Holy Crap! There’s a New DragonLance Novel Coming in August, 2022!
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/21/22 at 09:19 PM CT
The DragonLance High Fantasy campaign setting created by TSR in 1984 is near and dear to the hearts of most of us here on the MeltedJoystick Crew. While we were only 5 years old when the series launched, we all went through a school curriculum that promoted reading through unguided courses called “Reading Workshop,” in which students, from roughly 5th Grade through 8th Grade, were expected to choose their own books to read, and about which to write weekly short-form book reports in the form of letters to classmates and/or the teacher.
I found Reading Workshop to be a painful experience, initially. In spite of being a voracious reader of Little Golden Books – which I read aloud to my cat, Nommy Jr. – to the point of getting waaaay too much free Pizza Hut from the “Book It!” program, once it came time to transition from super-short children’s books to young-adult novels, I couldn’t find anything that could hold my interest for 100+ pages. In 5th Grade, I recall …
Woke Corporatism: Activision Introduces “Diversity Space Tool” Ahead of Microsoft Acquisition
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/15/22 at 04:27 PM CT
Remember when we could all hate on corporate Big Business for being greedy, unethical, and in-bed with the Far Right conservatives of the Republican Party – who, naturally, offered the corporations fat tax breaks through the magic of Trickle-Down Reaganomics? Well, ever since that Orange Clown bulldozed his way through American public discourse, corporations have been trying to distance themselves from the Right Wing as much as possible. They, of course, do this primarily by embracing – or making the appearance of embracing – the lunatic fringe of the other side’s politics. For years now, we’ve seen ‘Woke Capitalism’ pushing for diversity, casting the overwhelming majority of advertisements with non-European, non-male, non-hetero characters, and voicing support for Left Wing social movements, even as the corporations themselves don’t actually change their behavior in any way, and continue to suck as much profit out of the economy as possible.
This kind of nonsense …
Square-Enix Dumps Its Half-Dead Western Division
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/08/22 at 02:30 PM CT
We at MeltedJoystick have never truly understood what Square-Enix was thinking back in 2009 when it bought the dying carcasses of Eidos and Crystal Dynamics – the Interplay-era Western developers responsible for Leaden Age PC games the likes of ‘Tomb Raider,’ ‘Deus Ex,’ and ‘Thief’ – and grafted those studios and development philosophies onto a Japanese megacorporation that built its entire reputation on a foundation of 16-and-32-bit console RPGs.
Obviously Square-Enix has finally come around to our side of the argument, and doesn’t know why they did that either, because news broke this week that they are now selling-off Eidos and Crystal Dynamics (along with their homebrewed Western-style developer, Square-Enix Montreal) to Embracer Group, a Scandinavian holding company that used to go by the more-familiar name of THQ Nordic. Even more shocking, in this era of Sony and Microsoft spending BILLIONS of dollars to buy studios and IP, Square-Enix only asked Embracer …
Backlog: The Embiggening – May, 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/01/22 at 02:49 PM CT
April showers are supposed to bring May flowers, but with the drought affecting so much of the U.S., that’s kind of tough. Actually, as May rolls in, it’s finally starting to feel like it was supposed to in April, leading me to believe that, with climate change, we’re seeing the seasons shifting away from what’s traditionally been expected… Just like the Games Industry, which, thanks to the cataclysmic changes wrought during the 7th Generation, has changed from a monthly cycle of new releases to a predictable cycle of re-releases and ports. How big a proportion of this month’s release schedule with be consumed by the old instead of the new? Read on!
We’ve got an eclectic mix of shovelware coming in May. Of course, there’s licensed swill based on non-game IP: “My Little Pony: A Maretime Bay Adventure,” based on an IP that primarily appeals to middle-aged male Furries (dubbed “Bronies”), and “Evil Dead: The Game,” based on a hoary old horror movie …
Paradox Interactive Models Positive Behavior Regarding Fangames
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/24/22 at 04:43 PM CT
Fangames have been around since the adolescence of the Internet, circulating within the same gaming communities that tended to pass-around ROM-hacks that spice-up (or ruin) old favorites and Fanslations of unlocalized gems (or turds) out of Japan. Unsurprisngly, most fangames are based on Nintendo IP, thanks to that company’s presence at the very heart of gaming culture in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Also unsurprisingly, Nintendo being the litigious and authoritarian business that they are, loves to bludgeon the communities of their most adoring fans with lawsuits and copyright takedowns at every opportunity – especially when a fangame is involved that manages to deliver a better, truer experience than Nintendo’s own studios.
