Online Communities and the Size Thereof
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/08/17 at 02:25 PM CT
As a reformed console-exclusive gamer myself, I’m intimately familiar with all of the old pros and cons of console gaming vs. PC gaming. And as someone who is willing to reassess things as variables change, I no longer cling to any of those obsolete arguments for the sake of tradition.
The current breed of console-exclusive gamer needs to come up with new reasons to avoid the ever-more-difficult-to-deny superiority of PC gaming when compared to the current console situation. The latest fuel for the fire is something that never would have registered with me during my console-exclusive years even if it had been a significant factor at the time (between roughly 2002 and 2013).
Apparently, the online communities for multi-platform games with a heavy online multi-player element are much, much smaller on PC than they are on any given console. Adding the fact that console online communities are segregated from each other due to money grubbing on behalf of the console manufacturers, …
Backlog: The Embiggening – January, 2017
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/01/17 at 02:55 PM CT
Happy 2017, dear MeltedJoystick readers and staff! And welcome back to another look into the near future! The dismal months of 2016 are in the past. Baby New Year has once again aged into Father Time, providing us – and, more importantly, the games industry – a chance for a symbolic fresh start. Will things improve in the coming year? I certainly hope so!
2017 is kicking off with a fresh dose of ‘high-quality’ shovelware. By that, I mean that the games are still based on licensed IPs, but they generally have a stronger reputation than shlock based on Burger King or Doritos. There’s a new ‘Digimon’ RPG (I’m really surprised that IP is still running, but if ‘Pokemon’ can do it…), a new game based on the ‘Fate’ anime/manga series, and an HD port of the last game in the Disney mash-up series, ‘Kingdom Hearts.’
That ‘Kingdom Hearts’ port isn’t alone, however. Square-Enix is starting out 2017 with a compilation of the episodic first season of their …
Year in Review: 2016
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/25/16 at 05:50 PM CT
Happy Yule to all MeltedJoystick staff and readers alike! 2016 is on its way out the door, and I, for one, am glad to see another rather dismal year of gaming news move out of the way, allowing blind hope and baseless speculation to buoy us into the New Year. As usual, I’ve hand-picked the top 10 gaming-related events of the year, dividing the lot into stacks of 5 Fails and 5 Wins.
While 2016 was certainly better than the abysmal 2014, in which there were no wins, it was a difficult year to get excited about, especially when the Fails just kept coming. It was ultimately difficult to narrow down the Fails to merely 5 and equally difficult to find 5 unequivocal Wins, but I persevered and the results now await your reading pleasure.
Here’s hoping for a bigger and brighter 2017!
Top 5 Fails
5. WiiU Discontinued, World Says, “Meh.”
After a botched birth and short, painful life, the WiiU was officially discontinued by Nintendo in 2016… to the despair of nearly no …
Empty Nest: “Dragon Nest” MMO Switches Publishers, Murders Thousands of Characters
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/18/16 at 03:31 PM CT
With the general friendliness and reliability of services like Steam, GOG, and Netflix, it’s easy to become complacent and forget that online-only games, products, and services can vanish overnight and with little to no warning. Last week, I covered the disappearance of online Indie game marketplace/community, Desura. This week, I bring belated tidings of sadness and despair regarding one MMO – specifically the MMO into which the MeltedJoystick crew sank thousands of hours.
“Dragon Nest,” a Korean MMO regularly advertised as the ‘fastest’ MMO, recently changed publishers. While the game was always published by different parties in different parts of the world, from the time of its North American launch in 2011, it was published by one Nexon. Nexon never had a particularly great reputation with any of the online game servers it operates, but it seems that “Dragon Nest’s” developer, Eyedentity, finally got fed-up with them and decided to run the North American …
Bye-Bye, Desura! Hello… OnePlay?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/11/16 at 02:49 PM CT
That PC gaming client I love to hate is officially dead. No, not Uplay! No… not Origin either! Desura, the Indie client that I compared unfavorably to Linux way back in 2013, filed for bankruptcy back in June of 2015. After flailing around in limbo for over a year, all of Desura’s assets went offline earlier this Fall in September, 2016. For anyone who was heavily invested in Desura games (*chuckle*), the company’s disappearance serves as a cautionary tale about the ephemeral nature of digitally-distributed software. Of course, anyone who was heavily invested in Desura clearly had something wrong with them, mentally. The bright side is that Desura wasn’t DRM, so any Desura games one might have downloaded should still work. (Just remember to make a backup!)
