MeltedJoystick.com Gaming Blog

Epic (Store) Fail

Sun, 19 May 2019 00:22:02 -0500

At the end of 2019, the MJ Crew was tentatively excited about the prospect of a new competitor in the increasingly-crowded digital PC games ecosystem, with the transformation of Epic Games� Epic Launcher into the Epic Store. Unfortunately for gamers everywhere, the Epic Store has spent the first half of 2019 proving to be t...

On the Properties of Backlog Strata

Sun, 12 May 2019 14:58:27 -0500

At the end of every month, I write up a little feature called �Backlog: The Embiggening,� in which I typically eviscerate the coming month�s game release docket for being awful, while occasionally adding one or two (or rarely three) new games to that looming monster known only as my Backlog. Like assholes and opinions, everyone has a Backlog. Even people who don�t play videogames have Backlogs, a...

Dreamcast Retrospective

Sun, 05 May 2019 16:31:43 -0500

As regular readers know, the MeltedJoystick Crew gets together in person (nearly) every week to play some local coop games at the MJHQ. Unfortunately for us (and our review output), the rise of the Network Wars has put a damper on the number of game releases with local multi-player, and an even bigger damper on such games w...

Backlog: The Embiggening � May, 2019

Sun, 28 Apr 2019 14:53:45 -0500

Welcome back to another look into the near future! April showers (of watery fecal matter) bring May flowers (turd blossoms), so as the Spring quarter begins to wind down, let�s take a look at what the Industry is leaving for us to squabble over as the Summer Game Drought looms on the horizon. Shovel-ready doo-doo is light on the ground in May. We�ve got one super-casual non-game, in the form o...

The New Ascetics

Sun, 21 Apr 2019 15:49:33 -0500

This weekend, while Jews the world over celebrate the avoidance of a plague by the smearing of sheep�s blood on their door lintels, and Christians celebrate the agonizing physical abuse, torment, and death heaped upon the god-man at the center of their mythology, here I am thinking about games. But really, I�m thinking about games AND religion. As a Classicist, there are actually very few time...

The Post-Steam World: A Speculative Fiction

Sun, 14 Apr 2019 16:32:04 -0500

With the Epic Games Store�s recent endeavors to curry favoritism amongst publishers and lock-down exclusive distribution of a handful of big titles for limited time windows via the use of monetary incentives paid to said publishers (colloquially known as �money-hatting,� but traditionally known as �bribery�), the p...

�Labo VR� Arrives Right on Schedule

Sun, 07 Apr 2019 14:34:51 -0500

I first declared �Reality� to be the hot hardware gimmick way back in 2014, when Oculus and Sony were pushing Virtual Reality and Microsoft and Nintendo were pushing Augmented Reality. Over the course of the intervening years, Valve and HTC jumped int...

Backlog: The Embiggening � April, 2019

Sun, 31 Mar 2019 14:33:26 -0500

Welcome back to another look into the near future! April is for fools, as we all know all too well. Too bad the fools in the games industry (and American government) can�t keep their idiocy contained to a single month! Let�s take a look at how big the dumpster fire will be over the course of the next 4 weeks. Shovelware is much lighter on the ground for April than it was for March, with only t...

Trendy Entertainment is Now Chromatic Games

Sun, 24 Mar 2019 15:08:08 -0500

In a surprise announcement at the beginning of March, Trendy Entertainment, the Indie developer we at MeltedJoystick love to hate, revealed that they were dead and gone. While everyone at MeltedJoystick has something of a love/hate relationship wit...

5 of the Laziest Game Design Techniques Devs Should Avoid

Sun, 17 Mar 2019 15:36:00 -0500

As we all know, game development, like any form of media and art creation, can be a lot of work. While Indie development studios typically make due with a small team of dedicated folks with a lot of passion for the project, big �AAA� corporate developers create games with credit rolls that sometimes last longer than the actual gameplay (I�m looking at you, �PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale�!)....