Backlog: The Embiggening – April, 2021
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/28/21 at 02:48 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! April, as always, is for fools, and the continued impact of the pandemic, combined with a silicon chip shortage, has all of us playing the part. But the Games Industry is content to continue churning its mechanism to produce lots of new products for ‘us’ to buy. Let’s take a look at what the next month has in store…
Not only is there a chip shortage, there’s a shovelware shortage! Other than two officially licensed Racing games that are barely different from their entire line of predecessors – “WRC 9” and “Monster Energy Supercross 4” – there’s nothing to panic about!
Unfortunately, there are still plenty of ports, remasters, remakes, and rehashes to panic about. In April 2021, for the first time since 2018, the Nintendo Switch is not the main target for this column’s port shaming, as the Industry’s gaze has turned to rest more heavily on the new greener pastures of the PlayStation 5 now that the …
PlayStation VR Not Dead; Motion Controls Neither
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/21/21 at 04:04 PM CT
This week, Sony revealed their new generation of PlayStation VR equipment for the PlayStation 5. The most impressive piece of the reveal was the new generation of motion controllers that go along with the new VR headset. These controllers are clearly modeled upon the Oculus Touch VR controllers that have been available for PC for a while now, but Sony confirmed that there are no external tracking devices required, and that these new motion controllers are tracked by the VR helmet itself, similar to how Microsoft’s Mixed Reality Hololens works.
While it is good news that someone other than our brilliant and visionary Lord GabeN is still thinking about VR in the gaming space, I’m significantly disappointed that Sony’s new motion controllers aren’t VR agnostic like their old PlayStation Move controllers were. The only non-VR motion controller systems on the market that are anywhere near viable are the aging (and discontinued) Razer Hydra and the aging (and discontinued) …
Nvidia’s Tone-Deaf “Solution” to the Graphics Card Shortage
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/14/21 at 03:25 PM CT
We’re one quarter of the way through 2021, and the horrors of 2020 – the COVID-19 pandemic, global logistics and shipping challenges, and a microchip shortage – have doggedly followed us into what we’d all hoped would be a brighter future and a return to normalcy. The new Xbox and PlayStation consoles (as well as the old Nintendo Switch) are still hard to come by on store shelves, but PC gamers have taken the most damaging blow from the continuing hardware shortages, as they aren’t the only ones trying to buy-up new PC hardware components.
Nvidia, the manufacturer of premier graphics cards for PC gaming and workstations, has finally decided to do something about the fact that unscrupulous crypto-currency miners keep buying-up all the new GPUs as soon as a new batch hits retail channels: As reported by Linus Tech Tips, Nvidia will be pushing a new ‘designed-for-crypto-mining’ range of headless graphics cards to that audience, with the idea being that the miners will …
I’m Everywhere!?: Self-Deprecation Edition
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/07/21 at 05:26 PM CT
For the past four years, each time MeltedJoystick’s Community Manager – and my oldest friend – Chris has gotten a year older, I’ve poked fun at him for the fact that, nearly everywhere I look across all forms of media, there are a plethora of people, creatures, and objects that remind me of him. Usually I throw Chris a bone and drop a self-deprecating reference to the fact that he and I are, essentially, the world’s least-popular comedy duo into the lists. This year, I decided to go all the way and put together a full list of 10 characters from videogames that remind me of myself. This was a much more challenging task than finding a random assortment of small, round, annoying things and pointing out how they are like Chris, so I was actually thankful, for a change, that there are so many licensed videogames based on non-game IP out there.
Get ready for a list packed with antisocial antagonistic anti-heroes!
10. The Boy (“A Boy and His Blob”)"A completely average …
Review Round-Up: Winter 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/28/21 at 03:54 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:
King Richard the Third was right: NOW is the Winter of our discontent (or discount tent, as the great Canadian wordsmith, Red Green, put it). While it may seem that all the numbers on my keyboard are broken except the ‘3,’ that’s not actually the case. It just so happens that my run of encounters with mediocre games has continued nearly unbroken for two entire seasons. This is becoming… aggravating. At least I got off to a good start with my Backlog Ablutions for 2021, clearing out 2/3 of them before even reaching Spring.
“Stardew Valley” – 3/5
“A Total War Saga: Troy” – 3/5
“Final Fantasy 14” – 2/5
“Indivisible” – 3/5
“Knightin’+” – 3.5/5
“Mass Effect” – 2.5/5
“Mass Effect 2” – 3.5/5
“Mass Effect 3” – 3.5/5
Chris’ Reviews:
THE Disgruntled Dwarf did not …
Backlog: The Embiggening – March, 2021
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/21/21 at 05:17 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Corporations are people too! And just like all the rest of us, they ring in the (Fiscal) New Year in March! That goes a long way toward explaining the traditional influx of garbage from the Games Industry as “we” (read: “they”) turn the ledger page to another year.
