MeltedJoystick.com Gaming Blog

Vaguely Related: The Hurto Diet

Sun, 08 Sep 2019 21:01:37 -0500

MeltedJoystick’s favorite fur-bearing creature, Chris (a.k.a., Hurto, a.k.a., THEdisgruntleddwarf), has been on a low-carb, low-sugar ‘keto’ diet for a few months. On this diet, he must refrain from eating most staple foods, which all contain tons of carbohydrates, incl...

Review Round-Up: Summer 2019

Mon, 02 Sep 2019 02:51:23 -0500

Welcome back to another installment of the MeltedJoystick Review Round-Up. Here’s what our staff has reviewed since last time: Nelson’s Reviews: The Summer quarter saw me playing mostly crap. While I did manage to knock the last game off my list of New Year Backlog Ablutions and had a decent time dusting off ...

Backlog: The Embiggening – September, 2019

Sun, 25 Aug 2019 20:57:36 -0500

Welcome back to another look into the near future! Just in time for the darling little School Shooters to be back in their happy hunting grounds, the videogame industry opens its floodgates and releases a glut of games, which perhaps would have done better in sales if they were released during a time in which the target audience is home all day and perpetually bored. But, alas, as a corporatized ...

The 10 “Modern” 2D Games with the Most Striking Visuals

Sun, 18 Aug 2019 21:07:06 -0500

For a good long while, there, it looked like 2D games were going to disappear from the world. For roughly a decade between 1996 and 2006, 3D games were all there was, ranging in quality from “crude” to “fairly impressive, actually.” However, with the advent of the 7th Generation, just when the push for ever-more-realistic brown-and-gray 3D environments seemed irresistible, the Indie games...

GOG Galaxy 2.0: A Step in a Direction

Sun, 11 Aug 2019 21:28:48 -0500

Back at the beginning of Summer 2019, erstwhile MeltedJoystick photo/video-grapher, Matt, despaired to me about digital gaming’s lack of a unifying interface. With the fracturing of one-time monoliths like Steam and Netflix within the digital media market, it is becoming increasingly annoying and expensive for customers to reta...

Hello… Gamers?

Sun, 04 Aug 2019 20:16:23 -0500

Ten months ago, I discussed a report on the local news which revealed that MeltedJoystick’s regional Friendly Local Game Store, Gamers, had gone bankrupt and had its assets liquidated in order to pay its debts, with no forewarning for customers or employees. Anyone with unspent store credit or wages waiting to be paid end...

Backlog: The Embiggening – August, 2019

Sun, 28 Jul 2019 20:45:44 -0500

Welcome back to another look into the near future! As August – a month saturated with witchcraft, in which we celebrate the birthday of the best, least-biased game reviewer on the Internet on Lammas Sabbath – rolls in, we bid a fond farewell to Summer, even though it’s still too hot to do anything but sit inside and play videogames. Sad t...

RetroArch Hitting Steam Brings Emulation One Step Closer to Full Legitimacy

Sun, 21 Jul 2019 21:16:21 -0500

On July 12th, a very interesting thing appeared on Steam. RetroArch, the official frontend for the Libretro emulation API, is coming to PC gaming’s oldest and biggest digital distribution platform on July 30th. For FREE. RetroArch...

“AtariBox” Becomes Atari VCS

Sun, 14 Jul 2019 21:01:18 -0500

During E3 2017, Atari (delenda est), one of the first-and-worst game console manufacturers, announced that they were coming back from obscurity with a new hardware device. All of 2018 rolled by without a whisper about the so-called “AtariBox,...

Shadow of Stadia

Sun, 07 Jul 2019 21:32:55 -0500

When Google revealed their soon-to-launch Stadia game-streaming platform earlier this year (and pushed a video about it at E3), the world said, “Meh.” With Google’s business model from yesteryear, where users buy individual games exclusively for play on Stadia; combined with smolderin...