Of MMOs and Glazed Donuts
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/04/15 at 02:22 PM CT
Since I started writing for MeltedJoystick, I have done something I never thought I would do. I did not do this uncharacteristic thing once, but twice. What is this strange, alien, Lovecraftian affront to reason that I did? I played – and enjoyed – a Massively Multi-Player Online game.
When MMOs were first a thing, they were universally MMORPGs. And these MMORPGs took one aspect traditionally found in RPGs – grinding – and made it the entire purpose of the game. Early MMOs like “Everquest” weren’t too keen on telling a story or presenting a unique and engaging set of gameplay mechanics. No, they were intent on getting people to pay a monthly fee and then forcing everything in-game to take an unreasonably long amount of time in order to string subscribers players along for many, many months. These early MMORPGs were the games we still see stereotyped in other media when ‘normal’ characters talk about dysfunctional characters with online gaming addictions – …
H.A.R.D. is a 4-Letter Word
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/27/15 at 02:51 PM CT
Increasingly, I have noticed that when I climb down from my Ivory Tower to walk unseen amongst the unwashed gaming masses that there seems to be a building resentment toward “Easy” games. I don’t understand where these feelings came from, as someone who began gaming in the 8-bit 3rd Generation. I was desperate for some easier games back then, and barely played much of anything until the 4th Gen came along and the SNES provided a lessening of the cheapest, most masochistic elements from its predecessor’s games. I wouldn’t call the SNES’ games “Easy” – instead I would use glorifying terms such as “Balanced” or “Playable” (though there were still exceptions… like the abomination known as “Plok”).
Yet now that we are neck-deep in the 8th Generation, after suffering through a fairly dismal 7th Generation, “Easy” is being used as a slur against games in much the same way the letter “J” has been added to certain RPGs to designate them as inferior. …
<i>Quis spectat ipsos spectantes?</i> Jimmy Kimmel and the Art of Game Watching.
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/20/15 at 03:35 PM CT
Early this month, late night talk show host and former “The Man Show” buffoon, Jimmy Kimmel, ignited the billowing fumes of generalized angst and Internet stupidity surrounding the group of morons and illiterate children that now pass as the “Gaming Community” (the same brilliant community that thinks “J”RPGs and “W”RPGs are a thing, that PvP FPSes and MOBAs are the best genres ever, and that provoking militant feminists is a good way to accomplish anything). Kimmel produced a rather amusing little video poking fun at the particular strain of ‘gamer’ that enjoys watching other people play games on services such as YouTube Gaming and Twitch TV more than they enjoy actually playing games themselves.
I found this video to be right on the nose, taking a questionable concept and reducing it to absurdity via reduplication of the core premise. If watching other people play games is stupid, then watching other people watch other people play games is even moreso! …
No-Intro: Helping the Wayback Machine Become a Better Archive for Console Games.
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/13/15 at 05:29 PM CT
Back in January of this year, news of the Internet Archive’s appropriation of thousands of old DOS games pinged pretty hard on my radar for relevant happenings in the world of gaming. Just recently, however, I stumbled across another group that is providing a significant service in the preservation of the old games that built the industry as we know it today.
No-Intro started out with the simple goal of removing the sometimes-annoying headers, intros, and trainers hacked into ROM images of old games by pirates more interested in gaining fame from their ROM dumps than in preserving the game software in an unaltered state. As a hacking group, No-Intro has been working since 2002 to organize and document every ‘clean’ ROM for every console in the history of gaming (even the weird ones,like the LeapFrog educational handheld). Since hosting those ROMs can get a group in trouble with ‘The Man,’ No-Intro itself only hosts their own software, consisting of searchable .DAT files …
Review Round-Up: Summer 2015
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/05/15 at 01:54 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:
This Summer, I plowed ahead and completed the final episodes of Aldorlea’s ‘Millennium’ RPG series… and decided to be more careful about buying Aldorlea games in the future. I also cleared the final WiiU game out of my current backlog, so Nintendo needs to start releasing something (since third-parties won’t) before I’ll need to re-exhume the console we buried quite some time ago.
