Backlog: The Embiggening – September, 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/30/20 at 04:10 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future… or is it the past? With the never-ending, never-slowing torrent of old games – be they successes or flops – being flogged as ‘new,’ it’s getting harder and harder to tell. And with our days filled with pandemic saminess and nothing but bad news on TV and in the (digital) ‘papers,’ putting up with the continuous stream of nonsense coming out of the Games Industry is almost too much to bear. Almost… batten down the hatches, folks, because we’ve got a flood of excrement incoming!
Last month was pretty bad for shovelware, but this month is only a slight reprieve. We’ve got licensed swill in the form of a ‘Trollhunters’ game based on the Netflix CG animated show and a licensed Marvel Comics Live Service MMO-thing made by… Square-Enix… well, not really by Square or Enix, but by one of the half-dead Western dev studios they’ve purchased. While I was willing to give “Marvel’s Avengers” the benefit of …
Many Hands, Light Work: Why isn’t This Standard in Videogames?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/23/20 at 04:04 PM CT
The MeltedJoystick Crew absolutely loooooves our cooperative gaming. We’ve played pretty much every coop game for 3-4 people that doesn’t advertise itself as complete, irredeemable trash (and a few that do *coughSpelunkycough*), but we frequently run unto situations where a given coop game is actually more fun as a solo experience due to bizarre development choices that actually make the overall experience much more difficult with more people.
The old adage goes, “Many Hands Make Light Work,” meaning that when a group of people all get together and cooperatively focus on the same objective, accomplishing said objective becomes much easier than when a single person tries to take it on by themselves. Unfortunately, there is an awkward obsession in the world of videogames to actually make things harder when there are more players involved.
Exhibit A: The ‘Borderlands’ series. In the genre-defining Looter Shooter, a solo player will face off against relatively sane …
Electronic Arts Shareholders Fire Shots in the Class Wars
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/16/20 at 04:27 PM CT
Thanks to my good fortune of being part of a successful family business, my Uncle Scrooge levels of frugality, and through my well-reasoned, non-bandwagoning, non-sleazy investments in the United States’ Stock Market, I own just shy of $800,000 worth of “value” in the corrupt corporate American economy. Of course, as a shareholder, I am frequently given the opportunity to “vote my shares” on a variety of issues. These issues, sadly, almost always boil down to three:
1) Should we keep the Directors of the Board?
2) Should we ratify Deloitte and Touche (or some other equally enormous and suspect accounting firm) to be the company’s CPA for the year?
3) Should we pass this executive compensation package?
Then, at the end of the shareholder ballot, there are occasionally a few shareholder proposals (that is, proposals written and submitted by private individuals who own company stock, not by the company’s executive apparatus) couched in a legalese framework …
Could Microsoft Lead the Way to a Subscription-Free Future for Consoles?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/09/20 at 03:27 PM CT
There have been a few rumblings lately in the land of Xbox that point, ever so vaguely, toward the possibility of Xbox Live Gold going away. This is an exciting rumor since it was Microsoft who started the trend of consoles begging for loose change every month way back in November 2002, a year after the launch of the OG Xbox.
Rumormongers leaked information about the multi-player modes in the upcoming Xbox tentpole, “Halo Infinite,” being Free2Play, and Microsoft confirmed the leaked information as true. Meanwhile, other astute observers have noticed that Xbox Live Gold subscriptions are no longer available for purchase in large lump quantities, though it is still possible to roll an existing Gold subscription into Microsoft’s new Gamepass subscription. Microsoft also confirmed that this was intentional.
Combined, these changes from Microsoft all seem to indicate that the non-gaming company that started the vile trend that ultimately saddled all console gamers with …
Backlog: The Embiggening – August, 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/01/20 at 03:12 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future. Unhappy birthday to me! Not only is the world still in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic, 6 months after it began, but even worse, the Videogames Industry is still up to its old tricks and releasing mostly irredeemable crap. Though, I suppose we, as gamers, should be grateful that the Industry is deigning to release anything at all in the grip of both a pandemic and the annual Summer Game Drought… though this year’s particular drought hasn’t felt particularly dry, much like an overfull diaper.
