Review Round-Up: Spring 2025
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/01/25 at 01:46 PM CT
Welcome back to another installment of the MeltedJoystick Review Round-Up. Here’s what our staff has reviewed since last time:
Nelson’s Reviews:
I finished the second of my 3 Backlog Ablution picks… and was sorely disappointed by it. Other than that, Chris and I got through two pretty good couch-coop ‘Vania-style games, and I splurged on a new Switch game that was good, but could have been better.
“Gal Guardians: Demon purge” – 3.5/5
“Pentiment” – 2.5/5
“The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom” – 4/5
“Pampas & Selene: The Maze of Demons” – 4/5
Chris’ Review:
Chris is STILL playing “Assassin’s Creed Odyssey” feverishly, and insists that he’s “almost done.” On my advice, he’s waiting to set up his new gaming PC until he actually IS done, so Uplay’s cloud save feature doesn’t accidentally send him back to square one. Even more disappointing, in spite of completing 2 couch coop games with me this Spring, he only submitted a …
Backlog: The Embiggening – June, 2025
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/25/25 at 03:52 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! May was surprisingly Spring-like as it brought the first season of the year to a close. With Spring in the rear-view mirror, it’s time for us to watch the Games Industry go into its annual state of spastic catatonia known as the Summer Games Drought. With our mild Spring, is there any hope for a mild Summer as well? Or are we doomed to be confronted with our existing backlogs instead of coveting something novel that might get us fired up?
Sadly, the scourge of Shovelware will never go away, no matter how hard we ignore it. In June, we’ve got two bits of Licensed Swill coming: A “Smurftastic Collection” based on the 1980s’ favorite tiny, blue, Communists; as well as an anime game based on one of the OLDEST mech shows, “MACROSS: Shooting Insight.” (Does anyone even remember or care about EITHER of those IPs? Enough to fund new game development?!) In Cazual Swill, there’s the “100-in-1 Game Collection” hitting the …
Nintendo’s New Draconian EULA Gives THEM Perpetual Ownership of ALL Switch 2 Handhelds
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/18/25 at 01:08 PM CT
Oh, dear. We’ve gotten used to the status quo of Nintendo living in the past and constantly waging a losing war against Games Preservation of ROMs of games from their ancient and obsolete consoles. Meanwhile, Sony has been on the cutting edge of terrible DRM that can prevent even physical games from working without a persistent Internet connection.
This past week, Nintendo took a page from Sony’s playbook (instead of the usual situation where it’s Sony cribbing off Nintendo’s notes) when they updated the Legalese soup of their blanket End User License Agreement with wording that includes the ability to permanently render Nintendo devices unusable in the event that a user does something that provokes the corporation’s ire.
Sadly, Nintendo is well within their rights to do this kind of thing, after the Japanese government revised their policy on modding electronic devices. This is the type of corporate misconduct that spurred me to leave my original Switch permanently …
You Want Console Price Drops? Have Some Price Hikes Instead!
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/11/25 at 04:35 PM CT
Oh dear, it looks like Trump’s idiotic tariffs (import taxes that he still doesn’t understand how they work) and trade war are already hitting gamers in the wallet. Hot on the heels of Sony’s overpriced PS5 Pro announcement and Nintendo announcing an egregious new price point for the Switch 2 and $80 first-party Switch 2 games, this past week, Microsoft rolled out price hikes on… OLD hardware that already exists!
It seems that the Xbox Division doesn’t want to maintain its status as Loss Leader, and with new tariffs on all of their made-in-China junk, they’re jacking up prices across the board, as IGN has helpfully laid-out in list format. We’re seeing jumps of anywhere from $10-20 on controllers and $80-100 on Xboxen themselves as the 9th Generation grinds to a close, whereas we used to see consoles and peripherals DROP by that much in the same general time frame, often accompanied by re-releases of “Greatest Hits” reprints of high-selling physical …
Bye-Bye Polygon: The Latest Victim of the “New” Media Collapse
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/04/25 at 05:26 PM CT
News broke this past week that the second-worst site for gaming news, reviews, and information, Polygon, had been sold by parent company Vox Media, and faces a 20% staff layoff and potential shuttering in the near future. The new owner is Valnet, an Arab-owned Canadian media conglomerate known widely for its low-quality content and contentious click-bait headlines… so Polygon should fit right in!
