The Never-Ending Chip Shortage
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/02/21 at 03:40 PM CT
If you haven’t managed to snag a 9th Gen console or a new PC graphics card for anywhere close to the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, you might be SoL at this point. According to numerous big players in the silicon microchip industry, things don’t look like they’ll improve until sometime in 2023. Yes, that’s TWO YEARS away!
I managed to snag the new hardware I needed to refresh my 9-year-old gaming PC for a mix of prices. While I was able to get the CPU and all the other components for the MSRP (No sales, rebates, or discounts to be found, alas!), I ended up paying triple-MSRP for my graphics card, much to my annoyance. If I had pulled the trigger a couple months earlier, I could have had it for merely DOUBLE the MSRP, which at this point feels like a huge savings. Of course, learning that the chip supply, and thus the prices of hardware, would continue to be out-of-whack until the Summer or Autumn of 2021 was what ultimately spurred me into action instead of …
Backlog: The Embiggening – May, 2021
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/24/21 at 09:12 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! April showers (of watery diarrhea) bring May flowers (or maybe some sort of fungus that grows in manure), and Games Industry watchers are getting settled-in for one last month of copious releases before the onset of the annual Summer Games Drought. Though in a post-COVID world, it’s possible some of these ‘traditions’ may have been shunted out of alignment due to last year’s lockdown of… pretty much everything. Onto the crap!
We’ve got shovelware, oh yes we do! Though, thankfully, we don’t have very much… and it seems that the purveyors of such drivel are targeting Nintendo, like they think it’s still the Blue Ocean Wii era, or something. Anyway, we’ve got a crappy valet-themed party game called “Very Very Valet,” and Nintendo is resurrecting the corpse of the 3DS’s social non-game, “Miitopia” for another round on the treadmill.
And speaking of things being dragged out of storage and plopped on the …
You Think You “OWN” PlayStation Games? Think Again!
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/17/21 at 08:36 PM CT
I still occasionally see a particularly depraved breed of console fanboy crusading on the Internet against the inexorable tide that is PC gaming. And, of course, one of the old chestnuts that gets dragged out, dusted off, considered, and stored again for another day is always the fact that physical PC games don’t really exist anymore and that the True Faithful of gaming will always buy physical media so they can replay their crusty, old games again in 20 years when they need a nostalgia hit. To these Console Justice Warriors, PC gaming is nothing but DRM and evil, while their magical game-playing boxes are the archetype of purity and will never fail them.
Thus, I was filled to overflowing with schadenfreude when Sony shutting down digital services for the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, and PlayStation Vita brought to light a truly ugly secret that Sony fanboys have willfully ignored for a good many years, even after it was revealed by the hacking and modding scene.
It …
Three Years Later, the Epic Store is Still a Failure
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/11/21 at 02:20 PM CT
Back in 2018, the MJ Crew was tentatively excited about a new competitor entering the PC gaming digital distribution market. Unfortunately, we had to walk that assessment back very quickly, as Epic Games didn’t have their doo-doo together in 2018…
… or 2019…
… or the Plague Year of 2020.
Here we are today, in 2021, and the Epic Games Store is still a joke. Here’s why:
4. Chinese Control
Chinese megacorporation, Tencent, is a big name in videogames… at least globally. Things that aren’t relevant anywhere else in the world can become “globally” relevant merely by pandering to China due to that nation’s stupidly oversized population and the fact that the entire population is, by and large, herded by its government into using specific businesses and services to the exclusion of all others. Naturally the businesses the Chinese Communist Party wants its Citizens to use are all Chinese businesses owned (at least in part) by the Chinese Communist Party. How …
‘Sunsetting’ Has Been Sunset: Top Legendary Weapon Picks for “Destiny 2.”
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/03/21 at 11:35 PM CT
A mere 4 months after implementing the wildly unpopular ‘Sunsetting’ mechanic, which put an expiration date on every piece of Legendary rarity loot in the game, “Destiny 2’s” developer, Bungie, partially reversed the move, leaving already Sunset weapons out of the game’s future loot pool, but removing that ticking timer on all currently viable loot and future loot moving forward. Sunsetting had a profoundly negative effect on my opinion of the game, and I was quite ready and willing to stop playing altogether until the next major expansion pack because all of the grinding and repetition would only earn very temporary rewards.