Get your shovels ready, folks, as there is a lot of poop to scoop this month. Licensed, annualized, and ultra-casual junk is back in full-force in August, with an outrageous 12 titles, leading me to believe that developers who haven’t been able to get plastered in the bars or go on vacation have spent their Summer “productively,” working on these shovel-ready projects. We’ve got a whopping 4 annualized Sports releases including …
Xbox Games Showcase 2020: Good/Bad/Ugly
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/25/20 at 08:41 PM CT
Lagging behind both Sony, PC Gamer Magazine, and Ubisoft with their E3 substitute presentation, Microsoft followed their less-than-impressive Xbox SeX reveal earlier this year with a new Games Showcase this past week. Clocking in at a reasonable runtime of “about an hour,” the games showcase gave MS the opportunity to show off all the big projects the company’s numerous development studios have been working on since the House of Gates acquired them over the course of the last few years. What has Microsoft’s investment in first-party studios produced? Let’s look at the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
Good
Microsoft bragged that a whopping NINE out of the enormous FIFTEEN studios the Microsoft Games Division now owns have new projects ready to go… unfortunately, most of those projects went into the other categories in this breakdown, and most of the stuff shown probably won’t even see the light of day until late into 2021.
Regardless, I’m personally excited to see …
Ubisoft “Forward” Event is One “Backward” Step for Ubisoft Among Many
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/18/20 at 04:13 PM CT
Last weekend, Ubisoft, French purveyor of “AAA” swill and Triumvirate of Evil member (alongside Electronic Arts and Activision-Blizzard) hosted its own substitute E3 presentation. Dubbed “Ubisoft Forward,” the hour-and-a-half live video presentation, like so many other dumb, hype-generating affairs (like the Super Bowl), had extra pre-show and post-show events, dragging the display of advertising might out for far longer than anyone (besides Ubisoft) would have wanted.
Of course, prior to last Sunday, when Ubisoft Forward streamed live all afternoon, Ubisoft had already started promoting the affair, promising bribes rewards for Uplay members who watched, including the giveaway of one of their $60 “AAA” games, “Watch_Dogs 2.” While I personally have no interest in playing “Watch_Dogs 2,” I AM interested in claiming free games and making gaming corporations take the financial hit, so against my better judgment (and while struggling to write an article while …
Vaguely Related Review: The New “DuckTales”
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/12/20 at 04:19 PM CT
Back in 1987, Disney Television Studios Buena Vista produced a cultural touchstone for a generation. The original “DuckTales” cartoon, which ran from 1987-1990 over the course of four seasons and a feature-length film, was originally based on the “Uncle Scrooge” Disney comic books written and drawn by the legendary Carl Barks.
Thanks to a partnership between Disney and Capcom during that era, “DuckTales” also found itself cemented into the hearts and minds of a generation of gamers thanks to a fairly good NES adaptation of the show into a 2D Platformer. Indeed, Capcom was renowned for producing high-quality licensed videogames (an oxymoron, for sure) based on Disney IPs well into the ‘90s.
Thanks to the fact that ‘80s kids are now reaching their mid-life crises, everything old is new again, as media peddlers try to help the first wave of Millennials (and the last wave of Gen-X) recapture the nostalgia of their lost youth… for a nominal fee, of course. Thus, in …
New Gen = New Price Hike
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/05/20 at 04:09 PM CT
This past week, rumbles from within the bowels of the Games Industry began to murmur of a $10 price hike that at least some big “AAA” publishers will start applying to their console (and probably PC multi-platform) game releases. This increase will take the retail cost of a new game from the exorbitant $60 it has been since roughly 2006 to an egregious $70 for the “basic” game experience.
Those of us with some common sense know that games have, in fact, NOT been “priced at $60 forever, and thus due for an increase due to inflation,” as the apologists like to argue. No, new “AAA” videogames have been roughly $100 new for quite some time, thanks to the fact that the $60 “basic” experience pretty much requires an extra payment of $40 for the season pass in order to have the “complete” experience. There’s no word yet about whether publishers plan to hike their season pass prices too, but the smart bet is that they will.
“AAA” publishers, who make up …
Backlog: The Embiggening – July, 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/28/20 at 03:15 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future. Here we sit in July, right at the height of the Summer Game Drought Season, with COVID-19 showing no signs of relenting and “going away with the Summer heat,” as our Dear Leader promised – in his infinite ignorance – that it would. So we’re all still stuck at home with nothing but our (huge enormous) backlogs to keep us company. Yet, surprisingly, this year’s annual Summer Game Drought has been remarkably mild, with a large slug of titles slated for release in July… and it’s not all crap!
Of course, we will start with the crap. Get your shovels ready, folks, because it’s getting a little deep in here. We’ve got two upcoming anime-based games in “Fairy Tale” and the Junk-Latin titled “Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris.” We’ve got two upcoming annual releases in two officially licensed Racing series, “NASCAR Heat 5” and “F1 2020.” Shockingly, VR (specifically PlayStation VR… the …
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