Backlog: The Embiggening – January, 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/29/19 at 03:40 PM CT
The Boring ‘20s are right around the corner, and as a new year and a new decade prepare to land upon us like so much parasite-riddled excrement from an unwell ruminant, it’s somewhat peaceful to soak-in the tiny, insignificant January Games Industry release schedule. Indeed, the Two-Faced God, Janus, whose name is attached to the first month of the year, symbolically looks forward and backward at the same time. If he ever actually existed, old Janus would get a real charge out of the Games Industry because they JUST CAN’T STOP LOOKING BACK. You know what that means: More crap, more ports, and more ports of crap.
Two pieces of licensed tie-in garbage are coming in January that were supposed to have graced us with their presence months ago already. But sometimes to ensure that your crap is thoroughly excremental, you have to delay things, since making truly garbage games takes time and effort (just ask From Software). We’re getting both the oft-delayed “Dragon Ball Z: …
New Year’s Backlog Ablutions 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/22/19 at 04:26 PM CT
Last year’s New Year’s Backlog Ablutions experiment turned out to be quite the success. While both Nick and Matt ultimately failed the challenge, this goal-setting activity succeeded in getting both of them to play more regularly.
However, Chris and I both found the challenge to be “2EZ,” so this year the MeltedJoystick Crew has decided to mix it up a bit and add some actual consequences for failure. Instead of picking three games from our own backlogs and pledging to play them in the year 2020, we’ve each picked a single game for everyone else. Justifications for our given picks can be found below.
Finally, we found that the lack of a penalty for failure didn’t motivate certain Crew members quite enough. Thus, this year, anyone who fails to clear their Backlog Ablutions must buy a game for the Crew members who did off of their respective wish lists. This should be fun!
Chris: Community Manager
From Matt: “Metro 2033”
“Metro 2033” is a FPS based on a …
Year in Review: 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/15/19 at 04:15 PM CT
Another year has come and gone, and through it all, the MeltedJoystick crew has been watching. Always watching… Once again, it’s time to take a look back at the year and praise the 5 biggest Wins for the gaming community while simultaneously *facepalming* over the 5 biggest Fails.
Top 5 Fails
5. Japan Bans Console Modding
Just when our friends in the Land of the Rising Sun thought they owned the gaming hardware they bought and were free to do with it as they pleased, Japan’s government decided to crack down on hardware modding, making the practice fully illegal. We know this is all just copyright police nonsense and really has nothing to do with “security” or any other buzzwords multinational corporations like to throw out when they do something unpopular (or coerce governments to do it for them). Maybe Japan should be more worried about the Nuke-Testing Triple-Chinned Haircut on the other side of the Sea of Japan if “security” is so high on their minds? Worst …
MeltedJoystick Games of the Year 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/07/19 at 03:50 PM CT
2019 was a challenging year. So many of the “hot, new releases” turned out to be “old things being ported to new platforms,” to the point where, if you pruned all the ports, remasters, and compilations out of the annual release summary, you really wouldn’t have much.
It was also a rough year for exclusives, with little in the way of Game of the Year material hitting any lone console… except for Epic Games. The new Epic Games Store managed to secure exclusive distribution rights for the PC versions of nearly every outstanding multi-platform release in its first year, pissing off hordes of Steam and GOG users in the process.
RPG fans, though, had it roughest of all, with all of the major GotY contender releases being pushed back to 2020, leaving us, like a flock of ducks (or perhaps Untitled Geese) to filter befouled water through our bills in the desperate hope of seining out a nugget of partially-digested corn. Conversely, fans of quality, single-player …
Review Round-Up: Fall 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/01/19 at 03:02 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 admit, I cheated a little, as two of these reviews are for coop games that I finished on my own. But I was completely fed-up with people canceling, postponing, and showing up late all the time, so I capped them off this week since we were literally one boss battle away from the end in both “Divinity: Original Sin 2” and “Sundered.”
Because we were playing “Divinity: Original Sin 2” as a group for sooooooo long, and I wanted to play a single-player RPG from my own backlog, I was pretty much forced to pick something from the Dungeon Crawler subgenre. I decided on the ancient ‘Lands of Lore’ series from GOG… which was a mistake. I didn’t manage to get the taste out of my mouth until I played a modern Indie effort in the same subgenre.
Suffice to say, I didn’t have a particularly enjoyable quarter. Let’s …
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