Review Round-Up: Fall 2016
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/03/16 at 01:42 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:
This quarter, Chris and I managed to review exactly the same number of games! This is what happens when we’re both bogged down in open-world hell… and when I decide I’d rather clean up after a deceased hoarder for a month than play “Pier Solar and the Great Architects” because the game is so horrible.
“Pier Solar and the Great Architects HD” – 1.5/5
“Dragon Age: Inquisition GotY Edition” – 4/5
“Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Mirror of Fate HD” – 3.5/5
“Adventurer Manager” – 3.5/5
“Singularity” – 4.5/5
“Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! GotY Edition” – 4/5
“Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power” – 3.5/5
Chris’ Reviews:
Chris finally finished “Fallout 4” after… what’s it been, nearly a year?! He wisely chose to follow it up with some shorter Indie games and explore some …
Backlog: The Embiggening – December, 2016
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/27/16 at 02:09 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Holiday crunch time is officially upon us, once again. Developers and publishers have pushed most of what they plan to push for the year, leaving us with a meager 12 releases in December. Let’s see if any of them are worth getting excited about!
Last minute shovelware is very light and also very non-licensed. “Stern Pinball Arcade” got pushed back – to no one’s sorrow – as did “We Sing.”
In ports and remasters, Sony is, surprisingly, only getting one: A port from PC to PS4 for “Deponia.” The rest of the porting is going to… Nintendo, of all outfits, with “Super Mario Maker” and “Dragon Quest 8” unnecessarily gracing the 3DS (who would want to play either of those games in 10-minute bursts?) and “Minecraft: Story Mode” getting a physical release on the officially-dead WiiU.
Of the three multi-plat releases, two are looking intriguing. “Steep” is, of course, an uninspired snowboarding …
5 Ways the Switch Could Sink
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/20/16 at 01:59 PM CT
With Nintendo playing coy regarding details about their upcoming Switch hybrid console/handheld hardware, speculation is rampant. Obviously, gamers have a lot of questions about this upcoming device, and Nintendo is simply refusing to answer them, instead remaining stonily silent until the company’s pre-determined time to release more information, which is coming up in a few months.
Where there’s speculation, of course, there is fear. Some of the hardest-core Nintendo fanboys have found themselves wringing their hands, fretting that the reason for Nintendo’s silence is some sort of bad news tied to the Switch that will abruptly cause the entire concept to tank in the collective eyes of the consumer public. With that in mind, here are five ways the Switch could go horribly wrong.
5. Media Bias
While the mainstream media loves to talk about Nintendo (and Apple) products, this is likely because the last time they actively thought about videogames, Nintendo had a …
WiiU is Officially Dead
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/13/16 at 03:00 PM CT
Last Thursday, Nintendo of Japan made official statements regarding the state of their current last home console, the WiiU. Japanese production of the console is coming to an end, and all remaining WiiU hardware available in North America has already been shipped to retail. It’s official: The WiiU is no more.
When MeltedJoystick buried my WiiU in a mock funeral attended by all manner of console dignitaries back in 2013, we did so in a tongue-in-cheek manner. We didn’t want to see the WiiU fail and die. We explicitly ended that video with the WiiU Gamepad lighting up inside its coffin as a symbol of hope, leaving the potential for Nintendo to get it together with the WiiU like they did with the 3DS.
As we all know now, that never happened. The WiiU launched a failure, remained a failure, and died a failure. But why?
The first problem lined up against the WiiU was Nintendo’s split focus on two devices with different games. The 3DS launched as a failure, and in a …
Backlog: The Embiggening – November, 2016
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/06/16 at 02:29 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Now that Halloween is over, once again, Americans will look forward to that next great commercial holiday. No! Not Thanksgiving, as most Americans don’t have anything to be thankful for (as illustrated by the election travesty that is currently going on between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton). Black Friday and Christmas will be here in but a few short weeks, forcing game publishers to rush things out the door, regardless of their state of readiness, in order to meet arbitrary deadlines. The result is, as usual, a LOT of game releases. But many of them will suffer quality control issues.
The shovelware is relatively tame for November. Someone made a ‘Digimon’ MMO, Nordic Games is channeling Ubisoft and releasing yet another unwanted/unneeded “We Sing” karaoke ‘game,’ and “Cartoon Network: Battle Crashers” seems to be a ‘Smash Bros.’ inspired Beat ‘Em Up. There’s another ‘Sword Art Online’ game based …
Obsidian Hints at Pathfinder cRPG Project
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/29/16 at 04:36 PM CT
Do you like cRPGs? Do you worry – like I do – that the genre has been tainted by so much Action and so watered-down that it might as well not even exist? Do you get upset – like I do – that the most acclaimed and award-winning ‘RPGs’ in recent years have been Action/Sandbox games mislabeled as ‘W’RPGs in order to garner more sales through false advertising?
