Pause! The Killer Feature No One Has Figured Out Yet
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/07/20 at 08:10 PM CT
As they did with TV, movies, and music, subscription services are now trying to consume the world of videogames. While Microsoft endeavors to become the “Netflix of Gaming,” Netflix itself has already fallen prey to the next step in subscription saturation – that is fracturing into many separate subscriptions as rightsholders withdraw their consent from Netflix to broadcast their content, in favor of ‘rolling their own’ solution, thus allowing them to keep more of the profits.
But as subscription services change from monolithic to marginal, the end user, the customer, the gamer, is the one who suffers, forced to shell out ever more money every month just to maintain access to what they had before. Customers are suffering from subscription fatigue and wasting hundreds of dollars per year as individuals, which all adds up to untold billions of dollars wasted worldwide.
This begs the question: Why stay subscribed to all these services all the time? After all, most people …
Backlog: The Embiggening – November, 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/31/20 at 06:04 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into… the past. Where dead games receive new life in the form of ports, remakes, and remasters, in the hope that the new generation of gamers is stupid (they are) enough to buy them when their forerunners (who were also generally quite stupid) weren’t. With the onset of November, we’re into what was traditionally Holiday Season territory, but with 2020 being the Year of COVID and nothing following its traditional cycle, everything is subject to change without notice. Usually we’d see publishers squeezing out some last-ditch panic-turds in order to get them on store shelves early enough to confuse grandparents shopping for Little Timmy and Suzy. Now, those grandparents are likely dead of COVID and Little Timmy and Suzy are out in the streets because their parents lost their jobs and spent the$200 they had in their savings account.
Yet, in spite of the fact that, more than ever, only the privileged upper crust of society has any disposable …
10 Reasons Why I Plan to Buy a VR Headset Next Gen
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/25/20 at 04:12 PM CT
The 8th Generation is coming to its inevitable close, and that means it’s time to start thinking about new system purchases. While I have little-to-no interest in either the PlayStation 5 or the Xbox SeX, thanks in large part to rumors of useful functionality turning out to be false, sometime next year, after COVID-19 is under control and the hardware has finished dribbling into the market, I’ll be gutting my old, reliable Steambox I built in 2012 and filling it with shiny, new parts, most likely including an AMD Zen3 CPU, an Nvidia RTX 3060ti GPU, and 32GB of DDR4 RAM.
However, those thoughts are still for another day, as the old workhorse is still trucking along admirably, demonstrating a longevity that PC gamers of the ‘90s would have believed impossible. Yet the one thing that my current gaming PC can’t do and that I’m not bold/foolish enough to throw away money in attempting, is Virtual Reality. Last Winter, before the pandemic started, the MJ Crew went to a local …
Gateway Drug, HeroQuest, is Back to Claim a New Generation
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/18/20 at 03:18 PM CT
I have already written in-depth about the late-‘80s collaboration between Milton-Bradley and Games Workshop known as “HeroQuest,” and my eternal admiration and respect for the hybrid board game/role-playing game that introduced me, and my entire generational cohort, to the wondrous world of Fantasy Role-Playing and Adventure. Indeed, the original game’s tagline, highlighted in its 1991 TV spot, “Once you get into it, you’ll never be the same!” could not be more apt.
Even as a relic of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, HeroQuest is still relevant to the MJ Crew to this very day, as, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve been playing this classic of our youth in “Tabletop Simulator” in lieu of getting together in person every week. And I managed to convince someone else to take on the role of Zargon the Game Master, so I can have a much-needed reprieve from running nearly a decade’s worth of Dungeons & Dragons games.
Of course, the game designer in me …
Nintendo to “Nope Out” of Mobile Gaming
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/11/20 at 01:59 PM CT
While it may have gotten lost in the shuffle of other news, including both the COVID-19 pandemic and the months-long E3 substitute presentations by game developers and platform holders, one of the most interesting nuggets of information to appear over the course of Summer 2020 is a report that Nintendo has “chilled” on the concept of mobile gaming, and will be retreating from that market instead of marching forward boldly in order to claim its piece of the multi-billion-dollar mobile pie.
