Shadow of Stadia
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/07/19 at 04:32 PM CT
When Google revealed their soon-to-launch Stadia game-streaming platform earlier this year (and pushed a video about it at E3), the world said, “Meh.” With Google’s business model from yesteryear, where users buy individual games exclusively for play on Stadia; combined with smoldering resentment among the tech crowd who has seen Google launch numerous promising projects, only to abandon them within months or a few years; interest in this new type of gaming platform is tempered, as best.
Even worse, in a recent interview, Google Vice President, Phil Harrison, revealed himself to be completely out of touch with reality regarding the state of broadband Internet in Google’s home country, the United States. This is a nation where real, usable broadband is a luxury not available to many, where actual broadband penetration is inaccurately represented on coverage maps ostensibly maintained by the government, where the FCC no longer gives a fig about anything after the death of …
Backlog: The Embiggening – July, 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/01/19 at 12:28 AM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! With July comes the traditional Summer Game Drought. Just when all the cute, little kiddies thought they’d have all the time in the world to veg-out with some mindless fragging and forget everything they learned the previous year in school, the game publishers always shut off the flow valve, dropping the deluge of game releases down to a trickle. This month we’ve got 20 titles baring down on us… let’s see how many are crap!
Only three piles of shovelware are coming in July. Two are based on Japanese anime: “Kill la Kill: The Game FA,” and “Attack on Titan 2: Final Battle.” The last is based on an American animated property: “Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3,” and is also conveniently a port!
When you read the intro paragraph, did you stop to wonder how the Corporate Games Industry could push out 20, yes TWENTY, double-digits, games in a Drought month? If so, clearly you haven’t been paying attention at all! More …
Hasbro Finally Puts the D&D License in Good Hands
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/23/19 at 04:15 PM CT
The Dungeons & Dragons videogame license has long been a coveted property for the creators of computerized role-playing games on any platform capable of playing videogames. Back in the halcyon days of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, the D&D license was firmly in the hands of SSI – Strategic Simulations, Inc. – under the auspices of Gary Gygax’s original company, TSR. During this time, SSI churned out dozens of AD&D-based titles, primarily for PC, but occasionally dabbled in failed experiments with adapting their take on the CRPG to consoles, with “Order of the Griffon” on the TurboGrafx-16, a port of “Eye of the Beholder” for the SNES (with the help of Capcom), and two misbegotten titles on the ill-fated 3DO: “Deathkeep” and “Slayer” (the latter of which was just a re-titled port of “Dungeon Hack”).
After SSI was gobbled up by Mindscape in the mid-‘90s – which, itself, went defunct at the end of the 7th Generation after …
E3 Impressions 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/16/19 at 12:21 PM CT
Going into E3 this year, my hopes were higher than at any point in recent memory, thanks in large part to the pre-E3 reveals of a number of exciting titles that I actually care about. These games, which I wanted to see more of at E3, include, but are not limited to, “Baldur’s Gate 3” and “Borderlands 3,” as well as a number of older announcements like “The Outer Worlds” and “Cyberpunk 2077.” It’s a good thing those games made appearances at the show, as, without them, the amount of intriguing content was dismally low, with only a handful of pleasant surprises.
Microsoft:
Want: “The Outer Worlds,” “Wasteland 3,” “Psychonauts 2,” Xbox Elite Controller Series 2
Not Sure if Want: “Ori and the Will of the Wisps” (still!), “Minecraft Dungeons,” “Spiritfarer,” “Battletoads” (still!), “Rightime!,” Gamepass Ultimate, Project Xcloud
Do Not Want: “Bleeding Edge,” “Phantasy Star Online 2,” “Elden Ring,” PvP, Zombies, ‘Star …
Review Round-Up: Spring 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/09/19 at 01:53 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 MJ Crew had a pretty good coop quarter for the first time in a while. We managed to get through 2 local coop games during our Friday gatherings, and I – personally – sank many pleasurable hours into “Destiny 2,” which we all finished, yet only I reviewed. I also made good progress on my New Year’s Backlog Ablution vow to clear “Shadowrun Returns” out of my backlog, and even went so far as to clear out all of the ‘Shadowrun’ games based on that engine in one fell swoop.
