Backlog: The Embiggening – September, 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/30/20 at 04:10 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future… or is it the past? With the never-ending, never-slowing torrent of old games – be they successes or flops – being flogged as ‘new,’ it’s getting harder and harder to tell. And with our days filled with pandemic saminess and nothing but bad news on TV and in the (digital) ‘papers,’ putting up with the continuous stream of nonsense coming out of the Games Industry is almost too much to bear. Almost… batten down the hatches, folks, because we’ve got a flood of excrement incoming!
Last month was pretty bad for shovelware, but this month is only a slight reprieve. We’ve got licensed swill in the form of a ‘Trollhunters’ game based on the Netflix CG animated show and a licensed Marvel Comics Live Service MMO-thing made by… Square-Enix… well, not really by Square or Enix, but by one of the half-dead Western dev studios they’ve purchased. While I was willing to give “Marvel’s Avengers” the benefit of …
Many Hands, Light Work: Why isn’t This Standard in Videogames?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/23/20 at 04:04 PM CT
The MeltedJoystick Crew absolutely loooooves our cooperative gaming. We’ve played pretty much every coop game for 3-4 people that doesn’t advertise itself as complete, irredeemable trash (and a few that do *coughSpelunkycough*), but we frequently run unto situations where a given coop game is actually more fun as a solo experience due to bizarre development choices that actually make the overall experience much more difficult with more people.
The old adage goes, “Many Hands Make Light Work,” meaning that when a group of people all get together and cooperatively focus on the same objective, accomplishing said objective becomes much easier than when a single person tries to take it on by themselves. Unfortunately, there is an awkward obsession in the world of videogames to actually make things harder when there are more players involved.
Exhibit A: The ‘Borderlands’ series. In the genre-defining Looter Shooter, a solo player will face off against relatively sane …
Electronic Arts Shareholders Fire Shots in the Class Wars
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/16/20 at 04:27 PM CT
Thanks to my good fortune of being part of a successful family business, my Uncle Scrooge levels of frugality, and through my well-reasoned, non-bandwagoning, non-sleazy investments in the United States’ Stock Market, I own just shy of $800,000 worth of “value” in the corrupt corporate American economy. Of course, as a shareholder, I am frequently given the opportunity to “vote my shares” on a variety of issues. These issues, sadly, almost always boil down to three:
1) Should we keep the Directors of the Board?
2) Should we ratify Deloitte and Touche (or some other equally enormous and suspect accounting firm) to be the company’s CPA for the year?
3) Should we pass this executive compensation package?
Then, at the end of the shareholder ballot, there are occasionally a few shareholder proposals (that is, proposals written and submitted by private individuals who own company stock, not by the company’s executive apparatus) couched in a legalese framework …
Could Microsoft Lead the Way to a Subscription-Free Future for Consoles?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/09/20 at 03:27 PM CT
There have been a few rumblings lately in the land of Xbox that point, ever so vaguely, toward the possibility of Xbox Live Gold going away. This is an exciting rumor since it was Microsoft who started the trend of consoles begging for loose change every month way back in November 2002, a year after the launch of the OG Xbox.
Rumormongers leaked information about the multi-player modes in the upcoming Xbox tentpole, “Halo Infinite,” being Free2Play, and Microsoft confirmed the leaked information as true. Meanwhile, other astute observers have noticed that Xbox Live Gold subscriptions are no longer available for purchase in large lump quantities, though it is still possible to roll an existing Gold subscription into Microsoft’s new Gamepass subscription. Microsoft also confirmed that this was intentional.
Combined, these changes from Microsoft all seem to indicate that the non-gaming company that started the vile trend that ultimately saddled all console gamers with …
Backlog: The Embiggening – August, 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/01/20 at 03:12 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future. Unhappy birthday to me! Not only is the world still in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic, 6 months after it began, but even worse, the Videogames Industry is still up to its old tricks and releasing mostly irredeemable crap. Though, I suppose we, as gamers, should be grateful that the Industry is deigning to release anything at all in the grip of both a pandemic and the annual Summer Game Drought… though this year’s particular drought hasn’t felt particularly dry, much like an overfull diaper.
Get your shovels ready, folks, as there is a lot of poop to scoop this month. Licensed, annualized, and ultra-casual junk is back in full-force in August, with an outrageous 12 titles, leading me to believe that developers who haven’t been able to get plastered in the bars or go on vacation have spent their Summer “productively,” working on these shovel-ready projects. We’ve got a whopping 4 annualized Sports releases including …
View Archive
