Backlog: The Embiggening – October, 2018
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/30/18 at 04:20 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! October will be here in the blink of an eye, and since October is traditionally associated with horror thanks to the Pagan holiday of Samhain, upon which Halloween is based, we should all be well and truly prepared for the horrors the Games Industry will heap upon us in the coming month.
No, NO WAIT! I’m not ready for this much shovelware! After becoming complacent that perhaps intentionally-terrible garbage might be falling out of favor with publishers, October is bringing a downpour of no less than 20 shovelware releases, and in all of the major categories. We’ve got games based on other IPs, including anime/manga games like “Punchline,” “My Hero One’s Justice,” and a new game based on a very old anime “Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise.” Also in licensed crap, we’ve got “PAW Patrol: On a Roll” for the pre-school crowd (and whenever I hear people say the name of that IP aloud, I look around for a …
Telltale is Done For: Narrative Minus Cinematics Apparently Can’t Turn a Profit
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/23/18 at 02:52 PM CT
This past week, Telltale Games, the Indie start-up Adventure game developer that worked closely with popular IP holders, revealed that they had fired 90% of their staff and cancelled all of their remaining game development projects except for “Minecraft: Story Mode.” Once that last project is finished, it is almost guaranteed that Telltale Games will be done for good.
Perhaps the company, which was founded in 2004 and which I constantly confused with the completely unrelated British game developer Traveller’s Tales, will find its fate the same as so many other failed small-time game developers within the colon of a huge “AAA” conglomerate like Electronic Arts – Microsoft seems to be in the mood to buy failures lately, so maybe they’ll try to acquire Telltale’s remains.
Regardless of what happens to the last dregs of Telltale once “Minecraft: Story Mode” is out the door, it’s bad news for any gamer who loved narrative-driven games, and worse news for anyone …
Something Worse than Hitler is Now Threatening to Conquer Europe
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/16/18 at 02:27 PM CT
*sigh* Meh. Videogame news has been pretty dead lately. Nothing to get excited about or enraged by.
On the other hand, those crazy kids in European government are trying to destroy the online world as we know it. Articles 11 and 13 have successfully passed the first of a handful of hurdles required to become continent-wide law.
Article 11 is intended to limit how much material content aggregators can display without forcing the reader to visit the actual originating site. Apparently the attention span of the average Internet user has degraded to the point where they can’t even be bothered to click on the links they find in Google, but merely read Google’s summary before walking away. Publishers are naturally upset about this because users who don’t click-through don’t get to view their tasty, tasty ads or bump into their friendly, friendly paywalls.
Article 13 is intended to hold platform owners responsible for user-generated content. So when Joe Schmoe uses his …
Confessions of a Square-Enix Enabler
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/09/18 at 03:14 PM CT
Those who follow this blog or interact with me regularly via other online media know that I am vehemently opposed to the corrupt practices that have begun to infest the Games Industry over the last decade or so. The gold-digging behavior of big, corporate “AAA” publishers makes me sick, and when I look back on the truly classic games that emerged during the 16-bit Golden Age, I can’t help but think that the Golden Age never could have happened if game publishers then were as greedy and profit-mongering as game publishers now.
Square-Enix has been the subject of my ire for a long time as well. Not only has the merger of my two former favorite dev/pubs continued to poop all over its flagship franchises with the likes of THREE undesirable ‘Final Fantasy 13’ games and wasting several flagship sequel slots on subscription MMORPGs (“Final Fantasy 11,” “Final Fantasy 14,” and “Dragon Quest 10” for those who haven’t been paying attention), but after buying the …
Review Round-Up: Summer 2018
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/01/18 at 02:11 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 wasn’t as productive as usual this Summer, largely because I spent the bulk of July and August enjoying (!) the “Dungeon Defenders II – Protean Shift” patch, endeavoring to get as much pleasure out of the game as possible before Trendy Trendies it up again in a different patch. Aside from that, the MJ Crew managed to touch upon a lot of really terrible coop games, and I got to play a great RPG, a good FPS compilation, and a handful of ecchi games about boobs.
