Review Round-Up: Winter 2024
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/02/25 at 01:28 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:
Once again, the entire MJ Crew was pretty much in the doldrums and didn’t do a whole lot of gaming over the gloomy Winter months. But at least I did get started on my Backlog Ablutions, clearing the shortest of my three titles and actually experiencing genuine JOY while gaming for the first time in a while.
“7 Days to Die” – 1.5/5
“Hogwarts Legacy” – 3.5/5
“TinyKin” – 4.5/5
Chris’ Reviews:
Chris also got started on his Backlog Ablutions, and has been playing “Assassin’s Creed Odyssey” fairly non-stop since the holiday break. Of course, he still has to make time for his day job, two evenings per week (provided Nick hasn’t caught the plague again), and Saturday afternoons for couch coop, so he still hasn’t finished it. But at least he did submit some overdue reviews for our enjoyment… though …
Backlog: The Embiggening – March, 2025
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/22/25 at 11:16 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Winter is officially “over,” but the weather didn’t get the memo. That leaves us with plenty of time to sit inside and play our backlogs instead of dealing with the cold and snow. Unfortunately, many of us aren’t exactly enamored of the giant pile of (mostly digital) games we’ve got stacked up, and are mostly looking forward to coop sessions more than anything else.
Will March come in like a lion, bringing some roaring new titles to get us fired-up and out of our doldrums? Or will it come in like a lamb… or rather a LAME, with more crap to ignore?
Keep your shovels at the ready, folks, because we’ve got some manure to move. In the Licensed Swill category, we’ve got an attempt at rebooting the ‘Carmen Sandiego’ Edutainment series with a new game called… “Carmen Sandiego.” There’s also “The First Berserker: Khazan,” based on the ‘Dungeon and Fighter’ IP, a new ‘Bleach’ game that I might …
Sony’s DRM Ecosystem Nightmare Strikes Again
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/16/25 at 02:41 AM CT
Well, PlayStation Network, a.k.a., PSN, went and had another major outage that lasted a couple days. Even worse, this most recent failure of their online infrastructure revealed that, far from the cheerleaders of “simple” and “reasonable” game-sharing and DRM features they pretended to be when the Xbox One was threatening potential customers with an always-online hellscape of DRM and disc-checks, Sony is actually just as bad as Microsoft intended to be.
It seems that plenty of folks went out and grabbed the sold-separately PS5 optical disc drive during the outage in order to play physical copies of their games, only to discover that the PS5 optical drive won’t work without phoning home to PSN first. This has, apparently, been a known issue for a year already, but with the flagging popularity and relevance of both physical media and PlayStation in general, it’s the type of thing that didn’t make a splash among any of the activist-driven James Gournalism outlets of the …
“Veilguard” Flops Hard, “It Wasn’t a Live Service,” Says EA CEO
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/09/25 at 03:35 PM CT
Yahtzee Crowshaw over at the Second Wind gaming YouTube channel coined a phrase – and is now selling t-shirts bearing it – that becomes increasingly relevant, year after year. “Let’s all laugh at an Industry that never learns anything. Tee, hee, hee!”
Our most recent bout of uneducatable Industrial Gaming pontificating comes from none other than Electronic Arts – the last stable member of the former Triumvirate of Evil Gaming Companies, with Activision now part of Microsoft and Ubisoft teetering on the brink – who once won Worst Company in America two years in a row. EA CEO Andy Wilson told investors that the reason the publisher’s latest sequel in the ‘Dragon Age’ franchise flopped so unbelievably hard was entirely due to the fact that the game didn’t have any ‘shared world’ features – which is code for ‘It wasn’t a Live Service.’
Talk about sheer ignorance! Andy needs to lose his job immediately, since he is willing to ignore the obvious …
Backlog: The Embiggening – February, 2025
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/02/25 at 02:26 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Big things are happening at MeltedJoystick, as we have recently inked an official partnership with the International Games Database, a.k.a., IGDB. As a result, you’ll be seeing a lot more cover-and-box art appearing on games in our database. Even better, Nick has expressed interest in finally revising the way the site handles multi-platform titles to make the database less cluttered and make new releases more discoverable.
In order to prepare for these upcoming changes, I’m going to revise the way I look at upcoming releases in a way I’ve been dreaming of for at least 8 years: I’m no longer going to mention ports, remakes, remasters, compilations, or other rehashes of old releases (unless circumstances warrant a rare exception). As a result, it will be much clearer just how little the Games Industry does each month.
