Backlog: The Embiggening – November, 2023
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/29/23 at 12:39 AM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! November is the Month of Gratitude, hosting the United States’ version of the Thanksgiving holiday, in which people look back at the previous year (or more) and take the time to reflect upon what they’re truly grateful for. In my case, those things are the other members of the MJ Crew, my fur babies (Barkley and Mao), and my forward-thinking, dearly-departed parents.
What I am NOT grateful for, however, is the absolute STATE of the Games Industry, where every month is flooded with trash releases, trash ports, censorship, and ideological bickering to the point that I’d like to watch the entire thing burn to the ground. Let the handful of people and businesses who are in it because they value it instead of trying to wring value from it rebuild from the ground up, and give us release schedules filled with a smaller number of meaningful titles that will all garner attention instead of drowning us in crap and seeing which …
Vaguely Related Review: DragonLance Destinies Vol. 2 “Dragons of Fate”
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/15/23 at 02:26 PM CT
Last year, I was incredibly excited about the fact that a new trilogy of DragonLance novels by the setting’s original creators, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, was being launched outside of the purview of the increasingly-tragic Wizards of the Coast. Sadly, the first volume of the DragonLance Destinies trilogy left me quite disappointed, as even without the heavy-handed oversight of WotC (rhymes with “Nazi”), Weis and Hickman appeared to be taking the beloved 1980’s High Fantasy franchise in a more Woke direction.
I was so disappointed with “Dragons of Deceit” that I very nearly gave up on the trilogy. But with the August I already had going for me in 2023, I figured the pain and suffering of another volume like “Dragons of Deceit” couldn’t faze me. To my surprise and delight, though, not only is volume 2 of the trilogy, “Dragons of Fate,” a much more polished product than its immediate predecessor, it’s also a good novel in its own right.
First of all, …
Wizards of the Coast is Censoring Things… AGAIN!
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/08/23 at 07:02 PM CT
Sometimes the immortal Corporate Persons whose lobbying makes the world such a shitty place to live seem to have memories far shorter than their lifespans. Just 10 months ago, at the beginning of 2023, Wizards of the Coast – the subsidiary of Hasbro and devourer of the late TSR which currently controls the Dungeons & Dragons Intellectual Property – got itself into deep dookie by attempting to change all the rules by which third-parties could create official content for the… “World’s Most Popular Role-Playing Game” in the name of control, greed, and censorship, not necessarily in that order. Naturally, those of us who have been paying attention even slightly saw Wizards’ early 2023 debacle as the fulfilment of a variety of promises/threats they made in the name of promoting Woke Ideology.
Sadly, Corporate Persons really seem to have a collective learning disability to go along with their goldfish-caliber long-term memories. Thus, it comes as no surprise that – …
Backlog: The Embiggening – October, 2023
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/02/23 at 04:25 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! The month of horror is upon us once again… and I have a strong suspicion that the game release schedule will be the most dreadful, terrifying abomination the world will see this month (come on, Putin, Xi… prove me wrong!).
After years of relative dormancy, shovelware really came roaring back onto the scene last month, and it’s EVEN WORSE for October! While in September, ports (etc.) were so numerous, the browser tabs wouldn’t all fit on one screen, in October that’s how bad the shovelware is.
We’ve got a butt-load of Licensed Swill coming in October, plus I threw in the Atari (delenda est) published re-whatever of “Haunted House,” since it clearly exists solely due to the presence of Halloween this month. But, yeah, we’ve got games based on Disney, Dreamworks, ‘Star Trek,’ ‘Barbie,’ ‘Spongebob,’ ‘Hot Wheels,’ ‘King Kong,’ ‘Robin Hood,’ ‘Papa Troll,’ ‘Inspector Gadget’ (How is …
Epic Games is Full of Debt
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/01/23 at 03:05 PM CT
Remember when we all got excited about a new digital storefront being run by Epic Games joining the fray on PC? Remember how disappointed we were in the Epic Store not having basic features for YEARS after launch? Remember how nearly anyone you asked about their use of the Epic Store simply said, “I claim the free games every week, but don’t actually buy anything”?
Yeah, all of that has come home to roost, with Epic Games announcing layoffs this week totaling roughly 16% of the company’s staff. Apparently, at Epic, “we’ve been spending more money than we earn.” Is this really a surprise?
