Backlog: The Embiggening – September, 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/25/19 at 03:57 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Just in time for the darling little School Shooters to be back in their happy hunting grounds, the videogame industry opens its floodgates and releases a glut of games, which perhaps would have done better in sales if they were released during a time in which the target audience is home all day and perpetually bored. But, alas, as a corporatized industry, gaming is, as ever, slow to change, leaving us with a predictable cycle year after year.
The floodgates have opened, ladies and gentlemen, so man the shovels… actually, it’s not THAT bad for September, as the shovel-ready crap didn’t quite manage to make it to double-digits. There’s “Star Wars Pinball” attempting to cash in on the mobile/console crossover audience, a new VR game based on “The Angry Birds Movie 2” for those with lots of money and no sense (or taste), a Switch (natch) port of “LEGO Jurassic World,” and a ‘Definitive’ compilation of the late …
The 10 “Modern” 2D Games with the Most Striking Visuals
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/18/19 at 04:07 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 movement burst onto the scene with the not-particularly-revelatory declaration that older styles of gameplay and game presentation were still viable and still had an audience.
Since that time, 2D games have come roaring back onto the scene. Unfortunately, in far too many cases, the 2D visuals are mere nostalgia bait, featuring chunky, lo-fi pixel art intended to stoke feelings of warm, fuzzy childhood memories in the withered black hearts of Generation X. While pixel art can be beautiful and eye-catching in its own right, there is no reason for modern developers to limit their 2D assets …
GOG Galaxy 2.0: A Step in a Direction
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/11/19 at 04:28 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 retain access to all of the content they want and to maintain a convenient library of content they’ve already purchased.
During this discussion, Matt mentioned a service called MoviesAnywhere, which allows heavy purchasers of digital movies to corral all of their licenses together in one place, and lamented that there wasn’t a similar service for digital videogames.
I had never heard of MoviesAnywhere, largely because I never buy digital movies. If I’m going to watch a movie, I’ll either rent it on physical media, see it in the theatre, stream it, buy it on physical media and “format shift” it (read: rip it from the disc to a digital file) …
Hello… Gamers?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/04/19 at 03:16 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 ended up sucking the short end of the tailpipe.
Perhaps both the local news and I were a bit premature in eulogizing Eastern Nebraska’s and Western Iowa’s primary alternative to GameStop, as this week, one location in Omaha and one location in Lincoln have re-opened, under new management. According to the Gamers website’s About section, the new owner, David Mitchell, was able to obtain all of the late business’s trademarks and reopen a couple of locations.
While this is good news for locals who enjoy the buying and selling of physical games media and hardware, I fear that the new owner may not truly understand why the business he just bought failed in …
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