De Metroides
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/16/11 at 06:34 PM CT
The ‘Metroid’ series has become one of Nintendo’s most popular franchises. This popularity seems pretty inexplicable when one considers the series’ roots. The original game, “Metroid,” appeared on the NES and, while it did take bold steps into unexplored types of gameplay, it was also one of the most inscrutable games ever made. Actually, out of the original ‘Metroid’ trilogy, only the third, “Super Metroid,” had the style, pacing, and gameplay framework to be playable and enjoyable without hours of boring trial-and-error and reams of graph paper. “Metroid II: The Return of Samus” was stuck in the middle, approaching the refined experience of “Super Metroid,” but stuck in the Hell of portable exclusivity.
How did this franchise become one of Nintendo’s ‘Big Three,’ alongside ‘Super Mario’ and ‘The Legend of Zelda,’ when it only had three games, one good game, and skipped an entire hardware generation (the N64) as a no-show? The answer lies …
Love and Hate: Portable Game Systems
Matt - wrote on 10/09/11 at 02:41 PM CT
Greetings fellow gamers! It is great to be a guest on the MeltedJoystick blog. Nelson asked me to fill in for him while he’s on vacation.
My adventure into the world of gaming began with the NES and has continued through this current generation. Since I am a child of gaming in the '80s and early '90s, I have a distinct love and admiration for platformers and RPGs. My brother and I spent countless hours mastering all the ‘Super Mario Bros.’ games for the NES and the SNES, along with many other platformers for the Genesis, Game Boy, and, later, the PlayStation.
Over the years my gaming habits have evolved and grown for better and for worse, which brings me to the topic of this blog post: portable game systems, particularly my love/hate relationship with them. Unfortunately, my career and life choices have dictated that I spend more time with portable systems than consoles, and I am sure that I am not alone in this camp. So I would like to reflect a little on portable …
Review Round-Up: Summer 2011
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/25/11 at 09:29 PM CT
This is the first in what I hope to make a quarterly feature in which I round-up all of the Official Staff Reviews from the previous season and put them in one easy-to-find location. As you probably know, the MeltedJoystick staff currently consists of four people: Me, Chris, Nick, and Alex. Nick and Alex spend a lot of time working on behind-the-scenes matters for the ImaJAN Media Network, so their reviews aren’t nearly as numerous as those written by me and Chris, and can easily be lost in the shuffle. These articles will also only feature full-length reviews of games we have played immediately before write-up. Since MeltedJoystick opened this year, the Summer 2011 Review Round-Up has a bit of overlap with Spring 2011.
For future installments, I’m considering featuring a member review that the MeltedJoystick staff agree is exemplary of the kind of writing we like to see. So keep submitting those reviews!
Nelson’s Reviews:
I followed my usual trend of reviewing an …
Unfinished Business
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/17/11 at 03:38 PM CT
“Skyrim” comes out in 24 days.
Do you know what that means?
“Skyrim” won’t be ready to play for at least 389 days.
The reason should be obvious: PC games have always followed the paradigm of ‘release it now, fix it later.’ Since “Skyrim” is a PC game (that just happens to appear on consoles as well), this is old news. Even worse, it’s a game built by Bethesda and a sequel to one of the buggiest games ever made. But I continually find myself asking, ‘Why does it have to be this way?’
As I have mentioned before, I think PC gaming should be moving in the direction of console gaming instead of the other way around. In this specific instance, I think Bethesda needs to keep the lid on “Skyrim” until it’s done cooking. Of course, they won’t. They want to get “Skyrim” out the door in time for Black Friday and the Christmas rush. Bethesda wants to ensure that every little child (who is at least 17 years old due to the ‘M for Mature’ rating) …
The End Comes Beyond Chaos
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/09/11 at 03:19 PM CT
Having been a stalwart supporter of the game-creation endeavors of both Squaresoft and Enix since 1989, it pains me to say this: Square Enix is dead. No, they aren’t going out of business or anything official. It’s worse than that: They have turned their last unsullied franchise into an MMO.
While the merger Squaresoft and Enix in 2003 prompted many to rend their garments and gnash their teeth, it ultimately turned out okay, combining two of Japan’s most beloved developers/publishers under one roof. Indeed, the merged Square Enix managed to produce some very nice sequels in their core franchises. But that’s all they did. Non-sequel games with new ideas diminished to a trickle from the Square Enix tap, and what did manage to leak out wasn’t particularly good. Square Enix has become a company that ONLY does ‘Final Fantasy’ and ‘Dragon Quest.’
