He’s Everywhere VI!: Dungeons & Dragons Edition
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/12/22 at 05:53 PM CT
Every March, our beloved Community Manager, drain clogger, stale potato chip disposal, and disappearer of money, Chris, gets a year older and a year more idiosyncratic. Last year, I threw Chris a bone and poked fun at myself for being such an antisocial misanthrope, but in prior years, I’ve pointed out the numerous people and things I see EVERYWERE across all forms of media that remind me of him, be it ‘Pokemon,’ ‘ Dragon Quest,’ ‘ Final Fantasy,’ or just videogames in general.
This year, we’re taking things back to basics and ignoring all the fancy electronics and scientific magic that makes videogames work. Instead, I’ve compiled a list of 10 creatures from the pages of the various ‘Monster Manuals’ and related tomes in the world’s most popular tabletop Role-Playing Game, Dungeons & Dragons, that remind me of Chris. It’s a game that’s close to both of our hearts, and that we’ve been playing together off-and-on for 30 – that’s THIRTY – …
ALL the Games to Watch for in 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/06/22 at 01:41 PM CT
Wow, is it March already? I guess we’d better take a look at the games coming in 2022 that are worth getting hyped about before any more of 2022 is in the rear-view mirror! Unlike previous years, there are a LOT of titles coming up in the near future to get excited about: 14 of them, to be precise. Let’s get to it.
14. Steel Rising
This upcoming release from Euro-Jank developer, Spiders, and trash-tier publisher, Focus (formerly Focus Home), is filled with mystery. While the visible surface looks like a mix of Dark Fantasy Revolutionary War… with Mechs, combined with open-world game design, we won’t actually know what we’ve got on our hands until we get to play it. Will this be an amazing Action/Adventure to follow on the heels of Spiders’ last release, “Greedfall,” or will it be another unplayable wreck like… nearly all of Spiders’ other games?
13. Sonic Frontiers
Who gets excited about new ‘Sonic’ games anymore? It seems to be mostly Furries and …
Review Round-Up: Winter 2021
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/02/22 at 12:03 AM 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:
Nick doesn’t like it when I curse in the blog, but I had a FUCKING horrible quarter. The open-world Sandbox game I played, which received RAVE reviews, turned out to be the embodiment of mediocrity. “Borderlands 3” was worn so threadbare by the time we finished it after 8+ months of irregular coop sessions that I was relieved to be done and ready to move onto something else. The first Pathfinder tabletop-to-cRPG conversion by Owlcat Games turned out to be a dumpster fire. And my dog died.
“Horizon: Zero Dawn” – 3.5/5
“Borderlands 3” – 4/5
“Pathfinder: Kingmaker” – 2/5
Chris’ Reviews:
THE Disgruntled Dwarf got through a couple of decent solo games and submitted a super-late review for a coop game we played last May. Better late than never!
“Katamari Damacy REROLL” – 4/5
“Victor Vran” …
Backlog: The Embiggening – March, 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/20/22 at 04:02 PM CT
With the coming of March, Spring is officially sprung. You know that that means: The crappy games will start replicating like rabbits. Let’s take a look at what Fiscal Year 2022 is going to lead off with from our beloved corporate overlords in the Games Industry.
There is, unfortunately, some shovelware popping up above the soil as the Winter freeze bleeds away. Four such titles are assaulting us in March, with half of them falling into both the Licensed Swill and Annualized Swill buckets: The (in)gloriously-titled “Monster Energy Supercross – The Official Videogame 5” (at least Monster is attaching its name to a videogame, after suing Ubisoft out of using “Gods and Monsters” as a title for a completely unrelated game) and “WWE 2k22” are both set to rape the wallets of the ignorant. Meanwhile, two 2Cazual2Live titles are getting ported from their original platforms to offend a wider audience: “Instant Sports Paradise” and “Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security …
5 Amazing, Irreplaceable, Discontinued Pieces of Hardware
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/13/22 at 03:47 PM CT
Hardware comes and hardware goes, usually with a new-and-improved version replacing older tech as it’s phased-out and discontinued. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work that way, and with increasing frequency, incredible, novel pieces of hardware are quietly discontinued, vanishing off store shelves and out of Amazon warehouses, with no apparent successor intended to replace them. Here’s a short list of the most traumatizing discontinuations that have affected me, personally.
5. Gyration Airmouse
The Gyration Airmouse isn’t officially “discontinued,” however, the company that invented it – Gyration – has been bought-out by another company – Adesso – which seems more interested in security cameras than wireless, gyroscopic computer mice. The Gyration Airmouse is now “legacy” hardware, which means it’s not getting any R&D money dumped on it, and there won’t be any newer, better versions. As far as I’m concerned, this is THE best way to interact with …
WTF? Sony to Buy Bungie
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/06/22 at 03:24 PM CT
It seems like only a couple weeks ago that we were all expressing shock and bemusement over Microsoft’s announced intentions to buy Activision for 69 billion dollars. Oh, wait that was only a couple weeks ago!
