Backlog: The Embiggening – August, 2017
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/30/17 at 04:01 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Summer is winding down already, and all of the cute, little children (read: insufferable semen-stains) will be back to school, and no longer clogging up ‘Call of Duty’ servers 24 hours a day. The looming approach of August also means I’ll be another year older and another year more jaded. So let’s see what kind of garbage I can hope not to get for my birthday.
The shovelware is fairly light for August. One licensed anime game based on ‘Naruto’ is joined by two worthless annual ‘sport’ releases, ‘Madden’ and ‘F1’ (racing not being a real ‘sport,’ and all).
The ports, remasters, and compilations are still plentiful, though. Modern-day ‘Wolfenstein’ is getting a two-pack compilation, while ‘Mega Man’ is getting a second legacy collection. Critically-ignored “Troll & I” as well as Telltale’s “Minecraft: Story Mode” are coming to the Switch, while the saddest of the sad console peasants …
Console Gaming is Dead: It Just Doesn't Know It Yet
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/23/17 at 03:39 PM CT
For years, we heard the cries of those in the know: “PC gaming is dead! Rampant piracy, nobody is buying new PCs, and the market is stagnant! DOOOOOOOOOOM!” But now the tables have turned, leaving the future of console gaming a big, empty void filled with more questions and uncertainty than hope and excitement.
It all started when Microsoft tried to do a console and couldn’t get their heads truly into the console space. They ended up creating a horrific chimera that bolted a lot of negative PC gaming aspects from the 90s and 00s onto a unified, console-style hardware target.
Sony followed suit with their disastrous PlayStation 3, and transformed the appliance-like simplicity of the PlayStation brand into a knock-off PC that could even run Linux at one point in time. I have called this elision of PC gaming and console gaming a “singularity” moment, but it has ultimately proven to be better for one side than the other.
Nintendo, however, has proven that there is …
How I Destroyed Console Gaming: A Tale of Superstition
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/16/17 at 03:40 PM CT
I generally pride myself on not being a superstitious person. Witnessing the *facepalm*-worthy antics of my Catholic grandmother growing up pushed me away from superstition and toward the path of rationality, even while my personal interests in the paranormal and supernatural tugged me back toward madness.
No matter how hard I try to discard all superstitious nonsense in my day-to-day life, clearing the temple of my mind for Truth and Reason, there lingers a vague feeling that a specific thing I did during the 7th Generation had far-reaching symbolic significance and somehow, via proxy, the actions of one insignificant man reverberated through the ether, destroying the part of the videogame industry I held most dear.
What is this terrible thing I did? No, it wasn’t building a gaming PC and switching to Steam and GOG for 90%+ of my gaming needs: That was a reaction to the continuing downfall of console gaming. One cannot immediately assume that those who leap from the deck of …
First Official Pathfinder CRPG Coming from Paizo and… Owlcat?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/09/17 at 03:15 PM CT
Remember back in October, 2016 when I got all excited about Obsidian Entertainment, the semi-Indie RPG developer crafted from the remains of Black Isle Studios, hinting at a collaboration with Paizo Productions, the company that kept tabletop RPGs alive while Wizards of the Coast worked through a number of psychological issues?
I don’t know if I should still be excited or not. Paizo has officially announced that, yes, they will be collaborating with a videogame developer to create a cRPG based on the “Kingmaker” Pathfinder Adventure Path… but the developer in question won’t be Obsidian. Instead, Paizo will be teaming up with an unknown quantity called Owlcat Games, an Indie outfit so new and untested they don’t even have a Wikipedia entry at the time of writing.
Owlcat Games consists of former employees of both Nival Interactive and My.com. It appears to be a foreign company, perhaps Polish or Russian, due to the rather… ethnic quality of the development team’s …
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