Year in Review: 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/15/19 at 04:15 PM CT
Another year has come and gone, and through it all, the MeltedJoystick crew has been watching. Always watching… Once again, it’s time to take a look back at the year and praise the 5 biggest Wins for the gaming community while simultaneously *facepalming* over the 5 biggest Fails.
Top 5 Fails
5. Japan Bans Console Modding
Just when our friends in the Land of the Rising Sun thought they owned the gaming hardware they bought and were free to do with it as they pleased, Japan’s government decided to crack down on hardware modding, making the practice fully illegal. We know this is all just copyright police nonsense and really has nothing to do with “security” or any other buzzwords multinational corporations like to throw out when they do something unpopular (or coerce governments to do it for them). Maybe Japan should be more worried about the Nuke-Testing Triple-Chinned Haircut on the other side of the Sea of Japan if “security” is so high on their minds? Worst …
MeltedJoystick Games of the Year 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/07/19 at 03:50 PM CT
2019 was a challenging year. So many of the “hot, new releases” turned out to be “old things being ported to new platforms,” to the point where, if you pruned all the ports, remasters, and compilations out of the annual release summary, you really wouldn’t have much.
It was also a rough year for exclusives, with little in the way of Game of the Year material hitting any lone console… except for Epic Games. The new Epic Games Store managed to secure exclusive distribution rights for the PC versions of nearly every outstanding multi-platform release in its first year, pissing off hordes of Steam and GOG users in the process.
RPG fans, though, had it roughest of all, with all of the major GotY contender releases being pushed back to 2020, leaving us, like a flock of ducks (or perhaps Untitled Geese) to filter befouled water through our bills in the desperate hope of seining out a nugget of partially-digested corn. Conversely, fans of quality, single-player …
Review Round-Up: Fall 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/01/19 at 03:02 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 admit, I cheated a little, as two of these reviews are for coop games that I finished on my own. But I was completely fed-up with people canceling, postponing, and showing up late all the time, so I capped them off this week since we were literally one boss battle away from the end in both “Divinity: Original Sin 2” and “Sundered.”
Because we were playing “Divinity: Original Sin 2” as a group for sooooooo long, and I wanted to play a single-player RPG from my own backlog, I was pretty much forced to pick something from the Dungeon Crawler subgenre. I decided on the ancient ‘Lands of Lore’ series from GOG… which was a mistake. I didn’t manage to get the taste out of my mouth until I played a modern Indie effort in the same subgenre.
Suffice to say, I didn’t have a particularly enjoyable quarter. Let’s …
Backlog: The Embiggening – December, 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/24/19 at 02:49 PM CT
December is upon us, as the Twenty-Teens prepare to give way to the Boring ‘20s. Shockingly, Publishers seem to have caught on – finally – that releasing games late in December is an exercise in futility. The result is a month with few releases, but all of them crammed in the first 10 days or so. It doesn’t really matter, though, as the continued dominance of ports means there’s not much to get excited about, regardless.
We can mostly lean on our shovels like Department of Roads employees, as there are only two pieces of trash-disguised-as-games releasing in December, and both fall into the super-casual non-game variety. We’ve got “Avicii Invector,” a Rhythm game based on some Electronic Dance Music DJ’s portfolio of ‘work;’ and “Waku Waku Sweets,” a spiritual successor to the ‘Cooking Mama’ series of motion-controlled Home Economics simulators.
In spite of the lack of releases overall coming in December, we’ve still got 5 ports, remasters, …
“Received Knowledge” and Criticism
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/17/19 at 04:29 PM CT
Recently, I read a videogame review on another site and dared to delve into the dark underbelly that is the typical Internet comment section. Actually, I read comment sections with regularity, as they are a great way to keep in touch with the zeitgeist of the Mob at any given point in time. However, in this particular instance, I actually learned something new. No, I didn’t actually learn it directly from an Internet comment section remark, but the comment spurred me to do some online research, which yielded results both from the expected Well of All Knowledge that is Wikipedia as well as some American universities.
