Mario Goes Back to the Movies. Will It Be Any Better This Time?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/09/22 at 03:43 PM CT
This week, the world got its first look at Nintendo’s and Illumination’s upcoming “The Super Mario Bros. Movie.” Now, with a stellar and original title like that, no one should have any doubts that this new film will be better than the 1993 disaster, “Super Mario Bros.,” a live action mess starring a number of big names that completely missed the mark, even as a wildly imaginative ‘adaptation’ of Nintendo’s flagship IP.
We’ve been hearing speculation and fake news for a while now about how Chris Pratt, better known for his roles in the ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ and ‘Jurassic World’ movies, where he always sounds like… Chris Pratt, wouldn’t be up to the task of inhabiting the titular role of Mario, and the few lines of Pratt’s dialog in the trailer are… inconclusive.
The question of Mario’s voice is a rabbit hole of inconsistencies. Early on in the history of the ‘Super Mario’ IP, Nintendo collaborated with both Korean animation …
Games I Wish Microsoft Studios Were Working On (But They Aren’t)
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/02/22 at 03:42 PM CT
Microsoft has been on a buying spree of videogame development studios since at least 2018, when they spent time at E3 touting their enhanced ability to produce great first-party games through the acquisition of new studios. I personally didn’t feel particularly excited about these earlier acquisitions, as the studios in question were never on my radar to begin with. However, when Microsoft reassembled the scattered remnants of Interplay under one roof again and bought-out Tim Schafer’s Double-Fine Productions, I started to care, because those studios actually made games I have enjoyed – or at least attempted to enjoy – in the past.
In 2020, when most of the world was laser-focused on the COVID-19 pandemic, Microsoft was ramping up the scale of its studio acquisitions, purchasing the videogame holding company, Zenimax Media, almost exclusively for access to Bethesda Softworks and id Software – the “Skyrim” and “DOOM” people. Now, in late 2022, Microsoft is mere …
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 …
Backlog: The Embiggening – September, 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/27/22 at 05:43 PM CT
Well, Summer’s officially over. Naturally, the Games Industry, which seems incapable of learning anything from its mistakes, is continuing the tradition of christening the start of the new school year – during which most of their customers suddenly go from having TONS of free time to play new videogames, to have NO time – with an absolutely gigantic release schedule packed so full of titles that the tabs for them scroll waaaaay off the edge of my browser window. With this many games packed into one month, there’s GOT to be something that’ll catch my eye, as it glimmers within the steaming cesspool of… everything else.
We’ve got a wide variety of shovelware coming in September, and some of it might actually sell! In licensed swill, we’ve got a new LEGO game – a casual brawler this time, because, apparently, WB’s release of (and success with) “Multiversus” finally woke everyone else up to the fact that ripping off ‘Smash Bros.’ is easy money… provided …
Vaguely Related Review: DragonLance Destinies Vol. 1 “Dragons of Deceit”
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/21/22 at 04:26 PM CT
As a fan of the DragonLance series of Dungeons & Dragons novels dating way back to my middle-school days in the early ‘90s, I thought the series was finished. There hasn’t been a new DragonLance novel published since a last buckshot-load of them was fired-off in 2009, with the final volume of “Tracy Hickman Presents: The Anvil of Time” quartet capping things off. I have been quite terrible about keeping up with DragonLance, as far too many of the “recent” (and I’m using the term both loosely and relatively) books not directly penned by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman themselves have been wholly forgettable at best, mind-numbingly terrible at worst.
In the gaming space, things haven’t been much better, with Margaret Weis and her Sovereign Press self-publishing all of the D&D 3rd Edition sourcebooks and adventure modules, and the series remaining completely dormant through the turbulent tenure of D&D 4th Edition. However, with the advent of D&D 5th Edition in 2014, …
Vaguely Related: Has No One Painted Their <i>Bunkers & Badasses</i> Miniatures?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/14/22 at 04:44 PM CT
To celebrate my birthday this year, I asked Chris to crack open the lovely Bunkers & Badasses Deluxe Boxed Set I gave him for Yuletide two years ago (but which arrived last year thanks to the supply chain cock-up) and run a game for the MJ Crew. His body language suggested that instead of asking him to run a new tabletop game based on an IP he absolutely loves, I’d just dumped a bucket of dead hagfish over his head, but he said he’d “get around to it.” So, while I waited for Chris to come up with a less-than-creative excuse to get out of some B&B mayhem, I decided to crack open my own Deluxe Boxed Set and paint the included Vault Hunter miniatures.
I’ve been painting tabletop gaming models for many decades, and frequently enter them in my county fair, where I typically take home blue ribbons, and one year even won Best of Division for my “Troll Scoutmaster.” Unfortunately, with the COVID pandemic in effect, I haven’t participated in the fair, and haven’t painted …
PlayStation VR2 Coming This Year, Still Lacks Killer Software
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/07/22 at 03:43 PM CT
We’ve known for a while now that Sony hasn’t given up on virtual reality within the PlayStation ecosystem. Recently, we got a look at some of the new features coming in their revised PSVR2 headset, most of which aren’t particularly compelling outside of niche edge-cases. Indeed, the most compelling new features in PSVR2 seem to be the single cable that connects to the console and the fact that the new headset comes with revised, dedicated VR motion controllers, instead of requiring users to track down hard-to-find, discontinued, and generally poorly-implemented PlayStation Move controllers to play the role of ‘hands.’
Ultimately, though, Sony isn’t doing enough to really push VR experiences forward. Honestly, neither is Valve. Each company has one big VR project – “Half-Life: Alyx” for Valve and “Horizon: Call of the Mountain” for Sony (revealed during this year’s Summer Games Fest) – which doesn’t really feel all that impressive from the perspective of …
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