Backlog: The Embiggening – March, 2021
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/21/21 at 05:17 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Corporations are people too! And just like all the rest of us, they ring in the (Fiscal) New Year in March! That goes a long way toward explaining the traditional influx of garbage from the Games Industry as “we” (read: “they”) turn the ledger page to another year.
We’ve got a lot of shovelware coming in March, and the publishers are trying to disguise some of it. But I’ve been watching the release slates for too long, and I’m going to call a Spade a Spade. Square Enix is porting their (critical failure) “Marvel Avengers” Live Service to the Xbox SeX, perhaps in an attempt to get some of that sweet, sweet (hypothetical) Gamepass money. There are plenty of officially-licenced games about watching vehicles go “vroom!” in “WRC 9,” “Monster Energy Supercross 4,” and “Monster Jam: Steel Titans 2,” but there’s also a no-name knock-off of monster truck… racing? game called “Monster Truck …
Visionary Valve, Myopic Multitudes
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/14/21 at 03:26 PM CT
Valve, the parent company of the PC digital distribution service Steam, is still a privately-owned corporation, beholden not to the demands of shareholders, but to the whims of its visionary Big Boss, Gabe Newell, colloquially known to Steam fans as ‘Lord GabeN.’ Back when Steam launched in 2003, PC gaming was on its last legs, utterly unable to compete with consoles like the PlayStation 2 and Gamecube, with a number of PC-centric Western developers jumping on-board Microsoft’s PC-like Xbox for their biggest projects of the time.
But Valve ultimately proved that PC gaming wasn’t, in fact, dead, but suffering from numerous logistics issues, which Steam went a long way toward solving. While it got off to a bit of a slow start, before it was a decade old, “Steam” had become as synonymous with “PC gaming” as “Nintendo” had been synonymous with “console gaming” throughout the 1980s.
Steam, however, wasn’t GabeN’s only bright idea, and Valve has continued …
Default Controls
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/07/21 at 04:12 PM CT
Way back in the 1980s, those who were on the cutting edge of technology, and who had a huge amount of discretionary income, were playing games on the prototypical systems – things like Amiga, Commodore, Atari (delenda est) and even incredibly early versions of DOS – that would eventually evolve into PC gaming as we know it today.
However, PC gaming as we know it has been greatly influenced by the dedicated, single-purpose game machines known as consoles, as these two branches of the same technological family tree have evolved side-by-side over the decades. Prior to the influence of single-function, ‘appliance-like’ game machines in the form of arcade cabinets and home consoles, gamers were content to interact with their games using the default control devices that came in the box: Keyboards. And while mice would eventually be added to the stable of default PC gaming control devices, it was something of a long-fraught ideological war, with hardcore typists insisting that …
Backlog: The Embiggening – February, 2021
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/30/21 at 04:47 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! February is the shortest month of the year, but with even the new Biden Administration at the reins, COVID doesn’t look to be going away anytime soon, and is, in fact, getting WORSE in some ways, with new variants that are more contagious and (possibly) more fatal. With worldwide industry and logistics severely hobbled by the virus, it’s probably too optimistic to expect to see good videogame releases this early in 2021 (in spite of the fact that videogames should be one of the least impacted industries due to largely digital distribution and the ability for coders and digital artists to work from anywhere). On to the crap!
We’re light on shovelware again in February. Two of the three titles are, unsurprisingly, also ports (but we’ll get to that in a moment), and both fall into the ‘Too Casual to Live’ category of shovelware, as they are the Gender Role Simulators targeted at little girls who no longer have feminine …
Xbox Division Nearly Self-Destructs with Announced, then Retracted, Price-Hike on Gold
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/23/21 at 04:47 PM CT
It’s a new year, and a quick trip through the grocery store will reveal to anyone paying attention that we’ve gotten a pretty severe price hike across the board in 2021. And as this new year begins Microsoft seemed dead set on being the bad guy again, after spending the entirety of the 8th Generation groveling and pandering to gamers in the hope of winning us back after the comically-disastrous XBONE reveal event.
