Backlog: The Embiggening – August, 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/31/22 at 03:52 PM CT
The Summer Games Drought has broken after but a single month! Of course, now, much like those poor folk in Kentucky right now, we are forced to deal with an unrelenting and continuous flood of crap. Not only is this flood annoying to deal with as gamers, it’s actually damaging to the hobby and medium as a whole. The Games Industry is repeating the mistakes of the Atari (delenda est) Era, and I still wonder how long it will be before everything comes crashing down again.
We’ve got all three major subvarieties of shovel-ready crap coming in August, and much like the mythological figure of Utnapishtim/Noah, they are coming in pairs (during a Great Flood… of crap). In the Licensed Swill category, we’ve got yet another version of “Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?” hitting every platform like it was shot out of a blunderbuss, accompanied by a new game about ‘Zorro.’ In the Casual Swill category, we’ve got a mobile-inspired management Sim in “Arcade Paradise” …
D&D 6th Edition Coming in 2024, Set to be ‘5.Woke’ Edition
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/24/22 at 05:05 PM CT
The MeltedJoystick Crew have been playing tabletop RPGs together on a very regular basis for decades, not including the unfortunate break we had to take when that annoying and useless activity known as “going to college” got in the way. Since August 2019, though, we’ve taken a break from our usual Dungeons & Dragons activities and went back to the simpler times of Milton Bradley’s HeroQuest board/role-playing game hybrid. As we draw close to the end of available, published HeroQuest content, most of us are greatly looking forward to going back to D&D 5th Edition, which we thoroughly enjoyed via a long, multi-part campaign in which we took a single party of player characters through the “Hoard of the Dragon Queen,” “Rise of Tiamat,” and “Out of the Abyss” official adventure modules.
As much as I love tabletop RPGs and consider them to be one of the core facets of my life, I don’t generally follow the news surrounding the industry all that closely, and …
Remaining Big <strike>Three</strike> Two Members Take Opposite Stands on Legacy DLC
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/17/22 at 03:03 PM CT
With Microsoft set to devour Activision within the year, the Triumvirate of Evil videogame corporations is down to two: The French bastards at Ubisoft, who, admittedly, have been making much better games in the last decade than all of their prior efforts combined; and Electronic Arts, the ‘Worst Company in America’ two years running.
This past week, both companies have had to address the long tail of their 7th Gen dalliances with DRM, Live Services, and DLC. Neither company actually did what I expected, though. Ubisoft, whose recent excellent games have softened by hatred toward them quite a bit, decided that they will simply turn-off all support for a number of legacy games (none of which I care about, in spite of receiving a couple of them as freebies). At first it seemed that these games were being, effectively, delisted, preventing even current owners from redownloading them. Later clarification revealed that it will only be online features and DLC that will be …
Trick Out Your Warframe Arsenal with These Top Picks
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/10/22 at 04:46 PM CT
Digital Extremes’ “Warframe” is a very busy Live Service game with a LOT of moving parts under the hood. Having been in Perpetual Beta since 2013, some of the basic mechanical systems have been revised multiple times, while – unlike Bungie – Digital Extremes has never actually removed any content from the game. Thus there’s a lot to take in, which can be overwhelming to new players and those who don’t read the Wiki – which is doubly important with how generally piss-poor Digital Extremes is when it comes to tutorializing or providing in-game explanations of how things work.
The Arsenal itself is a pretty big deal, allowing players to pick and choose not only the warframe they pilot, but a loadout of three weapons, replete with mods. While modding is an in-depth activity that would require a full-length article for any one given piece of equipment, below I’ll provide a rough overview of my top 5 picks in each weapon slot, and what Mastery Rank those items become …
Square-Enix to take “Final Fantasy Record Keeper” Offline in September 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/03/22 at 03:47 PM CT
Last year, Square-Enix surprised us with the announcement that they would be re-launching the ‘Dragon Quest’ massively-multiplayer online RPG in an offline, single-player format, dubbed “Dragon Quest 10 Offline.” Normally, MMOs tend to linger around longer than their profitability dictates, before fading away after years of neglect by the publisher. Unfortunately, Square-Enix still has not announced a localization outside of Japan for this newly unplugged ‘Dragon Quest’ title.
Neglecting their Western audience has been part of Square-Enix’s modus operandi for decades, but in recent years, the Japanese mega-corporation seemed to have changed its ways somewhat, frequently bringing weird, niche games Westward and, most recently, localizing a few of their ancient Golden Age titles (which weren’t, actually, all that golden), like the ‘Romancing SaGa’ series and “Live A Live.”
