He’s Everywhere IV!: Final Fantasy Edition
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/08/20 at 03:10 PM CT
The first time I roasted Chris for his early-March birthday, I tried to prune-down the large number of Chris-like people and creatures that inhabit the entirety of videogames to a meager 10. In the next roast, I stuck with the cockfighting pets from Nintendo’s ‘Pokemon’ franchise. The year after that, I went with Akira Toriyama-designed creatures from the venerable ‘Dragon Quest’ series. The other side of the ‘Dragon Quest’ coin, though, is the equally-venerable ‘Final Fantasy’ series, which has been under the same banner as ‘Dragon Quest’ since Squaresoft and Enix merged in 2003, and is the topic of this year’s roast.
Like ‘Dragon Quest,’ much of ‘Final Fantasy’s’ consistent visual style (what little there actually is) comes from the design work of artist, Yoshitaka Amano, who designed most of the iconic enemies the series is known for, having done nearly all of the visual design work for the first 6 games (i.e., before the series went to pot). …
Review Round-Up: Winter 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/01/20 at 02:30 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 spent most of the quarter playing relatively new additions to my backlog. Some of these experiences incited me to go back and (re)play the titles that inspired them, so I managed to squeeze in a few Retroarch romps (more like slogs) as well. Ultimately, it was still a mostly disappointing quarter, with only the untarnished glory of “Valkyria Chronicles 4” keeping my hopes afloat as 2020 begins.
“Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire” – 4/5
“Super Mario Maker 2” – 3/5
“Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins” – 2/5
“The Messenger” – 3.5/5
“Super Mario Land” – 2.5/5
“Ninja Gaiden (1989)” – 1/5
“Valkyria Chronicles 4” – 5/5
“Asterix & Obelix XXL2: Roman Rumble in Las Vegum” – 3/5
“Even the Ocean” – 3.5/5
“The Fall of Gods” – 3.5/5
Chris’ Reviews:
It was a really …
Backlog: The Embiggening – March, 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/23/20 at 03:15 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future. With the onset of March, we bid farewell to the misery of Winter and begin to look forward to the rebirth ceremonies associated with Springtime and the Spring Equinox, representing the long-fought victory of warmth, light, and life over cold, darkness and death. March is also the month that traditionally “comes in like a lion and out like a lamb”… but it looks like both of those animals had chronic diarrhea, based on the games being released this month.
As per the usual, we’ve got three piles based on kids’ TV coming in March, two based on anime and one based on something far worse. The anime games are based on the grammatically-torturous “My Hero Ones Justice” and the questionably-drawn “One Piece,” while the non-anime game is based on something called “Gigantosaurus,” but conveniently includes “The Game” in the title, calling itself out as shovelware for those who might just think “Gigantosaurus” …
Can’t Stoppy That Copy
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/16/20 at 03:20 PM CT
The other day while doing some late-night reading, I noticed a large scratch across my wrist and immediately thought, “Yikes! It looks like I tried to kill myself!” I don’t know why I thought that, considering the scratch most likely came from hauling a load of firewood without gloves, but the seed of that thought has stuck with me. Why do we, in the 21st Century, immediately think of suicide when we think of scratches or cuts on the wrist? By all accounts of medical professionals, it’s a highly inefficient and dubiously effective way of offing oneself, yet the idea sits in our collective psyche like a leaden weight.
While the idea of suicide itself is as ancient as the human species, the slitting of the wrists is not a concept of ancient origin, as our ancestors were typically much more efficient and dedicated, either in drinking poison (usually at the behest of the local government) or jamming a sword into the neck or abdomen, guaranteeing that they wouldn’t “get …
Console Gaming Deathwatch Enters Phase Three
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/09/20 at 03:27 PM CT
The long, slow death of console gaming is continuing at its leisurely pace. The first phase was the “singularity,” in which all consoles and PC became largely undifferentiated due to the rampant multi-platforming of third-party game releases. The second phase was when consoles themselves ceased to be profitable and network infrastructure began to be the primary source of revenue for platform holders.
Recently, Sony announced that it would be following Microsoft’s example from 2016, and start releasing its first-party exclusive titles on PC in addition to PlayStation. Thus comes the third phase, the shedding of first-party exclusives and the loss of the last traditional differentiating feature of the various gaming platforms.
Back in 2018, Sony renewed its focus on first-party titles, with a corporate restructuring that placed a greater emphasis than ever on the concept of “making PlayStation the best place to play” by having stuff that gamers couldn’t get elsewhere. …
Backlog: The Embiggening – February, 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/02/20 at 02:30 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future. February is, thankfully, the shortest month of the year. It also signals the last official month of the Winter season here at MeltedJoystick. Not only can we look forward to breaking free from the grasp of the Winter doldrums, we can be grateful that another month of crap releases will fly by in the blink of an eye.