Last summer, when Xbox Live Gold 12-month subscription cards disappeared from retail outlets, the rumor mill started churning up an idea that really excited me, speculating that Microsoft would end the mandatory subscription for online features that has been a defining feature of the Xbox ecosystem since its inception. What with Microsoft’s more recent endeavor to create a “Netflix of videogames” in their Gamepass subscription service – which includes Xbox Live Gold in its price – removing the paywall from basic features was the only rational path to …
Honestly, It’s Time for “Destiny 3”
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/17/21 at 03:29 PM CT
Live Service games always generate some amount of controversy. Whether it’s their intentionally-addictive design that ropes gamers in for more hours-per-week than they really ought to be spending with a single game, or heavy-handed monetization schemes that force invested players to continuously shell-out more cash to keep up with the proverbial “Joneses,” or some other, even-more-nefarious bit of corporate manipulation, there’s just something about an always-on, always evolving videogame that invites questionable social experimentation.
The MeltedJoystick Crew is generally quite leery of Live Services and MMOs, but we’ve been (mostly) pleasantly surprised by the few we’ve given a shot. No Live Service has had such a large and long-lasting impact on us (and I don’t just mean that as the Royal Us – it applies to everyone on the team) as “Destiny 2,” Bungie’s multi-platform sequel to their first post-“Halo” game development effort, the …
10 (!) Games to Look Forward to in 2021.
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/09/21 at 03:27 PM CT
Last year, I received a special request to talk about the upcoming game releases for 2020 that the curators at MeltedJoystick were keeping an eye on. Of course, we had no idea at the time that the year was going to bring a pandemic with it, which screwed with industries, arts, and release dates across the board. Then there’s the elephant-in-the-room sized fact that the Games Industry universally does a poor job of pre-announcing release dates and sticking to them (even when cracking the whip via mandatory “crunch” work schedules, which are ultimately useless anyway, since the hang-up in such cases nearly always falls at one department’s feet, making punishing everyone with mandatory, unpaid overtime completely pointless).
That said, after sorting through the hundreds of ports, remasters, and remakes coming in 2021 (what, you thought the flood would slow down instead of speed up?), it looks like a much more exciting year than its predecessor.
10. “Bravely Default 2” …
New Year’s Backlog Ablutions 2021
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/03/21 at 02:12 PM CT
The results from last year’s revised New Year’s Backlog Ablutions are in, and it seems that the challenge was a bit too much for everyone except me. Thus in 2020, in spite of COVID locking everyone down so they really shouldn’t have had anything better to do than play a few of their games, I was, disturbingly, the only winner, and got 3 new games for my trouble.
Of course, even during the first year we embarked on this little group dare, I was the only one who actually succeeded, so we’ve decided to mix things up once again, especially because Chris whined incessantly about “wanting to play the games HE picks,” even though he didn’t even manage to do that in 2019. Chris came close to succeeding in 2020, but ultimately made the silly mistake of playing “Watch_Dogs 2” instead of “Watch_Dogs 1,” and failing to submit a review of “Fable Anniversary” (which I have on word-of-mouth authority that he hated). While in 2019, Nick came close to success, completing …
Backlog: The Embiggening – January, 2021
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/26/20 at 03:31 PM CT
Welcome back to another year of glimpses into the immediate future, where we spy upon planned Games Industry releases, and appropriately temper our expectations with cynicism. As per usual, January is never a particularly full month, usually relegated to deadline-missers that were supposed to launch during the previous September-through-December, or low-budget junk whose publishers didn’t want to compete with the big releases of the prior season.
It’s nice to start off the new year with a little bit of good news: There’s no shovelware… well, there’s no officially licensed shovelware, too-Casual-to-live non-games, or annualized treadmill releases… but there is a compilation of ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ titles, which comes dangerously close to all three categories without falling into any of them. At least now console peasants can join their PC gaming counterparts in experiencing this punishment.
Of course, the fact that the ‘FNAF’ compilation is, indeed, a …
MeltedJoystick Games of the Year 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/20/20 at 02:56 PM CT
Here we are, once again. As we stand at the end of another cycle of seasons after slogging through a torturous trip around the Sun that made 2019’s “challenging” year seem like a cake-walk, we must look back and pass judgment on the hot “new” titles – that were, once again, mostly old, re-warmed slop.
But in spite of its overall insane levels of awfulness, 2020 was ever-so-slightly better than its predecessor in the realm of exclusives and RPGs, even though it was mostly flooded with big, sprawling Sandboxes, which have seemingly become the “default game” of the modern era, much like janky 2D Platformers were the default of the 8-bit and 16-bit eras.
As a Plague Year, 2020 saw huge sales numbers for both ‘comfort food’ style games and distanced socializing “games.” None of those actually contributed to the betterment of the medium as a whole, nor did they stand out as exemplary within their respective genres, so they’ve been left off the list.
Thus, …
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