Year in Review: 2021
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/30/21 at 09:11 PM CT
Alack and alas, 2021 has come and gone, and it was nearly a dreadful remake/remaster/port/whathaveyou of the exceedingly dire 2020. Was there anything praiseworthy to get excited about? Or was it all Fails? Read on to find out:
Top 5 Fails
5. The Year of Ransomware
Ahh, remember back in the Summer of 2021, when we thought the worst thing the year had to offer was a bunch of ransomware attacks? Yeah, they were pretty annoying, and blew up the news during the brief window in which it seemed that COVID might be under control. Fortunately European investigators and the FBI managed to find and arrest a number of the shitheels behind the wave of cyberattacks. Of course, this rare competence shown by bureaucrats is likely going to give us all a false sense of security, so when the next big cyber-meltdown hits, we can all stand around with our mouths open, wondering how it happened. Again.
4. Nintendo Network “Plus Expansion”
Nintendo demonstrated some Sony-grade hubris …
MeltedJoystick Games of the Year 2021
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/26/21 at 04:04 PM CT
For the second year in a row, the watery rock floating torturously around Old Sol, which we call “Earth,” was beset by plague. While at first it seemed like things might be getting better, it was but an illusion, as not only did the virus that shut-down the whole of 2020 mutate into “delightful” new forms such as Delta and Omicron, but the true extent of the havoc caused by 2020’s torpor finally came to light. Supply chain issues, microchip shortages, and mass resignations combined to make for another challenging year.
Gaming didn’t fare particularly well, with continued delays, cancelations, and long-time-coming projects turning out to be lesser than imagined. Even as console gamers attempted to forge ahead bravely into the 9th Generation, the lack of available hardware units helped to disguise the dismal “launch window” slates for Sony and Microsoft.
That said, even with an overall uneventful and poor release schedule, 2021 turned out to be one of the most …
Games of the Decade: The 2010s
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/19/21 at 03:43 PM CT
Last year was pretty crazy for every global citizen. So crazy, in fact, that the MeltedJoystick Crew failed to acknowledge the fact that 2020 not only ushered in a new console Generation for gaming, but also marked the end of a decade. As we all get retrospective thanks to the rapidly-approaching New Year, let’s take a look back at the decade that was the Twenty-Teens, calling out each year’s best game (in hindsight), and giving the Banner Years the credit they’re due.
2010: “Red Steel 2”
This was a good year for the Nintendo Wii. Instead of becoming complacent with their “Blue Ocean” of non-gamers, Nintendo continued to push out a number of stellar first-party titles during the motion-controlled system’s middle-and-late life, with titles like “Super Mario Galaxy 2” and the controversial “Kirby’s Epic Yarn.” Third-parties helped bolster the Wii further, with the exclusive release of “Sonic Colors” (the only good 3D ‘Sonic’ game) from Sega and the …
Square-Enix to take “Dragon Quest 10” ‘Offline’ in February 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/12/21 at 01:26 PM CT
Usually when there’s a headline about a massively-multiplayer online (MMO) game going offline, it’s met with nostalgic reminiscence and melancholy from said game’s fanbase. Either it’s a long-running game that just isn’t profitable anymore, or it’s a new effort that just failed to get off the ground. Regardless, it’s destined to become a talking point in the argument between IP rightsholders and media preservationists who would rather see such doomed titles open-sourced or given the option to run on official private servers than disappear entirely.
Thus it came as a great shock to learn (back in May of 2021, during the ‘Dragon Quest’ 35th Anniversary Livestream) that Square-Enix, with its long and dismal reputation of taking beloved flagship game franchises and unnecessarily turning one or more of their mainline, numbered sequels into MMOs, was taking one of these games ‘offline’… but in a good way. In February of 2022, “Dragon Quest 10 Online” will …
Review Round-Up: Fall 2021
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/05/21 at 01:31 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:
Fall is traditionally my “busy season” when it comes to my agricultural career, and I’ve been putting in the hours, operating heavy machinery, burning brush piles, and generally cleaning up a lot of messes that don’t need to be there when planting time rolls around again next Spring. Of course, that doesn’t really cut into my videogaming time all that much, since videogames happen in the evening and work happens during the day. So I’m not really sure how I managed to play and review a miserable 3 games this Fall… other than the fact that the Crew still has had messed up scheduling that has prevented us from finishing “Borderlands 3” (which we started in EFFING MAY of this year), and Chris and I haven’t managed to get together enough times to finish the second episode in the ‘Boot Hill’ Indie RPG series. I …
Backlog: The Embiggening – December, 2021
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/28/21 at 12:45 AM CT
December is nearly upon us, and as the end of 2021 draws near, we can all take comfort in the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic is still raging on, with increasingly worse mutant variants that will likely render our vaccines irrelevant before too long. We can also revel in the fact that the microchip shortage hasn’t lessened up, and the supply-chain backlogs that make the MJ Crew’s gaming backlogs look miniscule, are still clogged as hard as a cancerous colon. But in the world of the Games Industry, somehow the poop factory just keeps chugging away, churning out another month’s worth of trash to sift through, in the vain hope that something good might be buried in there.