I first noticed Desura’s absence during Black Friday, when I was checking around all of the PC gaming clients for amazing sales. When I went to Desura’s site, I was greeted with a full-screen message relating that …
Review Round-Up: Fall 2016
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/03/16 at 01:42 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:
This quarter, Chris and I managed to review exactly the same number of games! This is what happens when we’re both bogged down in open-world hell… and when I decide I’d rather clean up after a deceased hoarder for a month than play “Pier Solar and the Great Architects” because the game is so horrible.
“Pier Solar and the Great Architects HD” – 1.5/5
“Dragon Age: Inquisition GotY Edition” – 4/5
“Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Mirror of Fate HD” – 3.5/5
“Adventurer Manager” – 3.5/5
“Singularity” – 4.5/5
“Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! GotY Edition” – 4/5
“Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power” – 3.5/5
Chris’ Reviews:
Chris finally finished “Fallout 4” after… what’s it been, nearly a year?! He wisely chose to follow it up with some shorter Indie games and explore some …
Backlog: The Embiggening – December, 2016
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/27/16 at 02:09 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Holiday crunch time is officially upon us, once again. Developers and publishers have pushed most of what they plan to push for the year, leaving us with a meager 12 releases in December. Let’s see if any of them are worth getting excited about!
Last minute shovelware is very light and also very non-licensed. “Stern Pinball Arcade” got pushed back – to no one’s sorrow – as did “We Sing.”
In ports and remasters, Sony is, surprisingly, only getting one: A port from PC to PS4 for “Deponia.” The rest of the porting is going to… Nintendo, of all outfits, with “Super Mario Maker” and “Dragon Quest 8” unnecessarily gracing the 3DS (who would want to play either of those games in 10-minute bursts?) and “Minecraft: Story Mode” getting a physical release on the officially-dead WiiU.
Of the three multi-plat releases, two are looking intriguing. “Steep” is, of course, an uninspired snowboarding …
5 Ways the Switch Could Sink
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/20/16 at 01:59 PM CT
With Nintendo playing coy regarding details about their upcoming Switch hybrid console/handheld hardware, speculation is rampant. Obviously, gamers have a lot of questions about this upcoming device, and Nintendo is simply refusing to answer them, instead remaining stonily silent until the company’s pre-determined time to release more information, which is coming up in a few months.
Where there’s speculation, of course, there is fear. Some of the hardest-core Nintendo fanboys have found themselves wringing their hands, fretting that the reason for Nintendo’s silence is some sort of bad news tied to the Switch that will abruptly cause the entire concept to tank in the collective eyes of the consumer public. With that in mind, here are five ways the Switch could go horribly wrong.
5. Media Bias
While the mainstream media loves to talk about Nintendo (and Apple) products, this is likely because the last time they actively thought about videogames, Nintendo had a …
WiiU is Officially Dead
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/13/16 at 03:00 PM CT
Last Thursday, Nintendo of Japan made official statements regarding the state of their current last home console, the WiiU. Japanese production of the console is coming to an end, and all remaining WiiU hardware available in North America has already been shipped to retail. It’s official: The WiiU is no more.
When MeltedJoystick buried my WiiU in a mock funeral attended by all manner of console dignitaries back in 2013, we did so in a tongue-in-cheek manner. We didn’t want to see the WiiU fail and die. We explicitly ended that video with the WiiU Gamepad lighting up inside its coffin as a symbol of hope, leaving the potential for Nintendo to get it together with the WiiU like they did with the 3DS.
As we all know now, that never happened. The WiiU launched a failure, remained a failure, and died a failure. But why?
The first problem lined up against the WiiU was Nintendo’s split focus on two devices with different games. The 3DS launched as a failure, and in a …
Backlog: The Embiggening – November, 2016
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/06/16 at 02:29 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Now that Halloween is over, once again, Americans will look forward to that next great commercial holiday. No! Not Thanksgiving, as most Americans don’t have anything to be thankful for (as illustrated by the election travesty that is currently going on between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton). Black Friday and Christmas will be here in but a few short weeks, forcing game publishers to rush things out the door, regardless of their state of readiness, in order to meet arbitrary deadlines. The result is, as usual, a LOT of game releases. But many of them will suffer quality control issues.
The shovelware is relatively tame for November. Someone made a ‘Digimon’ MMO, Nordic Games is channeling Ubisoft and releasing yet another unwanted/unneeded “We Sing” karaoke ‘game,’ and “Cartoon Network: Battle Crashers” seems to be a ‘Smash Bros.’ inspired Beat ‘Em Up. There’s another ‘Sword Art Online’ game based …
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