Review Round-Up: Summer 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/03/22 at 10:51 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 had a pretty mediocre gaming quarter, and I actually spent quite a bit of time in August, specifically, doing things other than videogaming, since the mediocrity was so overwhelming. I painted my Bunkers & Badasses miniatures, I read a new DragonLance novel, and spent quite a bit of time poring over some new tabletop RPG rulebooks I’ve purchased. But there was videogaming in there, too. And it was mostly BLAH. I got into an ‘ActRaiser’ groove, and found that none of the new efforts can really match the original. Everything else I played was likewise disappointing.
“Earthlock” – 2.5/5
“Override: Mech City Brawl” – 3/5
“SolSeraph” – 3/5
“ActRaiser” – 4.5/5
“ActRaiser Renaissance” – 4/5
“The Outer Worlds” – 3.5/5
Chris’ Ennui:
THE Disgruntled Dwarf still has way too many irons in …
Backlog: The Embiggening – September, 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/27/22 at 05:43 PM CT
Well, Summer’s officially over. Naturally, the Games Industry, which seems incapable of learning anything from its mistakes, is continuing the tradition of christening the start of the new school year – during which most of their customers suddenly go from having TONS of free time to play new videogames, to have NO time – with an absolutely gigantic release schedule packed so full of titles that the tabs for them scroll waaaaay off the edge of my browser window. With this many games packed into one month, there’s GOT to be something that’ll catch my eye, as it glimmers within the steaming cesspool of… everything else.
We’ve got a wide variety of shovelware coming in September, and some of it might actually sell! In licensed swill, we’ve got a new LEGO game – a casual brawler this time, because, apparently, WB’s release of (and success with) “Multiversus” finally woke everyone else up to the fact that ripping off ‘Smash Bros.’ is easy money… provided …
Vaguely Related Review: DragonLance Destinies Vol. 1 “Dragons of Deceit”
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/21/22 at 04:26 PM CT
As a fan of the DragonLance series of Dungeons & Dragons novels dating way back to my middle-school days in the early ‘90s, I thought the series was finished. There hasn’t been a new DragonLance novel published since a last buckshot-load of them was fired-off in 2009, with the final volume of “Tracy Hickman Presents: The Anvil of Time” quartet capping things off. I have been quite terrible about keeping up with DragonLance, as far too many of the “recent” (and I’m using the term both loosely and relatively) books not directly penned by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman themselves have been wholly forgettable at best, mind-numbingly terrible at worst.
In the gaming space, things haven’t been much better, with Margaret Weis and her Sovereign Press self-publishing all of the D&D 3rd Edition sourcebooks and adventure modules, and the series remaining completely dormant through the turbulent tenure of D&D 4th Edition. However, with the advent of D&D 5th Edition in 2014, …
Vaguely Related: Has No One Painted Their <i>Bunkers & Badasses</i> Miniatures?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/14/22 at 04:44 PM CT
To celebrate my birthday this year, I asked Chris to crack open the lovely Bunkers & Badasses Deluxe Boxed Set I gave him for Yuletide two years ago (but which arrived last year thanks to the supply chain cock-up) and run a game for the MJ Crew. His body language suggested that instead of asking him to run a new tabletop game based on an IP he absolutely loves, I’d just dumped a bucket of dead hagfish over his head, but he said he’d “get around to it.” So, while I waited for Chris to come up with a less-than-creative excuse to get out of some B&B mayhem, I decided to crack open my own Deluxe Boxed Set and paint the included Vault Hunter miniatures.
I’ve been painting tabletop gaming models for many decades, and frequently enter them in my county fair, where I typically take home blue ribbons, and one year even won Best of Division for my “Troll Scoutmaster.” Unfortunately, with the COVID pandemic in effect, I haven’t participated in the fair, and haven’t painted …
PlayStation VR2 Coming This Year, Still Lacks Killer Software
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/07/22 at 03:43 PM CT
We’ve known for a while now that Sony hasn’t given up on virtual reality within the PlayStation ecosystem. Recently, we got a look at some of the new features coming in their revised PSVR2 headset, most of which aren’t particularly compelling outside of niche edge-cases. Indeed, the most compelling new features in PSVR2 seem to be the single cable that connects to the console and the fact that the new headset comes with revised, dedicated VR motion controllers, instead of requiring users to track down hard-to-find, discontinued, and generally poorly-implemented PlayStation Move controllers to play the role of ‘hands.’