It’s another month, and of course there’s shovelware. There’s a new J-Fighting game coming based on the “One Punch Man” anime. There are also two officially licensed Game of the Game takes on vehicular mayhem, with a port of the latest ‘Monster Jam’ monster truck driving sequel to the Switch, and another ‘Monster Energy Supercross’ motorcycle/dirtbike game. Lastly, we’ve got “Doug Flutie’s Maximum Football 2019.” This game is not yet an annualized sequel like ‘Madden Football,’ so why is it considered shovelware? Well, first of all, it has the name of a dried-up, washed-up old football ape …
Apple Gaming Hands-On: It Sucks as Much as Expected
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/26/20 at 03:33 PM CT
I have never owned an Apple product, not even an iPod MP3 player back in the day when iPods were all the rage and a new model was released every couple years (like iPhones nowadays). However, I have used plenty of Apple products, and this use exposure is why I never actually bought any: I just don’t enjoy the experience they provide.
However, if one were to dig deep into my own personal past relationships with technology, one would find that there was indeed a time and place where I actually liked Mac computers. That time and place was middle-school, on the cusp of the turnover between the 1980s and 1990s. “IBM Compatible” PCs still ran DOS, that esoteric command line OS that required secret wizard knowledge in order to make it do anything useful. By comparison, the greenscale/grayscale all-in-one Macintosh computers in my school library, with their point-and-click graphical user interfaces and WYSIWYG word processing (my first book reports were written in WordPerfect for …
Could Compelling Console Capabilities Come in the 9th Generation?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/18/20 at 04:30 PM CT
At MeltedJoystick, we’ve been aware of the death of console gaming since 2017. Sure, we may occasionally partake in some brief necromantic dalliances – Chris with his PlayStation 4 and me with my dusty, offline Switch – but for the most part, we’ve been quite happy with modern era PC gaming.
However, recently the rumormill has produced some material that is incredibly compelling: Allegedly, the upcoming Xbox SeX will include a ‘Windows Mode,’ allowing it to act more like the commodity PC it and its ancestors dating back to 2001 have always wanted to be. On the other side of the aisle, the PlayStation 5 will, again allegedly, include full Backward Compatibility for the full breadth of the PlayStation ecosystem.
The PlayStation 5 including full Backward Compatibility would be a huge boon to PlayStation loyalists, as it would provide a simple all-in-one box for playing everything from “Tomba!” and “Suikoden 2” to… “Bloodborne” (*dry heave*) and “Dad of …
“Done Right?” GameFreak Completes Nintendo’s Transition to Scummy “AAA” Corporate Publisher
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/12/20 at 02:33 PM CT
When the newest entries in the ‘Pokemon’ franchise of beginner/casual RPGs were released in November 2019, there was a major fan uproar. In a decision that could only be described as “questionable,” perpetual ‘Pokemon’ developer, GameFreak, released “Pokemon Sword Version” and “Pokemon Shield Version” with a gutted National Pokedex, leaving hundreds of pocket monsters on the cutting room floor and making the series’ tag line, “Gotta Catch ‘Em All!” into an impossibility. Long-time ‘Pokemon’ fans were incredibly upset, with numerous pro/con arguments made on both sides of the decision, while GameFreak itself stood by its decision to release a ‘Pokemon’ game missing most of the actual pokemon.
This past week, we have learned why GameFreak was so proud of itself for releasing an unfinished, incomplete ‘Pokemon’ experience as the franchise’s debut in the 9th Generation and on a not-explicitly-handheld platform. Sometime in Summer 2020, …
100… err 50… err 10… err 5? Yes, Five Games to Look Forward to in 2020.
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/04/20 at 03:35 PM CT
The monthly ‘Backlog: The Embiggening’ articles I assemble for MeltedJoystick are usually depressing enough. But I received a special request from a reader to ring in the new year with a list of ‘kinda-sorta-confirmed-we’ll-get-back-to-you-on-that’ game releases coming over the entirety of 2020. The big games journalism sites would just dump everything in a big pile and point excitedly, kinda like Nintendo Power Magazine used to do when EVERY trash NES game got coverage and generally-positive reviews (I’m still traumatized by the fact that “Bayou Billy” got a WHOLE ISSUE dedicated to it). Or, at bare minimum, they’d gather together all the “AAA” swill and Sony-produced ‘Is-This-a-Movie-or-a-Game?’ titles that mainstream trough-feeders can’t get enough of and tell us to get excited about spending our hard-earned cash on those.
At MeltedJoystick, though, some of us have higher standards and something resembling a curator’s eye. Thus it was difficult to …
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