“Shadowrun: Hong Kong” – 4/5
“Destiny 2: Forsaken” – 4/5
“Shadowrun: Dragonfall” – 4/5
“Shadowrun Returns” – 3/5
“Kirby: Star Allies” – 3.5/5
“Dark Quest 2” – 3.5/5
Chris’ Reviews:
Holy crap! Famewhoring as THE Disgruntled Dwarf on Twitch is working so well for Chris that he beat me for total …
Backlog: The Embiggening – June, 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/02/19 at 01:52 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! June is here, and the dreaded Summer Game Drought is at our doorstep. Will entire crops of gamers wither in the fields beneath the blistering Summer heat? Or will game publishers and Indies finally get their doo-doo together and space out their releases more? Only one way to find out!
Devourers of shovel-ready excrement may find themselves disappointed in June, as there are only 3 pieces of licensed schlock coming, and all of them belong to the same genre: Driving. There’s “Monster Jam Steel Titans” accompanied by two annual releases in annual Racing titles: “F1” and “MotoGP.”
There are many fewer ports, remasters, remakes, reboots, and rehashes coming in June than there have been for a loooong time. Even better, I get to take a break from calling out the Nintendo Switch as the literal port toilet it has become, as it’s not really getting any more ports in June than anyone else. The Switch is getting a port of …
OUYA Suffers Second Death as Forge TV Goes Away Next Month
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/26/19 at 03:48 PM CT
MeltedJoystick has been covering the life and times of the ill-fated OUYA Android microconsole since before it launched, optimistically expecting it to usher in a new era of Indie games. Unfortunately, the OUYA proved to be one big failure after the next, as the Android ecosystem continued to cement itself as an exclusively-smartphone platform, riddled with predatory mobile games, and with no developers willing to rock the boat and even try to turn it into something better.
After OUYA started begging people to use its platform and gave away free money (which I never did spend), the company sold out to Razer, the PC peripherals company that was the one-time maker of one of my favorite things ever, the Razer Hydra. Razer re-branded the OUYA storefront into the Cortex TV storefront, and plopped it into the company’s Forge TV microconsoles, released in 2016, which had the added feature of being Steam Link-style in-home streaming devices (a feature shared by the Nvidia Shield line of …
Epic (Store) Fail
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/19/19 at 12:22 AM CT
At the end of 2018, the MJ Crew was tentatively excited about the prospect of a new competitor in the increasingly-crowded digital PC games ecosystem, with the transformation of Epic Games’ Epic Launcher into the Epic Store. Unfortunately for gamers everywhere, the Epic Store has spent the first half of 2019 proving to be the exact opposite of what we wanted. Let us count the four ways in which Epic failed.
4. Feature Incomplete
Despite existing as a Publisher-centric launcher for Epic Games… err… games, for quite a few years already, going into its inaugural year as an actual store, the Epic Games Store is a brittle skeleton of barely-present functionality and non-existent features. The store organization is simplistic to the point of hilarity – if they actually had a large number of games available, nobody would be able to find anything. The damned thing doesn’t even have a shopping cart or wishlist! Some shoppers have even been auto-flagged as fraudulent because the …
On the Properties of Backlog Strata
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/12/19 at 02:58 PM CT
At the end of every month, I write up a little feature called “Backlog: The Embiggening,” in which I typically eviscerate the coming month’s game release docket for being awful, while occasionally adding one or two (or rarely three) new games to that looming monster known only as my Backlog. Like assholes and opinions, everyone has a Backlog. Even people who don’t play videogames have Backlogs, as any form of planned, yet unfinished, activity is Backloggable. Throughout history, Backlogs have tormented all manner of people, and even the 1970’s folk song, “Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin is ultimately about the sadness caused by putting ‘playing with your kid’ on the Backlog and never finding time to get it taken off.
However, for modern gamers in particular, the Backlog has become an omnipresent plague. Folks who gamed in the 1st through 6th Generations would easily be able to find the time to experience everything of quality and personal interest that the …
Dreamcast Retrospective
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/05/19 at 04:31 PM CT
As regular readers know, the MeltedJoystick Crew gets together in person (nearly) every week to play some local coop games at the MJHQ. Unfortunately for us (and our review output), the rise of the Network Wars has put a damper on the number of game releases with local multi-player, and an even bigger damper on such games with a primarily cooperative modus operandi (which are the only ones we bother with).
Thus, we decided it would be a good idea to mine the past for some local coop games that we may have missed back in the day (or just played so long ago that we’d be up for a new run). I decided to blow the dust off my old Dreamcast and fire-up that platform’s definitive cooperative game, “Armada.” This activity got me thinking about the Dreamcast as a whole.
The Dreamcast was the last console developed by Sega, a hardware developer that had been playing second fiddle to Nintendo since the post-crash recovery in the mid-1980s. I never really cared much about Sega back …
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