Backlog: The Embiggening – November, 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/30/22 at 04:46 PM CT
Welcome back, once again, to another look into the near future! November is upon us, and as the month when Americans are supposed to set aside time to think about all the things we’re thankful for in our lives, I can’t help but think that I’m NOT thankful for all these terrible monthly release schedules crammed with crap. Of course, gratitude isn’t the real thing the market has on its hive mind, but the rapidly-approaching advent of the Winter Black Ink-on-the-Ledger (as if anyone still uses those, or changes the color of their Excel font) holidays, starting with November’s own Black Friday, and continuing in an orgy of profit mongering all the way until the end of the Fiscal Year in March. Yeah, after two downer years thanks to COVID and ‘successive economic contractions’ marking a ‘recession,’ Games Industry players are desperate to push products out the door and trade them for buyers’ increasingly-devalued currency.
Oh, my EFFing head… we need to hire …
How Has Square-Enix NOT Screwed-Up ‘Dragon Quest’?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/23/22 at 03:17 PM CT
Recently, I started playing the latest “new” spinoff release (from 2018) in the long-running and highly-respected ‘Dragon Quest’ franchise, while also anticipating this year’s upcoming release of “Dragon Quest Treasures,” and I found myself wondering: “How is it that the ‘Dragon Quest’ series has remained steadfastly good, with only a few exceptions, over the course of 35+ years?”
While it is true that when it started in 1986, with a trilogy of 8-bit NES titles that featured grinding, tedium, and more grinding, ‘Dragon Quest’ was, like every game of the era, a bit ‘basic.’ Furthermore, in the era of localization instead of translation, Enix of America took great pains to knock all the ‘funny’ out of ‘Dragon Quest’ and turn it into a ‘serious’ RPG that would compete directly with PC-centric releases like the ‘Ultima’ series. However, the 8-bit era wasn’t a time for creating masterpieces, it was a time for laying foundations and …
Valve Steam Deck Ad Gives Nintendo Fanboys Aneurisms
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/16/22 at 03:19 PM CT
Ever since Valve launched the Steam Deck, Nintendo fanboys have been squealing and squirming at the prospect of a portable PC with a huge back catalog of games and FREE online dragging attention away from the Nintendo Switch, which they love to worship as the first handheld/console hybrid device, in spite of the fact that it is NOT. Recently, one Patreon Panhandler on Twitter (which recent Pew data revealed to be nothing but an echo chamber where 3% of the users generate 90% of the content) noticed that, in Valve’s official Steam Deck advertisement, the logo for the excellent Yuzu Nintendo Switch emulator appears on the Steam Deck launcher menu. Naturally, this Tweet was picked up by NintendoLife and turned into a story, which has its own share of delusional fanboyism going on in the comments section.
Unfortunately, Yuzu isn’t available for download on Steam. However, there is a Linux version available, which can be downloaded and installed quite easily on a Steam Deck, since …
Mario Goes Back to the Movies. Will It Be Any Better This Time?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/09/22 at 03:43 PM CT
This week, the world got its first look at Nintendo’s and Illumination’s upcoming “The Super Mario Bros. Movie.” Now, with a stellar and original title like that, no one should have any doubts that this new film will be better than the 1993 disaster, “Super Mario Bros.,” a live action mess starring a number of big names that completely missed the mark, even as a wildly imaginative ‘adaptation’ of Nintendo’s flagship IP.
We’ve been hearing speculation and fake news for a while now about how Chris Pratt, better known for his roles in the ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ and ‘Jurassic World’ movies, where he always sounds like… Chris Pratt, wouldn’t be up to the task of inhabiting the titular role of Mario, and the few lines of Pratt’s dialog in the trailer are… inconclusive.
The question of Mario’s voice is a rabbit hole of inconsistencies. Early on in the history of the ‘Super Mario’ IP, Nintendo collaborated with both Korean animation …
Games I Wish Microsoft Studios Were Working On (But They Aren’t)
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/02/22 at 03:42 PM CT
Microsoft has been on a buying spree of videogame development studios since at least 2018, when they spent time at E3 touting their enhanced ability to produce great first-party games through the acquisition of new studios. I personally didn’t feel particularly excited about these earlier acquisitions, as the studios in question were never on my radar to begin with. However, when Microsoft reassembled the scattered remnants of Interplay under one roof again and bought-out Tim Schafer’s Double-Fine Productions, I started to care, because those studios actually made games I have enjoyed – or at least attempted to enjoy – in the past.