But with Sunsetting having ridden off into the sunset (or, more accurately, having been tarred and feathered, and driven out of town on a rail), “Destiny 2’s” loot system has been given a second lease on life and actually feels mildly rewarding again. Of course, with so many weapons in the game, and with so many of them Sunset into …
Backlog: The Embiggening – April, 2021
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/28/21 at 02:48 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! April, as always, is for fools, and the continued impact of the pandemic, combined with a silicon chip shortage, has all of us playing the part. But the Games Industry is content to continue churning its mechanism to produce lots of new products for ‘us’ to buy. Let’s take a look at what the next month has in store…
Not only is there a chip shortage, there’s a shovelware shortage! Other than two officially licensed Racing games that are barely different from their entire line of predecessors – “WRC 9” and “Monster Energy Supercross 4” – there’s nothing to panic about!
Unfortunately, there are still plenty of ports, remasters, remakes, and rehashes to panic about. In April 2021, for the first time since 2018, the Nintendo Switch is not the main target for this column’s port shaming, as the Industry’s gaze has turned to rest more heavily on the new greener pastures of the PlayStation 5 now that the …
PlayStation VR Not Dead; Motion Controls Neither
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/21/21 at 04:04 PM CT
This week, Sony revealed their new generation of PlayStation VR equipment for the PlayStation 5. The most impressive piece of the reveal was the new generation of motion controllers that go along with the new VR headset. These controllers are clearly modeled upon the Oculus Touch VR controllers that have been available for PC for a while now, but Sony confirmed that there are no external tracking devices required, and that these new motion controllers are tracked by the VR helmet itself, similar to how Microsoft’s Mixed Reality Hololens works.
While it is good news that someone other than our brilliant and visionary Lord GabeN is still thinking about VR in the gaming space, I’m significantly disappointed that Sony’s new motion controllers aren’t VR agnostic like their old PlayStation Move controllers were. The only non-VR motion controller systems on the market that are anywhere near viable are the aging (and discontinued) Razer Hydra and the aging (and discontinued) …
Nvidia’s Tone-Deaf “Solution” to the Graphics Card Shortage
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/14/21 at 03:25 PM CT
We’re one quarter of the way through 2021, and the horrors of 2020 – the COVID-19 pandemic, global logistics and shipping challenges, and a microchip shortage – have doggedly followed us into what we’d all hoped would be a brighter future and a return to normalcy. The new Xbox and PlayStation consoles (as well as the old Nintendo Switch) are still hard to come by on store shelves, but PC gamers have taken the most damaging blow from the continuing hardware shortages, as they aren’t the only ones trying to buy-up new PC hardware components.
Nvidia, the manufacturer of premier graphics cards for PC gaming and workstations, has finally decided to do something about the fact that unscrupulous crypto-currency miners keep buying-up all the new GPUs as soon as a new batch hits retail channels: As reported by Linus Tech Tips, Nvidia will be pushing a new ‘designed-for-crypto-mining’ range of headless graphics cards to that audience, with the idea being that the miners will …
I’m Everywhere!?: Self-Deprecation Edition
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/07/21 at 05:26 PM CT
For the past four years, each time MeltedJoystick’s Community Manager – and my oldest friend – Chris has gotten a year older, I’ve poked fun at him for the fact that, nearly everywhere I look across all forms of media, there are a plethora of people, creatures, and objects that remind me of him. Usually I throw Chris a bone and drop a self-deprecating reference to the fact that he and I are, essentially, the world’s least-popular comedy duo into the lists. This year, I decided to go all the way and put together a full list of 10 characters from videogames that remind me of myself. This was a much more challenging task than finding a random assortment of small, round, annoying things and pointing out how they are like Chris, so I was actually thankful, for a change, that there are so many licensed videogames based on non-game IP out there.
Get ready for a list packed with antisocial antagonistic anti-heroes!
10. The Boy (“A Boy and His Blob”)"A completely average …
Review Round-Up: Winter 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/28/21 at 03:54 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:
King Richard the Third was right: NOW is the Winter of our discontent (or discount tent, as the great Canadian wordsmith, Red Green, put it). While it may seem that all the numbers on my keyboard are broken except the ‘3,’ that’s not actually the case. It just so happens that my run of encounters with mediocre games has continued nearly unbroken for two entire seasons. This is becoming… aggravating. At least I got off to a good start with my Backlog Ablutions for 2021, clearing out 2/3 of them before even reaching Spring.
“Stardew Valley” – 3/5
“A Total War Saga: Troy” – 3/5
“Final Fantasy 14” – 2/5
“Indivisible” – 3/5
“Knightin’+” – 3.5/5
“Mass Effect” – 2.5/5
“Mass Effect 2” – 3.5/5
“Mass Effect 3” – 3.5/5
Chris’ Reviews:
THE Disgruntled Dwarf did not …
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