Backlog: The Embiggening – December, 2024
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/10/25 at 10:34 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! It’s a New Year, once again, and – as is always the case with a new beginning – the Games Industry has a chance to make a fresh start and maaaaaybe not do all the same stupid stuff they did last year that lost them a ton of money and left several Big Names in Industrial Gaming teetering on the precipice of Broke (induced, in many cases, by Woke). As we’ve already seen from noodle-suckers like Mink Tinklebag, the backpedaling and about-facing has already begun ahead of the U.S. Government’s looming change of administration from a dottering old fool who let the Woke Fringe run roughshod over him to a… dottering old fool who will hand our society over to religious fundamentalists and/or Neo-Soviets as long as they give him personal compliments. Ugh.
One bit of good news coming out of the first month of 2025’s game releases is NO shovelware! Buuut I’m not going to leave this category completely blank, as there’s a …
New Year’s Backlog Ablutions 2025
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/05/25 at 02:01 PM CT
The results of the last year’s New Year’s Backlog Ablutions are in! Sadly, we couldn’t keep our Perfect Streak going into a third year, as Erstwhile Matt – this initial instigator of this entire sorry display – failed utterly, completing only one of his three chosen games and, furthermore, failing to submit a review for that game. Even though Nick was still in a quantum state with his third (and worst) game, he managed to submit a review on the last possible day, in spite of dealing with his 4th official bout with COVID-19.
Since Matt was a Loser this year, he was obligated to buy each of the rest of us a game from our wishlists. To mix up the formula a bit – since we seem to do that every year – Nick proposed that Matt’s Penalty Games should automatically become picks for the rest of us.
To reiterate the rules: We all have one year to play three specific backlogged games that we’ve chosen for ourselves in advance. Included within those three games must be …
Year in Review: 2024
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/28/24 at 10:57 PM CT
Well, the world didn’t end last year, in spite of world politicians’ overwhelming levels of hubris and stupidity. Unfortunately, that means the MJ Crew had to come up with a year-end list including 5 things that didn’t completely suck about gaming and nerd culture in 2024… Hey, we tried. At least coming up with complete gaming disasters was still easy, so that’s a plus, right? (No, it’s not.)
Top 5 Fails
5. Square-Enix Makes No Money from Traditional Games
Oh, me, oh, my! While everyone in the MJ Crew loved Square-Enix at some point in the past, we’ve all come to feel a great sense of disdain and betrayal from the former titan of Japanese RPG publishing. We thought the company might get back on track after getting rid of its Western, non-RPG-related studios, but, alas, it was not to be. In 2024, Square-Enix revealed that they make next to nothing from “traditional” games – the type that used to be their bread and butter – with most of their revenue …
MeltedJoystick Games of the Year 2024
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/22/24 at 02:04 PM CT
This year seemed to fly by, even as quality videogame releases were few and far-between.
The good news, though, is that every single game that got the MJ Crew’s attention this year (in a good way) was the type of thing that would normally fly under the radar. These were mostly surprise releases with no (or next-to-no) hype buoying them up, while the most-hyped titles of the year fell-flat alongside “AAA” sales and profit margins.
Without further ado, MeltedJoystick proudly presents our selection of the 5 most intriguing releases of 2024:
1. Unicorn Overlord (Multi)
Vanillaware is back in grand style with a Fantastical blend of Turn-Based Roleplaying and Strategy games that managed to invoke the spirits of some of our favorite RPGs and Strategy games of all-time, while also being unafraid to do its own thing. Even better, It’s one of Vanillaware’s first attempts at branching out into multi-platform releases, allowing anyone with a 9th Gen console to experience the …
Are You Prepared for Dungeons X Dragons?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/14/24 at 07:24 PM CT
The social downfall of Hasbro Wizards of the Coasts continues. Not merely satisfied with filling its last 4 years of book releases with enough DEI pandering to choke a hippogriff and purposefully alienating its core audience, the corporation recently released a 50th anniversary coffee table book with a foreword that included disparaging comments about the game’s co-creator and community folk hero, Gary Gygax. These comments weren’t anything surprising, of course: Simply more 2020’s accusations of misogyny, and the like… The types of basic insults the Woke crowd has leveled at pretty much EVERYONE in the last decade (including each other). However, something about these Social Justice platitudes appearing in an official product that was supposed to be a celebration of half-a-century of tabletop roleplaying really shook the hornets’ nest.
