Backlog: The Embiggening – June, 2024
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/26/24 at 02:25 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! As June approaches, it’s time for us to prepare, once again, for the annual Summer Games Drought. Of course, an industry that still primarily caters to young people (or the young at heart) has always reduced new releases to a trickle when said target audience has the most free time and said target audience’s parents are most feverishly on the hunt for something to keep the target audience placated and out of trouble. The more things change, the more they remain the same, and the more our Corporate Overlords make unpopular decisions for the sake of profit margins, the more they ignore opportunities to make popular decisions and shake-up age-old paradigms. *sigh* Let’s look at the crap coming in June…
There’s shovelware, with two of the three categories represented. In the Licensed Swill category, we have two dinosaur-themed games based on ‘Gigantosaurus’ and ‘Jurassic Park,’ as well as a game based on ‘The …
RetroArch (and Other Stand-Alone Emulators) Gain Further Legitimacy Thanks to… Apple?!
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/19/24 at 02:04 PM CT
In a shocking move that I never believed would happen, Apple – the creator of Walled Garden App Ecosystems whose own walls are some of the highest, widest, and thickest in the industry – has officially decided that emulation is acceptable inside the walls. RetroArch, which made news a while back for being the first officially-endorsed emulator listed on Steam – the biggest and oldest PC gaming digital storefront – is officially up for download on the App Store, along with a few other stand-alone emulators whose RetroArch Cores haven’t quite reached parity, such as the PlayStation Portable emulator, PPSSPP.
This is fantastic news for Apple ‘Tards, who previously had to jailbreak or otherwise jump through numerous technical hoops in order to install emulators on iDevices. Of course, Apple’s draconian and restrictive nature is still on display, with the App Store version of RetroArch unable to support a handful of rather hacky emulation tricks that aren’t strictly …
The PSN-on-PC Debacle Should Make Subscription Peddlers Think Twice
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/12/24 at 02:06 PM CT
This past week, Sony revealed that a number of PlayStation Exclusives with Steam ports would require PC players to link a PSN account to their existing Steam account to continue accessing online multiplayer features. The backlash was immediate, immense, and unrelenting, forcing Sony to backtrack on requiring PC players of the inexplicably-popular “Helldivers 2” to have a PSN account (though the upcoming port of “Ghost of Tsushima” will still require a PSN account to access the online cooperative ‘Legends’ mode).
The fact that PC gamers made such a massive stink about requiring linkage to a free PSN account is somewhat surprising. However, a lot of it seems to be driven by the fact that there are many countries on the globe where PSN accounts aren’t available, and PC is generally the default – or, indeed, ONLY – gaming platform in those regions.
My biggest take-away from this episode, though, is that PC gamers will push back against corporate decisions that …
Too Much of… Everything
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/05/24 at 03:00 PM CT
Recent data from the TV and movie industries have shown that, when given access to the entire depth of said media, viewers tend to gravitate to older stuff, leaving modern shows to flop and flail, unable to recoup their multi-million-dollar budgets, let alone become the type of shared cultural touchstone TV and movies of the past were. Sadly, the same is also true of videogames, especially the loss of shared experiences.
I have lamented the loss of shared experiences before, but in the world of gaming, the process just keeps getting worse. While during the Console Gaming Golden Age of the ‘90s, most Gamers played and praised the same games – with the notable exception of those who were on the losing side of the Console War – since the turn of the millennium, gaming has fragmented from a unified, shared experience with the common ‘identity’ of ‘Gamer’ tied to it, into a large selection of exclusionary echo chambers, each with wildly different definitions of what …
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