Ubisoft Goes Crypto-Crazy
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/14/21 at 01:38 PM CT
I feel like I’ve been a really forgiving person, lately. While I never gave Ubisoft the time of day during their early years of crap development, or their middle years of crap development… or their latter day years of crap development, when the company started to produce actual high-quality products for the first time in its history, I was right there to hand out the solid review scores. Heck, I’m not even critical of Ubisoft’s alleged intra-corporation “rape” culture, because they’re French, and everything I know about the French, I learned from Pepe LePew.
No, Ubisoft has been on a solid roll lately, with two rollicking entries in their oldest-currently-running franchise, ‘Rayman,’ a nice art-house Indie-style RPG in “Child of Light,” a thought-provoking entry in their ‘Far Cry’ series, and transitioning ‘Assassin’s Creed’ from a banal “Da Vinci Code”-esque conspiracy simulator to a set of sprawling historical Sandboxes, it seemed like the …
Game Releases in a Perfect World
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/07/21 at 05:58 PM CT
Regular readers of my column, here, will no doubt have noticed a trend. At the end of every month, I look at the upcoming game releases scheduled for the next month, and in doing so, criticize the Games Industry for its crushing lack of creativity and interest. I also lambast low-effort titles as ‘shovelware’ and express my ever-increasing disenchantment with the trend of re-releases of old games on new hardware. So what, pray-tell, would the monthly game release schedule look like in my perfect world?
Well, first of all, there would be no platform lock-in or lock-down. Games would simply be games, much like how movies on optical media were simply movies on optical media. Everyone could make players for the format, but the format was (mostly, and disregarding foreign regional DRM) universal. Thus, outside of a few outliers like the original “Star Wars” trilogy, movie fans didn’t get subjected to seeing “new release” lists that contain nothing but old titles (unless, …
Backlog: The Embiggening – November, 2021
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/31/21 at 02:25 AM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Now that November is upon us, once again, it’s time to participate in the perpetual ritual of Games Industry Publishers pushing out gobs and gobs of licensed crap in the hopes of moving units as Holiday gifts, usually given by confused and bemused grandparents who might be vaguely familiar with the names of things Little Timmy and Little Susie like, and that the kiddos like videogames, so combining the two is a guaranteed successful gifting! Outside of that slat-splosion of watery effluent, we’ve got a ton of old stuff and late stuff that was supposed to come out a month or two (or three) ago, but didn’t. *SIGH* Let’s just get to the pre-mortem post-mortem.
We’ve got all three flavors of shovelware coming in November. First, there’s tons of licensed crap for the kiddies: Disney is bringing us “Disney Classic Games Collection” (I assume this’ll be ‘Vol. 1’), “Star Wars Racer & Commando Combo,” and “Star …
2021: The Year Stadia Died
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/24/21 at 02:57 PM CT
It’s official: Google, the search giant that embodies the very concept of “Big Data,” has decided to ‘pivot’ their ill-conceived Cloud gaming service into a ‘backend’ service for other corporations that think they can sell Cloud gaming to end-users more effectively than Google could. Stadia, Google’s Cloud gaming consumer offering, only launched in 2019 (a year in which it earned a coveted(?) spot on the MeltedJoystick List of Fails), and even after a year of pandemic lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, nobody wanted to use it, causing the service to drastically undershoot Google’s sales and usage projections.
And you know what that means! Time to pull the plug! Of course, with Google’s track record of unceremoniously discontinuing products and services that don’t meet astronomical and arbitrary metrics, end-users have become savvy to the whole issue, causing Stadia’s failure to be something of a self-fulfilling prophecy: Users didn’t believe Google would …
The 10 Worst IPs that Somehow Have More than 3 Games
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/17/21 at 04:21 PM CT
Back in 2018, I lamented the lack of sequels in a number of good game franchises that were cut-off before they really had a chance to get going. Surprisingly, over the past three years, we’ve actually gotten new games in two of these neglected series; specifically, the surprise 2021 release of the rebooted “ActRaiser Renaissance” and last year’s GotY contender, “Half-Life: Alyx.” But while The Industry seems to be trying to do better, far more often than not, terrible games will either find a toehold in either mainstream or niche appeal, and the corporate IP holder will flog their development slaves into churning out sequel after sequel of crap. Here’s a list of some of the worst offenders.
10. ‘Hyperdimension Neptunia’
Allegedly a satire on the games industry itself, ‘Nep-Nep’ seems to have taken the piss – then drank it – as the series continues to devolve into nothing more than super-softcore porn for Weebs. I mean, I can’t think of a single …
Nintendo: A Bad Joke Told Twice… Still Isn’t Funny.
