Backlog: The Embiggening – May, 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/28/19 at 02:53 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! April showers (of watery fecal matter) bring May flowers (turd blossoms), so as the Spring quarter begins to wind down, let’s take a look at what the Industry is leaving for us to squabble over as the Summer Game Drought looms on the horizon.
Shovel-ready doo-doo is light on the ground in May. We’ve got one super-casual non-game, in the form of “Little Friends: Dogs & Cats,” which is clearly trying to take up slack in the absence of a new ‘NintendDogs’ title. Then we’ve got two licensed trash fires, one based on the stoner comedy by Cartoon Network’s ‘Rick & Morty’ team, “Trover Saves the Universe;” then we’ve got a compilation port of other licensed drek from Cartoon Network. Nothing I love (read: hate) more than ports of shovelware.
And, boy, do we have ports coming in May! 17, all told… and unsurprisingly, the Switch is still leading the way, as desperate rats try to save themselves by bailing on …
The New Ascetics
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/21/19 at 03:49 PM CT
This weekend, while Jews the world over celebrate the avoidance of a plague by the smearing of sheep’s blood on their door lintels, and Christians celebrate the agonizing physical abuse, torment, and death heaped upon the god-man at the center of their mythology, here I am thinking about games. But really, I’m thinking about games AND religion.
As a Classicist, there are actually very few times when I’m NOT thinking about religion from an outside, unattached perspective. With great dismay, I see all the time how stupid people do stupid or horrific things in the name of Faith. Indeed, the thing that first dislodged my own faith, and placed me on the True Path of heathendom, was a college course I took as a sophomore on the writings of the early Church Fathers. The Christianity I grew up with was supposed to be a faith of forgiveness, freedom from fear, and the end of superstition. What I read about in the Church Fathers was, instead, a Christianity steeped in anxiety, …
The Post-Steam World: A Speculative Fiction
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/14/19 at 04:32 PM CT
With the Epic Games Store’s recent endeavors to curry favoritism amongst publishers and lock-down exclusive distribution of a handful of big titles for limited time windows via the use of monetary incentives paid to said publishers (colloquially known as “money-hatting,” but traditionally known as “bribery”), the pro-Epic corporate shills and garden variety Internet Trolls have been out in full-force, declaring the DOOM of Valve Softworks’ Steam store. According to these self-styled prophets, the pro-corporation moves made by the Epic Store – beginning with their founding features of taking a smaller cut of sales made through their store than Steam does and the waiving of the Unreal Engine licensing fee on games built using Epic’s own Unreal Engine (i.e., about half of all modern games); then culminating in the money-hatting of “Metro: Exodus,” “The Outer Worlds,” “Journey,” and “Borderlands 3” – has lead the upstart game retailer to ‘great …
“Labo VR” Arrives Right on Schedule
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/07/19 at 02:34 PM CT
I first declared “Reality” to be the hot hardware gimmick way back in 2014, when Oculus and Sony were pushing Virtual Reality and Microsoft and Nintendo were pushing Augmented Reality. Over the course of the intervening years, Valve and HTC jumped into the VR arena, and Microsoft’s AR merged with VR to form the Voltron-esque Mixed Reality of the Hololens. Meanwhile, other (non-gaming) companies, like Samsung and Google, experimented with VR on smartphones, typically by strapping said devices to the user’s face.
In view of these trends, I have been speculating in private (and on other Internet fora) for several years now that when Nintendo decided to throw its hat into the VR arena, it would likely do so in a manner modeled on the mobile paradigm set by Google and Samsung rather than the PC/Console paradigm set by everyone else. In fact, when Nintendo first released its “Labo” cardboard origami sets for the Switch, I immediately declared that a Google Cardboard-style VR …
Backlog: The Embiggening – April, 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/31/19 at 02:33 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! April is for fools, as we all know all too well. Too bad the fools in the games industry (and American government) can’t keep their idiocy contained to a single month! Let’s take a look at how big the dumpster fire will be over the course of the next 4 weeks.
Shovelware is much lighter on the ground for April than it was for March, with only three titles. One, “UglyDolls: An Imperfect Adventure,” is based on the series of plushies that is, apparently, supposed to help post-Millennial kids come to terms with how Effed-up they are. Another, “Super Dragon Ball Heroes: World Mission,” is based on one of the oldest manga/anime IPs to make the trip from Japan to the West (and also one of the worst). Lastly, we’ve got “World War Z,” a zombie-schlock Shooter based on the movie “World War Z.” I have a sinking feeling that Chris is somehow going to force us to play this turd for Co-op Monday sometime next …
Trendy Entertainment is Now Chromatic Games
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/24/19 at 03:08 PM CT
In a surprise announcement at the beginning of March, Trendy Entertainment, the Indie developer we at MeltedJoystick love to hate, revealed that they were dead and gone.
