Backlog: The Embiggening – April, 2021
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/28/21 at 02:48 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! April, as always, is for fools, and the continued impact of the pandemic, combined with a silicon chip shortage, has all of us playing the part. But the Games Industry is content to continue churning its mechanism to produce lots of new products for ‘us’ to buy. Let’s take a look at what the next month has in store…
Not only is there a chip shortage, there’s a shovelware shortage! Other than two officially licensed Racing games that are barely different from their entire line of predecessors – “WRC 9” and “Monster Energy Supercross 4” – there’s nothing to panic about!
Unfortunately, there are still plenty of ports, remasters, remakes, and rehashes to panic about. In April 2021, for the first time since 2018, the Nintendo Switch is not the main target for this column’s port shaming, as the Industry’s gaze has turned to rest more heavily on the new greener pastures of the PlayStation 5 now that the …
PlayStation VR Not Dead; Motion Controls Neither
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/21/21 at 04:04 PM CT
This week, Sony revealed their new generation of PlayStation VR equipment for the PlayStation 5. The most impressive piece of the reveal was the new generation of motion controllers that go along with the new VR headset. These controllers are clearly modeled upon the Oculus Touch VR controllers that have been available for PC for a while now, but Sony confirmed that there are no external tracking devices required, and that these new motion controllers are tracked by the VR helmet itself, similar to how Microsoft’s Mixed Reality Hololens works.
While it is good news that someone other than our brilliant and visionary Lord GabeN is still thinking about VR in the gaming space, I’m significantly disappointed that Sony’s new motion controllers aren’t VR agnostic like their old PlayStation Move controllers were. The only non-VR motion controller systems on the market that are anywhere near viable are the aging (and discontinued) Razer Hydra and the aging (and discontinued) …
Nvidia’s Tone-Deaf “Solution” to the Graphics Card Shortage
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/14/21 at 03:25 PM CT
We’re one quarter of the way through 2021, and the horrors of 2020 – the COVID-19 pandemic, global logistics and shipping challenges, and a microchip shortage – have doggedly followed us into what we’d all hoped would be a brighter future and a return to normalcy. The new Xbox and PlayStation consoles (as well as the old Nintendo Switch) are still hard to come by on store shelves, but PC gamers have taken the most damaging blow from the continuing hardware shortages, as they aren’t the only ones trying to buy-up new PC hardware components.
Nvidia, the manufacturer of premier graphics cards for PC gaming and workstations, has finally decided to do something about the fact that unscrupulous crypto-currency miners keep buying-up all the new GPUs as soon as a new batch hits retail channels: As reported by Linus Tech Tips, Nvidia will be pushing a new ‘designed-for-crypto-mining’ range of headless graphics cards to that audience, with the idea being that the miners will …
I’m Everywhere!?: Self-Deprecation Edition
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/07/21 at 05:26 PM CT
For the past four years, each time MeltedJoystick’s Community Manager – and my oldest friend – Chris has gotten a year older, I’ve poked fun at him for the fact that, nearly everywhere I look across all forms of media, there are a plethora of people, creatures, and objects that remind me of him. Usually I throw Chris a bone and drop a self-deprecating reference to the fact that he and I are, essentially, the world’s least-popular comedy duo into the lists. This year, I decided to go all the way and put together a full list of 10 characters from videogames that remind me of myself. This was a much more challenging task than finding a random assortment of small, round, annoying things and pointing out how they are like Chris, so I was actually thankful, for a change, that there are so many licensed videogames based on non-game IP out there.
Get ready for a list packed with antisocial antagonistic anti-heroes!
10. The Boy (“A Boy and His Blob”)"A completely average …
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