And when you shake a hornets’ nest hard enough, eventually the Queen will show up. In this case the “queen” in question is a …
Review Round-Up: Fall 2024
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/07/24 at 09:56 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:
Ugh. None of us really did much gaming this Fall. After my distasteful Summer filled with mediocrity and disappointment, I found myself avoiding starting a new game for well over a month. I fiddled around with some mobile games, which were all crap… except one, which has an identical PC version, so I went ahead and reviewed it. With the logjam broken, I played one of my most recent acquisitions and actually enjoyed it. Plus Chris and I finally finished a 12-hour coop game after more than half a year.
“Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel” – 4/5
“It Takes Two” – 4.5/5
“Unicorn Overlord” – 4.5/5
Chris’ Reviews:
Chris has, once again, had plenty of free time to play games, and finally tore himself away from zombie-schlock to play… some ‘Star Wars’ schlock… before going straight back to zombie-schlock with what …
Backlog: The Embiggening – December, 2024
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/01/24 at 09:20 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! It’s time to toll the ancient Yuletide carol once again, as the end of the year stares us in the face. Let’s take a look at what the constipated factories of Industrial Gaming are trying to squeeze out in a desperate attempts at generating a last-minute profit.
There are only half-a-dozen shovelware titles coming in December, and all of them are part of the Licensed Swill category. We’ve got games coming based on the ‘Indiana Jones’ movies, the ‘Fairy Tail’ anime, the ‘Rugrats’ cartoon, Funko-pop toys, and ‘Predator’ movie(s), and the scheduled holiday movie release of ‘Dog Man,’ based on the children’s comic books.
Some of that shovelware was old, but in the grand sorting scheme, being some form of Swill outranks being some form of port… and yes, there are ports. Thankfully, there are significantly fewer ports than usual, and, as a year-end twist, the Nintendo Switch is NOT the primary dumping …
GOG is Blowing Smoke Again, This Time “Games Preservation”
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/24/24 at 03:04 PM CT
As much as I would love to love the Polish videogame publisher formerly known as Good Old Games, I’ve been finding it incredibly difficult to overlook the fact that their audacious soapbox pontificating has never actually resulted in significant positive changes in Industrial Gaming. Little more than a week ago GOG launched their latest round of favor-currying directly into users’ inboxes with a mass email detailing their latest initiative: The GOG Preservation Program.
“Games Preservation” has been quite the buzzword in the gaming community for quite a few years, typically as the purview of noble pirates who hack the DRM out of discontinued, unsupported games or upload cartridge ROM or disc ISO images of console titles that have never received a modern re-release. However, what GOG’s so-called “new” initiative is actually doing isn’t actually “new” at all, but is rather just a slight re-wording of GOG’s DRM-free and guaranteed compatibility promises that …
What’s Going on at Kotaku?!
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/16/24 at 02:58 PM CT
Kotaku used to be the definitive place for Games Journalism in the 20- ‘00s. Every game, every discussion, every gaming tangential subject – you name it, if you Google’d it, all roads lead to Kotaku, and they were – with heavy emphasis on the past tense part of the statement – a comprehensive and good place to read about videogames. Kotaku’s ability, as a digital-only platform, to react to rapidly emerging and changing environment of the Games Industry effectively dealt the death blow to print gaming magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly. But as we’ve been seeing in the Post-Dot-Com-Bubble era, tech monopolies are fertile fields for corruption and decadence.
In the last decade, Kotaku has gone from the de-facto source for information about videogames to a punchline after many years of creeping activism that saw the site’s focus shift dramatically from covering every tidbit of gaming news before any other outlet could produce an article about it, to berating and …
Nintendo’s Draconian IP Enforcement Just Got Worse
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/10/24 at 02:20 PM CT
Oh, Nintendo. We love Nintendo, don’t we folks? Yeah, they were the company that rebuilt console gaming after the 1983 Crash. They were the company whose developers, led by the likes of Shigeru Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata, created some of the best, brightest, and most memorable IPs in gaming, frequently carving out whole new genres, but always, at least, iterating on what came before in novel and positive ways.
That Nintendo is a relic of the past, however. Today’s Nintendo isn’t a Good Guy or a company that produces great games out of a passion for entertaining. Rather, it’s just another corporate monolith, fussing over money and possessed by an insane obsession with wringing every nickel possible out of the things created by its most passionate (and frequently ex- or late) employees.
Thus we come to the latest news out of Nintendoland that the company is introducing a music streaming app to its already bloated, poorly-designed, and overpriced stable of subscription …
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