While everyone at MeltedJoystick has something of a love/hate relationship with Trendy (some leaning more toward love, while others lean more toward pure white-hot hate), we all recognize the company’s amazing original contribution to videogame genre hybridization, as their ‘Dungeon Defenders’ titles are truly novel takes on the once-booming fad of Tower Defense games. At the same time, we’ve often criticized Trendy for pandering to the tiniest, vocal, HARD-headed fragment of their audience to the detriment of everyone else.
Trendy had been radio-silent since posting the Winter 2018 update to their current Live Service, “Dungeon Defenders 2,” which added a Christmas tree that gives away a free loot box every 24 hours. And I do indeed mean ‘gives’ in the present tense, because as of the time of …
5 of the Laziest Game Design Techniques Devs Should Avoid
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/17/19 at 03:36 PM CT
As we all know, game development, like any form of media and art creation, can be a lot of work. While Indie development studios typically make due with a small team of dedicated folks with a lot of passion for the project, big “AAA” corporate developers create games with credit rolls that sometimes last longer than the actual gameplay (I’m looking at you, “PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale”!). Regardless of studio size, however, developers can – and do – fall into a number of game design traps; shortcuts that will ultimately pad-out their project’s runtime, without providing any real value to their potential players or to the gaming medium as a whole.
Here are 5 of the most common laziness-induced missteps that can ruin a game, with examples of (fairly) recent good-ish games that could have been better without these shortcuts:
5. Arbitrary Performance Grading
So you finished a stage and beat the boss at the end? Good for you! Now, let’s see how well you …
Review Round-Up: Winter 2018
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/10/19 at 03:34 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:
Thanks to inclement weather, the MJ Crew’s local coop nights were canceled on far too many occasions this Winter. Between the weather, the fact that we’ve been deep into some content-dense online coop games, and the fact that I played the longest ‘Fallout’ game and a 100-hour RPG meant that my Winter output was rather low. Oh well.
“Never Alone” – 3/5
“Octopath Traveler” – 3/5
“Guacamelee! 2” – 4/5
“The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing” – 4/5
“Fallout 4” – 3/5
Chris’ Reviews:
Oh, Christoper! While last quarter, his pursuit of online fame and fortune via his streaming channel encouraged him to get into a regular gaming schedule, this quarter, his intentions were corrupted by starting (and not finishing) several long, dense games at the same time. Look forward to many more Chris …
He’s Everywhere III!: Dragon Quest Edition
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/02/19 at 05:06 PM CT
The first time I roasted Chris for his early-March birthday, I had to cut-down the large number of Chris-like people and creatures that inhabit the entirety of videogames to 10. In the next roast, I stuck with creatures from Nintendo’s ‘Pokemon’ franchise. This year, in honor of the recent release of “Dragon Quest 11” and upcoming Definitive Edition release of said game, I’ve chosen to pick out the top 10 most Chris-like monsters designed by Akira Toriyama for Enix’s venerable ‘Dragon Quest’ RPG franchise.
Thanks to Toriyama’s idiosyncratic drawing style and Chris’ idiosyncratic… everything, there is naturally a ton of overlap between fantasy and reality when it comes to observing Chris-ness in ‘Dragon Quest’ monsters. As a bit of trivia, the humble Slime has appeared in the number one spot in the bestiaries of every ‘Dragon Quest’ game… except “Dragon Quest 6,” for some reason… but the humble Slime will NOT be making an appearance on this …
Backlog: The Embiggening – March, 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/24/19 at 04:05 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! The hoary, old chestnut states that March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb, or vice-versa. Here at the MJHQ, March is coming in like a big, annoying pile of snow, so it better damn well go out like a tropical paradise. At least we’ve already got our shovels (and snow blowers) at the ready, which will help with the lion’s and lamb’s share of this month’s game releases!
We’ve got 8 samples of shovelware to deal with this month. We’ve got an extra-crappy Sports title based on the “American Ninja Warrior” TV show, plus a couple of anime games based on “One Piece” and the incredibly convoluted “Fate” franchises. Nintendo is getting hit by a Casual mini-game shovelfest, “FUN! FUN! Animal Park,” by Aksys, who apparently think the Switch is still the Wii (and when you have to put that much ‘FUN’ in your game’s title, you’re trying too hard). Every platform except Nintendo’s is getting a new …
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