What’s Going on at Kotaku?!
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/16/24 at 02:58 PM CT
Kotaku used to be the definitive place for Games Journalism in the 20- ‘00s. Every game, every discussion, every gaming tangential subject – you name it, if you Google’d it, all roads lead to Kotaku, and they were – with heavy emphasis on the past tense part of the statement – a comprehensive and good place to read about videogames. Kotaku’s ability, as a digital-only platform, to react to rapidly emerging and changing environment of the Games Industry effectively dealt the death blow to print gaming magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly. But as we’ve been seeing in the Post-Dot-Com-Bubble era, tech monopolies are fertile fields for corruption and decadence.
In the last decade, Kotaku has gone from the de-facto source for information about videogames to a punchline after many years of creeping activism that saw the site’s focus shift dramatically from covering every tidbit of gaming news before any other outlet could produce an article about it, to berating and …
Nintendo’s Draconian IP Enforcement Just Got Worse
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/10/24 at 02:20 PM CT
Oh, Nintendo. We love Nintendo, don’t we folks? Yeah, they were the company that rebuilt console gaming after the 1983 Crash. They were the company whose developers, led by the likes of Shigeru Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata, created some of the best, brightest, and most memorable IPs in gaming, frequently carving out whole new genres, but always, at least, iterating on what came before in novel and positive ways.
That Nintendo is a relic of the past, however. Today’s Nintendo isn’t a Good Guy or a company that produces great games out of a passion for entertaining. Rather, it’s just another corporate monolith, fussing over money and possessed by an insane obsession with wringing every nickel possible out of the things created by its most passionate (and frequently ex- or late) employees.
Thus we come to the latest news out of Nintendoland that the company is introducing a music streaming app to its already bloated, poorly-designed, and overpriced stable of subscription …
Vaguely Related Review: DragonLance Destinies Vol. 3 “Dragons of Eternity”
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/03/24 at 02:13 PM CT
It’s hard to believe that it has already been two years since we first learned that the DragonLance Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting wasn’t permanently dead. Rather, we learned that the series progenitors, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, were coming back to the series, perhaps in a cynical and legalistic attempt to maintain copyright and trademark ownership of their original IP, perhaps in a genuine effort to rekindle the light of THE definitive Fantasy series of the 1980s.
Volume 1 of the new DragonLance Destinies left me cold, as it appeared that Weis and Hickman were bending the knee to Woke influences in tabletop gaming and pop media in general. However, in hindsight, I think that may have been some deadpan satire played a bit too closely to the chest. After all, Volume 2 completely redeemed the shortcomings of Volume 1 while also fleshing out the details of one of the series’ most famous historical battles… which didn’t previously have a lot of narrative …
Backlog: The Embiggening – November, 2024
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/26/24 at 04:07 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! November is upon us, and our thoughts return to our obligation to be thankful for what we have and to exercise our American right to vote. Neither of those things is particularly compelling in 2024.
The Earth is still spinning, and its core is still molten, so of course there is shovelware. We’ve got all three major subcategories coming at us too. In the Licensed Swill category, there’s “LEGO Horizon Adventures,” which combines LEGO with Sony’s ‘Horizon’ IP, delving to new depths of horror. There are also a new ‘Totally Spies!’ game and a new ‘Harry Potter’ game, along with a compilation of old ‘Marvel vs. Capcom’ Fighting games, which are Licensed Swill due to the Marvel part, not the Capcom part. In the 2Cazual2Liv subcategory, we’ve got “Zero to Hero Dance,” “MySims: Cozy Bundle,” and… “Needy Streamer Overload.” Lastly, we come to the Annualized Swill subcategory, which, shockingly …
5 Essential Dungeons and Dragons Supplements Regardless of Edition
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/20/24 at 02:51 PM CT
Well, Hasbro Wizards of the Coast recently released the 5.Woke Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, which they are calling “2024 Edition” apparently. While it allegedly maintains compatibility with the 2014 release of 5th Edition, there are already enough minor changes being reported that it will drive Dungeon Masters and experienced players insane trying to keep track of them.
That got me thinking: I have D&D books on my shelf that date all the way back to 1st Edition and were originally released in the early 1980s… and I still refer to these books all the time when looking for a way to spice-up the increasingly-bland and “for everyone, a.k.a., modern audiences, a.k.a., the most sensitive wieners in the world who should be sitting under their security blankets in their safe spaces instead of playing D&D” version of the game we have today. So let’s take a quick look at the 5 most-consulted books of ancient and arcane dungeonometry in my library!
