Backlog: The Embiggening – June, 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/02/19 at 01:52 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! June is here, and the dreaded Summer Game Drought is at our doorstep. Will entire crops of gamers wither in the fields beneath the blistering Summer heat? Or will game publishers and Indies finally get their doo-doo together and space out their releases more? Only one way to find out!
Devourers of shovel-ready excrement may find themselves disappointed in June, as there are only 3 pieces of licensed schlock coming, and all of them belong to the same genre: Driving. There’s “Monster Jam Steel Titans” accompanied by two annual releases in annual Racing titles: “F1” and “MotoGP.”
There are many fewer ports, remasters, remakes, reboots, and rehashes coming in June than there have been for a loooong time. Even better, I get to take a break from calling out the Nintendo Switch as the literal port toilet it has become, as it’s not really getting any more ports in June than anyone else. The Switch is getting a port of …
OUYA Suffers Second Death as Forge TV Goes Away Next Month
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/26/19 at 03:48 PM CT
MeltedJoystick has been covering the life and times of the ill-fated OUYA Android microconsole since before it launched, optimistically expecting it to usher in a new era of Indie games. Unfortunately, the OUYA proved to be one big failure after the next, as the Android ecosystem continued to cement itself as an exclusively-smartphone platform, riddled with predatory mobile games, and with no developers willing to rock the boat and even try to turn it into something better.
After OUYA started begging people to use its platform and gave away free money (which I never did spend), the company sold out to Razer, the PC peripherals company that was the one-time maker of one of my favorite things ever, the Razer Hydra. Razer re-branded the OUYA storefront into the Cortex TV storefront, and plopped it into the company’s Forge TV microconsoles, released in 2016, which had the added feature of being Steam Link-style in-home streaming devices (a feature shared by the Nvidia Shield line of …
Epic (Store) Fail
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/19/19 at 12:22 AM CT
At the end of 2018, the MJ Crew was tentatively excited about the prospect of a new competitor in the increasingly-crowded digital PC games ecosystem, with the transformation of Epic Games’ Epic Launcher into the Epic Store. Unfortunately for gamers everywhere, the Epic Store has spent the first half of 2019 proving to be the exact opposite of what we wanted. Let us count the four ways in which Epic failed.
4. Feature Incomplete
Despite existing as a Publisher-centric launcher for Epic Games… err… games, for quite a few years already, going into its inaugural year as an actual store, the Epic Games Store is a brittle skeleton of barely-present functionality and non-existent features. The store organization is simplistic to the point of hilarity – if they actually had a large number of games available, nobody would be able to find anything. The damned thing doesn’t even have a shopping cart or wishlist! Some shoppers have even been auto-flagged as fraudulent because the …
On the Properties of Backlog Strata
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/12/19 at 02:58 PM CT
At the end of every month, I write up a little feature called “Backlog: The Embiggening,” in which I typically eviscerate the coming month’s game release docket for being awful, while occasionally adding one or two (or rarely three) new games to that looming monster known only as my Backlog. Like assholes and opinions, everyone has a Backlog. Even people who don’t play videogames have Backlogs, as any form of planned, yet unfinished, activity is Backloggable. Throughout history, Backlogs have tormented all manner of people, and even the 1970’s folk song, “Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin is ultimately about the sadness caused by putting ‘playing with your kid’ on the Backlog and never finding time to get it taken off.
However, for modern gamers in particular, the Backlog has become an omnipresent plague. Folks who gamed in the 1st through 6th Generations would easily be able to find the time to experience everything of quality and personal interest that the …
Dreamcast Retrospective
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/05/19 at 04:31 PM CT
As regular readers know, the MeltedJoystick Crew gets together in person (nearly) every week to play some local coop games at the MJHQ. Unfortunately for us (and our review output), the rise of the Network Wars has put a damper on the number of game releases with local multi-player, and an even bigger damper on such games with a primarily cooperative modus operandi (which are the only ones we bother with).
Thus, we decided it would be a good idea to mine the past for some local coop games that we may have missed back in the day (or just played so long ago that we’d be up for a new run). I decided to blow the dust off my old Dreamcast and fire-up that platform’s definitive cooperative game, “Armada.” This activity got me thinking about the Dreamcast as a whole.
The Dreamcast was the last console developed by Sega, a hardware developer that had been playing second fiddle to Nintendo since the post-crash recovery in the mid-1980s. I never really cared much about Sega back …
Backlog: The Embiggening – May, 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/28/19 at 02:53 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! April showers (of watery fecal matter) bring May flowers (turd blossoms), so as the Spring quarter begins to wind down, let’s take a look at what the Industry is leaving for us to squabble over as the Summer Game Drought looms on the horizon.