As the Big Tech monopolies continue to consolidate their power with the help of AI driven tools, it seems that traditional media, new media, and even social media no longer have a relevant place in the journalism landscape. Where Google used to give small sites the ability to support themselves and even grow into big sites through its reasonable – or even generous – advertising rates, that has changed over the years to the point where the only way for news sites – of any kind, not just gaming-related or nerd-related – to keep the lights on is to charge a subscription or get …
Backlog: The Embiggening – May, 2025
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/27/25 at 05:14 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! We got quite a few April Showers (and hailstorms, and tornadoes…), but will they bring May Flowers? They always do… but that doesn’t mean the Games Industry will benefit any! Let’s see what the Corporate Suits at the big publishing houses and platform holders have deigned to spurt forth as the last hurrah before the inevitable Summer Game Drought.
Well, the good news is, there’s no Licensed Swill slated for May. There’s only a little bit of Casual Swill that could have gone under “PlayStation Exclusives,” but I don’t want to be that mean: Two “Hidden Object” games with “Hidden Object” in the title. Wow. In Annualized Swill, we’ve got a new entry in the ‘F1’ series. Finally, in Notable Ports, the ‘Super Mario RPG’-inspired “Born of Bread” will be leaving PC exclusivity behind to live on PlayStation and Nintendo (LOL, Xbox).
In multi-platform releases we’ve got half-a-dozen titles to look …
10 Animes that Might Help Reignite the Old Spark
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/21/25 at 12:04 AM CT
Everyone on the MJ Crew (except Nick) used to be avid fans of anime – the Japanese flavor of animation that initially started out as a rip-off of Disney before moving in its own decidedly-bizarre and unmistakably-Japanese direction – but we’ve really fallen out of the habit as of late. I was pondering why this was, and it essentially boils down to a few factors: 1) The rampant success of shonen anime like “One Piece” and “Naruto” absolutely flooded the pipeline with similar fare, 2) The online communities we were part of either stopped recommending good anime, stopped recommending anime altogether, or decided that anime was sexist and bigoted and should be actively fought against, and 3) After a few poor choices in DVD/Blu-Ray purchases that turned out to be duds, we became leery about going into any new series blind.
Recently, however, I’ve been using the free “Roku Fast Channels” on my living room TV to watch streaming programming as if these channels were …
ESA’s Mask Slips, Revealing that the Dire Condition of Games Preservation is Intentional
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/13/25 at 01:03 PM CT
Did you know that 87% of videogames released before 2010 are no longer commercially available? The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) knows, and it turns out they LIKE it that way!
In a 16 minute expose, tech YouTuber, Bellular News, goes into the gory details, revealing just how intentionally-terrible “games preservation” efforts, videogames in the public domain, and modern copyright laws are.
It turns out that videogames are being treated as a “special” case, wherein, despite the fact that games are both art and tech simultaneously, they are excluded from all of the copyright exceptions that protect other forms of media, such as film and books. As a result, it is proving next to impossible for legitimate Games Preservationists – not just wannabes like GOG.com – to build legitimate game lending libraries within the structure of the Law.
And why is it so difficult to work out such a library? Because the Corporate Overlords squatting at the top of …
All is Not Well as GOG Floats Subscriptions in New Survey
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/05/25 at 07:51 PM CT
Oh dear! Last we heard of Steam’s most competent competitor, GOG (formerly known as Good Old Games, but changed the name when they started to add BAD old games and newer Indie games to their catalog), the Polish company was getting into bed with Jeff Bezos via an unwholesome and unwelcome alliance with Amazon.
Amazon’s only real claim to fame within the Gaming hobby is its web services, powering both the Twitch ‘creator’ streaming platform and the Luna gamestreaming service. Conversely, GOG has built up a reputation over several decades as being pro-Gamer, pro-consumer, pro-preservation, anti-DRM, and anti-corporate. Now it seems that our former friends in Poland are going to throw all of that away.
In a new survey (which is already closed) e-mailed out to GOG members last weekend, the platform holder nonchalantly asked members what they would like to see from a subscription-based model to “support” GOG’s games preservation activities. While the survey starts out …
Backlog: The Embiggening – April, 2025
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/30/25 at 04:54 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! April is here, and, naturally, the Fools are out in full force. It won’t be long now until the little darlings who make up the bulk of gaming’s target demographic are out of school for the Summer and the big players in Industrial Gaming decide to turn off the tap again. Let’s see if Mid-Spring has anything for us to get excited about.
Is there shovel-ready crap coming in April? Of course there is! And it’s coming in all three major flavors of Shovelware. In Licensed Swill there’s a new ‘Care Bears’ game… what is this, 1984? In Casual Swill, there’s a new ‘Big Buck Hunter’ title for deer hunting fanatics who would rather bag imaginary trophies during the off season than hunt something else or go to the shooting range, and a “100 in 1 Game Collection” that wouldn’t feel out of place as the pre-installed content on a Chinese bootleg console. Lastly, in Annualized Swill, we’ve got entries in ‘MotoGP’ …
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