At the tail-end of June, 2022, however, Square-Enix made the stunning announcement …
Backlog: The Embiggening – July, 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/26/22 at 02:09 PM CT
July is nearly upon us, and the Summer Games Drought has finally arrived in full force. There are less than 10 titles coming in the middle of Summer, so it shouldn’t take too much time to determine whether any of them are worth getting excited about.
Sadly, out of our tiny July release slate, 3 of them must be shoveled directly into the trash. There’s a ‘Digimon’ TRPG and the first part of an *episodic* (*dryheave*) Adventure game based on the ‘Cyanide and Happiness’ webcomic (yikes, there’s so much barrel bottom in that bit of scraping, I got splinters just reading about it). There are, however, no painfully Casual non-games polluting the July shovelware category, so that’s something, at least. There is, however, an annualized title, “F1 2022,” which was supposed to come out last month, but didn’t.
Will the Summer Games Drought stem the unrelenting tide of ports, remasters, remakes, and other rehashes that have been drowning us – particularly Switch …
Not-E3 Impressions 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/18/22 at 04:43 PM CT
As mentioned a couple weeks ago, E3 has been cancelled for 2022, without even an all-digital event like E3 2021 to fill the empty space in June’s Gaming Media coverage. Nature abhors a vacuum, though, and something else has arisen to fill the E3-shaped hole in our gaming lives: Enter Summer Games Fest, produced by The Game Awards – a completely useless outfit that wants to be the Oscars of gaming, yet only succeeds at being as out-of-touch and flakey as the Oscars. Other typical E3 participants decided to release digital presentations around the Summer Games Fest presentation, so, guess what? We’ve got E3, just with a different name.
Summer Games Fest:
Want: “Warframe” Duviri Paradox expansion, “TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge”
Not Sure if Want: “Witchfire,” “Stormgate,” “Goat Simulator 3,” “Neon White,” “Honkai Starrail,” “Nightingale”
Do Not Want: “Street Fighter 6,” “Aliens: Dark Descent,” “The Callisto Protocol,” “Call of …
Guess Who Owns SNK
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/12/22 at 12:24 AM CT
There has been a lot of buying and selling and merging of videogame studios as of late, what with both Microsoft and Sony spending Billions (with a “B”) of dollars on studios and publishers, Square-Enix dumping its under-performing Western division, and – as always – the Chinese Communist Party extending its reach and influence through Tencent. Just when we thought Chinese meddling or Woke idiocy in North America were the worst influences on gaming we had to worry about, a once-big(ish)-name in Japanese game development has been bought out by an unexpected benefactor.
SNK, known for its stable of Golden Age fighting games and overpriced also-ran consoles in the NeoGeo line, has always been a publicly-traded corporation. As such, after struggling to penetrate the home videogaming market, the collapse of arcades worldwide saw SNK fall on hard times, leading to a buyout by Playmore to form SNK-Playmore. This hyphenated version of the company continued to flail away at the …
Review Round-Up: Spring 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/04/22 at 07:53 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 good gaming quarter, which looks magnificent compared to my last quarter. Chris and I finished the second ‘Boot Hill’ game, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I got to dig into another high-quality Ubisoft Sandbox, which is THE definitive “Break of the Weapons” killer. We also started a new Live Service to replace “Destiny 2” (for some of us, at least), which turned out to be an interesting and engrossing time-sink, if not particularly cooperative. I managed to squeeze in an Epic Store freebie at the last minute (and found out why it was a freebie in the process). And I adopted a new dog.
“Boot Hill Bounties” – 4/5
“Immortals: Fenyx Rising” – 4.5/5“
“Warframe” – 3.5/5
“Cris Tales” – 3/5
Chris’ Reviews:
THE Disgruntled Dwarf appears to have given-up on his dreams of becoming a …
Backlog: The Embiggening – June, 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/29/22 at 04:28 PM CT
June is nearly upon us, once again. And with the coming of the Summer season, we must all prepare ourselves mentally for the withering despair of the annual Summer Games Drought, in which the corporate troglodytes of the Games Industry refuse to release very many games during the three months of the year when the biggest proportion of the videogaming audience has significantly decreased amounts of responsibility and obligations and overwhelming amounts of free time – you know, school kids, and, increasingly, their Gen-X and Millennial teachers, who grew up with the NES. Well, it looks like this year, the Drought hasn’t arrived, just yet. There are gobs and gobs of ‘new’ releases coming in June, and it’s up to me to tell you, dear readers, which ones are worth getting out of bed for.
Not much shovelware is coming in June, which is good news. We’ve got all three major categories represented, though. In the category of “Licensed Swill,” we’ve got “MX vs. ATV …
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