Backlog: The Embiggening – April, 2025
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/30/25 at 04:54 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! April is here, and, naturally, the Fools are out in full force. It won’t be long now until the little darlings who make up the bulk of gaming’s target demographic are out of school for the Summer and the big players in Industrial Gaming decide to turn off the tap again. Let’s see if Mid-Spring has anything for us to get excited about.
Is there shovel-ready crap coming in April? Of course there is! And it’s coming in all three major flavors of Shovelware. In Licensed Swill there’s a new ‘Care Bears’ game… what is this, 1984? In Casual Swill, there’s a new ‘Big Buck Hunter’ title for deer hunting fanatics who would rather bag imaginary trophies during the off season than hunt something else or go to the shooting range, and a “100 in 1 Game Collection” that wouldn’t feel out of place as the pre-installed content on a Chinese bootleg console. Lastly, in Annualized Swill, we’ve got entries in ‘MotoGP’ …
Legitimize Mobile Gaming? Microsoft Doesn’t Think So!
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/23/25 at 02:07 PM CT
The last time I took a look at the state of mobile gaming, it was in those halcyon days of 2019, before the COVID pandemic made the entire world a duller, gloomier place to live. Back then, Apple and Google were trying to tame the monster they unleashed upon the world with a muzzle shaped like perpetual subscriptions. Unsurprisingly, very little has changed within the mobile gaming ecosystem, and ad-infested microtransaction engines providing the absolute bare minimum of interest and functionality have continued to clog the app stores, making it next to impossible to find anything legitimately good to play on a mobile device that isn’t already a straight-up port of a PC/console game.
For a while, though, it seemed that Microsoft was going to flex its muscle as the still-dominant OS manufacturer, by creating a way to access Android apps – through the Amazon storefront, NOT Google Play – on Windows 11 devices. To me, it seemed that Microsoft was hoping for two things to …
Former Exec: Microsoft Should Quit Gaming
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/16/25 at 05:28 PM CT
Well, well, looks like it’s time to add another voice to the ever-growing choir of people who think Xbox should just go away. Enter one Bobby Kotick, who looks like a cross between some sort of sheep and a Wizarding World goblin, the former CEO of Activision-Blizzard(-King) before Microsoft initiated the purchase of the massive Industrial Gaming publisher to use it as fertilizer for the ever-struggling Xbox Division back in 2022.
In a recent interview, Kotick, now free from the shackles of Microsoft as a redundant executive unleashed a full salvo of disparaging comments about the Xbox Division. According to Kotick, Xbox was near death before the merger, and Microsoft’s desperation to acquire Activision was spurred by the fact that only the infusion of a massive existing customer base could possibly jump-start Xbox’s flagging life-signs. Prior to the Activision/Xbox deal, Kotick had even advised Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, that purchasing Activision in order to feed it to …
He’s Everywhere IX!: Yu-Gi-Oh! Edition
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/09/25 at 01:24 PM CT
It’s that time of year, again! The coming of March means that MeltedJoystick’s favorite non-Euclidian Elder Thing, Chris, is another year older and another year more madness-inducing. Last year, I opened Chris up to the wonderful world of Name, Image, Likeness Lawsuits that he could level at the Indie Games cottage industry.
This year, since I’ve spend an inordinate amount of time enjoying the Yu-Gi-Oh! Card Game, Duel Monsters, via the “Master Duel” mobile app, I’ve been exposed to tons of bizarre, Japanese monsters drawn from the imagination of the late, great Kazuki Takahashi… and let’s just say that Mr. Takahashi obviously had Chris on the Brain.
10. Big Belly Knight"Starting off this way seems a bit on the nose… but I couldn’t help myself."
9. Il Blud"We know Chris’ internal world is an undead hellscape full of horrors, and Il Blud does a good job of representing that. He also looks like Chris wearing Beetlejuice’s pajamas."
8. …
Review Round-Up: Winter 2024
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/02/25 at 01:28 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:
Once again, the entire MJ Crew was pretty much in the doldrums and didn’t do a whole lot of gaming over the gloomy Winter months. But at least I did get started on my Backlog Ablutions, clearing the shortest of my three titles and actually experiencing genuine JOY while gaming for the first time in a while.