Shovel-ready doo-doo is light on the ground in May. We’ve got one super-casual non-game, in the form of “Little Friends: Dogs & Cats,” which is clearly trying to take up slack in the absence of a new ‘NintendDogs’ title. Then we’ve got two licensed trash fires, one based on the stoner comedy by Cartoon Network’s ‘Rick & Morty’ team, “Trover Saves the Universe;” then we’ve got a compilation port of other licensed drek from Cartoon Network. Nothing I love (read: hate) more than ports of shovelware.
And, boy, do we have ports coming in May! 17, all told… and unsurprisingly, the Switch is still leading the way, as desperate rats try to save themselves by bailing on …
The New Ascetics
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/21/19 at 03:49 PM CT
This weekend, while Jews the world over celebrate the avoidance of a plague by the smearing of sheep’s blood on their door lintels, and Christians celebrate the agonizing physical abuse, torment, and death heaped upon the god-man at the center of their mythology, here I am thinking about games. But really, I’m thinking about games AND religion.
As a Classicist, there are actually very few times when I’m NOT thinking about religion from an outside, unattached perspective. With great dismay, I see all the time how stupid people do stupid or horrific things in the name of Faith. Indeed, the thing that first dislodged my own faith, and placed me on the True Path of heathendom, was a college course I took as a sophomore on the writings of the early Church Fathers. The Christianity I grew up with was supposed to be a faith of forgiveness, freedom from fear, and the end of superstition. What I read about in the Church Fathers was, instead, a Christianity steeped in anxiety, …
The Post-Steam World: A Speculative Fiction
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/14/19 at 04:32 PM CT
With the Epic Games Store’s recent endeavors to curry favoritism amongst publishers and lock-down exclusive distribution of a handful of big titles for limited time windows via the use of monetary incentives paid to said publishers (colloquially known as “money-hatting,” but traditionally known as “bribery”), the pro-Epic corporate shills and garden variety Internet Trolls have been out in full-force, declaring the DOOM of Valve Softworks’ Steam store. According to these self-styled prophets, the pro-corporation moves made by the Epic Store – beginning with their founding features of taking a smaller cut of sales made through their store than Steam does and the waiving of the Unreal Engine licensing fee on games built using Epic’s own Unreal Engine (i.e., about half of all modern games); then culminating in the money-hatting of “Metro: Exodus,” “The Outer Worlds,” “Journey,” and “Borderlands 3” – has lead the upstart game retailer to ‘great …
“Labo VR” Arrives Right on Schedule
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/07/19 at 02:34 PM CT
I first declared “Reality” to be the hot hardware gimmick way back in 2014, when Oculus and Sony were pushing Virtual Reality and Microsoft and Nintendo were pushing Augmented Reality. Over the course of the intervening years, Valve and HTC jumped into the VR arena, and Microsoft’s AR merged with VR to form the Voltron-esque Mixed Reality of the Hololens. Meanwhile, other (non-gaming) companies, like Samsung and Google, experimented with VR on smartphones, typically by strapping said devices to the user’s face.
In view of these trends, I have been speculating in private (and on other Internet fora) for several years now that when Nintendo decided to throw its hat into the VR arena, it would likely do so in a manner modeled on the mobile paradigm set by Google and Samsung rather than the PC/Console paradigm set by everyone else. In fact, when Nintendo first released its “Labo” cardboard origami sets for the Switch, I immediately declared that a Google Cardboard-style VR …
Backlog: The Embiggening – April, 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/31/19 at 02:33 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! April is for fools, as we all know all too well. Too bad the fools in the games industry (and American government) can’t keep their idiocy contained to a single month! Let’s take a look at how big the dumpster fire will be over the course of the next 4 weeks.
Shovelware is much lighter on the ground for April than it was for March, with only three titles. One, “UglyDolls: An Imperfect Adventure,” is based on the series of plushies that is, apparently, supposed to help post-Millennial kids come to terms with how Effed-up they are. Another, “Super Dragon Ball Heroes: World Mission,” is based on one of the oldest manga/anime IPs to make the trip from Japan to the West (and also one of the worst). Lastly, we’ve got “World War Z,” a zombie-schlock Shooter based on the movie “World War Z.” I have a sinking feeling that Chris is somehow going to force us to play this turd for Co-op Monday sometime next …
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