Review Round-Up: Winter 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/28/21 at 03:54 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:
King Richard the Third was right: NOW is the Winter of our discontent (or discount tent, as the great Canadian wordsmith, Red Green, put it). While it may seem that all the numbers on my keyboard are broken except the ‘3,’ that’s not actually the case. It just so happens that my run of encounters with mediocre games has continued nearly unbroken for two entire seasons. This is becoming… aggravating. At least I got off to a good start with my Backlog Ablutions for 2021, clearing out 2/3 of them before even reaching Spring.
“Stardew Valley” – 3/5
“A Total War Saga: Troy” – 3/5
“Final Fantasy 14” – 2/5
“Indivisible” – 3/5
“Knightin’+” – 3.5/5
“Mass Effect” – 2.5/5
“Mass Effect 2” – 3.5/5
“Mass Effect 3” – 3.5/5
Chris’ Reviews:
THE Disgruntled Dwarf did not …
Backlog: The Embiggening – March, 2021
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/21/21 at 05:17 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Corporations are people too! And just like all the rest of us, they ring in the (Fiscal) New Year in March! That goes a long way toward explaining the traditional influx of garbage from the Games Industry as “we” (read: “they”) turn the ledger page to another year.
We’ve got a lot of shovelware coming in March, and the publishers are trying to disguise some of it. But I’ve been watching the release slates for too long, and I’m going to call a Spade a Spade. Square Enix is porting their (critical failure) “Marvel Avengers” Live Service to the Xbox SeX, perhaps in an attempt to get some of that sweet, sweet (hypothetical) Gamepass money. There are plenty of officially-licenced games about watching vehicles go “vroom!” in “WRC 9,” “Monster Energy Supercross 4,” and “Monster Jam: Steel Titans 2,” but there’s also a no-name knock-off of monster truck… racing? game called “Monster Truck …
Visionary Valve, Myopic Multitudes
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/14/21 at 03:26 PM CT
Valve, the parent company of the PC digital distribution service Steam, is still a privately-owned corporation, beholden not to the demands of shareholders, but to the whims of its visionary Big Boss, Gabe Newell, colloquially known to Steam fans as ‘Lord GabeN.’ Back when Steam launched in 2003, PC gaming was on its last legs, utterly unable to compete with consoles like the PlayStation 2 and Gamecube, with a number of PC-centric Western developers jumping on-board Microsoft’s PC-like Xbox for their biggest projects of the time.
But Valve ultimately proved that PC gaming wasn’t, in fact, dead, but suffering from numerous logistics issues, which Steam went a long way toward solving. While it got off to a bit of a slow start, before it was a decade old, “Steam” had become as synonymous with “PC gaming” as “Nintendo” had been synonymous with “console gaming” throughout the 1980s.
Steam, however, wasn’t GabeN’s only bright idea, and Valve has continued …
Default Controls
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/07/21 at 04:12 PM CT
Way back in the 1980s, those who were on the cutting edge of technology, and who had a huge amount of discretionary income, were playing games on the prototypical systems – things like Amiga, Commodore, Atari (delenda est) and even incredibly early versions of DOS – that would eventually evolve into PC gaming as we know it today.
However, PC gaming as we know it has been greatly influenced by the dedicated, single-purpose game machines known as consoles, as these two branches of the same technological family tree have evolved side-by-side over the decades. Prior to the influence of single-function, ‘appliance-like’ game machines in the form of arcade cabinets and home consoles, gamers were content to interact with their games using the default control devices that came in the box: Keyboards. And while mice would eventually be added to the stable of default PC gaming control devices, it was something of a long-fraught ideological war, with hardcore typists insisting that …
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