Year in Review: 2017
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/23/17 at 04:35 PM CT
Another year has come and gone, yet the videogames industry still hasn’t managed to self-destruct like it did in the early ‘80s at the hands of Atari (delenda est). Once again, it’s time to take a look back at the year and praise the 5 biggest Wins while simultaneously *facepalming* over the 5 biggest Fails.
Top 5 Fails
5. Steam Branded Hardware Flops in the Market.
Steam Machines, the officially branded SteamOS (Linux) powered prebuilt PCs manufactured by licensed partners seemed like a great way for Valve to open the eyes of the wider world to the joys of Modern Era PC gaming. Combined with the excellent and well-designed Steam Controller and the ‘any screen’ Steam Link streaming microconsole, Valve had a well-planned ecosystem in the works. But unfortunately, most gamers are too hard-headed and set in their ways to give something the benefit of the doubt. PC Master Racists decried Steam Machines as worthless pre-builts, and everyone knows that a PC Master …
The Paleo-Switch Experiment
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/17/17 at 03:51 PM CT
I just learned that I will be receiving a Nintendo Switch for Yule this year. This is a marked difference to the last four years, since starting way back in 2013 I have received ‘nuttin’ for Christmas’ except a handful of Steam gifts from my friends and colleagues here on MeltedJoystick.
I’m still kind of lukewarm on the Switch in general though. It still doesn’t have very many games* (*exclusives that I want to play; though that looks to be changing drastically in 2018/19, as I have 11 Switch games on my Wish List at present), plus there’s the dangling Other Shoe/Sword of Damocles of the Nintendo Network subscription that was supposed to kick in this Fall, but has apparently been delayed until next year. I flat-out refuse to pay for Nintendo Network services, and am generally disappointed in Nintendo’s willingness to adopt all of the worst memes from Sony’s and Microsoft’s 7th/8th Generation efforts while staunchly refusing to adopt anything good, like openness, …
Square-Enix Finally Provides Official Localization for Ancient SNES Game…
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/09/17 at 08:51 PM CT
But it’s the accursed “Romancing SaGa 2”!
I’ve discussed before how many classic SNES games were left behind by the North American branches of their respective publishers during the ‘90s. Recently, I’ve even been enjoying quite a number of these titles via the magic of emulation and fanslations.
At the Game Awards that happened this past week, a few teasery-trailery materials were also shown off, and one of them happened to be that Square-Enix – the once-beloved RPG developer/publisher(s) responsible for so many of the Greatest of All Time – are not only remastering “Secret of Mana” (meh) on all of the major digital platforms, but will also be localizing one of their Golden Age RPGs that never saw the light of day outside of Japan (barring woefully incomplete fanslation). With all of the missing ‘Dragon Quest’ and ‘Final Fantasy’ titles taken care of, we knew it had to be something else. Maybe the awesome TRPG “Bahamut Lagoon”?! Maybe another …
Review Round-Up: Fall 2017
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/02/17 at 03:26 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 release of “Divinity: Original Sin 2” with 4-player coop inspired me to get going and play the first “Divinity: Original Sin” (the fact that it hit $16 during a Steam sale also helped)… and what an amazing experience it was! It definitely goes on my list of all-time bests. “The Witcher 3” also hit the purchasable price of $20 for the whole enchilada, so I bought and played that too… but was far less impressed than I was with “Divinity: Original Sin.” Outside of those, I played a number of retro games, including one crufty old DOS title that has haunted my nightmares since the ‘90s, as well as a handful of coop and new-ish titles. In general, it was a good quarter for me, with plenty of high scores handed-out.
“Odysseus: Long Way Home” – 1.5/5
“Windward” – 3/5
“The Witcher 3” – …
Backlog: The Embiggening – December, 2017
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/26/17 at 02:37 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Yule, and all of its syncretic Abrahamic holidays are just around the corner. What last-minute releases can we look forward to before the end of the first year of the Trump Administration? Let’s see!
What’s this? NO SHOVELWARE for December?! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! Well… I guess I do have one correction to make from prior months. Remember “Battle Chasers: Night War”? Well, it’s getting ported to the Switch… and it’s apparently based on an obscure comic book/graphic novel. Therefore, it must be shovelware, despite the fact that it actually looks decent. There’s also a port of an annual “WWE” wrestling release on the Switch… so there’s that.
