Review Round-Up: Summer 2015
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/05/15 at 01:54 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 Summer, I plowed ahead and completed the final episodes of Aldorlea’s ‘Millennium’ RPG series… and decided to be more careful about buying Aldorlea games in the future. I also cleared the final WiiU game out of my current backlog, so Nintendo needs to start releasing something (since third-parties won’t) before I’ll need to re-exhume the console we buried quite some time ago.
“Ironclad Tactics” – 3/5
“Child of Light” – 4/5
“Awesomenauts” – 2.5/5
“Death and the Fly” – 1.5/5
“Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition” – 4/5
“Millennium 5: The Battle of the Millennium” – 3/5
“Defiance” – 3.5/5
“Muffin Knight” – 4/5
“Millennium 4: Beyond Sunset” – 2.5/5
“Sonic: Lost World” – 4/5
Chris’ Reviews:
Chris posted his (late) “Trine 2” review and …
Backlog: The Embiggening - September, 2015
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/30/15 at 02:22 PM CT
Summer’s officially over, and the lion’s share of gaming’s demographic is going Back to School... yet now is the time that game publishers have – after four months of barren, desolate drought – decided to flood store shelves with a large quantity of releases. Why do publishers do this when they know very well that their potential customers will have much less free time to play games and much less disposable cash to spend on them once they’re back in school instead of lazing about at their part-time Summer jobs? My guess is that it’s the same reason the game industry does a lot of questionable thing: Stupidity and/or Greed.
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There is a LOT of shovelware this month. Of course, only a small quantity of the stuff is based on other IPs. In that particular sub-set of shovelware, we have a new LEGO game (because, why not?!) and a game based on the new “Mad Max” movie (which Chris says is awesome) blasting as many platforms as possible, while a new …
OUYA to be Sacrificed by the Cult of Razer
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/22/15 at 03:30 PM CT
OUYA, the Independent, Kickstarter-funded company behind the Little Indie Console That Couldn’t has finally given up and sold out to another company. After months of increasingly dismal news, starting with bribing OUYA owners with free money and whoring out the OUYA storefront to the likes of Mad Catz, OUYA has, as of the beginning of August 2015, sold themselves body and soul to Razer, the company most widely known for producing low-durability, high-priced PC peripherals.
Of course, I’m familiar with Razer primarily through my exposure to the Razer Hydra – a (now discontinued) motion controller designed by Sixense but manufactured by Razer. Sixense’s partnership with Razer didn’t appear to actually go anywhere, as the default Razer drivers included with the Hydra are a joke, requiring a separate download from Sixense’s own website to unlock the motion controller’s true, glorious potential. With the Hydra’s wireless successor, the STEM, Sixense has broken away from …
Windstream <i>Delenda Est</i>.
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/16/15 at 06:32 PM CT
This week, Jon Brodkin of Ars Technica (one of my favorite tech blogs) published an article about the plight of the rural residents of the United States who find it difficult – if not impossible – to get modern telecommunications monopolies to throw them a bone and provide telephone and Internet service that is up to anyone’s standards. This article hit very close to home and I can completely relate to the subject’s situation… because the subject is indeed me.
I wrote to Ars this summer and – at the suggestion of MeltedJoystick’s erstwhile video/photo-grapher, Matt – submitted my plight as a news tip to see if Ars was interested in exposing Windstream for the villain it is. One phone interview and several e-mails later, my story has been added to the annals of the history of Terrible Internet in America.
Some readers may be surprised to learn that I am a farmer. However, farming and videogame critique go incredibly well together, as farming allows for an …
Rehash, Reiterate, Remaster
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/09/15 at 05:40 PM CT
Almost exactly one year ago, I lamented the banal state of the 8th Generation with its unnatural love of ‘remastering’ non-old games in order to pull further profits out of them. While last year’s Sony proclaimed that “You can't have too many of these things, otherwise next-gen just looks like rehashed last-gen,” this year’s Sony has changed its tune. So in honor of Sony’s newfound commitment to remasters, I’m going to rehash my disappointment with the 8th Gen’s lack of originality (now with 40% new content!).
As far as I can tell, I am the first person to come up with the term ‘remasterbation’ – a simple portmanteau of ‘remaster’ and ‘masturbation’ – to refer to Sony’s self-pleasuring act of releasing last-gen content under the guise of ‘new.’ Despite the fact that Sony claims they are beating their last-gen meat for the pleasure of the 40% of PS4 owners who didn’t own a PS3, we all know that they are really doing it to make money, since …
Backlog: The Embiggening - August, 2015
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/02/15 at 01:20 PM CT
It’s August! Happy Birthday to me! Or not… especially if I wanted a new game or two as gifts (which I do NOT, looking at the releases below).
