Backlog: The Embiggening – June, 2018
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/27/18 at 03:04 PM CT
June is just around the corner, and that means it’s time to take a look at what our friendly Uncles in the videogame industry have planned for our Summer fun. This month looks a bit more evenly spread amongst the categories than last month… but the single biggest group of games being released to kick off the Season of Freedom for kids (or not, it seems that kids today are more firmly guided into thousands of hours of extracurriculars rather than being left to their own devices like we on the MJ Crew were) still begins with a ‘p’ and ends with ‘orts and remasters.’
Three bits of shovelware are poking their weed-like heads above ground in June: A new ‘Gundam’ breaker game creatively titled “New Gundam Breaker” (based on the mecha anime), “LEGO The Incredibles” (based on the Disney CG superhero movie, and released conveniently as a tie-in for the upcoming sequel), and “Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn” (based on stupid memes and an aging ex-baller who apparently …
The Nintendo Network Subscription is an Unfunny Joke
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/19/18 at 06:48 PM CT
Nintendo has been dragging their feet for over a year after the company announced that they would be adding a subscription paywall to online play for the Nintendo Switch (and presumably all future Nintendo hardware). For a while, it looked like maybe they’d changed their minds, but alas, last week they officially pulled off the obscuring tarp and revealed the monstrosity in all its glory.
For a basic price of $4/month (which only idiots would pay instead of grabbing the $20/year ‘bonus’ package, which is still of dubious value), Switch owners can pass unmolested through the paywall for games like “Splatoon 1.5,” “Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo Switch,” or “Mario Kart 8” (which were free to play online on the WiiU…), plus SO MUCH MORE! Let’s take a look:
Save Data Cloud Backup
One of the biggest oversights with the Switch hardware is the inability to locally back-up saves to an SD card or USB drive. Nintendo is clearly still terrified by the way the …
Make vs. Let
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/12/18 at 06:02 PM CT
The handwringing over the popularity of the Sandbox genre (or style, if you prefer) has reached something of a head. Perhaps it was caused by the fact that Nintendo has finally gotten on board with the idea of non-linear, open-world game design; or perhaps it’s because Ubisoft has continued to produce the same basic Sandbox over and over again, and just released another iteration of it in “FarCry 5.” Non-linear, open-world gameplay is, regardless of oversaturation, still incredibly popular, and there’s a very simple reason for it that has been with gaming as far back as the transition from the NES to the SNES (and caused no small share of handwringing then too).
This concept first started to crystallize for me during a discussion with MeltedJoystick’s CTO, Nick. I was making fun of him for wasting his time speedrunning the original “Super Mario Bros.” and wondered why he was doing that instead of playing one of the many, many untouched games in his backlog. I also …
D&D 3.x Officially to Die, as Paizo Pushes Pathfinder 2nd Edition
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/05/18 at 04:23 PM CT
I’ve frequently praised Paizo, the third-party tabletop RPG publishing house turned savior of tabletop gaming, for their consistency and willingness to stick with a rules set for a long time. Unfortunately, that praise must now come to an end, as over the last few months, Paizo has been sending out e-mail blasts promoting the upcoming 2nd Edition of the Pathfinder RPG which will enter active playtesting on August 2 of this year. It’s a pretty crappy birthday gift for me to have nearly 20 rulebooks in my tabletop RPG collection obsoleted in one fell swoop… but my tabletop gaming group hasn’t used Pathfinder in a couple years in favor of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, anyway.
While D&D 5E reverted a significant portion of its mechanics to be more similar to 2nd Edition, it also decided to adopt ‘bounded accuracy’ – which is code for ‘flatter numbers’ – in order to address balance issues, it won’t be clear what Paizo intends to do to address the numerous math …
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