Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/14/19 at 04:32 PM CT

With the Epic Games Store’s recent endeavors to curry favoritism amongst publishers and lock-down exclusive distribution of a handful of big titles for limited time windows via the use of monetary incentives paid to said publishers (colloquially known as “money-hatting,” but traditionally known as “bribery”), the p...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/07/19 at 02:34 PM CT

I first declared “Reality” to be the hot hardware gimmick way back in 2014, when Oculus and Sony were pushing Virtual Reality and Microsoft and Nintendo were pushing Augmented Reality. Over the course of the intervening years, Valve and HTC jumped int...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/31/19 at 02:33 PM CT

Welcome back to another look into the near future! April is for fools, as we all know all too well. Too bad the fools in the games industry (and American government) can’t keep their idiocy contained to a single month! Let’s take a look at how big the dumpster fire will be over the course of the next 4 weeks.

Shovelware is much lighter on the ground for April than it was for March, with only t...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/24/19 at 03:08 PM CT

In a surprise announcement at the beginning of March, Trendy Entertainment, the Indie developer we at MeltedJoystick love to hate, revealed that they were dead and gone.

While everyone at MeltedJoystick has something of a love/hate relationship wit...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/17/19 at 03:36 PM CT

As we all know, game development, like any form of media and art creation, can be a lot of work. While Indie development studios typically make due with a small team of dedicated folks with a lot of passion for the project, big “AAA” corporate developers create games with credit rolls that sometimes last longer than the actual gameplay (I’m looking at you, “PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale”!)....

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/10/19 at 03:34 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:
Thanks to inclement weather, the MJ Crew’s local coop nights were canceled on far too many occasions this Winter. Between the weather, the fact that we’ve been deep into...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/02/19 at 05:06 PM CT

The first time I roasted Chris for his early-March birthday, I had to cut-down the large number of Chris-like people and creatures that inhabit the entirety of videogames to 10. In the next roast, I stuck with creatures from Nintendo’s ‘Pokemon’ franc...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/24/19 at 04:05 PM CT

Welcome back to another look into the near future! The hoary, old chestnut states that March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb, or vice-versa. Here at the MJHQ, March is coming in like a big, annoying pile of snow, so it better damn well go out like a tropical paradise. At least we’ve already got our shovels (and snow blowers) at the ready, which will help with the lion’s and lamb’s share ...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/17/19 at 02:46 PM CT

Remember way back in 2018 (3 months ago) when Square-Enix earned special praise in the MeltedJoystick Year in Review retrospective? It is with great sadness that we must recant that praise and return Square-Enix to the garbage heap with the rest of the “AAA” mega-corporate publishers.

When Square-Enix released “Dragon Qu...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/10/19 at 03:30 PM CT

At long last, science, that great discipline through which all Truth is revealed, has taken a look at a unique phenomenon of the modern world: Copyright. Since the Digital Revolution brought on by the advent of the Internet in the early 21st Century, IP rightsholders have tried desperately to continue enforcing their will on the general public through excessive lobbying, which has led to increasi...