With Zenimax Purchase, Microsoft Got the Band Back Together
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/04/20 at 04:27 PM CT
Two years ago, when Microsoft started gobbling up the small-time Single “A” developers that popped-up like so many nomadic tribes after the collapse of the Pre-Columbian Latin American empires, I pointed out that these shattered fragments of the once-great InterPlay – the only publisher from gaming’s Golden Age that made both Western games and PC games worth thinking about – were now reunited in the Happy House that Gates Built, and that the only thing missing from a complete reconciliation was the IP purchased by Bethesda Softworks.
Well, as of last week, Microsoft has officially gotten the band back together, when the tech megacorporation purchased Bethesda’s parent company, Zenimax Media, for $7.5 billion. That may seem like a lot of money just to give ‘Fallout’ back to Brian Fargo, but MS got so much more out of the purchase than just Bethesda, since Zenimax had gone on a buying spree of its own over the last several years, and was also the parent company of id …
Backlog: The Embiggening – October, 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/26/20 at 05:00 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into… some sort of whirling physics vortex where time has no meaning. I mean, yeah, the constant wearing-down of our spirits upon the grinding wheel of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic can no doubt cause many of us to go a little loopy, but I’ve been living that Quarantine Life since before it was cool, so I thought I’d be unaffected. Yet, October is bringing more than the horrors of an airborne plague and the dark Wiccan rituals of Samhain, it’s bringing shovelware by the shovelful and ports by the boatload, and all of this feels like déjà vu all over again.
I am… sooooo confused! In shovelware, we’ve got licensed swill based on ‘Karate Kid,’ ‘G.I. Joe,’ ‘Transformers,’ ‘Star Wars,’ and ‘Zoids’… so we must have traveled back in time to the ‘80s? But there’s also shovelware coming based on ‘Power Rangers,’ ‘Blair Witch,’ and ‘Nickelodeon’… so it must be the ‘90s? But, hold on, there’s also a game …
Compelling Console Capabilities Cease
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/20/20 at 02:36 PM CT
We’re on the very cusp of Sony and Microsoft joining Nintendo’s party and launching the remainder of the 9th Gen hardware that will take us through roughly the next decade of gaming. Both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X are scheduled to launch in November, and both are expected to face supply issues as COVID-19 has both hampered material production across Industry as a whole, and mobs of desperately bored people sheltering in place and self-quarantining pine for some new distraction.
Unfortunately, there’s no reason to get excited about these releases. Remember back in January, before COVID, before the race riots, and generally before 2020 had a chance to become the worst year in living memory? Remember how optimistic I was about the P(i)S5 and SeX bringing compelling features like full backwards compatibility and Windows Mode to the table? Yeah, you can forget all that, because in the run-up to launch, those rumors have been dispelled, and the truth is predictably …
Movies = Finished
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/13/20 at 04:47 PM CT
The movie industry is Big Business worldwide, with huge, prolific production centers not only in America, but in Europe, China, and India. In fact, MeltedJoystick itself exists as a sister-site for FilmCrave, which is a dedicated place for movie fanatics to review, rank, and list their favorite (and least favorite) titles from across the broad history of cinema.
Personally, though, I don’t really get all that excited about movies. With their typical two-hours-or-less runtimes and formulaic formulae, I tend to consider them to be far too ephemeral and lacking in depth when compared side-by-side with RPGs and other narrative-rich genres of videogames (and even long-form TV shows that typically encapsulate a story in no less than 12 hours rather than 2). Of course, Chris vehemently disagrees with me in this respect, which is why he writes for FilmCrave and I do not.
However, this last week, an announcement about the future of movies went public that is so deplorable, so …
Review Round-Up: Summer 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/05/20 at 05:07 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 fairly mediocre Summer of COVID with regard to gaming. The Crew only managed to get through one new coop game, while the majority of titles I completed and reviewed solo were mediocre to the extreme, with only “Ittle Dew 2” putting a smile on my face. Then I made the Chris-like mistake of starting a massive Sandbox game on August 1st (since, what else was I supposed to do for my birthday thanks to COVID?), which I didn’t finish until last night (September 4th), too late for submission this quarter.