After a month of absence in July, the shovelware has returned in droves. The undisputed King of Shovelware would have to be the third rendition of “Disney Infinity,” which cleverly attempts to sell videogames by getting kids hooked on a series of collectable, overpriced figurines. Aside from that, there are a lot of licensed shovelware exclusives, which is mind-blowing in that it undermines the general purpose of shovelware to saturate the market with releases on every platform. The PS4 is getting a new ‘One Piece’ game, while the 3DS is getting a whopping THREE licensed games based on the ‘Paddington Bear’ movie (a little late on that one, guys), the ‘Garfield’ comic strip (which has been irrelevant for years), and tiny-robot battling anime ‘LBX.’ All that exclusive shovelware is really going to hurt the 3DS’ …
PS4: Give Me 5 Reasons, Sony
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/26/15 at 03:40 PM CT
Another week in July, another week of nothing interesting, game-wise. I’ve been putting in some good backlog-clearing hours, but whenever I go online to see what’s what in the community, most of what I see is rabid Sony fanboys flagellating themselves into a frothing frenzy over the market dominance of the PlayStation 4. A couple weeks ago, I asked MJ’s readers who are backing the PS4 for some of their reasons. I received well-written responses… with inadequate reasons.
Of course, every Sony console has been a tough sell for me, despite the fact that I loved the original PlayStation almost as much as I loved the SNES that came before it. But even that first outing by Sony took a while to get through my armor. My first PS1 experience was a demo of “King’s Field,” which made me question why ANYONE would spend money to play THAT when they could keep replaying their SNES games over, and over… and over. The PS1’s library ultimately fleshed out with a large number of …
Satoru Iwata: 1959-2015
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/19/15 at 02:38 PM CT
On July 11, Nintendo President, Satoru Iwata, lost his battle with bile duct cancer at the young age of 55. The entirety of the gaming industry and gaming culture has lost a paragon in his death.
Iwata served as the President of Nintendo since 2002, guiding the company through both great successes with the unorthodox Wii and DS platforms and great struggles with the WiiU and 3DS. Throughout it all, he kept the faith that games should be fun, and kept Nintendo true to itself, instead of mimicking the unsustainable business practices that have been whirling around the industry since the dawn of the 7th Generation.
Iwata was also the type of corporate president I can actually respect. Iwata wasn’t a “Professional CEO,” as so many Western corporate executives are, head-hunted from company to company, bouncing from industry to industry, installed based solely on their perceived ability to exploit market conditions and turn profits, regardless of external factors. No, Iwata …
Atlus Acts as Smelling Salts for Sega
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/12/15 at 04:20 PM CT
Way back in 2013, Sammy, the parent company of Sega, purchased Index Digital Media, the parent company of Atlus, for $140 million. This merger of two generally half-assed Japanese game developers/publishers made me quite happy, as it gave the two the opportunity to merge their respective halves into a competent whole. Now, as if embodying the subtitle of the upcoming “South Park” RPG sequel, “The Fractured, But Whole,” Sega’s CEO, Naoki Satomi, has revealed that the company has indeed learned things from Atlus and will make another push into the console space after announcing their abandonment of consoles for smartphones not so long ago.
Apparently, Atlus taught Sega that creating quality games and releasing them when they are ready instead of when they are due is a great way to win new fans and keep existing fans happy. In my eyes, it looks like Atlus simply slapped Sega across the face with the not-so-secret revelation that smaller Japanese companies can’t get away …
Where4 PS4?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/05/15 at 02:22 PM CT
The post-E3 Summer doldrums are really dragging-down my article inspiration. With most of the interesting games shown at E3 being a year or more away, and with the Summer release schedule being as bland as always, the present seems like nothing more than the perfect time to do some Backlog shoveling.
However, the one gaming-related thing that is strongly on my mind at the moment is the sheer number of people I know who have recently jumped on the PlayStation 4 bandwagon. When these people reveal to me that they have purchased Sony’s newest doorstop/paperweight, I can only stand in stunned dismay wondering why.
Paraphrasing the immortal words of Shakespeare spoken by Juliette, “Wherefore art thou buying PS4?” It has been less than a year since even Sony’s executives threw their hands into the air in dismay at the number of people buying PS4s… I can’t see how the situation has changed.
MJ’s Community Manager, Chris, is the first of my acquaintances to drink the …
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