Backlog: The Embiggening – March, 2021

Sun, 21 Feb 2021 17:17:57 -0500

Visionary Valve, Myopic Multitudes

Sun, 14 Feb 2021 15:26:26 -0500

Valve, the parent company of the PC digital distribution service Steam, is still a privately-owned corporation, beholden not to the demands of shareholders, but to the whims of its visionary Big Boss, Gabe Newell, colloquially known to Steam fans as ‘Lord GabeN.’ Back when Steam launched in 2003, PC gaming was on its last legs, utt...

Default Controls

Sun, 07 Feb 2021 16:12:01 -0500

Way back in the 1980s, those who were on the cutting edge of technology, and who had a huge amount of discretionary income, were playing games on the prototypical systems – things like Amiga, Commodore,

Honestly, It’s Time for “Destiny 3”

Sun, 17 Jan 2021 15:29:45 -0500

Live Service games always generate some amount of controversy. Whether it’s their intentionally-addictive design that ropes gamers in for more hours-per-week than they really ought to be spending with a single game, or heavy-handed monetization schemes that force invested players to continuously shell-out more cash to keep up with the proverbial “Joneses,” or some other, even-more-nefarious...

10 (!) Games to Look Forward to in 2021.

Sat, 09 Jan 2021 15:27:52 -0500

New Year’s Backlog Ablutions 2021

Sun, 03 Jan 2021 14:12:54 -0500

The results from last year’s revised New Year’s Backlog Ablutions are in, and it seems that the challenge was a bit too much for everyone except me. Thus in 2020, in spite of COVID locking everyone down so they really shouldn’t have had anything better to do than play a few of their games, I was, disturbingly, the onl...

Backlog: The Embiggening – January, 2021

Sat, 26 Dec 2020 15:31:28 -0500

Welcome back to another year of glimpses into the immediate future, where we spy upon planned Games Industry releases, and appropriately temper our expectations with cynicism. As per usual, January is never a particularly full month, usually relegated to deadline-missers that were supposed to launch during the previous September-through-December, or low-budget junk whose publishers didn’t want ...

MeltedJoystick Games of the Year 2020

Sun, 20 Dec 2020 14:56:48 -0500

Here we are, once again. As we stand at the end of another cycle of seasons after slogging through a torturous trip around the Sun that made 2019’s “challenging” year seem like a cake-walk, we must look back and pass judgment on the hot “new” titles – that were, once again, mostly old, re-warmed slop. But in spite of its overall insane levels of awfulness, 2020 was ever-so-slightly...

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