Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/18/19 at 09:07 PM CT

For a good long while, there, it looked like 2D games were going to disappear from the world. For roughly a decade between 1996 and 2006, 3D games were all there was, ranging in quality from “crude” to “fairly impressive, actually.” However, with the advent of the 7th Generation, just when the push for ever-more-realistic brown-and-gray 3D environments seemed irresistible, the Indie games...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/11/19 at 09:28 PM CT

Back at the beginning of Summer 2019, erstwhile MeltedJoystick photo/video-grapher, Matt, despaired to me about digital gaming’s lack of a unifying interface. With the fracturing of one-time monoliths like Steam and Netflix within the digital media market, it is becoming increasingly annoying and expensive for customers to reta...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/04/19 at 08:16 PM CT

Ten months ago, I discussed a report on the local news which revealed that MeltedJoystick’s regional Friendly Local Game Store, Gamers, had gone bankrupt and had its assets liquidated in order to pay its debts, with no forewarning for customers or employees. Anyone with unspent store credit or wages waiting to be paid end...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/28/19 at 08:45 PM CT

Welcome back to another look into the near future! As August – a month saturated with witchcraft, in which we celebrate the birthday of the best, least-biased game reviewer on the Internet on Lammas Sabbath – rolls in, we bid a fond farewell to Summer, even though it’s still too hot to do anything but sit inside and play videogames. Sad t...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/21/19 at 09:16 PM CT

On July 12th, a very interesting thing appeared on Steam. RetroArch, the official frontend for the Libretro emulation API, is coming to PC gaming’s oldest and biggest digital distribution platform on July 30th. For FREE.

RetroArch...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/14/19 at 09:01 PM CT

During E3 2017, Atari (delenda est), one of the first-and-worst game console manufacturers, announced that they were coming back from obscurity with a new hardware device. All of 2018 rolled by without a whisper about the so-called “AtariBox,...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/07/19 at 09:32 PM CT

When Google revealed their soon-to-launch Stadia game-streaming platform earlier this year (and pushed a video about it at E3), the world said, “Meh.” With Google’s business model from yesteryear, where users buy individual games exclusively for play on Stadia; combined with smolderin...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/01/19 at 05:28 AM CT

Welcome back to another look into the near future! With July comes the traditional Summer Game Drought. Just when all the cute, little kiddies thought they’d have all the time in the world to veg-out with some mindless fragging and forget everything they learned the previous year in school, the game publishers always shut off the flow valve, dropping the deluge of game releases down to a trickl...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/23/19 at 09:15 PM CT

The Dungeons & Dragons videogame license has long been a coveted property for the creators of computerized role-playing games on any platform capable of playing videogames. Back in the halcyon days of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, the D&D license was firmly in the hands of SSI – Strategic Simulations, In...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/16/19 at 05:21 PM CT

Going into E3 this year, my hopes were higher than at any point in recent memory, thanks in large part to the pre-E3 reveals of a number of exciting titles that I actually care about. These games, which I wanted to see more of at E3, include, but are not limited to, “Baldur’s Gate 3” and “Borderlands 3,” as well as a number of older announcements like “The Outer Worlds” and “Cyber...