The Top (Bottom?) 5 Falls from Grace in the 7th Generation
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/27/14 at 03:35 PM CT
Some game makers never really amount to anything. Some game makers start small, rising to greatness and glory upon the back of an extremely well-crafted game (or series of games). Some game makers start out big and evil and simply stay the course, raking in huge profits while lighting cigars with $1,000 bills. Then there are the game makers that, through every fault of their own, take a glowing reputation and completely flush it down the toilet, never to recover. The 7th Generation saw a lot of not-so-great things happen in the videogame industry, including huge numbers of bankruptcies and shuttered studios. The following five companies may not have crashed and burned, but they are desperately close to the ground, dragging their reputations behind them.
5. Re-Logic
Starting life essentially as a pirate developer, Re-Logic gave us the definitive (and unlicensed) ‘Super Mario Bros.’ experience with “Super Mario Bros. X.” After receiving takedown requests from Nintendo, …
Vaguely Related Review: The DragonLance “Age of Mortals Campaign” Trilogy
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/20/14 at 04:17 PM CT
May 2014 saw the end of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign I started running in August 2009. It was great to get back to the tabletop for some gaming after a ridiculously long hiatus that saw me bereft of this type of experience for almost all of the 7 years I spent as a college undergrad and grad student. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to keep playing tabletop games, it was simply a matter of impracticality… and the glaring fact that everyone I played tabletop games with had either moved to another state or otherwise dropped off the face of the Earth after high school. I graduated high school in 1997, so there was no TwitFace or Big Brother to help us keep tabs on each other. It was as if my admittedly-tiny social circle was there one day and gone the next.
Likewise, my beloved DragonLance Campaign Setting was also going through quite a few growing pains at exactly the same time my tabletop gaming group was in crisis. In 1996, TSR, in a desperate attempt to return to …
What Good, Really, is a Second Screen?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/13/14 at 01:50 PM CT
It has been a decade since Nintendo first floated the idea of giving players twice the screen real estate for gaming by giving them twice the screens. With three Nintendo hardware platforms in a row sporting a second screen – the DS, 3DS, and WiiU – it appears the Japanese company has doubled-down on this particular gimmick.
But is the second screen provided by Nintendo hardware really of significant benefit? On the two handheld platforms, the two screens are tightly packed-together, acting instead as one long vertical screen that can be divided in half or taken as a single unit. While the close proximity of these two screens puts them both within the player’s field of view at all times, the end result isn’t exactly spectacular. The DS and 3DS suffer from a chronic case of Vertical Video Syndrome, presenting visual information in a manner counter to the layout of the human visual system. Likewise, this visual layout is counter to every other technology made for displaying …
What’s New in D&D Next: A Primer
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/06/14 at 05:33 PM CT
Last month I discussed the rise and fall of the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop RPG, and how Wizards of the Coast managed to lose their non-digital gaming crown to upstart Paizo. What I didn’t discuss was what is actually changing in D&D Next (a.k.a., D&D 5th Edition). Let’s take a look at how D&D Next will be breaking compatibility with 3.0/3.5/Pathfinder (henceforth, 3.x), as well as 4th Edition, while streamlining game mechanics at the same time.
1. Goodbye Skill Ranks, Base Attack Bonus, and Saving Throw Bonuses; Hello Proficiency Bonus
3.x introduced these three core mechanics to replace a lot of Gygaxian weirdness that was present in AD&D, such as the infamous THAC0, negative Armor Classes being better, and inconsistency in determining whether high or low roll on a 20-sided die (d20) determines success. D&D Next wants to get rid of the complicated paperwork and number inflation these mechanics can cause by combining them all into a single bonus: Proficiency.
The weird …
View Archive