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/10/21 at 03:00 PM CT
At the end of September 2021, Nintendo tried to be a uniter, rather than a divider, by revealing something so outrageous, so wantonly greedy, so lazy, and so stupid that every gamer should have been united in their disdain for it… Of course, Nintendo fanboys, as always, jumped to the corporation’s defense.
What was this egregious sin committed by the House of Mario? They revealed their plans to add emulation of Nintendo 64 and Sega Genesis games to their online subscription service.
Now, CLEARLY I hate both the N64 AND the Genesis, so I’m OBVIOUSLY too biased to hold a legitimate opinion. Isn’t that right, Comments Section?
Yeah, no, this goes beyond what I personally like or dislike, since Nintendo isn’t simply adding these terrible consoles’ games to the existing subscription – perhaps giving it some minor semblance of ‘value’ in the process. Instead, Nintendo will be creating a new subscription tier, currently just dubbed “Plus Expansion,” that will …
Capcom: “PC Will Be Our Main Platform”
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/03/21 at 02:12 PM CT
The long, slow death of traditional console gaming has entered yet another phase, with Capcom’s declaration to Japanese media site, Nikkei, which later filtered to us in the west through Bloomberg and PC Gamer Magazine. Apparently, the one-time titan of console gaming wants to shift its focus and divide its sales neatly in half between PC gaming and console gaming by 2023.
This wouldn’t really be newsworthy if it weren’t for the decades-long reputation of Japanese videogame companies like Capcom as fixtures of the console space, rarely, if ever crossing over to sell (terrible) PC versions of console games. Of course, Capcom isn’t really the ‘first’ to get onboard with the idea of PC gaming being the future of the medium, as Konami, Square-Enix, Namco-Bandai, and Sega – all big names from console gaming’s past – have been quietly peddling their wares on Steam (and other PC storefronts) for a few years now. It’s just that Capcom is the first to really make a big …
Backlog: The Embiggening – October, 2021
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/26/21 at 03:50 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! The deluge of the Autumn Games Flood is showing no signs of letting up, and has, in fact, gotten worse. The gaming community is now analogous to those doughty hurricane survivors of the Gulf Coast who refuse to abandon their land, even though it has been reduced to an inundated, toxic cesspit. Let’s start seining through those turds, again, to see if there’s anything worth salvaging.
The shovelware count from last month has nearly doubled, with a whopping 17 titles falling into one of the three major categories of ‘Crap.’” First, we’ve got a plethora of licensed games, including “PJ Masks: Heroes of the Night” and “My Friend Peppa Pig” for the pre-school crowd, “Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl,” “Blaze and the Monster Machines: Axle City Racers,” “Star Wars: Jedi Knight Collection,” “LEGO Marvel Superheroes,” “Guardians of the Galaxy,” and “Jumanji: The Videogame” for the juvenile crowd, …
5 Licensed Games I’d Actually Like to See
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/19/21 at 07:14 PM CT
I give officially licensed tie-in games a lot of grief, most notably when I call them out in the “shovelware” category at the beginning of each of my monthly ‘Backlog: The Embiggening’ articles. However, just because a game is based on an existing IP doesn’t necessarily mean that it absolutely has to be irredeemable garbage. It’s just a good indication that it will be. Indeed, there are several un-mined veins of licensed IPs and videogame genres that have not actually been slammed together by corporate suits and focus groups, which might actually be good if someone bothered to but 2 and 2 together.
5. GorkaMorka + Direct Conversion
“GorkaMorka” is an obscure tabletop skirmish game developed by Games Workshop (of ‘Warhammer’ fame), and supported for a couple of years before the company got bored and abandoned it, as is their wont. I was never into Warhammer 40K, as I much preferred the Fantasy setting to Sci-Fi at the time I was most invested in tabletop …
Tokyo RPG Factory… Sucks.
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/12/21 at 03:21 PM CT
Time flies, it seems, even when we aren’t having fun. It feels like just yesterday when I was so excited about the news filtering through the 2015 Blog-o-Sphere that Square-Enix, the one-time RPG titan of console gaming turned “complete failure,” was opening a new development studio called Tokyo RPG Factory. Somehow, the megaconglomerate of Square-Enix forgot that its two halves had both made their entire reputations by producing (and localizing) extremely high-quality 16-bit RPGs, and had turned to copying ideas from Western game developers (or just buying Western game developers). When an RPG did appear from within the bowels of the merged Square-Enix, it was usually something extremely terrible, like “Final Fantasy 13” or… “Final Fantasy 15.” Thus, when the news broke that Square-Enix was going to renew focus on their defining genre, it was such momentous news that it made the MeltedJoystick Year in Review list of Wins.
The first fruit of Tokyo RPG Factory’s …
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