Nintendo, however, isn’t alone in owning IP that receives fangame support… they’re just alone in their knee-jerk, draconian reaction to such heart-felt out-pourings of adulation. Indeed, this week, Paradox Interactive, a B-tier Eurojank publisher that …
Why <i>Can’t</i> Official Emulation Compete? Copyright, of Course!
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/17/22 at 03:47 PM CT
Last week I raked Nintendo (and to a lesser extent Sony) over the coals with the help of a YouTuber. But we never really got to the root of “why” corporations like Nintendo and Sony – who have been so foundational to the history of videogaming on the whole – refuse to engage with Games Preservation, backward compatibility, and official emulation support in any meaningful way.
Even as I slap Nintendo across the face with one hand, I have to wipe away their tears with the other, since they actually have done quite a bit for backwards compatibility compared to other Big Gaming industrial players: They made the Game Boy Advance compatible with original/color Game Boy cartridges, and further put in the extra effort in creating the DS with an entirely different cartridge slot at the bottom so it could continue that legacy of backwards compatibility. They’re also the company that created both the Super Game Boy cartridge shim for the SNES AND the Game Boy Player expansion slot …
Nintendo Proves that Official Emulation Just Can’t (Won’t) Compete
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/10/22 at 03:31 PM CT
Last year, at about this time, the big gaming bugaboo was the fact that Sony was planning to shut-down access to their digital PlayStation Store for the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, and PlayStation Portable. This news, combined with the fact that an known bug in Sony’s firmware could invalidated digital purchases until the user reconnected their device to the PlayStation Store, saw a massive grassroots backlash which effectively “forced” (insofar as regular persons can force Corporate Persons to do anything) Sony to keep 2/3 of their slated-for-closure stores up and running, AND to patch the ownership issue.
Well, this year, Nintendo decided to do almost the exact same thing! While Wii and DSi owners haven’t been able to make purchases from those consoles’ digital stores in quite some time, recently, the stores were unceremoniously shut-down with no notice. Well, technically, there was some notice: Specifically, a Nintendo announcement that the WiiU and 3DS eShops …
E3 Cancelled Again, 2023 to Feature “Revitalized” Show
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/03/22 at 01:43 PM CT
Due to the lingering effects of the still-ongoing (thanks, anti-vax retards) COVID-19 pandemic, E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, which has long been the Entertainment Software Association’s biggest and most publicly-visible trade show, has been cancelled again in 2022. Back in early 2020, when the outbreak was just getting started and nobody knew how COVID was spread, let alone had access to testing, vaccines, and therapeutics, the ESA rightfully cancelled a large semi-public trade show, where swarms of gaming bodies would mash-together, swapping sweat and various flavors of BO. In 2021, with the pandemic still raging and vaccination rates still low due to logistical issues (and the afore-mentioned anti-vax retards – guess what, vaccines don’t cause retardation, since the people who refuse to get them already have it), the ESA transitioned E3 to an all-digital format, which, I personally, found to be the best E3 in many years (Sony quitting also helped filter out a lot of …
Backlog: The Embiggening – April, 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/27/22 at 02:51 PM CT
The most Foolish month of the year will soon be upon us, once again. Let’s see what the fools within the Corporate Games Industry want the fools they call consumers to buy now!
We’ve got shovel-ready trash, once again, coming in April, and from some unexpected corners. In the Licensed Swill category, there’s a HUGE, all-encompassing ‘LEGO Star Wars’ game coming from… Warner Brothers, NOT Disney, somehow. Also, “Record of Lodoss War: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth,” a – from all reports, shockingly good – Metroidvania based on an ancient anime is losing its PC exclusivity and coming to PlayStation 5 as well. We are mercifully spared any Annualized Releases in the shovelware category, but we are getting two 2 Cazul 2 Live games. One is a completely unnecessary port of a completely unnecessary sequel in the belabored ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ streamer-meme series. The other is Nintendo apparently trying to revive “WiiSports,”only under the less …
PlayStation “State of Play” 2022: Good, Bad, and Ugly
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/20/22 at 02:47 PM CT
E3 2022 is just around the corner, and thanks to the continually-mutating COVID-19 virus, will most likely take the same form as last year’s all-digital show. Of course, some “people” (and I mean that in the corporate sense of the word) are still pouty about being mocked for their miserable E3 presentations of years past, and are thus continuing to do their own thing. Sony is the most high-profile example of such pouting – since at least Nintendo does release a special Direct video for E3 each year – and has started releasing “State of Play” videos instead, showcasing upcoming releases that they think will get the PlayStation fanbase all fired up.
Now, I established a few years ago that I simply do NOT connect with the PlayStation fanbase anymore, even after being one of the first in my high school to jump ship from Nintendo to Sony during the early days of the PlayStation 1 vs. Nintendo 64 console wars, showing my willingness to abandon any platform I perceived as a …
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