Backlog: The Embiggening - July, 2015
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/28/15 at 02:43 PM CT
Summer is in full-swing… yet game publishers don’t seem to realize they have a captive audience of customers with a lot of vacation time on their hands and no games to play. July isn’t getting very many releases, and several of the stated July releases are just delayed titles from the past few months. Add a lot of ports and remasters to the mix and it’ll be a very difficult month for those looking to spend money on videogames.
Shovelware is practically gone again this month. In fact, the only shovelware titles releasing are annual sports and racing titles: “Rory McIlroy PGA Tour” (since Tiger Woods is no longer good enough at golf to keep his face on the box) and “F1 2015.”
In the land of ports and remasters, the “Zombie Army Trilogy” and “Legend of Kay HD” were both delayed to July. In addition, the “Wolfenstein: The Old Blood” stand-alone DLC will be coming to the 8th Gen consoles (minus WiiU). Sony will also be remastering the PS3’s …
E3 Impressions 2015
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/21/15 at 02:57 AM CT
After several years in a row of bland, unexciting, disappointing E3s, I was expecting this year to be more of the same: Bag on Microsoft because Xbox is a waste of space. Bag on Sony for leaning too hard on third-party games. Bag on Nintendo for leaning solely on first-party games. Bag on the developer conferences because EA, Ubisoft, and Activision are the spawn of Satan and Square Enix is wearing whiteface and blue contact lenses, pretending to be a Westerner. It’s getting to be old hat and feels very redundant.
This year’s E3 promised to be different from the start, however, both by including a few more publisher conferences than usual and by including a PC gaming conference for the first time ever. Color me surprised, as well, that my chosen victor in the Battle of E3 2015 did NOT turn out to be PC, but Microsoft… with Windows 10, not XBONE, so I guess PC still won, in a way. Likewise, I was completely shocked and amazed by a large number of the game reveals (both …
Steam Begins Offering Refunds; Can Used Digital PC Games be Far Behind?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/14/15 at 02:33 PM CT
On June 2nd, 2015, Valve did something unexpected with their Steam gaming platform. While Steam has been beloved by PC gamers for quite some time due to its unobtrusive DRM, all-inclusive client features, and sales with discounts so huge a movie ticket and a cup of Starbucks look like a house payment in comparison, the Achilles Heel of the House that Gaben Built has always been the customer service. PC gamers love Steam when everything is working correctly, but the moment something goes awry and the need to contact customer service arises, Steam loses a bit of its luster, with anecdotes commonly siting weeks to months of waiting for a resolution.
Valve is aware of this smudge on Steam’s reputation, and back in March one of the company’s business officers, Erik Johnson, flat-out said that Steam needs better customer service. Fast forward to June, and that customer service has just gotten a bit friendlier with the added ability to return any Steam game for any reason and …
Redefining RPGs: Let’s Do it Right
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/07/15 at 06:49 PM CT
It has been quite some time since I railed against the stupidity of the modern videogames industry dividing my favorite genre, the RPG, in half along regionally-described lines at the beginning of the 7th Generation. Since then, I have had several unproductive arguments with my own personal Gadfly – and frequent MeltedJoystick Featured User Review winner – Jonzor about ‘J’RPGs and ‘W’RPGs, and have gotten back into tabletop RPGs after a long, involuntary hiatus.
In reading the large amount of material, both in rulebooks and online, about tabletop RPGs that I had missed due to being out of the loop, it seems that arguments about style have been going on since at least 2001, when an Indie RPG writer by the name of Ron Edwards started a discussion about three pillars of RPG theory. Based on the Threefold GDS model that spawned from the dark pits of UseNet in 1997, Edwards’ GNS theory states that RPGs can be divided into three stylistic groups depending on their main …
Review Round-Up: Spring 2015
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/01/15 at 01:55 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:
My year in gaming got off to a great start. By which I mean that I cleared a large number of games off my backlog, not that all of the games I played were great, as that was, unfortunately, not the case.
“Trine 2” – 3.5/5
“Millennium 3: Cry Wolf” – 3.5/5
“The Wonderful 101” – 3/5
“Swords & Soldiers HD” – 2/5
“NyxQuest: Kindred Spirits” – 3.5/5
“NES Remix Pack” – 2/5
“Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons” – 4/5
“Millennium 2: Take Me Higher” – 4/5
“SteamWorld Dig” – 4.5/5
“The Banner Saga” – 3/5
“Orc Attack: Flatulent Rebellion” – 1/5
“DuckTales” – 3.5/5
“DuckTales Remastered” – 4.5/5
“Pikmin 3” – 3.5/5
Chris’ Reviews:
Chris has been spending way, way, waaaay too much of his game time lately making sweet, sweet love to his Android …
Backlog: The Embiggening - June, 2015
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/24/15 at 02:53 PM CT
With the coming of June, all of the little schoolchildren will, once again, have free reign to wash across the world in a wave of terror. Hopefully there will be plenty of new game releases to keep them busy. In their rooms. Away from the adults.