We’ve got a lot of shovelware coming in March, and the publishers are trying to disguise some of it. But I’ve been watching the release slates for too long, and I’m going to call a Spade a Spade. Square Enix is porting their (critical failure) “Marvel Avengers” Live Service to the Xbox SeX, perhaps in an attempt to get some of that sweet, sweet (hypothetical) Gamepass money. There are plenty of officially-licenced games about watching vehicles go “vroom!” in “WRC 9,” “Monster Energy Supercross 4,” and “Monster Jam: Steel Titans 2,” but there’s also a no-name knock-off of monster truck… racing? game called “Monster Truck …
Visionary Valve, Myopic Multitudes
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/14/21 at 03:26 PM CT
Valve, the parent company of the PC digital distribution service Steam, is still a privately-owned corporation, beholden not to the demands of shareholders, but to the whims of its visionary Big Boss, Gabe Newell, colloquially known to Steam fans as ‘Lord GabeN.’ Back when Steam launched in 2003, PC gaming was on its last legs, utterly unable to compete with consoles like the PlayStation 2 and Gamecube, with a number of PC-centric Western developers jumping on-board Microsoft’s PC-like Xbox for their biggest projects of the time.
But Valve ultimately proved that PC gaming wasn’t, in fact, dead, but suffering from numerous logistics issues, which Steam went a long way toward solving. While it got off to a bit of a slow start, before it was a decade old, “Steam” had become as synonymous with “PC gaming” as “Nintendo” had been synonymous with “console gaming” throughout the 1980s.
Steam, however, wasn’t GabeN’s only bright idea, and Valve has continued …
Default Controls
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/07/21 at 04:12 PM CT
Way back in the 1980s, those who were on the cutting edge of technology, and who had a huge amount of discretionary income, were playing games on the prototypical systems – things like Amiga, Commodore, Atari (delenda est) and even incredibly early versions of DOS – that would eventually evolve into PC gaming as we know it today.
However, PC gaming as we know it has been greatly influenced by the dedicated, single-purpose game machines known as consoles, as these two branches of the same technological family tree have evolved side-by-side over the decades. Prior to the influence of single-function, ‘appliance-like’ game machines in the form of arcade cabinets and home consoles, gamers were content to interact with their games using the default control devices that came in the box: Keyboards. And while mice would eventually be added to the stable of default PC gaming control devices, it was something of a long-fraught ideological war, with hardcore typists insisting that …
Backlog: The Embiggening – February, 2021
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/30/21 at 04:47 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! February is the shortest month of the year, but with even the new Biden Administration at the reins, COVID doesn’t look to be going away anytime soon, and is, in fact, getting WORSE in some ways, with new variants that are more contagious and (possibly) more fatal. With worldwide industry and logistics severely hobbled by the virus, it’s probably too optimistic to expect to see good videogame releases this early in 2021 (in spite of the fact that videogames should be one of the least impacted industries due to largely digital distribution and the ability for coders and digital artists to work from anywhere). On to the crap!
We’re light on shovelware again in February. Two of the three titles are, unsurprisingly, also ports (but we’ll get to that in a moment), and both fall into the ‘Too Casual to Live’ category of shovelware, as they are the Gender Role Simulators targeted at little girls who no longer have feminine …
Xbox Division Nearly Self-Destructs with Announced, then Retracted, Price-Hike on Gold
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/23/21 at 04:47 PM CT
It’s a new year, and a quick trip through the grocery store will reveal to anyone paying attention that we’ve gotten a pretty severe price hike across the board in 2021. And as this new year begins Microsoft seemed dead set on being the bad guy again, after spending the entirety of the 8th Generation groveling and pandering to gamers in the hope of winning us back after the comically-disastrous XBONE reveal event.
Last summer, when Xbox Live Gold 12-month subscription cards disappeared from retail outlets, the rumor mill started churning up an idea that really excited me, speculating that Microsoft would end the mandatory subscription for online features that has been a defining feature of the Xbox ecosystem since its inception. What with Microsoft’s more recent endeavor to create a “Netflix of videogames” in their Gamepass subscription service – which includes Xbox Live Gold in its price – removing the paywall from basic features was the only rational path to …
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