MeltedJoystick.com Gaming Blog

5 Licensed Games I’d Actually Like to See

Sun, 19 Sep 2021 19:14:23 -0500

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, ...

Tokyo RPG Factory… Sucks.

Sun, 12 Sep 2021 15:21:17 -0500

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 last time: Nelson’s Reviews: I got to touch all the icky typewriter number keys when inputting review scores this Summer, as stuff I played ran the gamut between “almost unplayable” to “al...

Backlog: The Embiggening – September, 2021

Sun, 29 Aug 2021 16:48:35 -0500

Welcome back to another look into the near future! The Drought That Never Happened is officially over, and as Fall comes upon us, we can look forward to the annual Autumn Games Flood, in which publishers poop out all the content they should have released gradually over the Summer, now that most of the target audience is back in school and doesn’t have as much time to play games. We’ve got a h...

8th Gen Retrospective

Sun, 22 Aug 2021 16:42:02 -0500

As of 2017, the 9th Generation of videogaming officially kicked off. However, with not all of the big players in the console space so over-anxious to usher their last-gen offerings into the Great Beyond, it only really “feels” like the 9th Gen has been going for a few months now. Combine the recent releases of the Xbox SeX and the PlayStation 5 with their unavailability on store shelves due t...

Who Makes the Best Sandboxes?

Sun, 15 Aug 2021 15:33:54 -0500

The Open-World Sandbox genre has come to dominate modern videogaming so completely that, at this point, it feels somewhat like the ‘default’ form-factor a game should take, not unlike the 2D Platformer across the 1980s and 1990s. However, the Sandbox isn’t just a natural progression of basic concepts, but is instead the result of decades of hard work on the part of various development teams...

Top & Bottom DLCs of the Past 20 Years

Sun, 08 Aug 2021 16:35:17 -0500

Downloadable Content, a.k.a., DLC, has been with us for quite a few years now, really taking off during the PC/Console singularity period that was the tumultuous 7th Generation. With the 9th Gen in full-stride and a full slate of new hardware platforms competing against each other to, essentially, run all of the same games, DLC and add-ons can still be a contentious subject in gaming communities....

Backlog: The Embiggening – August, 2021

Sun, 01 Aug 2021 15:35:58 -0500

Welcome back to another look into the near future! Summer’s almost over. You know what that means: I’m a year older and a year curmudgeonlier, and the cute (read: nauseating) little Snowflakes of Gen-Z and later are heading back to school, where to learn Critical Race Theory and Gender Spectrum, but not math, science, or good old traditional thinking (a.k.a., philosophy) because who needs tho...

Japan Really Respects Their Gaming Traditions

Sat, 24 Jul 2021 16:04:24 -0500

In spite of the word-of-mouth speculation that anyone over age 20 who still plays videogames is a NEET or Otaku, the statistical evidence that shows only 40% of the nation plays the...

Steam Deck: What GabeN Was Rambling About

Sun, 18 Jul 2021 15:32:04 -0500

All of the console gaming communities have been lighting up over the past few days with news of the upcoming (and up for pre-order) Steam Deck hybrid game console. While the disclosure of this new piece of hardware does make us say, “Aha!” as