“King’s Quest: The Complete Collection” – 3/5
“Star Trek: Bridge Crew” – 3.5/5
“Xuan- Yuan Sword: The Gate of Firmament” – 3/5
“Luigi’s Mansion 3” – 4/5
“Ittle Dew 2” – 4.5/5
Chris’ Reviews:
THE Disgruntled Dwarf has been even lazier than his usual self during the Summer of …
Backlog: The Embiggening – September, 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/30/20 at 04:10 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future… or is it the past? With the never-ending, never-slowing torrent of old games – be they successes or flops – being flogged as ‘new,’ it’s getting harder and harder to tell. And with our days filled with pandemic saminess and nothing but bad news on TV and in the (digital) ‘papers,’ putting up with the continuous stream of nonsense coming out of the Games Industry is almost too much to bear. Almost… batten down the hatches, folks, because we’ve got a flood of excrement incoming!
Last month was pretty bad for shovelware, but this month is only a slight reprieve. We’ve got licensed swill in the form of a ‘Trollhunters’ game based on the Netflix CG animated show and a licensed Marvel Comics Live Service MMO-thing made by… Square-Enix… well, not really by Square or Enix, but by one of the half-dead Western dev studios they’ve purchased. While I was willing to give “Marvel’s Avengers” the benefit of …
Many Hands, Light Work: Why isn’t This Standard in Videogames?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/23/20 at 04:04 PM CT
The MeltedJoystick Crew absolutely loooooves our cooperative gaming. We’ve played pretty much every coop game for 3-4 people that doesn’t advertise itself as complete, irredeemable trash (and a few that do *coughSpelunkycough*), but we frequently run unto situations where a given coop game is actually more fun as a solo experience due to bizarre development choices that actually make the overall experience much more difficult with more people.
The old adage goes, “Many Hands Make Light Work,” meaning that when a group of people all get together and cooperatively focus on the same objective, accomplishing said objective becomes much easier than when a single person tries to take it on by themselves. Unfortunately, there is an awkward obsession in the world of videogames to actually make things harder when there are more players involved.
Exhibit A: The ‘Borderlands’ series. In the genre-defining Looter Shooter, a solo player will face off against relatively sane …
Electronic Arts Shareholders Fire Shots in the Class Wars
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/16/20 at 04:27 PM CT
Thanks to my good fortune of being part of a successful family business, my Uncle Scrooge levels of frugality, and through my well-reasoned, non-bandwagoning, non-sleazy investments in the United States’ Stock Market, I own just shy of $800,000 worth of “value” in the corrupt corporate American economy. Of course, as a shareholder, I am frequently given the opportunity to “vote my shares” on a variety of issues. These issues, sadly, almost always boil down to three:
1) Should we keep the Directors of the Board?
2) Should we ratify Deloitte and Touche (or some other equally enormous and suspect accounting firm) to be the company’s CPA for the year?
3) Should we pass this executive compensation package?
Then, at the end of the shareholder ballot, there are occasionally a few shareholder proposals (that is, proposals written and submitted by private individuals who own company stock, not by the company’s executive apparatus) couched in a legalese framework …
Could Microsoft Lead the Way to a Subscription-Free Future for Consoles?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/09/20 at 03:27 PM CT
There have been a few rumblings lately in the land of Xbox that point, ever so vaguely, toward the possibility of Xbox Live Gold going away. This is an exciting rumor since it was Microsoft who started the trend of consoles begging for loose change every month way back in November 2002, a year after the launch of the OG Xbox.
Rumormongers leaked information about the multi-player modes in the upcoming Xbox tentpole, “Halo Infinite,” being Free2Play, and Microsoft confirmed the leaked information as true. Meanwhile, other astute observers have noticed that Xbox Live Gold subscriptions are no longer available for purchase in large lump quantities, though it is still possible to roll an existing Gold subscription into Microsoft’s new Gamepass subscription. Microsoft also confirmed that this was intentional.
Combined, these changes from Microsoft all seem to indicate that the non-gaming company that started the vile trend that ultimately saddled all console gamers with …
Backlog: The Embiggening – August, 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/01/20 at 03:12 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future. Unhappy birthday to me! Not only is the world still in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic, 6 months after it began, but even worse, the Videogames Industry is still up to its old tricks and releasing mostly irredeemable crap. Though, I suppose we, as gamers, should be grateful that the Industry is deigning to release anything at all in the grip of both a pandemic and the annual Summer Game Drought… though this year’s particular drought hasn’t felt particularly dry, much like an overfull diaper.
Get your shovels ready, folks, as there is a lot of poop to scoop this month. Licensed, annualized, and ultra-casual junk is back in full-force in August, with an outrageous 12 titles, leading me to believe that developers who haven’t been able to get plastered in the bars or go on vacation have spent their Summer “productively,” working on these shovel-ready projects. We’ve got a whopping 4 annualized Sports releases including …
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