“Ironclad Tactics” – 3/5
“Child of Light” – 4/5
“Awesomenauts” – 2.5/5
“Death and the Fly” – 1.5/5
“Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition” – 4/5
“Millennium 5: The Battle of the Millennium” – 3/5
“Defiance” – 3.5/5
“Muffin Knight” – 4/5
“Millennium 4: Beyond Sunset” – 2.5/5
“Sonic: Lost World” – 4/5
Chris’ Reviews:
Chris posted his (late) “Trine 2” review and …
Backlog: The Embiggening - September, 2015
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/30/15 at 02:22 PM CT
Summer’s officially over, and the lion’s share of gaming’s demographic is going Back to School... yet now is the time that game publishers have – after four months of barren, desolate drought – decided to flood store shelves with a large quantity of releases. Why do publishers do this when they know very well that their potential customers will have much less free time to play games and much less disposable cash to spend on them once they’re back in school instead of lazing about at their part-time Summer jobs? My guess is that it’s the same reason the game industry does a lot of questionable thing: Stupidity and/or Greed.
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Wow.
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There is a LOT of shovelware this month. Of course, only a small quantity of the stuff is based on other IPs. In that particular sub-set of shovelware, we have a new LEGO game (because, why not?!) and a game based on the new “Mad Max” movie (which Chris says is awesome) blasting as many platforms as possible, while a new …
OUYA to be Sacrificed by the Cult of Razer
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/22/15 at 03:30 PM CT
OUYA, the Independent, Kickstarter-funded company behind the Little Indie Console That Couldn’t has finally given up and sold out to another company. After months of increasingly dismal news, starting with bribing OUYA owners with free money and whoring out the OUYA storefront to the likes of Mad Catz, OUYA has, as of the beginning of August 2015, sold themselves body and soul to Razer, the company most widely known for producing low-durability, high-priced PC peripherals.
Of course, I’m familiar with Razer primarily through my exposure to the Razer Hydra – a (now discontinued) motion controller designed by Sixense but manufactured by Razer. Sixense’s partnership with Razer didn’t appear to actually go anywhere, as the default Razer drivers included with the Hydra are a joke, requiring a separate download from Sixense’s own website to unlock the motion controller’s true, glorious potential. With the Hydra’s wireless successor, the STEM, Sixense has broken away from …
Windstream <i>Delenda Est</i>.
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/16/15 at 06:32 PM CT
This week, Jon Brodkin of Ars Technica (one of my favorite tech blogs) published an article about the plight of the rural residents of the United States who find it difficult – if not impossible – to get modern telecommunications monopolies to throw them a bone and provide telephone and Internet service that is up to anyone’s standards. This article hit very close to home and I can completely relate to the subject’s situation… because the subject is indeed me.
I wrote to Ars this summer and – at the suggestion of MeltedJoystick’s erstwhile video/photo-grapher, Matt – submitted my plight as a news tip to see if Ars was interested in exposing Windstream for the villain it is. One phone interview and several e-mails later, my story has been added to the annals of the history of Terrible Internet in America.
Some readers may be surprised to learn that I am a farmer. However, farming and videogame critique go incredibly well together, as farming allows for an …
Rehash, Reiterate, Remaster
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/09/15 at 05:40 PM CT
Almost exactly one year ago, I lamented the banal state of the 8th Generation with its unnatural love of ‘remastering’ non-old games in order to pull further profits out of them. While last year’s Sony proclaimed that “You can't have too many of these things, otherwise next-gen just looks like rehashed last-gen,” this year’s Sony has changed its tune. So in honor of Sony’s newfound commitment to remasters, I’m going to rehash my disappointment with the 8th Gen’s lack of originality (now with 40% new content!).
As far as I can tell, I am the first person to come up with the term ‘remasterbation’ – a simple portmanteau of ‘remaster’ and ‘masturbation’ – to refer to Sony’s self-pleasuring act of releasing last-gen content under the guise of ‘new.’ Despite the fact that Sony claims they are beating their last-gen meat for the pleasure of the 40% of PS4 owners who didn’t own a PS3, we all know that they are really doing it to make money, since …
Backlog: The Embiggening - August, 2015
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/02/15 at 01:20 PM CT
It’s August! Happy Birthday to me! Or not… especially if I wanted a new game or two as gifts (which I do NOT, looking at the releases below).
After a month of absence in July, the shovelware has returned in droves. The undisputed King of Shovelware would have to be the third rendition of “Disney Infinity,” which cleverly attempts to sell videogames by getting kids hooked on a series of collectable, overpriced figurines. Aside from that, there are a lot of licensed shovelware exclusives, which is mind-blowing in that it undermines the general purpose of shovelware to saturate the market with releases on every platform. The PS4 is getting a new ‘One Piece’ game, while the 3DS is getting a whopping THREE licensed games based on the ‘Paddington Bear’ movie (a little late on that one, guys), the ‘Garfield’ comic strip (which has been irrelevant for years), and tiny-robot battling anime ‘LBX.’ All that exclusive shovelware is really going to hurt the 3DS’ …
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