Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/02/22 at 04:42 PM CT

Microsoft has been on a buying spree of videogame development studios since at least 2018, when they spent time at E3 touting their enhanced ability to produce great first-party games through the acquisition of new studios. I personally didn’t feel particularly excited about these earlier acquisitions, as the studios in q...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/24/22 at 04:07 PM CT

As Fall wears on, we find ourselves, once again, right smack in the middle of Harvest Season, with the looming threat of ghoulish horror and Type 2 Diabetes waiting for us at the end of October. With the Summer Game Drought far behind us, we’re getting a second month in a row absolutely crammed with releases… and shockingly a second month in a row with more than one game I’d actually consid...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/18/22 at 06:22 PM CT

Sony, once a champion of Backward Compatibility (BC) between then-current-gen PlayStation consoles and its predecessors, has been bending over backwards in recent decades to remove any and all such benefits from their ecosystems. Naturally, this happens because Sony loves to

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/11/22 at 05:50 PM CT

As I made clear in my review of the latest volume in the long-running and much-abused DragonLance series of Dungeons & Dragons-based novels, the setting hasn’t been in such a tenuous state since 1996, with the release of the novel, “Dragons of Summer Flame,” and the accompanying DragonLance 5th Age Boxed Set, which in...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/03/22 at 11:51 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:
I had a pretty mediocre gaming quarter, and I actually spent quite a bit of time in August, specifically, doing things other than videogaming, since the mediocrity w...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/27/22 at 06:43 PM CT

Well, Summer’s officially over. Naturally, the Games Industry, which seems incapable of learning anything from its mistakes, is continuing the tradition of christening the start of the new school year – during which most of their customers suddenly go from having TONS of free time to play new videogames, to have NO time – with an absolutely gigantic release schedule packed so full of titles...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/21/22 at 05:26 PM CT

As a fan of the DragonLance series of Dungeons & Dragons novels dating way back to my middle-school days in the early ‘90s, I thought the series was finished. There hasn’t been a new DragonLance novel published since a last buckshot-load of them was fired-off in 2009, with the final volume of “

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/14/22 at 05:44 PM CT

To celebrate my birthday this year, I asked Chris to crack open the lovely Bunkers & Badasses Deluxe Boxed Set I gave him for Yuletide two years ago (but which arrived last year thanks to the supply chain cock-up) and run a ...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/07/22 at 04:43 PM CT

We’ve known for a while now that Sony hasn’t given up on virtual reality within the PlayStation ecosystem. Recently, we got a look at some of the new features coming in their revised PSVR2 headset, most of which aren’t particularly compelling outside of niche edge-cases. Indee...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/31/22 at 04:52 PM CT

The Summer Games Drought has broken after but a single month! Of course, now, much like those poor folk in Kentucky right now, we are forced to deal with an unrelenting and continuous flood of crap. Not only is this flood annoying to deal with as gamers, it’s actually damaging to the hobby and medium as a whole. The Games Industry is repeating the mistakes of the Atari (delenda est) Era,...