Of course, even that one barely-laden shovel this month is full of ports, because ports seem to be all we get anymore. The Switch is leading the way again this month, with ports of a butt-load of Indie titles (which are apparently being called ‘Nindies’ …
Vaguely Related Review: Game Fuel Re-Redux
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/19/17 at 01:20 PM CT
I’m pretty sure Mountain Dew Game Fuel flavors come to grocery stores nationwide every year during Autumn, when the big annual Mainstream videogame releases drop, but as I said the last time I tasted and talked about Game Fuel back in 2014, the tie-in titles are so far outside my wheelhouse that relying on any form of in-game advertising or commercials run during televised sporting events is a sure-fire way for me to not know about a new round of custom Mountain Dew flavors.
As so happened last time, I didn’t so much seek-out Game Fuel, but serendipitously came upon it while shopping for Mello Yello at my local Russ’ IGA. The store was running a 4 fridge packs for $10 deal, but they only had 2 packs of MY left… so I filled in the rest of the slots with the two new Mountain Dew Game Fuel flavors.
In 2017, Cherry Citrus is out. Neither Game Fuel flavor is red in any way. Instead, this time around we’ve got yellow Tropical Smash and blue Arctic Burst. Unsurprisingly, …
New-Old Competitor, Intel, to Shake-Up the Discrete GPU Market
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/12/17 at 02:17 PM CT
After killing off their discrete GPU architecture, dubbed ‘Larrabee,’ way back in 2010, Intel has performed a complete 180, announcing that they will be diving back into the stand-alone GPU market, and giving Nvidia some much-needed competition. While AMD, the CPU maker that bought-up GPU maker ATI in 2006, has never really disappeared from the GPU market space, their products haven’t been particularly compelling – except possibly as bargain-basement alternatives for people who can’t afford the ‘good’ option from Nvidia – for a long, long time.
With Intel jumping back into the race, the GPU landscape stands to be shaken-up quite severely. Nvidia has grown complacent as the ‘best choice’ competitor, while AMD has continuously failed to apply any paradigm shifting breakthroughs of their own. Throwing a wild-card like Intel into the mix could dislodge both existing competitors from their dismal status-quo mire.
Interestingly, Intel already owns, according to …
Strike Your Colors and Prepare to be Boarded: Dev Torrents and Disappearing Denuvo
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/05/17 at 02:05 PM CT
Quite some time ago, I addressed the concept of DRM and praised ‘pirates,’ those anonymous hackers who strip DRM out of videogames and distribute them in gray/black channels for free, as saviors of old games – truly elite archivists whose preservation of gaming culture far outweighs the small financial damages their activities cause immediately. In the intervening years since I first wrote about pirates and DRM in 2011, a number of smaller developers seem to have come around to this more enlightened way of thinking. Instead of fighting pirates, they’re using pirates and torrent sites as an advertising venue.
Most recently in August of this year, developer Acid Wizard released their game, “Darkwood,” on The Pirate Bay (the galaxy’s most resilient BitTorrent tracker). “Darkwood” joins a long succession of games that have been ‘officially torrented’ by their makers, including “HFHO2,” and “Hotline Miami.” Other developers have taken a more duplicitous …
Backlog: The Embiggening – November, 2017
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/29/17 at 08:16 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! ‘Twas the month before Christmas and all through the aisles, 45 games were released, but ‘tweren’t greeted with smiles. At least by me, because it’s another month flooded with crap.
10 shovels full of filth are inbound for November. Of the 6 new pieces of licensed swill, we’re getting a new ‘.Hack//’ title based on the anime, “Star Wars: Battlefront 2” based on the movie franchise, “LEGO Marvel Super Heroes 2” based on both Marvel comics and LEGO bricks, “America’s Greatest Gameshows: Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!” based on… those things, and a delayed game that I’m actually glad was delayed (AGAIN) since it allows me to correct a horrible mistake on my part: It turns out that “Ken Follet’s Pillars of the Earth” is based on a series of young adult novels – not a stand-alone new IP, as I thought – and therefore qualifies as shovel-ready. The final new shovelware title is yet another …
Desura’s Back! … Sort Of?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/21/17 at 05:27 PM CT
Earlier this week, Desura, the Little Indie Gaming Client That Couldn’t, which was bought-out by Danish keytailer and digital game rental outfit, Oneplay, miraculously came back online after months of straight-up nonexistence. When OnePlay’s placeholder page for Desura disappeared earlier this year, I figured the site and service were gone for good. Color me surprised to see it back amongst the living!
Err… sort of.
While the site is back online, and my old login credentials still work, bringing me to my profile that only ‘owns’ “The fall of gods,” “Monster RPG 2,” and the free open-source “Flare,” the download links for the Desura client as well as ALL THE GAMES lead to 404 errors at the time of writing. Unfortunately, when I refreshed my Windows install a while back, I didn’t reinstall the Desura client, so there’s no way for me to test whether or not extant copies of it are working at all.
Essentially, the site appears to be in a transitional …
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