Unfortunately for us, June will be bringing a resurgence of licensed shovelware, which has been mercifully absent for months now. There will be a new LEGO-ification of upcoming unnecessary sequel, “Jurassic World,” another ‘Batman Arkham’ game (Aren’t people getting tired of these by now?), and a Sony exclusive Fighting mashup featuring the most popular characters from the most popular shonen manga in “Shonen Jump Magazine.” Also, while it’s not licensed, and therefore tangentially related to shovelware at best, the ‘F1’ series has become so prolific that the dev is now naming titles based on the year they are released, so I’m going to consider that series officially milked.
Ports and remasters? Of course! This is …
Konami’s Fall: The <i>Seppuku</i> of the Last Gaming Samurai
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/17/15 at 02:42 PM CT
During the Golden Age of gaming, the entire foundation of the industry was made from Japanese stonework. Nintendo, Sega, and Sony built the machines to run the games, while Nintendo, Sega, Squaresoft, Enix, Capcom, and Konami built the games that not only salvaged the industry from Atari’s (delenda est) chronic mismanagement, but built it up into something wonderful in its own right.
Over the course of the last two generations, things in Japan have started to go horribly awry. I have been lamenting the shift in Japan’s pop culture for years already. However, instead of doing anything to correct the course these former titans of the industry have found themselves on, they seem content to fall off the face of the Earth.
Sega was the first victim. When they decided to drop out of the hardware arena to focus solely on games after the Dreamcast failed, at first it seemed like a good idea. Unfortunately, it proved to be a disastrous move, with the company now hanging onto parent …
Amiibos: The Physical DLC Gimmick
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/10/15 at 04:12 PM CT
At this point in the 8th Generation, it has become quite obvious that Nintendo, once a paragon of the old console traditions and the last holdout in the face of updates and DLC, has given up and joined the rest of the console makers in adopting less-than-beloved modern business practices. With “Mario Kart 8,” “Super Smash Bros. U,” “Hyrule Warriors,” and the brand new “Splatoon” all featuring significant amounts of cut content later surfacing as an additional purchase, Nintendo looks right at home among the other DLC adopters, and will likely soon start with the microtransactions, once their partnership with DeNA bears fruit.
However, Nintendo as a company never seems satisfied to do something in exactly the same way as every other company. Thus instead of keeping DLC strictly in the digital realm, Nintendo has found a way to make it physical. Unfortunately this method of creating physical DLC has nothing to do with pressing updated game discs that include the DLC …
Backlog: The Embiggening - May, 2015
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/03/15 at 06:08 PM CT
April Showers bring May Flowers, as the old children’s song goes. But what happens when the only precipitation in April took the form of ports and remasters? More of the same!
May will be bringing “Final Fantasy 4: The After Years” (the 7th Gen’s only good ‘Final Fantasy’ game) to Steam… but not the same version that graced WiiWare or the PlayStation Portable. Instead, it will be a new 3D-ified version that looks and plays like the unnecessary DS port of “Final Fantasy 4.” In other ‘Final Fantasy’ news, the PS4 is getting a remaster (unsurprising) compilation of “Final Fantasy 10” and “Final Fantasy 10-2.” The PS4 is also getting a port of “Arcania” (a.k.a., “Gothic 4”). Finally, as if as part of a concerted effort to prove that modern non-Nintendo consoles are just really lame gaming PCs, “Farming Simulator 15” is making the leap from PC exclusivity to PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and XBONE.
In multi-platform releases, the PS4, XBONE, and PC …
The Arcade is Dead, Long Live the Arcade!
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/26/15 at 02:58 PM CT
Gamers who grew up during the late ‘70s, the ‘80s, or the early ‘90s no doubt remember at least something about the precursors to home game consoles. Arcade machines stood as location-based gaming attractions that required repeated, small payments in order to partake in the experience.
When PCs started to become more common in the home and when the home videogame console market took off in the 3rd Generation with Nintendo’s NES, the arcade began to suffer. It seemed that more people who were interested in playing videogames would rather plunk down a larger sum of money for ownership of a game machine and discreet pieces of software than travel to a destination and continually feed coins to a number of arcade boxes.
Unfortunately, even with the waning popularity of arcades and the booming popularity of in-the-home videogame entertainment, the game developers themselves had a very hard time shaking an ‘Arcade Mentality’ when designing their games. The reason so many …
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