Backlog: The Embiggening – February, 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/02/20 at 02:30 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future. February is, thankfully, the shortest month of the year. It also signals the last official month of the Winter season here at MeltedJoystick. Not only can we look forward to breaking free from the grasp of the Winter doldrums, we can be grateful that another month of crap releases will fly by in the blink of an eye.
It’s another month, and of course there’s shovelware. There’s a new J-Fighting game coming based on the “One Punch Man” anime. There are also two officially licensed Game of the Game takes on vehicular mayhem, with a port of the latest ‘Monster Jam’ monster truck driving sequel to the Switch, and another ‘Monster Energy Supercross’ motorcycle/dirtbike game. Lastly, we’ve got “Doug Flutie’s Maximum Football 2019.” This game is not yet an annualized sequel like ‘Madden Football,’ so why is it considered shovelware? Well, first of all, it has the name of a dried-up, washed-up old football ape …
Apple Gaming Hands-On: It Sucks as Much as Expected
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/26/20 at 03:33 PM CT
I have never owned an Apple product, not even an iPod MP3 player back in the day when iPods were all the rage and a new model was released every couple years (like iPhones nowadays). However, I have used plenty of Apple products, and this use exposure is why I never actually bought any: I just don’t enjoy the experience they provide.
However, if one were to dig deep into my own personal past relationships with technology, one would find that there was indeed a time and place where I actually liked Mac computers. That time and place was middle-school, on the cusp of the turnover between the 1980s and 1990s. “IBM Compatible” PCs still ran DOS, that esoteric command line OS that required secret wizard knowledge in order to make it do anything useful. By comparison, the greenscale/grayscale all-in-one Macintosh computers in my school library, with their point-and-click graphical user interfaces and WYSIWYG word processing (my first book reports were written in WordPerfect for …
Could Compelling Console Capabilities Come in the 9th Generation?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/18/20 at 04:30 PM CT
At MeltedJoystick, we’ve been aware of the death of console gaming since 2017. Sure, we may occasionally partake in some brief necromantic dalliances – Chris with his PlayStation 4 and me with my dusty, offline Switch – but for the most part, we’ve been quite happy with modern era PC gaming.
However, recently the rumormill has produced some material that is incredibly compelling: Allegedly, the upcoming Xbox SeX will include a ‘Windows Mode,’ allowing it to act more like the commodity PC it and its ancestors dating back to 2001 have always wanted to be. On the other side of the aisle, the PlayStation 5 will, again allegedly, include full Backward Compatibility for the full breadth of the PlayStation ecosystem.
The PlayStation 5 including full Backward Compatibility would be a huge boon to PlayStation loyalists, as it would provide a simple all-in-one box for playing everything from “Tomba!” and “Suikoden 2” to… “Bloodborne” (*dry heave*) and “Dad of …
“Done Right?” GameFreak Completes Nintendo’s Transition to Scummy “AAA” Corporate Publisher
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/12/20 at 02:33 PM CT
When the newest entries in the ‘Pokemon’ franchise of beginner/casual RPGs were released in November 2019, there was a major fan uproar. In a decision that could only be described as “questionable,” perpetual ‘Pokemon’ developer, GameFreak, released “Pokemon Sword Version” and “Pokemon Shield Version” with a gutted National Pokedex, leaving hundreds of pocket monsters on the cutting room floor and making the series’ tag line, “Gotta Catch ‘Em All!” into an impossibility. Long-time ‘Pokemon’ fans were incredibly upset, with numerous pro/con arguments made on both sides of the decision, while GameFreak itself stood by its decision to release a ‘Pokemon’ game missing most of the actual pokemon.
This past week, we have learned why GameFreak was so proud of itself for releasing an unfinished, incomplete ‘Pokemon’ experience as the franchise’s debut in the 9th Generation and on a not-explicitly-handheld platform. Sometime in Summer 2020, …
100… err 50… err 10… err 5? Yes, Five Games to Look Forward to in 2020.
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/04/20 at 03:35 PM CT
The monthly ‘Backlog: The Embiggening’ articles I assemble for MeltedJoystick are usually depressing enough. But I received a special request from a reader to ring in the new year with a list of ‘kinda-sorta-confirmed-we’ll-get-back-to-you-on-that’ game releases coming over the entirety of 2020. The big games journalism sites would just dump everything in a big pile and point excitedly, kinda like Nintendo Power Magazine used to do when EVERY trash NES game got coverage and generally-positive reviews (I’m still traumatized by the fact that “Bayou Billy” got a WHOLE ISSUE dedicated to it). Or, at bare minimum, they’d gather together all the “AAA” swill and Sony-produced ‘Is-This-a-Movie-or-a-Game?’ titles that mainstream trough-feeders can’t get enough of and tell us to get excited about spending our hard-earned cash on those.