The topic at hand was how we know game criticism is good, and the comment that spurred me on my latest quest for knowledge spoke directly to my own prejudices by pointing out that people today just accept the established view that certain pieces of media are “good” without applying any critical thinking of their own – such as the fact that Shakespeare is …
China Being China
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/10/19 at 03:20 PM CT
This week, news broke that China will be implementing strict new regulations on videogame playing for minors. These regulations include a 90 minute/day gaming quota on schooldays, an online gaming curfew of 10:00PM every night, and a micro/macro-transaction budget of $57USD equivalent/month, as relayed by the New York Times. Allegedly, the Chinese government is worried about an uptick in so-called game addiction and an epidemic of nearsightedness amongst its younger citizens, while at least some older Chinese citizens have kibitzed that videogaming is drawing young people away from sports, and that China should focus on building more stadiums. Clearly these thoughts are the products of fevered minds that somehow think that playing sportsball is less of a waste of time than playing videogames (likely out of an archaic belief that dominating at the Olympic games actually means anything), and are willing to deny the fact that being Han Chinese causes nearsightedness.
However, strict …
Reports of Kotaku’s Demise are (Unfortunately) Greatly Exaggerated
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/03/19 at 02:54 PM CT
This week, all gamers who place themselves further Right on the socio-political spectrum than ‘Woke Black Gay Trans-Woman’ were treated to a string of rumors and speculation that Kotaku, the formerly-Gawker Media-owned, formerly beating-heart of online games journalism, recently fringe-Left-wing propaganda mill, was in the midst of crisis, with staff being fired or quitting in solidarity in the wake of Word-of-God decisions handed-down by the site’s new holding company owner, G/O Media. Unfortunately, those rumors were mostly driven by Tweet-divination and wholly false.
The whole thing started earlier this week with Deputy Editor, Barry Petchesky, being fired by the overlords at G/O Media for not sticking to the subject matter of his journalism blog. Petchesky didn’t work for Kotaku, though, but its sister site, Deadspin, which is to sportsball as Kotaku is to gaming. G/O allegedly told the head of Deadspin to “stick to sports,” rather than focus on political …
Backlog: The Embiggening – November, 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/27/19 at 04:31 PM CT
Alas, in this world of corporate corruption where our government by-and-for the People is railed against by our own politicians, who inform us that “private” ownership puts things in the hands of the people, whereas “public” ownership puts things in the hands of some evil, bureaucratic entity (when, in reality, that’s the exact opposite of the Truth), it’s no surprise that November is known primarily for the phenomenon of Black Friday, rather than the day that comes before it. Indeed, there is often so little to be thankful for…
But this year, Black Friday is destined to be a non-entity, as the corporate retail machinery started to panic-grind into high gear a month earlier, moving the official start of the Winter Holiday Shopping Season to mid-October. What’s next? I’ll be getting X-mas gifts for my birthday in August?
Much like the Spice in the world of ‘Dune,’ the shovelware must flow. And flow it will in November. There are no unnecessary annual …
Fear and Loathing
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/20/19 at 04:31 PM CT
With Halloween – the Druidic celebration co-opted by both the Catholic Church and American Consumerism over the centuries – just around the corner, it’s impossible to step into any public space without seeing its festive trappings everywhere, as people revel in the indulgence of the supernatural, even as increasingly few Westerners believe in any of it. For those who regularly follow the blog here at MeltedJoystick, it should come as no surprise that I am quite dismissive of Survival Horror videogames, and, indeed, the entire Genre (with a big “G”) of Horror in general. This stance puts me strongly at odds with my brother-from-another-mother-(and-father), Chris, who obsessively loves Horror and has since we were elementary school kids.
I struggle to understand the idea of “scary = fun,” as I spent far too much of my childhood in abject terror, and it was decidedly NOT fun. As a kid, I fully believed in the supernatural and paranormal – not just at Halloween, but …
Can Anyone Legitimize Mobile Gaming?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/13/19 at 03:08 PM CT
Mobile gaming is a massive, multi-billion dollar industry, yet it has been a plague upon the world since its very inception. While a few Japanese developers, like my once-beloved Square-Enix, tried to migrate traditional gaming to the mobile space of feature phones via cheap episodic titles like “Final Fantasy 4: The After Years,” which originally released in February 2008, it wasn’t until the iPhone App Store and Google Play (formerly known as the Android Market) came blazing onto the scene later that same year that the modern concepts of the smart phone and the app were truly born.
In spite of the huge amount of money mobile gaming generates, it is well-known among Core Gamers as a hive of scum and villainy. Mobile versions of beloved IPs like ‘Diablo’ are met with heckling and derision. We’ve caught onto the fact that mobile games are shallow imitations of the ‘real’ games we care about, with cynical monetization tacked on. Hell, even non-game software, like …
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