What are Japanese Gamers Playing?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/22/17 at 05:46 PM CT
Quite some time ago, I wrote an open letter to Japan’s gaming industry as a whole, asking, “WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU?!” Naturally, I never got a response, but in working with Chris and Nick on MeltedJoystick in the intervening years I’ve noticed some interesting trends that might actually help explain Japan’s problems.
First of all, the top selling games in Japan and the top selling games in the wider world look much, much different from each other. Handhelds, specifically the 3DS, dominate Japanese charts, as do exclusives, with but a single non-exclusive and Western-developed game among them. Western charts, on the other hand, are, predictably, shooters and sandboxes and sandbox shooters with one sports game (soccer, because Europe) and a number of double-listings for multi-platform titles that artificially make the list even more homogenized.
What’s interesting about the lack of Western games being played by Japanese gamers is the fact that a not-insignificant …
Bait and: Switch Reactions
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/15/17 at 02:57 PM CT
This week, Nintendo finally held their long-awaited Switch reveal event. Lasting just over an hour, Nintendo spent a lot of time painstakingly showing us what the Switch is, seemingly as an overcompensation for their confusing messages regarding the late WiiU around the time of its own launch. Unfortunately, despite all that showing and telling, Nintendo still failed to explain some of the core nuts-and-bolts features of the Switch, such as whether or not the (Western) games shipped on cartridges will download and patch the game ON the cartridge or whether the Switch’s official, meager 32GB of storage space will be used for 20GB patches like every other platform.
Regular readers of MeltedJoystick’s blog column will no doubt remember my list of 5 Ways the Switch Could Sink. After watching the Switch reveal event, I’m very saddened to report that Nintendo has managed to nail 3 of them. The gaming media is surprisingly even-handed regarding the Switch, though there is still …
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 …
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