In 2020, when most of the world was laser-focused on the COVID-19 pandemic, Microsoft was ramping up the scale of its studio acquisitions, purchasing the videogame holding company, Zenimax Media, almost exclusively for access to Bethesda Softworks and id Software – the “Skyrim” and “DOOM” people. Now, in late 2022, Microsoft is mere …
Backlog: The Embiggening – October, 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/24/22 at 03:07 PM CT
As Fall wears on, we find ourselves, once again, right smack in the middle of Harvest Season, with the looming threat of ghoulish horror and Type 2 Diabetes waiting for us at the end of October. With the Summer Game Drought far behind us, we’re getting a second month in a row absolutely crammed with releases… and shockingly a second month in a row with more than one game I’d actually consider buying!
Ladies and gentlemen, get your shovels polished, sharpened, and ready to go, as there is a LOT of direct-to-dumpster gaming coming in October, representing all three major shovelware categories. First up, in the Licensed Swill category we’ve got a whole range of horrors. Least offensively, consoles are getting a physical release of the ‘TMNT’ game, “Shredder’s Revenge,” which is, by all accounts, one of the best licensed games released recently/ever. There are plenty of other rut-worn IPs getting new games, including ‘Batman’ with “Gotham Knights,” “Dragon …
Sony Takes a Dump on Backward Compatibility Yet Again
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/18/22 at 05:22 PM CT
Sony, once a champion of Backward Compatibility (BC) between then-current-gen PlayStation consoles and its predecessors, has been bending over backwards in recent decades to remove any and all such benefits from their ecosystems. Naturally, this happens because Sony loves to remaster (and re-remaster) old games in order to sell them again at full price, instead of allowing people who already bought licenses to first-party PlayStation games to play them across the entire hardware ecosystem. Sony isn’t the first outfit to change from a pro-BC position to an anti-BC position, as Nintendo previously went down that route with both consoles and handhelds, but in the present has come down on the side of making customers re-purchase games if they want the privilege of playing them on the company’s current hardware. Of course, Nintendo’s situation is slightly different from Sony’s, as Nintendo has continued to fool around with proprietary and generationally-different storage media for …
Upcoming DragonLance Worst Case Scenarios
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/11/22 at 04:50 PM CT
As I made clear in my review of the latest volume in the long-running and much-abused DragonLance series of Dungeons & Dragons-based novels, the setting hasn’t been in such a tenuous state since 1996, with the release of the novel, “Dragons of Summer Flame,” and the accompanying DragonLance 5th Age Boxed Set, which introduced the much-maligned SAGA System. While it is still unclear if Wizards of the Coast and their new commitment to Wokeness is behind the tonal shift in “Dragons of Deceit” or if Weis and Hickman have simply decided to shove real-world politics into their iconic Fantasy series for their own reasons (which could get even more bizarre, since Tracy Hickman is a lifelong Mormon), the time-traveling plot and the overall glorification of a boring character who is an overwhelming Mary-Sue and Strong Woman of Color leaves the door open for all sorts of terrible things to happen to the series at a foundational level.
Based on my impressions of the first volume in …
Review Round-Up: Summer 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/03/22 at 10:51 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:
I had a pretty mediocre gaming quarter, and I actually spent quite a bit of time in August, specifically, doing things other than videogaming, since the mediocrity was so overwhelming. I painted my Bunkers & Badasses miniatures, I read a new DragonLance novel, and spent quite a bit of time poring over some new tabletop RPG rulebooks I’ve purchased. But there was videogaming in there, too. And it was mostly BLAH. I got into an ‘ActRaiser’ groove, and found that none of the new efforts can really match the original. Everything else I played was likewise disappointing.
“Earthlock” – 2.5/5
“Override: Mech City Brawl” – 3/5
“SolSeraph” – 3/5
“ActRaiser” – 4.5/5
“ActRaiser Renaissance” – 4/5
“The Outer Worlds” – 3.5/5
Chris’ Ennui:
THE Disgruntled Dwarf still has way too many irons in …
Backlog: The Embiggening – September, 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/27/22 at 05:43 PM CT
Well, Summer’s officially over. Naturally, the Games Industry, which seems incapable of learning anything from its mistakes, is continuing the tradition of christening the start of the new school year – during which most of their customers suddenly go from having TONS of free time to play new videogames, to have NO time – with an absolutely gigantic release schedule packed so full of titles that the tabs for them scroll waaaaay off the edge of my browser window. With this many games packed into one month, there’s GOT to be something that’ll catch my eye, as it glimmers within the steaming cesspool of… everything else.
We’ve got a wide variety of shovelware coming in September, and some of it might actually sell! In licensed swill, we’ve got a new LEGO game – a casual brawler this time, because, apparently, WB’s release of (and success with) “Multiversus” finally woke everyone else up to the fact that ripping off ‘Smash Bros.’ is easy money… provided …
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