Without further ado, let’s get to the shortened release docket for the shortest month of the …
10 Games to Get Excited About in 2025
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/25/25 at 04:19 PM CT
Welcome back to MeltedJoystick’s mostly-annual feature where we take a look at the most exciting titles slated to be released over the course of the coming year. While these titles frequently don’t come out when expected thanks to delays, when they do, they either horribly disappoint OR find their way into the MeltedJoystick Games of the Year list. Let’s take a look at the most promising titles coming in 2025!
1. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
“Clair Obscur” is titled after a French artistic term, not a woman’s name, as English speakers might assume. This game is a brand-new original IP – and inaugural effort – from France-based Sandfall Interactive, and is being published by the London-and-Singapore-based conglomerate of Indie developers known as Kepler Interactive. It could have extensive Euro-jank, but the developer’s stated goal is to provide a “high fidelity turn-based RPG,” a genre which they consider “neglected by AAA developers.” Well, I certainly …
Wokeness Strikes Japan as Square-Enix Adopts Far-Left Policy
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/19/25 at 01:57 PM CT
Oh, dear. A few years ago, we reported that Japan was straying down the path of dictatorial control with their revised copyright policy. Now they’re straying down the path of censorship and stifling opposing viewpoints, and Square-Enix is Patient Zero.
The once-great RPG publisher revealed a new Anti-Harassment Policy that is really just an excuse to shut-down all criticism. Sadly, that’s the way these terrible policies always manage to sneak through and become law. It starts with a reasonable proposition that videogame company employees shouldn’t be sent death threats, or be doxed, or suffer any form of genuine harassment… but then quickly escalates into something like Square-Enix’s new policy, in which any criticism of the company’s products can be met with not only revocation of the critic’s ability to use Square-Enix’s platforms to criticize the company, but also full revocation of any and all game licenses for Square-Enix games the critic might have.
This …
Backlog: The Embiggening – January, 2025
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/10/25 at 10:34 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! It’s a New Year, once again, and – as is always the case with a new beginning – the Games Industry has a chance to make a fresh start and maaaaaybe not do all the same stupid stuff they did last year that lost them a ton of money and left several Big Names in Industrial Gaming teetering on the precipice of Broke (induced, in many cases, by Woke). As we’ve already seen from noodle-suckers like Mink Tinklebag, the backpedaling and about-facing has already begun ahead of the U.S. Government’s looming change of administration from a dottering old fool who let the Woke Fringe run roughshod over him to a… dottering old fool who will hand our society over to religious fundamentalists and/or Neo-Soviets as long as they give him personal compliments. Ugh.
One bit of good news coming out of the first month of 2025’s game releases is NO shovelware! Buuut I’m not going to leave this category completely blank, as there’s a …
New Year’s Backlog Ablutions 2025
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/05/25 at 02:01 PM CT
The results of the last year’s New Year’s Backlog Ablutions are in! Sadly, we couldn’t keep our Perfect Streak going into a third year, as Erstwhile Matt – this initial instigator of this entire sorry display – failed utterly, completing only one of his three chosen games and, furthermore, failing to submit a review for that game. Even though Nick was still in a quantum state with his third (and worst) game, he managed to submit a review on the last possible day, in spite of dealing with his 3rd official bout with COVID-19.
Since Matt was a Loser this year, he was obligated to buy each of the rest of us a game from our wishlists. To mix up the formula a bit – since we seem to do that every year – Nick proposed that Matt’s Penalty Games should automatically become picks for the rest of us.
To reiterate the rules: We all have one year to play three specific backlogged games that we’ve chosen for ourselves in advance. Included within those three games must be …
Year in Review: 2024
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/28/24 at 10:57 PM CT
Well, the world didn’t end last year, in spite of world politicians’ overwhelming levels of hubris and stupidity. Unfortunately, that means the MJ Crew had to come up with a year-end list including 5 things that didn’t completely suck about gaming and nerd culture in 2024… Hey, we tried. At least coming up with complete gaming disasters was still easy, so that’s a plus, right? (No, it’s not.)
Top 5 Fails
5. Square-Enix Makes No Money from Traditional Games
Oh, me, oh, my! While everyone in the MJ Crew loved Square-Enix at some point in the past, we’ve all come to feel a great sense of disdain and betrayal from the former titan of Japanese RPG publishing. We thought the company might get back on track after getting rid of its Western, non-RPG-related studios, but, alas, it was not to be. In 2024, Square-Enix revealed that they make next to nothing from “traditional” games – the type that used to be their bread and butter – with most of their revenue …
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