“The Yawhg” – 3.5/5
“Dungeon Defenders II – Protean Shift” – 4/5
“Spelunky” – 0.5/5
“Hard Reset Redux” – 2.5/5
“Girls and Dungeons” – 4/5
“Time Tenshi 2” – 3.5/5
“Time Tenshi” – 2.5/5
“We Are the Dwarves” – 1/5
“Shadow Warrior (2013)” – 3.5/5
“Torment: Tides of Numenera” – …
Backlog: The Embiggening – September, 2018
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/26/18 at 08:01 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! All of the adorable little school shooters are back in their hunting grounds, so naturally, the Games Industry traditionally choses the month when that happens to end the Summer Game Drought and start releasing things again. Of course, as we should remember from the past few months, the Summer Game Drought of 2018 was cleverly concealed by the release of dozens of ports. I can’t help but compare the Summer’s game releases to an Orwellian conspiracy, where the Industry titans acted like Big Brother, deluging us with artificially-created dehydrated raindrops in order to convince us that there was no drought, while those of us with our eyes open realize that if you dehydrate rain, you actually have nothing. With 45 releases dropping in September, I wonder how many will actually be “real.”
Ready your shovels, folks, as there’s a LOT of licensed garbage to cast aside in September. Sports seem to be the biggest offender here, …
Upcoming SteamOS Feature Could Finally Revolutionize Linux Gaming. Or Not.
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/19/18 at 02:50 PM CT
Earlier this year, Valve quietly removed the Steam Machines section from the Steam Storefront. Many industry watchers and gamers took this to mean that both the concept of Steam Machines – console-sized PCs that are built specifically for couch gaming – and the Linux-based SteamOS that powered them were dead, despite official word from Valve PR stating otherwise.
Recently, some clever delvers into the behind-the-curtains goings-on at Valve noticed that a new feature will be coming to SteamOS soon, and it’s the one I said Valve needed to put as much effort into as possible. Steam Play has been around since 2012, when it was introduced as a “Buy Once, Play Anywhere” marketing strategy that allowed Steam customers to buy a license for a specific game, rather than a specific game version for a specific OS, thus gamers could buy “Half-Life 2,” for example, and play it on Windows, MacOSX, or Linux, without having to pay a separate fee for each OS, as things had been done …
Nintendo Wins One Battle in Its Perpetual Uphill War
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/12/18 at 02:42 PM CT
This past week, EmuParadise – which is not a porn site for those who wish to have sexual relations with large flightless birds – pulled all ROM and ISO files from public availability, citing recent legal pressure from Nintendo on other emulation websites, which caved and shut themselves down. The site operators sensibly wished to protect themselves rather than risk utter and complete legal ruin at the hands of corporate lawyers, but have left the door open for the possibility of a fresh start in the future.
EmuParadise has been around since 2000, making it one of the oldest and most Google-friendly emulation sites on the Internet. It was EmuParadise where I first turned when I decided to finally experience “Dragon Quest 5” and “Dragon Quest 6” all those years ago, and it was EmuParadise that ultimately disappointed and frustrated me even then.
It’s easy to see the precedent set by EmuParadise caving to Nintendo’s legal threats as a disastrous one for both game …
‘Item Permanency’ is the Cure for what Ails Random Loot in Games
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/04/18 at 04:36 PM CT
Recently, I re-reviewed Trendy Entertainment’s “Dungeon Defenders II” Live Service due to a large overhaul update that redid some of the game’s fundamental systems and caused the whole thing to take a turn for the better. One of the key features Trendy added to their random-loot-centric hybrid of the Tower Defense and Hack ‘n Slash RPG genres was the concept of ‘Item Permanency,’ by which players are no longer forced to throw away their favorite pieces of serendipitously-discovered equipment when they find a new piece with slightly bigger numbers, but can instead craft and refine their extant favorite item(s) into newer and better forms, sometimes by combining pieces of new items with it, sometimes just bumping up its base power level to be on par with the new stuff that randomly drops during matches.
The concept of Item Permanency isn’t new, however. It’s just that Trendy took a bold step in assigning it a name and applying it to a genre which typically relies …
Backlog: The Embiggening – August, 2018
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/28/18 at 03:02 PM CT
Happy birthday to me, once again, as August rolls in. Usually July and August are the worst months of the year for new game releases, colloquially known as the Summer Game Drought. Like last month, publishers are flooding release channels with ports to fool us into thinking the drought isn’t as bad as it has been in past years, but they aren’t fooling me.
Shovelware starts us off with a friggin’ ‘Naruto’ game. Does anyone still watch that crap anime? Anyway, there are plenty of annual Sports releases, including motorsport “F1 2018” (when 2018 is already half over) and two different kinds of Ball played with Feet: “Pro Evolution Soccer 2019” and “Madden NFL 19” (the latter of which is returning to PC for the first time in years).
Once again the Nintendo Switch is leading the way with more ports and remasters than you can shake a stick at: “Victor Vran,” “Monster Hunter Generations,” “Tennis World Tour,” and detestable Roguelike “Dead Cells” …
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