So, knowing that the only Squaresoft and Enix games that are worth a damn have some combination of ‘final,’ …
Game Genre Ecology
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/03/11 at 04:35 PM CT
When it comes to maintaining a healthy ecosystem for videogames, it’s important for diversity to exist. While we may continually hear about how important this is in relation to grander things than games, such as biodiversity being an important aspect of evolutionary and ecological sciences, the same concepts can be applied to anything, including media, which comes in different varieties.
Regardless of the need for diversity, the history of videogames is fraught with a phenomenon I like to call “Genre Glut.” Every console generation that has mattered (i.e., 8-bit and later) as well as the eternally mutating PC have suffered from blockages in the creative flow, resulting in uninspired and rampant copycatting that frustrates customers and results in a platform going out with a whimper instead of a bang. Yet for every population explosion that has ultimately resulted in a crash, there has been another genre just waiting for the retail space to spread-out and dominate.
The …
Who Reviews the Reviewers?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/28/11 at 11:18 PM CT
Critics have always served as curators of culture, passing judgment on what has value and what has none. Yet in the environment of Web 2.0, everyone with a connection to the Internet has suddenly been empowered with this capability that was once limited to the connected and elite few. Sites like FilmCrave and MeltedJoystick are built upon this new paradigm and retail outlets like Amazon are relying more and more on customer input, in which mobs of users are free to share their own personal opinions to build-up or tear-down a product or piece of media, almost like a form of vigilantism. While ‘professional’ critics still exist, they are becoming less and less relevant, drowned-out in the ocean of other voices shouting opinions. To paraphrase Juvenal, “Who reviews the reviewers?”
Professional game reviewers have always battled off-and-on with a perception of corruption – that they receive free, early copies of games in exchange for favorable reviews. I have seen …
Terms of Enmity
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/21/11 at 04:07 PM CT
Any hobby that has been around as long as videogaming has is bound to accumulate a layer of jargon. Jargon is useful, as it allows the initiated to express complex concepts in few words. However, in my many travels across the vast intellectual wasteland of Internet gaming forums, I have come across several terms that grate on me with their utter lack of meaning.
1. “AAA”
I see this term bandied-around constantly about whatever newest, most over-hyped release is just around the corner. WTF does this even mean?! AAA… like the United States’ credit rating? Oh, nope, not anymore! Most of the time, games designated as ‘AAA’ are those with massive budgets for ‘realistic’ graphics and enough marketing to tell everyone in the developed world just how realistic those graphics are. Really, ‘AAA’ seems to be synonymous with the ‘summer blockbusters’ of the movie world, in that they’re all hype, no substance, have huge budgets, make a lot of money, and are forgotten …
5 Game Series Being Killed by Lack of Innovation
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/14/11 at 09:08 PM CT
Crafting an ongoing game franchise requires a delicate balance between conforming to the core elements of the first title in the series, incremental gameplay improvements, and subtle innovation. Straying too far from a franchise’s roots can alienate fans and risks losing touch with what made the original game popular in the first place. But being too conservative is fraught with risk as well. So here’s a list of 5 franchises that I used to enjoy, but have stopped caring about because the sequels have become more and more like blurry photocopies of the original.
5. Pokemon
This series started out with a lot of ingenuity: A turn-based RPG that focuses on one-on-one battles, local multi-player, and collectable characters. The first game, “Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow,” was pretty broken, as some of the Pokemon types had a huge advantage and no real weakness (Psychic) while others served as nothing but a burden, making a huge swath of the character roster worthless (Poison). These …
WTF is Wrong with You, Japan?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/07/11 at 05:16 PM CT
Dear Japan,
We’ve been friends for a long time. Ever since we met back in the 1980s, I was impressed by your quirky sense of humor and ability to come up with strange ideas that ultimately ended up being very entertaining. Sure, you were weird, but your weirdness was what made you unique.
But now, things have changed. I should have suspected it all along, but we were having such good times that I just went along with it and didn’t say anything. Now it seems obvious to me that something was wrong the entire time we’ve known each other, and you’ve been walking closer and closer to the precipice as the years have passed.
Japan, you have a problem, and this is an intervention.
I know you’ve had it rough lately with the economy. We all have. But the fact that your youth population is shrinking and what few youth you do have are straying down the paths of NEET, Hikikomori, Otaku, and Herbivores doesn’t mean you should embrace those negative aspects of your …
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