If so, you need to lay some truth on Obsidian Entertainment – the company crafted from the remains of Black Isle, which, along with BioWare, ushered in the cRPG Golden Age with the Infinity Engine games and pre-FPS ‘Fallout’ – in this survey, which they posted in their official forum in order to garner community feedback about the state of cRPGs. It’s a rather exhaustive list of questions, so it can take 20 minutes or so to complete, but isn’t shining the Light of Truth upon the state of videogame RPGs worth a little bit of time?
One incredibly noteworthy section of the poll is a group of …
The Nintendo Switch is a Long Time Coming
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/22/16 at 06:17 PM CT
After months of agonizing silence since unofficially taking the WiiU off life-support, this past week Nintendo finally produced a short teaser trailer revealing the Nintendo Switch, the Japanese company’s upcoming gaming platform, formerly codenamed “NX.” Unfortunately, this teaser doesn’t reveal much of anything new, as the rumors and speculation about the Switch being a console/handheld hybrid and using cartridges instead of optical discs have been around for many months. It is, however, nice to have these rumors confirmed. Even more unfortunately, Nintendo is committed to clamming up and not sharing anything more about the Switch until close to its release date in March 2017.
Looking way, way, waaaay back to 2011, one of my very first articles on the then-new MeltedJoystick.com was an exhortation for Nintendo to merge their console and handheld efforts into a single device, while simultaneously praising Sony’s efforts at Remastering PSP games for the PS3 (I have since …
From Micro to Macro: Enough is Enough
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/16/16 at 01:10 PM CT
Having recently dipped a toe into the multi-player mode of “Dragon Age: Inquisition,” I was disgusted to find a mobile-style microtransaction engine instead of a complementary game mode. Other mainstream “AAA” developers, like Square Enix, have been sneaking this type of nonsense into retail releases, like the latest ‘Deus Ex’ title, as well.
When microtransactions started out, they seemed innocuous enough. Horse Armor in “Oblivion” was one of the bigger, more memetic jokes made about early microtransactions, but, for the most part, they were indeed small, cosmetic, and fully optional.
More recently, however, I have noticed a distinct trend of ‘micro’transactions no longer remaining small. Many of the terrible mobile games that Chris and Nick just can’t stop playing are Free2Play – meaning that they are actually Pay2Win – and while the not-particularly-optional payments start out fairly small, they inexorably built, to the point that the costlier ones …
As Went TV, So Too Shall Go Videogames
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/09/16 at 02:47 PM CT
The new Fall Television Season is upon us. We’re already a few weeks in, and new shows – and new seasons of extant shows – will continue to trickle out for the rest of the year, before other shows are rotated in to fill-out the schedule for the remainder of the season, as few current shows can be bothered to produce a full 24-36 episodes as they once did.
Recently I was talking with the MeltedJoystick Crew over Steam chat about the shows we’re watching or are planning to watch in this upcoming season. While Chris and Nick both admitted to watching waaaaaaay too much TV, with gobs of shows cluttering up their DVRs, Matt – being the nauseatingly stereotypical workaholic ‘family’ guy – confessed to only streaming a single show to completion at any given time, while I proudly announced my meager TV-watching schedule as a boon, giving me more time every evening to work on my terrifying backlog of videogames (80, at time of writing).
It has actually been quite a long …
“Cinematic” is the New RPG
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/02/16 at 02:50 PM CT
In the 8th Generation, I have been gratefully relieved to see a resurgence of true, dyed-in-the-wool RPGs after the genre all but disappeared during the grim, bleak 7th Generation. However, I have been wondering why the King Maker genre, the genre that everyone agreed was one of their top-tier favorites from the 3rd Gen when “Final Fantasy” and “Dragon Quest” were breaking new ground with every sequel, all the way through the 6th Gen when nearly every publisher that mattered had their own IP in the genre, was driven to the brink of extinction in the first place.
Looking back at the RPG genre from the 3rd-6th Gens, one major feature of the genre stands out: RPGs were the only videogame genre to provide gripping narrative content and an investment by the player in a cast of characters over dozens of hours. Old-style platformers didn’t bother with story fluff. Neither did old shooters, and that genre still struggles with narrative-focused experiences to this day. As of the …
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