Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/29/22 at 05:28 PM CT

June is nearly upon us, once again. And with the coming of the Summer season, we must all prepare ourselves mentally for the withering despair of the annual Summer Games Drought, in which the corporate troglodytes of the Games Industry refuse to release very many games during the three months of the year when the biggest proportion of the videogaming audience has significantly decreased amounts o...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/21/22 at 10:19 PM CT

The DragonLance High Fantasy campaign setting created by TSR in 1984 is near and dear to the hearts of most of us here on the MeltedJoystick Crew. While we were only 5 years old when the series launched, we all went through a school curriculum that promoted reading through unguided courses called “Reading Workshop,” in whi...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/15/22 at 05:27 PM CT

Remember when we could all hate on corporate Big Business for being greedy, unethical, and in-bed with the Far Right conservatives of the Republican Party – who, naturally, offered the corporations fat tax breaks through the magic of Trickle-Down Reaganomics? Well, ever sin...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/08/22 at 03:30 PM CT

We at MeltedJoystick have never truly understood what Square-Enix was thinking back in 2009 when it bought the dying carcasses of Eidos and Crystal Dynamics – the Interplay-era Western developers responsible for Leaden Age PC games the likes of ‘Tomb Raider,’ ‘Deus Ex,’ and ‘Thief’ – and grafted those studios and d...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/01/22 at 03:49 PM CT

April showers are supposed to bring May flowers, but with the drought affecting so much of the U.S., that’s kind of tough. Actually, as May rolls in, it’s finally starting to feel like it was supposed to in April, leading me to believe that, with climate change, we’re seeing the seasons shifting away from what’s traditionally been expected… Just like the Games Industry, which, th...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/24/22 at 05:43 PM CT

Fangames have been around since the adolescence of the Internet, circulating within the same gaming communities that tended to pass-around ROM-hacks that spice-up (or ruin) old favorites and Fanslations of unlocalized gems (or

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/17/22 at 04:47 PM CT

Last week I raked Nintendo (and to a lesser extent Sony) over the coals with the help of a YouTuber. But we never really got to the root of “why” corporations like Nintendo and Sony – who have been so foundational to the history of videogaming on the whole – refuse to engage with Games Preservation, backward compati...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/10/22 at 04:31 PM CT

Last year, at about this time, the big gaming bugaboo was the fact that Sony was planning to shut-down access to their digital PlayStation Store for the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, and PlayStation Portable. This news, combined with the fact that an known bug in Sony’s firmware could invalidated digital purchases unti...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/03/22 at 02:43 PM CT

Due to the lingering effects of the still-ongoing (thanks, anti-vax retards) COVID-19 pandemic, E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, which has long been the Entertainment Software Association’s biggest and most publicly-visible trade show, has been cancelled again in 2022. Back in early 2020, when the outbreak was just getting started and nobody knew how COVID was spread, let alone had access...

Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/27/22 at 03:51 PM CT

The most Foolish month of the year will soon be upon us, once again. Let’s see what the fools within the Corporate Games Industry want the fools they call consumers to buy now!

We’ve got shovel-ready trash, once again, coming in April, and from some unexpected corners. In the Licensed Swill category, there’s a HUGE, all-encompassing ‘