Fragmenting Digital Ecosystems Re-Open the Sea Lanes for Pirates
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/15/19 at 03:42 PM CT
When Electronic Arts and Ubisoft launched their respective digital storefronts, launchers, and gaming clients in 2011/2012, they, in essence, created a wedge. When lumberjacks use wedges, it’s to amplify mechanical force and split a single large log into two (or more) smaller portions. Most recently, Epic Games has donned the plaid flannel shirt and stocking cap of legend, shoving their own wedge in with the others and thoroughly beating on it. The result is a heavily-fractured PC gaming ecosystem that requires a separate third-party program to half-assedly pull the splinters back together into something resembling the original log.
Other media has suffered even more severely through these acts of splitting and fragmentation, and are now beginning to reap their just desserts. When Netflix was the only game in town for movie and TV show rentals and/or streaming, everyone used it, everyone loved it, and everyone felt like they were getting their money’s worth out of their ONE …
Vaguely Related: The Hurto Diet
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/08/19 at 04:01 PM CT
MeltedJoystick’s favorite fur-bearing creature, Chris (a.k.a., Hurto, a.k.a., THEdisgruntleddwarf), has been on a low-carb, low-sugar ‘keto’ diet for a few months. On this diet, he must refrain from eating most staple foods, which all contain tons of carbohydrates, including bread, potatoes, and rice. While this, obviously, interferes with our weekly gatherings, as it is now like having a kosher Jew or practicing Hindu in the group, who must avoid certain foods (and thus certain restaurants), the results have been overall positive, with Chris losing a little over 20 pounds of pure grease and looking slightly less spherical.
Of course, any restrictive diet is difficult to stick with after a certain amount of time, and, recently, Chris has hit that threshold, with “cheat days” sneaking in more and more often. Nick continually badgers Chris about this, pointing out that a single cheat day will keep him out of ketosis for upwards of a week. I’m more pragmatic about the …
Review Round-Up: Summer 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/01/19 at 09:51 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:
The Summer quarter saw me playing mostly crap. While I did manage to knock the last game off my list of New Year Backlog Ablutions and had a decent time dusting off (and repairing) the old Dreamcast to replay “Armada” with the guys on Local Coop Night, the rest of the Summer wasn’t nearly as pleasant, with two major Indie FAILS and, most recently, a dismal Switch slog that saw another franchise added to my permanent Ignore List.
“Song of the Deep” – 4.5/5
“RiME” – 2.5/5
“Armada” – 4/5
“Jotun” – 2/5
“Far Cry 5” – 4/5
“Xenoblade Chronicles 2” – 2.5/5
Chris’ Reviews:
THE Disgruntled Dwarf is still chipping away at his backlog of games, all in full view of the general public, but was quite disorganized when it came to actually getting reviews done. As such, despite the fact that I …
Backlog: The Embiggening – September, 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/25/19 at 03:57 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Just in time for the darling little School Shooters to be back in their happy hunting grounds, the videogame industry opens its floodgates and releases a glut of games, which perhaps would have done better in sales if they were released during a time in which the target audience is home all day and perpetually bored. But, alas, as a corporatized industry, gaming is, as ever, slow to change, leaving us with a predictable cycle year after year.
The floodgates have opened, ladies and gentlemen, so man the shovels… actually, it’s not THAT bad for September, as the shovel-ready crap didn’t quite manage to make it to double-digits. There’s “Star Wars Pinball” attempting to cash in on the mobile/console crossover audience, a new VR game based on “The Angry Birds Movie 2” for those with lots of money and no sense (or taste), a Switch (natch) port of “LEGO Jurassic World,” and a ‘Definitive’ compilation of the late …
The 10 “Modern” 2D Games with the Most Striking Visuals
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/18/19 at 04:07 PM CT
For a good long while, there, it looked like 2D games were going to disappear from the world. For roughly a decade between 1996 and 2006, 3D games were all there was, ranging in quality from “crude” to “fairly impressive, actually.” However, with the advent of the 7th Generation, just when the push for ever-more-realistic brown-and-gray 3D environments seemed irresistible, the Indie games movement burst onto the scene with the not-particularly-revelatory declaration that older styles of gameplay and game presentation were still viable and still had an audience.
