Backlog: The Embiggening – August, 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/28/19 at 03:45 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! As August – a month saturated with witchcraft, in which we celebrate the birthday of the best, least-biased game reviewer on the Internet on Lammas Sabbath – rolls in, we bid a fond farewell to Summer, even though it’s still too hot to do anything but sit inside and play videogames. Sad teachers everywhere are being pulled back into the trenches of World War Student, as they prepare to put their firearms training to good, practical use. But what is the videogame industry doing? Pushing crap, as usual!
Out of 18 scheduled August releases, 5 are shovel-ready. Of these, the minority are licensed things based on movies and/or TV shows, with a port of the licensed “Friday the 13th: The Game” (and, as a friendly reminder, I’ll point out that whenever a game has ‘The Game’ in the title, you know it’s (not) quality), as well as the latest entry in the venerable ‘Yu-Gi-Oh!’ series, based on the card game based on the …
RetroArch Hitting Steam Brings Emulation One Step Closer to Full Legitimacy
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/21/19 at 04:16 PM CT
On July 12th, a very interesting thing appeared on Steam. RetroArch, the official frontend for the Libretro emulation API, is coming to PC gaming’s oldest and biggest digital distribution platform on July 30th. For FREE.
RetroArch, which is one of my favorite things to appear in the last decade, has been available on the Google Play Store for Android for years already, but the main PC version has languished in the traditional standalone model of PC software distribution, which becomes increasingly obsolete and outmoded with each passing year. RetroArch’s developers, the Libretro Team, like every other two-bit panhandler, started a Patreon account in order to beg for recurring donations from affluent fans, but as a platform designed around emulation, still remained an outsider in the larger games industry.
As rotund gaming pundit, Jim Sterling, eruditely discussed back in 2016, official games media outlets don’t like to talk about emulation, despite the fact that almost …
“AtariBox” Becomes Atari VCS
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/14/19 at 04:01 PM CT
During E3 2017, Atari (delenda est), one of the first-and-worst game console manufacturers, announced that they were coming back from obscurity with a new hardware device. All of 2018 rolled by without a whisper about the so-called “AtariBox,” and those of us with an understandable burning hatred for Atari (delenda est) were content to believe that the new abomination had transformed into vaporware and floated away like a bad dream with the coming dawn.
However, Atari (delenda est) was back again at E3 2019, and while they didn’t put on a big press conference (because that would require money they don’t have), they did have a physical presence, where they showed-off the near-final AtariBox, now with the official release name “Atari VCS” (presumably short for Video Computer System, as it was back in the 1970s).
Unlike Nintendo’s successful mini retro-consoles (and Sony’s and Sega’s dismal failure mini retro-consoles), the Atari VCS is emphatically NOT a mini …
Shadow of Stadia
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/07/19 at 04:32 PM CT
When Google revealed their soon-to-launch Stadia game-streaming platform earlier this year (and pushed a video about it at E3), the world said, “Meh.” With Google’s business model from yesteryear, where users buy individual games exclusively for play on Stadia; combined with smoldering resentment among the tech crowd who has seen Google launch numerous promising projects, only to abandon them within months or a few years; interest in this new type of gaming platform is tempered, as best.
Even worse, in a recent interview, Google Vice President, Phil Harrison, revealed himself to be completely out of touch with reality regarding the state of broadband Internet in Google’s home country, the United States. This is a nation where real, usable broadband is a luxury not available to many, where actual broadband penetration is inaccurately represented on coverage maps ostensibly maintained by the government, where the FCC no longer gives a fig about anything after the death of …
Backlog: The Embiggening – July, 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/01/19 at 12:28 AM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! With July comes the traditional Summer Game Drought. Just when all the cute, little kiddies thought they’d have all the time in the world to veg-out with some mindless fragging and forget everything they learned the previous year in school, the game publishers always shut off the flow valve, dropping the deluge of game releases down to a trickle. This month we’ve got 20 titles baring down on us… let’s see how many are crap!
Only three piles of shovelware are coming in July. Two are based on Japanese anime: “Kill la Kill: The Game FA,” and “Attack on Titan 2: Final Battle.” The last is based on an American animated property: “Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3,” and is also conveniently a port!
When you read the intro paragraph, did you stop to wonder how the Corporate Games Industry could push out 20, yes TWENTY, double-digits, games in a Drought month? If so, clearly you haven’t been paying attention at all! More …
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