The Epic Store proclaimed that it would capture a significant portion of the PC gaming market by offering more generous revenue splits with developers than entrenched competitors like Valve’s Steam or CD Projekt’s GOG. Epic further sweetened the pot by throwing money at studios/publishers who would agree to a temporary exclusivity deal, wherein they would sell a game(s) ONLY …
Phil Spencer Threatens to Kill-Off Xbox When Gamepass Fails
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/24/23 at 03:48 PM CT
The legal proceedings happening around the still-not-finished Activision/Blizzard/King merger with Microsoft’s Xbox Division continue to be a goldmine. Recently, Xbox head, Phil Spencer, who is frequently viewed as a messianic figure by the miserable and paltry community of Xbox Fandom online, had something very interesting to say to the court.
Apparently, Microsoft doesn’t see a future in traditional console style gaming (which we here at MeltedJoystick have been saying for years). Their push to turn gaming into a subscription-based hellscape via their Gamepass service is really the only thing Xbox cares about, as a way to penetrate further into the healthy and robust PC gaming ecosystem and establish themselves as a source of non-mobile-style games on mobile platforms.
Phil Spencer’s vision for Xbox is so intimately intertwined with the mass-adoption of Gamepass, he went on the record stating that, if Gamepass doesn’t hit specific financial and growth targets by 2027, …
Unity Engine = Finished
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/17/23 at 12:42 AM CT
This week, the corporate overlords that control the second-most-popular canned game development engine, commonly known as Unity, followed in the footsteps of Wizards of the Coast in being the second American corporation in 2023 to completely self-destruct after announcing intentions to reform their basic licensing structure in order to capture more profits. Not content to receive flat licensing fees from studios that wish to use their engine, and no longer feeling magnanimous with their engine’s free “Personal” licensing tier, Unity’s corporate overlord, John Riccitiello, came up with a scheme to charge developers who use Unity a so-called “per-install” fee, requiring them to pay upwards of 20 cents every time a game is installed – NOT purchased, but INSTALLED!
In a show of… ahem… unity, gamers and the predominantly-Indie-tier developers who use the engine have collectively decided that Unity is now WORSE than multi-year-worst-corporation-winner-loser, Electronic …
Backlog: The Embiggening – September, 2023
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/09/23 at 08:24 PM CT
Backlog: The Embiggening – September, 2023
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Summer’s over and all the little darlings have gone back to school, while the most of the MJ Crew has returned our dear mothers to the Earth. Can the Games Industry do anything to improve our collective mood? Not bloody likely!
The shovelware is OVERWHELMING for September, with all three major subvarieties present in the great, seething mass. In Licensed Swill, there are games based on ‘RoboCop,’ ‘Paw Patrol’ (which still disappoints me by not being ‘Papa Troll’), ‘Ninja Kidz,’ the ‘Fate’ anime, ‘Cry Babies Magic Tears,’ the auditory abomination known as ‘Baby Shark,’ ‘NASCAR,’ ‘Rainbow High,’ ‘House Flipper,’ ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender,’ and – inscrutably – an ancient Western movie that I have surprisingly never seen, ‘Bud Spencer & Terence Hill.’ That’s quite the load, and it includes both IPs I’ve never heard of because …
Review Round-Up: Summer 2023
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/03/23 at 01:21 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:
If Spring was unkind to me, Summer was as malicious and vindictive as possible. Most of the games I played through were definitively mediocre or slightly above average, but nothing to get excited about, with “Bug Fables” being the only real standout experience. But on top of everything else, my mother got the bad news of a terminal cancer diagnosis during the last week in July, and didn’t survive until the end of August. So on top of a frustrating gaming experience, I’ve been dealing with a heaping helping of despair. Thanks a fucking lot, Universe.
“Ruzar: The Life Stone” – 3.5/5
“Bladed Fury” – 3.5/5
“Middle-Earth: Shadow of War” – 3.5/5
“Front Mission 1st Remake” – 1.5/5
“Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling” – 4.5/5
“Riverbond” – 3/5
“Yaga” – 2.5/5
Chris’ …
RobotCache Introduces Open Markets for Digital Videogames
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/25/23 at 03:50 PM CT
Recently, a new startup calling itself RobotCache has started advertising in the gaming community. The service bills itself as a “game changer,” in that it is yet another digital videogame storefront, but that it also includes the incredibly-common-sense feature of allowing users to sell their games to each other when they’re done with them.
This is the type of thing I’ve been advocating as a killer feature for the Steam Community Market for as long as there has been a Steam Community Market. However, without being attached to any of the major players in the digital game sales space, like Steam, GOG, Humble, or even Fanatical and Greenman, it really feels like RobotCache has an uphill battle ahead of it to gain market share. After all, most people who are into digital game purchases already have sizeable libraries elsewhere, and without the ability to bring in those licenses into a universal bucket, RobotCache really only offers the tantalizing possibility of being able to …
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