1. Encyclopedia Magica …
Are Gamers Considerably More Culturally Aware than the Mainstream?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/13/24 at 02:37 PM CT
It seems like ever since the Orange Retard, Trollnald J. Dump, was elected President in 2016, the Culture Wars have been enflamed – as he might say – “like never before.” Seemingly in reaction to the MAGA movement, every single Marxist Sleeper Agent activated simultaneously… and prematurely.
While the Long March Through the Institutions has been partially successful in that it has captured both corporate Human Resources and the Ivory Towers of academia, the rest of the culture in the West was largely ignored. Obviously, the plan was to abruptly replace the existing culture with a Marxist worldview and hope that the Normies were so placated by their Bread and Circuses (e.g., welfare and professional sports) that they wouldn’t notice.
And, honestly, it almost worked. Normies are completely blind to the Culture Wars and mindlessly drift along, consuming whatever media or culture they happen to bump into, like NPC jellyfish. Gamers, on the other hand, have been …
Romhacking.net Shuts Down – It Has Nothing to do with Nintendo
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/06/24 at 02:24 PM CT
Gaming news is slow and dismal this Fall, so what better time to take a look back at the happenings we may have missed over the Summer?
It turns out that back in August, the long-running home for mods of classic Golden Age videogames – typically referred to as “rom-hacks,” as they involve editing the read-only memory dumped from a vintage cartridge (or, more rarely, disc) – romhacking.net, was permanently shut-down by its owner.
We’ve had plenty of grim news lately about Nintendo suing or sending Cease and Desist letters to all sorts of rom distribution sites and emulator developers in their perpetual game of Whack-a-Mole, but this time around, the decision to shut-down a rom-related site had nothing to do with them, but rather revolved entirely around personality conflicts between the site’s movers and shakers.
Romhacking.net had been around for 20 years, as an organized archive for rom-hacks and fanslations of all manner of 8-bit and 16-bit games, even …
Backlog: The Embiggening – October, 2024
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/29/24 at 02:32 AM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! We’re back in the “spooookiest” month of the year, but right now the only things that are scary are the ineptitude of our elected officials and the dismal quality of monthly videogame releases. Zombies won’t get the chance to eat my brain on Halloween if the neverending stream of political ads and shite game releases cause it to shrivel up and disintegrate!
Oh, EFF-ing, EFF! There are even more shovelware titles than there were last month: Over 20! And we’ve got all three categories represented to boot. In the Licensed Swill category there’s a LOT of stuff. There are games based on TV shows, like “Totally Spies! – Cyber Mission,” “Monster High: Skulltimate Secrets,” “The Smurfs: Dreams” (a show that’s been off the air for generations), “Nick Jr. Party Adventure” (really a whole TV network), “Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero,” “SpongeBob Squarepants: The Patrick Star Game,” “Sword Art Online: …
Sony Prices the PlayStation 5 Pro at $700 in a World Where No One Needs PlayStation
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/22/24 at 03:52 PM CT
I don’t know if Corporate Personhood is like the curse of immortality where the recipient/victim still ages and decays while living forever, or what. It seems that Sony might have Super Alzheimer’s Disease… or maybe they’re just retarded. One of those two things needs to be true in order for the corporation to justify selling its upcoming release of the PlayStation 5 Pro mid-gen upgrade for a whopping $700! That makes the Giant Enemy Crab-laden PlayStation 3 launch price of $600 look tame by comparison, especially with the PS3 being crammed full of cutting edge technology like a Blu-Ray drive and the multi-core Cell Processor, while the PS5 is… just an off-the-shelf, mid-range PC running a proprietary Sony OS. AND it doesn’t even have an internal disc drive anymore, so if you throw down for one of those, it’ll be MORE than $700!
It seems that Sony may be releasing this refresh of their already-unnecessary 9th Gen console to coincide with their 30th Anniversary as …
New “Steam Families” is Mired in Caveats
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/15/24 at 02:53 PM CT
Back in 2013, Valve introduced a feature in their PC gaming storefront, Steam, called “Steam Family Sharing,” which allowed relatives (and friends) to share their Steam libraries with each other, with the burdensome restriction that if a friend or relative was playing a game from your account, you couldn’t play ANY games in your account without kicking the share-ee out of their game first.
In March of 2024, Valve announced that Steam Family Sharing was going to be replaced by a re-designed take on the feature, simply called “Steam Families.” Allegedly, Steam Families would solve that glaring flaw in Steam Family Sharing by taking each copy of each game in a familial group and treating them separately, effectively transforming the collective game pools of all family members into a single pool, operated like a public library, in which each game license can be “checked-out” by any family member without impeding other family members from playing anything else in the …
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