putting as much of their stuff in the Cloud as they are.
But the worst part of Sony’s response to the North Korea-sponsored hit on their servers is that they chose now to give-in to the hackers. Cyber-security experts are warning that the hack against Sony is the first in what will become a new wave …
Nintendo Attempts to Subvert the ROM-Hack Community with “Mario Maker.”
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/14/14 at 01:21 AM CT
The fan communities of ROM-Hackers who take existing games and transform them into new experiences to be played via emulators have long been at odds with the companies that sell the base games that are the hackers’ medium. Between Square Enix shutting down the likes of “Chrono Trigger: Crimson Echoes” and “Chrono Resurrection,” and Nintendo ruffling its feathers over the fanslation of “Mother 3,” as well as completely original fangames like “Metroid: SR388,” “The Legend of Zelda: Outlands,” and “Super Mario Bros. X,” to name a few, it’s clear that these companies perceive their games only as products to be controlled and not the cultural phenomena they actually are.
While Nintendo may say that they don’t want to shut-down projects made by fans out of love for their IPs, very few of these projects manage to avoid being hit with cease and desist orders. Nintendo purports to only throw the book at fangame projects that don’t treat the source material …
Review Round-Up: Fall 2014
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/06/14 at 05:58 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:
Fall has not been conducive to the MJ crew playing coop games. Part of this dire situation is due to Nick using his turn to pick our online coop game to dump us back into the MMO void of “Dragon Nest.” We were also running low on local coop games, so Chris and I ended up doing a lot of solo gaming. I tackled numerous short Indie titles from my Steam list.
“FEZ” – 4.5/5
“Of Orcs and Men” – 3.5/5
“Valdis Story: Abyssal City” – 4/5
“New Super Luigi U” – 3/5
“Breath of Death 7: The Beginning” – 4/5
“UnEpic” – 4/5
“Ys 1 & 2 Chronicles +” – 1.5/5
Chris’ Reviews:
Chris continued his self-indulgence in ‘Chris would love that’ games, and continued to NOT actually love them (all those 3.5-star ratings equate to ‘like’ at best). The only game he LOVED was, again predictably, …
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