Backlog: The Embiggening – May, 2018
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/29/18 at 03:14 PM CT
Summer’s just around the corner, and with folks graduating from various institutions of education in droves during the month of May, there will be high demand for a videogame-based escape as they find it impossible to secure employment and begin paying-off their soul-crushing debt. The videogame industry hears the pleas of the downtrodden, and has a whopping 27 game releases slated for the month-before-Summer, perhaps in the hopes of shutting us up about ‘game drought’ as June and July roll in. Unfortunately for us, there are even more ports and remasters than usual. Seriously. This is BAD… there are soooo many ports it’s hard to wrap my head around it.
Mercifully, there’s only one piece of licensed IP flotsam floating around this month. “Conan Exiles” is based on the once-popular Conan the Barbarian pulp novels. I’ve been wanting to get into the Conan IP for some time, but find the extant volume of written work overwhelming, so I’ve been hoping for a videogame …
Enhanced Steam Reveals Russia Receives Massive Game Discounts Thanks to Regional Pricing
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/22/18 at 03:14 PM CT
I’ve been a fan of the Enhanced Steam browser plug-in for nearly as long as I’ve been using Steam. I admit, however, that, like with most fancy, multi-function software, I don’t use even close to all of Enhanced Steam’s features.
However, while browsing Steam recently, one of Enhanced Steam’s features caught my eye and really threw me for a loop. By mousing-over the little globe icon next to a game’s price, Enhanced Steam will reveal how much it costs in other parts of the world in those countries’ regional currencies, as well as whether or not the game is available in a given region at all. Naturally, I was unsurprised to find several Japanese games from my test sample that aren’t available for purchase in Japan, but I was surprised to see just what a massive discount Steam offers on games purchased in Russian Rubles.
As illustrated in the above screen captures, Russian gamers who pre-order the upcoming “Dragon Quest 11” will get it for 45% off of …
The 10 Best IPs that Somehow Have Less than 3 Games
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/15/18 at 03:07 PM CT
Sequels: Love them or hate them, in an Intellectual Property-driven medium like videogaming, wringing all of the value out of an idea is simply good for business. Some companies, like Nintendo, have managed to stave off irrelevance solely via the strength of their long-running franchises. Yet, sadly, in far too many cases, a great IP is cut short and never allowed to live up to its potential. Among the ridiculously long-running franchises out there, there are also a significant number of tiny franchises that, for whatever reason, never managed to receive even a full trilogy of titles. I’m not talking about one-hit-wonders or stand-alone titles that were never intended to be part of a larger series, but actual franchises that just faded away as their slated follow-ups were canceled or never materialized. Perhaps the first game in the series was terrible, so nobody was willing to give the significantly-improved sequel the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps the sequel was actually at …
“Shadow of War” is but One Victory in an Ongoing Conflict
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/08/18 at 02:36 PM CT
This week, videogamers and Middle-Earth fans alike were greeted with the fantastic news that the huge stink made by games journalists and the gaming public alike has resulted in Warner Bros. allowing “Middle-Earth: Shadow of War” dev, Monolith (not to be confused with the Japanese ‘Xenoblade’ dev, MonolithSoft) to dial-back the macrotransactions in the game before completely patching out the real money store in July of this year. While I enjoyed “Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor” well enough, and consider it to be something of a high water mark for licensed games based on non-game IP, I had no intention of ever touching the loot-box-riddled follow-up. With this complete reversal by Warner Bros., I’ll be doing a complete reversal of my own, and will definitely partake of the continuing adventures of Talion… sometime after the July update.
However, we as gamers can’t take this victory and put it in the bank. If we rest on our proverbial laurels, other game publishers …
Backlog: The Embiggening – April 1, 2018
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/01/18 at 01:36 PM CT
Oh, boy! April’s here, and that means the loveable professionals of the AAA videogame industry and the scrappy homebrewers of the Indie development scene are ready to give us tons more awesome games to play! Let’s take a look at how fun and exciting this month will be. I can hardly wait!
We all love the biggest corporations because they are the best. They have the best IP and they’re not afraid to use it. This month, we’re getting an awesome Action/Adventure based on the beautifully drawn and incredibly animated ‘Adventure Time’ TV show! WOW! The Switch is also getting ports of the WiiU’s “Hello Kitty Kruisers” Kart racing phenomenon and the culturally relevant (and also beautifully animated) JRPG, “South Park: The Fractured, But Whole,” so folks who missed out on these gems the first time have a chance to buy them again. YAY!
Indie devs are still using their loving attention to detail to bring versions of some of their best games to the Switch at a …
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