Nintendo was a latecomer to mobile gaming, only bothering to acknowledge the lucrative teat at which so many corrupt new gaming businesses were suckling and growing morbidly bloated with their cancerous gains, in 2016, with the release of “Super Mario Run,” nearly a decade after the platform went mainstream with the release of the iPhone and its accompanying App Store. Much of Nintendo’s half-hearted mobile efforts were done in collaboration with Japanese mobile powerhouse, DeNA. …
With Zenimax Purchase, Microsoft Got the Band Back Together
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/04/20 at 04:27 PM CT
Two years ago, when Microsoft started gobbling up the small-time Single “A” developers that popped-up like so many nomadic tribes after the collapse of the Pre-Columbian Latin American empires, I pointed out that these shattered fragments of the once-great InterPlay – the only publisher from gaming’s Golden Age that made both Western games and PC games worth thinking about – were now reunited in the Happy House that Gates Built, and that the only thing missing from a complete reconciliation was the IP purchased by Bethesda Softworks.
Well, as of last week, Microsoft has officially gotten the band back together, when the tech megacorporation purchased Bethesda’s parent company, Zenimax Media, for $7.5 billion. That may seem like a lot of money just to give ‘Fallout’ back to Brian Fargo, but MS got so much more out of the purchase than just Bethesda, since Zenimax had gone on a buying spree of its own over the last several years, and was also the parent company of id …
Backlog: The Embiggening – October, 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/26/20 at 05:00 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into… some sort of whirling physics vortex where time has no meaning. I mean, yeah, the constant wearing-down of our spirits upon the grinding wheel of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic can no doubt cause many of us to go a little loopy, but I’ve been living that Quarantine Life since before it was cool, so I thought I’d be unaffected. Yet, October is bringing more than the horrors of an airborne plague and the dark Wiccan rituals of Samhain, it’s bringing shovelware by the shovelful and ports by the boatload, and all of this feels like déjà vu all over again.
I am… sooooo confused! In shovelware, we’ve got licensed swill based on ‘Karate Kid,’ ‘G.I. Joe,’ ‘Transformers,’ ‘Star Wars,’ and ‘Zoids’… so we must have traveled back in time to the ‘80s? But there’s also shovelware coming based on ‘Power Rangers,’ ‘Blair Witch,’ and ‘Nickelodeon’… so it must be the ‘90s? But, hold on, there’s also a game …
Compelling Console Capabilities Cease
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/20/20 at 02:36 PM CT
We’re on the very cusp of Sony and Microsoft joining Nintendo’s party and launching the remainder of the 9th Gen hardware that will take us through roughly the next decade of gaming. Both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X are scheduled to launch in November, and both are expected to face supply issues as COVID-19 has both hampered material production across Industry as a whole, and mobs of desperately bored people sheltering in place and self-quarantining pine for some new distraction.
Unfortunately, there’s no reason to get excited about these releases. Remember back in January, before COVID, before the race riots, and generally before 2020 had a chance to become the worst year in living memory? Remember how optimistic I was about the P(i)S5 and SeX bringing compelling features like full backwards compatibility and Windows Mode to the table? Yeah, you can forget all that, because in the run-up to launch, those rumors have been dispelled, and the truth is predictably …
Movies = Finished
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/13/20 at 04:47 PM CT
The movie industry is Big Business worldwide, with huge, prolific production centers not only in America, but in Europe, China, and India. In fact, MeltedJoystick itself exists as a sister-site for FilmCrave, which is a dedicated place for movie fanatics to review, rank, and list their favorite (and least favorite) titles from across the broad history of cinema.
Personally, though, I don’t really get all that excited about movies. With their typical two-hours-or-less runtimes and formulaic formulae, I tend to consider them to be far too ephemeral and lacking in depth when compared side-by-side with RPGs and other narrative-rich genres of videogames (and even long-form TV shows that typically encapsulate a story in no less than 12 hours rather than 2). Of course, Chris vehemently disagrees with me in this respect, which is why he writes for FilmCrave and I do not.
However, this last week, an announcement about the future of movies went public that is so deplorable, so …
Review Round-Up: Summer 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/05/20 at 05:07 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 fairly mediocre Summer of COVID with regard to gaming. The Crew only managed to get through one new coop game, while the majority of titles I completed and reviewed solo were mediocre to the extreme, with only “Ittle Dew 2” putting a smile on my face. Then I made the Chris-like mistake of starting a massive Sandbox game on August 1st (since, what else was I supposed to do for my birthday thanks to COVID?), which I didn’t finish until last night (September 4th), too late for submission this quarter.
“King’s Quest: The Complete Collection” – 3/5
“Star Trek: Bridge Crew” – 3.5/5
“Xuan- Yuan Sword: The Gate of Firmament” – 3/5
“Luigi’s Mansion 3” – 4/5
“Ittle Dew 2” – 4.5/5
Chris’ Reviews:
THE Disgruntled Dwarf has been even lazier than his usual self during the Summer of …
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