Since that time, 2D games have come roaring back onto the scene. Unfortunately, in far too many cases, the 2D visuals are mere nostalgia bait, featuring chunky, lo-fi pixel art intended to stoke feelings of warm, fuzzy childhood memories in the withered black hearts of Generation X. While pixel art can be beautiful and eye-catching in its own right, there is no reason for modern developers to limit their 2D assets …
GOG Galaxy 2.0: A Step in a Direction
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/11/19 at 04:28 PM CT
Back at the beginning of Summer 2019, erstwhile MeltedJoystick photo/video-grapher, Matt, despaired to me about digital gaming’s lack of a unifying interface. With the fracturing of one-time monoliths like Steam and Netflix within the digital media market, it is becoming increasingly annoying and expensive for customers to retain access to all of the content they want and to maintain a convenient library of content they’ve already purchased.
During this discussion, Matt mentioned a service called MoviesAnywhere, which allows heavy purchasers of digital movies to corral all of their licenses together in one place, and lamented that there wasn’t a similar service for digital videogames.
I had never heard of MoviesAnywhere, largely because I never buy digital movies. If I’m going to watch a movie, I’ll either rent it on physical media, see it in the theatre, stream it, buy it on physical media and “format shift” it (read: rip it from the disc to a digital file) …
Hello… Gamers?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/04/19 at 03:16 PM CT
Ten months ago, I discussed a report on the local news which revealed that MeltedJoystick’s regional Friendly Local Game Store, Gamers, had gone bankrupt and had its assets liquidated in order to pay its debts, with no forewarning for customers or employees. Anyone with unspent store credit or wages waiting to be paid ended up sucking the short end of the tailpipe.
Perhaps both the local news and I were a bit premature in eulogizing Eastern Nebraska’s and Western Iowa’s primary alternative to GameStop, as this week, one location in Omaha and one location in Lincoln have re-opened, under new management. According to the Gamers website’s About section, the new owner, David Mitchell, was able to obtain all of the late business’s trademarks and reopen a couple of locations.
While this is good news for locals who enjoy the buying and selling of physical games media and hardware, I fear that the new owner may not truly understand why the business he just bought failed in …
Backlog: The Embiggening – August, 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/28/19 at 03:45 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! As August – a month saturated with witchcraft, in which we celebrate the birthday of the best, least-biased game reviewer on the Internet on Lammas Sabbath – rolls in, we bid a fond farewell to Summer, even though it’s still too hot to do anything but sit inside and play videogames. Sad teachers everywhere are being pulled back into the trenches of World War Student, as they prepare to put their firearms training to good, practical use. But what is the videogame industry doing? Pushing crap, as usual!
Out of 18 scheduled August releases, 5 are shovel-ready. Of these, the minority are licensed things based on movies and/or TV shows, with a port of the licensed “Friday the 13th: The Game” (and, as a friendly reminder, I’ll point out that whenever a game has ‘The Game’ in the title, you know it’s (not) quality), as well as the latest entry in the venerable ‘Yu-Gi-Oh!’ series, based on the card game based on the …
RetroArch Hitting Steam Brings Emulation One Step Closer to Full Legitimacy
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/21/19 at 04:16 PM CT
On July 12th, a very interesting thing appeared on Steam. RetroArch, the official frontend for the Libretro emulation API, is coming to PC gaming’s oldest and biggest digital distribution platform on July 30th. For FREE.
RetroArch, which is one of my favorite things to appear in the last decade, has been available on the Google Play Store for Android for years already, but the main PC version has languished in the traditional standalone model of PC software distribution, which becomes increasingly obsolete and outmoded with each passing year. RetroArch’s developers, the Libretro Team, like every other two-bit panhandler, started a Patreon account in order to beg for recurring donations from affluent fans, but as a platform designed around emulation, still remained an outsider in the larger games industry.
As rotund gaming pundit, Jim Sterling, eruditely discussed back in 2016, official games media outlets don’t like to talk about emulation, despite the fact that almost …
“AtariBox” Becomes Atari VCS
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/14/19 at 04:01 PM CT
During E3 2017, Atari (delenda est), one of the first-and-worst game console manufacturers, announced that they were coming back from obscurity with a new hardware device. All of 2018 rolled by without a whisper about the so-called “AtariBox,” and those of us with an understandable burning hatred for Atari (delenda est) were content to believe that the new abomination had transformed into vaporware and floated away like a bad dream with the coming dawn.
However, Atari (delenda est) was back again at E3 2019, and while they didn’t put on a big press conference (because that would require money they don’t have), they did have a physical presence, where they showed-off the near-final AtariBox, now with the official release name “Atari VCS” (presumably short for Video Computer System, as it was back in the 1970s).
Unlike Nintendo’s successful mini retro-consoles (and Sony’s and Sega’s dismal failure mini retro-consoles), the Atari VCS is emphatically NOT a mini …
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