Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/09/21 at 03:27 PM CT

Last year, I received a special request to talk about the upcoming game releases for 2020 that the curators at MeltedJoystick were keeping an eye on. Of course, we had no idea at the time that the year was going to bring a pandemic with it, which screwed with industries, arts, and release dates across the board. Then thereâ...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/03/21 at 02:12 PM CT

The results from last year’s revised New Year’s Backlog Ablutions are in, and it seems that the challenge was a bit too much for everyone except me. Thus in 2020, in spite of COVID locking everyone down so they really shouldn’t have had anything better to do than play a few of their games, I was, disturbingly, the onl...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/26/20 at 03:31 PM CT

Welcome back to another year of glimpses into the immediate future, where we spy upon planned Games Industry releases, and appropriately temper our expectations with cynicism. As per usual, January is never a particularly full month, usually relegated to deadline-missers that were supposed to launch during the previous September-through-December, or low-budget junk whose publishers didn’t want ...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/20/20 at 02:56 PM CT

Here we are, once again. As we stand at the end of another cycle of seasons after slogging through a torturous trip around the Sun that made 2019’s “challenging� year seem like a cake-walk, we must look back and pass judgment on the hot “new� titles – that were, once again, mostly old, re-warmed slop.

But in spite of its overall insane levels of awfulness, 2020 was ever-so-slightly...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/12/20 at 03:37 PM CT

Another year has come and gone… and what a year it was! 2020 will live in infamy for numerous reasons, some of them actually having to do with videogames.

Top 5 Fails

5. Australia’s Conservatives Ban Basically Everything

In a year marked by social, political, and economic upheaval, it’s somewhat reassuring that, at least in the Land Down-Under, conservat...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/05/20 at 03:50 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:
If I thought my Summer of COVID was mediocre, then the Autumn of COVID was even mediocre-er. I only had two stunningly positive experiences, with one being the huge-...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/29/20 at 04:46 PM CT

Welcome to the final look into the future for the Plague Year of 2020! It’s been a long, tiresome, awful ride of a year across the board, not just for Games Industry watching, and it’ll be good to start fresh in 2021 with a new President, a new COVID vaccine, new consoles… and the same old gridlock, polarization, and crappy game releases. Some things seem like they will never change.

Wit...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/22/20 at 04:25 PM CT

Way back in 2012, I wrote up a listicle of 10 sequels in long-running series that should have been released during the soul-crushingly awful 7th Generation, but weren’t. The good news is, FOUR of those ten sequels that didn’t manifest in the 7th Gen actually did come to light in the 8th Gen, with “Final Fantasy...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/15/20 at 03:01 PM CT

Recently, news broke of a ridiculous new legal situation in Australia, the Land Down-Under. Usually, those of us in the West who are irritated, exasperated, frustrated, and fed-up by our own nations’ governments’ (and citizens’) inexhaustible levels of stupidity like to fantasize about moving to ...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/07/20 at 08:10 PM CT

As they did with TV, movies, and music, subscription services are now trying to consume the world of videogames. While Microsoft endeavors to become the “Netflix of Gaming,� Netflix itself has already fallen prey to the next step in subscription saturation – that is