Hot on the heels of Microsoft’s massive corporate bulldozing, Sony felt the need to participate as well, by purchasing Bungie – the original developers of Microsoft’s ‘Halo’ FPS series, who jumped ship from the Xbox Division after the parent company gave the ‘Halo’ IP to 343 Games, went to Activision, then jumped ship again to be ‘independent’ with their ‘Destiny’ IP – for a less-than-staggering $4 billion.
Yes, there are already memes.
Furthermore, Sony has already announced their plans for Bungie – for whom $1.2 billion of that acquisition cost allegedly went into retention fees to make sure Bungie’s employees didn’t bail (as they have been shown to do) to start their own Indie-indie studio – and, unsurprisingly, Sony’s plans …
Backlog: The Embiggening – February, 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/29/22 at 04:59 PM CT
The shortest month of the year is back with 28 days’ worth of crap.
For the second month in a row, there’s no blatant shovelware being dumped on the unsuspecting game-buying public. That’s good news! I wonder how long it can last...
As with last month, though, February isn’t letting off the gas in the slightest when it comes to ports, remasters, remakes, and whatnot. Indeed, the Nintendo Switch – the near-constant Port King for the last half-decade – is getting several ports of remasters: “Grand Theft Auto Trilogy” and “Assassin’s Creed: Ezio Collection.” But that’s not all the Switch is getting dumped on it; it’s also getting “Life is Strange: True Colors.” However, the Switch isn’t the objectively worst dumping ground for February, as the PS5 is getting both “Tormented Souls” and “King of Fighters 15,” is sharing a port of “Assetto Corsa Competizione” with the SeX, while the Playstation 4 and XBONE are getting a port of PC-centric …
WTF? Microsoft to Buy Activision
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/23/22 at 03:26 PM CT
The Triumvirate of Evil is about to become a duo. This week, Microsoft, the tech giant of operating systems and productivity software – and also-ran gaming platform holder – announced that they were going to buy Activision-Blizzard for nearly $69 billion dollars. No, that’s not a typo!
Microsoft has been on a buying binge over the last few years, fattening up the Xbox Games Division with the scattered remains of once-great Western videogame publisher, Interplay, along with a number of other smaller-and-Indie studios like Double-Fine. It was earthshaking when Microsoft bought Zenimax Media, the parent company of Bethesda Softworks and id Software, last year, but buying one of the three biggest, evilest gaming publishing houses for more cash than most of us mere mortals can truly conceive of is positively earthshattering.
Microsoft representatives have made statements to reassure the fanboys of “competing” platforms that their favorite third-party multi-platform games …
New Year’s Backlog Ablutions 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/16/22 at 02:20 PM CT
The MJ Crew is back from an extended holiday break, and the results of the last year’s re-re-revised New Year’s Backlog Ablutions are in. After tasting the bitter sting of failure and growing my own personal backlog by three penalty games in 2020, most of us buckled down and cleared our ablutions. I, of course, have never failed this challenge since we started it in 2019, but for 2021, I wasn’t alone, as both Chris and Erstwhile Matt managed to clear and review the three games allotted to them – even if it took constant badgering and ass-riding on my part to steer them away from failure.
That, of course, leaves Nick. While he actually did put some effort into clearing his three Backlog Ablutions in 2021, said effort didn’t actually manifest until December 30. Procrastination’s a real bitch, eh? So, alack, and alas, Nick failed the Backlog Ablutions challenge for the third year in a row, and since everyone else succeeded, he owes each of us a game off our wishlists …
Backlog: The Embiggening – January, 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/08/22 at 04:41 PM CT
A new year is officially upon us, as 2022 roars in with… more COVID, more home-grown extremism on both fringes of the U.S. political spectrum, more economic woes, more China being China, more Russia being Russia, and generally no indication that things on the grand scale are going to improve any time soon. (Seriously, how is the U.S. bursting with Omicron Variant cases, while the Taliban puts no effort into public health and Afghanistan’s COVID situation never makes the news?) But what about GAMING? What about that most glorious form of escapism, where we can forget about how awful the real world is, and enjoy fictional scenarios where the Good Guys win, violence solves everything, and progress is inevitable? Neverending corporate greed is ensuring that gaming’s going to suck too. Let’s take a look at the new year’s opening releases to see just how hard it’s going to suck. After all, January sets the tone for the entire year!
We can, at least, rejoice in one small …
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