Ultimately, though, Sony isn’t doing enough to really push VR experiences forward. Honestly, neither is Valve. Each company has one big VR project – “Half-Life: Alyx” for Valve and “Horizon: Call of the Mountain” for Sony (revealed during this year’s Summer Games Fest) – which doesn’t really feel all that impressive from the perspective of …
Backlog: The Embiggening – August, 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/31/22 at 03:52 PM CT
The Summer Games Drought has broken after but a single month! Of course, now, much like those poor folk in Kentucky right now, we are forced to deal with an unrelenting and continuous flood of crap. Not only is this flood annoying to deal with as gamers, it’s actually damaging to the hobby and medium as a whole. The Games Industry is repeating the mistakes of the Atari (delenda est) Era, and I still wonder how long it will be before everything comes crashing down again.
We’ve got all three major subvarieties of shovel-ready crap coming in August, and much like the mythological figure of Utnapishtim/Noah, they are coming in pairs (during a Great Flood… of crap). In the Licensed Swill category, we’ve got yet another version of “Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?” hitting every platform like it was shot out of a blunderbuss, accompanied by a new game about ‘Zorro.’ In the Casual Swill category, we’ve got a mobile-inspired management Sim in “Arcade Paradise” …
D&D 6th Edition Coming in 2024, Set to be ‘5.Woke’ Edition
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/24/22 at 05:05 PM CT
The MeltedJoystick Crew have been playing tabletop RPGs together on a very regular basis for decades, not including the unfortunate break we had to take when that annoying and useless activity known as “going to college” got in the way. Since August 2019, though, we’ve taken a break from our usual Dungeons & Dragons activities and went back to the simpler times of Milton Bradley’s HeroQuest board/role-playing game hybrid. As we draw close to the end of available, published HeroQuest content, most of us are greatly looking forward to going back to D&D 5th Edition, which we thoroughly enjoyed via a long, multi-part campaign in which we took a single party of player characters through the “Hoard of the Dragon Queen,” “Rise of Tiamat,” and “Out of the Abyss” official adventure modules.
As much as I love tabletop RPGs and consider them to be one of the core facets of my life, I don’t generally follow the news surrounding the industry all that closely, and …
Remaining Big <strike>Three</strike> Two Members Take Opposite Stands on Legacy DLC
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/17/22 at 03:03 PM CT
With Microsoft set to devour Activision within the year, the Triumvirate of Evil videogame corporations is down to two: The French bastards at Ubisoft, who, admittedly, have been making much better games in the last decade than all of their prior efforts combined; and Electronic Arts, the ‘Worst Company in America’ two years running.
This past week, both companies have had to address the long tail of their 7th Gen dalliances with DRM, Live Services, and DLC. Neither company actually did what I expected, though. Ubisoft, whose recent excellent games have softened by hatred toward them quite a bit, decided that they will simply turn-off all support for a number of legacy games (none of which I care about, in spite of receiving a couple of them as freebies). At first it seemed that these games were being, effectively, delisted, preventing even current owners from redownloading them. Later clarification revealed that it will only be online features and DLC that will be …
Trick Out Your Warframe Arsenal with These Top Picks
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/10/22 at 04:46 PM CT
Digital Extremes’ “Warframe” is a very busy Live Service game with a LOT of moving parts under the hood. Having been in Perpetual Beta since 2013, some of the basic mechanical systems have been revised multiple times, while – unlike Bungie – Digital Extremes has never actually removed any content from the game. Thus there’s a lot to take in, which can be overwhelming to new players and those who don’t read the Wiki – which is doubly important with how generally piss-poor Digital Extremes is when it comes to tutorializing or providing in-game explanations of how things work.
The Arsenal itself is a pretty big deal, allowing players to pick and choose not only the warframe they pilot, but a loadout of three weapons, replete with mods. While modding is an in-depth activity that would require a full-length article for any one given piece of equipment, below I’ll provide a rough overview of my top 5 picks in each weapon slot, and what Mastery Rank those items become …
Square-Enix to take “Final Fantasy Record Keeper” Offline in September 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/03/22 at 03:47 PM CT
Last year, Square-Enix surprised us with the announcement that they would be re-launching the ‘Dragon Quest’ massively-multiplayer online RPG in an offline, single-player format, dubbed “Dragon Quest 10 Offline.” Normally, MMOs tend to linger around longer than their profitability dictates, before fading away after years of neglect by the publisher. Unfortunately, Square-Enix still has not announced a localization outside of Japan for this newly unplugged ‘Dragon Quest’ title.
Neglecting their Western audience has been part of Square-Enix’s modus operandi for decades, but in recent years, the Japanese mega-corporation seemed to have changed its ways somewhat, frequently bringing weird, niche games Westward and, most recently, localizing a few of their ancient Golden Age titles (which weren’t, actually, all that golden), like the ‘Romancing SaGa’ series and “Live A Live.”
At the tail-end of June, 2022, however, Square-Enix made the stunning announcement …
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