“7 Days to Die” – 1.5/5
“Hogwarts Legacy” – 3.5/5
“TinyKin” – 4.5/5
Chris’ Reviews:
Chris also got started on his Backlog Ablutions, and has been playing “Assassin’s Creed Odyssey” fairly non-stop since the holiday break. Of course, he still has to make time for his day job, two evenings per week (provided Nick hasn’t caught the plague again), and Saturday afternoons for couch coop, so he still hasn’t finished it. But at least he did submit some overdue reviews for our enjoyment… though …
Backlog: The Embiggening – March, 2025
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/22/25 at 11:16 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Winter is officially “over,” but the weather didn’t get the memo. That leaves us with plenty of time to sit inside and play our backlogs instead of dealing with the cold and snow. Unfortunately, many of us aren’t exactly enamored of the giant pile of (mostly digital) games we’ve got stacked up, and are mostly looking forward to coop sessions more than anything else.
Will March come in like a lion, bringing some roaring new titles to get us fired-up and out of our doldrums? Or will it come in like a lamb… or rather a LAME, with more crap to ignore?
Keep your shovels at the ready, folks, because we’ve got some manure to move. In the Licensed Swill category, we’ve got an attempt at rebooting the ‘Carmen Sandiego’ Edutainment series with a new game called… “Carmen Sandiego.” There’s also “The First Berserker: Khazan,” based on the ‘Dungeon and Fighter’ IP, a new ‘Bleach’ game that I might …
Sony’s DRM Ecosystem Nightmare Strikes Again
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/16/25 at 02:41 AM CT
Well, PlayStation Network, a.k.a., PSN, went and had another major outage that lasted a couple days. Even worse, this most recent failure of their online infrastructure revealed that, far from the cheerleaders of “simple” and “reasonable” game-sharing and DRM features they pretended to be when the Xbox One was threatening potential customers with an always-online hellscape of DRM and disc-checks, Sony is actually just as bad as Microsoft intended to be.
It seems that plenty of folks went out and grabbed the sold-separately PS5 optical disc drive during the outage in order to play physical copies of their games, only to discover that the PS5 optical drive won’t work without phoning home to PSN first. This has, apparently, been a known issue for a year already, but with the flagging popularity and relevance of both physical media and PlayStation in general, it’s the type of thing that didn’t make a splash among any of the activist-driven James Gournalism outlets of the …
“Veilguard” Flops Hard, “It Wasn’t a Live Service,” Says EA CEO
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/09/25 at 03:35 PM CT
Yahtzee Crowshaw over at the Second Wind gaming YouTube channel coined a phrase – and is now selling t-shirts bearing it – that becomes increasingly relevant, year after year. “Let’s all laugh at an Industry that never learns anything. Tee, hee, hee!”
Our most recent bout of uneducatable Industrial Gaming pontificating comes from none other than Electronic Arts – the last stable member of the former Triumvirate of Evil Gaming Companies, with Activision now part of Microsoft and Ubisoft teetering on the brink – who once won Worst Company in America two years in a row. EA CEO Andy Wilson told investors that the reason the publisher’s latest sequel in the ‘Dragon Age’ franchise flopped so unbelievably hard was entirely due to the fact that the game didn’t have any ‘shared world’ features – which is code for ‘It wasn’t a Live Service.’
Talk about sheer ignorance! Andy needs to lose his job immediately, since he is willing to ignore the obvious …
Backlog: The Embiggening – February, 2025
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/02/25 at 02:26 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Big things are happening at MeltedJoystick, as we have recently inked an official partnership with the International Games Database, a.k.a., IGDB. As a result, you’ll be seeing a lot more cover-and-box art appearing on games in our database. Even better, Nick has expressed interest in finally revising the way the site handles multi-platform titles to make the database less cluttered and make new releases more discoverable.
In order to prepare for these upcoming changes, I’m going to revise the way I look at upcoming releases in a way I’ve been dreaming of for at least 8 years: I’m no longer going to mention ports, remakes, remasters, compilations, or other rehashes of old releases (unless circumstances warrant a rare exception). As a result, it will be much clearer just how little the Games Industry does each month.
Without further ado, let’s get to the shortened release docket for the shortest month of the …
10 Games to Get Excited About in 2025
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/25/25 at 04:19 PM CT
Welcome back to MeltedJoystick’s mostly-annual feature where we take a look at the most exciting titles slated to be released over the course of the coming year. While these titles frequently don’t come out when expected thanks to delays, when they do, they either horribly disappoint OR find their way into the MeltedJoystick Games of the Year list. Let’s take a look at the most promising titles coming in 2025!
1. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
“Clair Obscur” is titled after a French artistic term, not a woman’s name, as English speakers might assume. This game is a brand-new original IP – and inaugural effort – from France-based Sandfall Interactive, and is being published by the London-and-Singapore-based conglomerate of Indie developers known as Kepler Interactive. It could have extensive Euro-jank, but the developer’s stated goal is to provide a “high fidelity turn-based RPG,” a genre which they consider “neglected by AAA developers.” Well, I certainly …
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