At MeltedJoystick, though, some of us have higher standards and something resembling a curator’s eye. Thus it was difficult to …
Backlog: The Embiggening – January, 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/29/19 at 03:40 PM CT
The Boring ‘20s are right around the corner, and as a new year and a new decade prepare to land upon us like so much parasite-riddled excrement from an unwell ruminant, it’s somewhat peaceful to soak-in the tiny, insignificant January Games Industry release schedule. Indeed, the Two-Faced God, Janus, whose name is attached to the first month of the year, symbolically looks forward and backward at the same time. If he ever actually existed, old Janus would get a real charge out of the Games Industry because they JUST CAN’T STOP LOOKING BACK. You know what that means: More crap, more ports, and more ports of crap.
Two pieces of licensed tie-in garbage are coming in January that were supposed to have graced us with their presence months ago already. But sometimes to ensure that your crap is thoroughly excremental, you have to delay things, since making truly garbage games takes time and effort (just ask From Software). We’re getting both the oft-delayed “Dragon Ball Z: …
New Year’s Backlog Ablutions 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/22/19 at 04:26 PM CT
Last year’s New Year’s Backlog Ablutions experiment turned out to be quite the success. While both Nick and Matt ultimately failed the challenge, this goal-setting activity succeeded in getting both of them to play more regularly.
However, Chris and I both found the challenge to be “2EZ,” so this year the MeltedJoystick Crew has decided to mix it up a bit and add some actual consequences for failure. Instead of picking three games from our own backlogs and pledging to play them in the year 2020, we’ve each picked a single game for everyone else. Justifications for our given picks can be found below.
Finally, we found that the lack of a penalty for failure didn’t motivate certain Crew members quite enough. Thus, this year, anyone who fails to clear their Backlog Ablutions must buy a game for the Crew members who did off of their respective wish lists. This should be fun!
Chris: Community Manager
From Matt: “Metro 2033”
“Metro 2033” is a FPS based on a …
Year in Review: 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/15/19 at 04:15 PM CT
Another year has come and gone, and through it all, the MeltedJoystick crew has been watching. Always watching… Once again, it’s time to take a look back at the year and praise the 5 biggest Wins for the gaming community while simultaneously *facepalming* over the 5 biggest Fails.
Top 5 Fails
5. Japan Bans Console Modding
Just when our friends in the Land of the Rising Sun thought they owned the gaming hardware they bought and were free to do with it as they pleased, Japan’s government decided to crack down on hardware modding, making the practice fully illegal. We know this is all just copyright police nonsense and really has nothing to do with “security” or any other buzzwords multinational corporations like to throw out when they do something unpopular (or coerce governments to do it for them). Maybe Japan should be more worried about the Nuke-Testing Triple-Chinned Haircut on the other side of the Sea of Japan if “security” is so high on their minds? Worst …
MeltedJoystick Games of the Year 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/07/19 at 03:50 PM CT
2019 was a challenging year. So many of the “hot, new releases” turned out to be “old things being ported to new platforms,” to the point where, if you pruned all the ports, remasters, and compilations out of the annual release summary, you really wouldn’t have much.
It was also a rough year for exclusives, with little in the way of Game of the Year material hitting any lone console… except for Epic Games. The new Epic Games Store managed to secure exclusive distribution rights for the PC versions of nearly every outstanding multi-platform release in its first year, pissing off hordes of Steam and GOG users in the process.
RPG fans, though, had it roughest of all, with all of the major GotY contender releases being pushed back to 2020, leaving us, like a flock of ducks (or perhaps Untitled Geese) to filter befouled water through our bills in the desperate hope of seining out a nugget of partially-digested corn. Conversely, fans of quality, single-player …
Review Round-Up: Fall 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/01/19 at 03:02 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 admit, I cheated a little, as two of these reviews are for coop games that I finished on my own. But I was completely fed-up with people canceling, postponing, and showing up late all the time, so I capped them off this week since we were literally one boss battle away from the end in both “Divinity: Original Sin 2” and “Sundered.”
Because we were playing “Divinity: Original Sin 2” as a group for sooooooo long, and I wanted to play a single-player RPG from my own backlog, I was pretty much forced to pick something from the Dungeon Crawler subgenre. I decided on the ancient ‘Lands of Lore’ series from GOG… which was a mistake. I didn’t manage to get the taste out of my mouth until I played a modern Indie effort in the same subgenre.
Suffice to say, I didn’t have a particularly enjoyable quarter. Let’s …
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