There’s plenty of shovel-ready junk created solely to make a quick buck, but not all three categories are represented. We do have licensed shovelware, mostly based on kid’s TV and movies, with a new ‘Smurfs’ game (which was supposed to come out last month), a compilation of old Disney games from the …
5 “Animaniacs” Sketches I’d Love to See (But Never Will)
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/21/21 at 02:13 PM CT
I just got done watching the second season of Hulu’s rebooted “Animaniacs” cartoon. It was one of my favorite shows in the ‘90s, and along with “DuckTales,” the new seasons came as a delightful and unexpected surprise. While “DuckTales” was never intended to be anything more than an adventure show, “Animaniacs,” on the other hand, frequently delved into political satire and social commentary, even during its original run.
Of course, with the two new seasons we got in 2020 and 2021, that didn’t change, and the Season 2 premier, in which the Warners make fun of Roman Emperor Nero whole opaquely comparing him to Trump, is one of the single greatest pieces of cartoon satire I’ve ever encountered. Unfortunately, as the second season went on, a bit of Left Fringe Wokeness started to push itself to the forefront. For the most part, the rebooted “Animaniacs” has been very even-keeled, mocking Trumpism, world dictators, and even Wokeness itself, such as the …
Ubisoft Goes Crypto-Crazy
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/14/21 at 01:38 PM CT
I feel like I’ve been a really forgiving person, lately. While I never gave Ubisoft the time of day during their early years of crap development, or their middle years of crap development… or their latter day years of crap development, when the company started to produce actual high-quality products for the first time in its history, I was right there to hand out the solid review scores. Heck, I’m not even critical of Ubisoft’s alleged intra-corporation “rape” culture, because they’re French, and everything I know about the French, I learned from Pepe LePew.
No, Ubisoft has been on a solid roll lately, with two rollicking entries in their oldest-currently-running franchise, ‘Rayman,’ a nice art-house Indie-style RPG in “Child of Light,” a thought-provoking entry in their ‘Far Cry’ series, and transitioning ‘Assassin’s Creed’ from a banal “Da Vinci Code”-esque conspiracy simulator to a set of sprawling historical Sandboxes, it seemed like the …
Game Releases in a Perfect World
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/07/21 at 05:58 PM CT
Regular readers of my column, here, will no doubt have noticed a trend. At the end of every month, I look at the upcoming game releases scheduled for the next month, and in doing so, criticize the Games Industry for its crushing lack of creativity and interest. I also lambast low-effort titles as ‘shovelware’ and express my ever-increasing disenchantment with the trend of re-releases of old games on new hardware. So what, pray-tell, would the monthly game release schedule look like in my perfect world?
Well, first of all, there would be no platform lock-in or lock-down. Games would simply be games, much like how movies on optical media were simply movies on optical media. Everyone could make players for the format, but the format was (mostly, and disregarding foreign regional DRM) universal. Thus, outside of a few outliers like the original “Star Wars” trilogy, movie fans didn’t get subjected to seeing “new release” lists that contain nothing but old titles (unless, …
Backlog: The Embiggening – November, 2021
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/31/21 at 02:25 AM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Now that November is upon us, once again, it’s time to participate in the perpetual ritual of Games Industry Publishers pushing out gobs and gobs of licensed crap in the hopes of moving units as Holiday gifts, usually given by confused and bemused grandparents who might be vaguely familiar with the names of things Little Timmy and Little Susie like, and that the kiddos like videogames, so combining the two is a guaranteed successful gifting! Outside of that slat-splosion of watery effluent, we’ve got a ton of old stuff and late stuff that was supposed to come out a month or two (or three) ago, but didn’t. *SIGH* Let’s just get to the pre-mortem post-mortem.
We’ve got all three flavors of shovelware coming in November. First, there’s tons of licensed crap for the kiddies: Disney is bringing us “Disney Classic Games Collection” (I assume this’ll be ‘Vol. 1’), “Star Wars Racer & Commando Combo,” and “Star …
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