Backlog: The Embiggening - September, 2015
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/30/15 at 02:22 PM CT
Summer’s officially over, and the lion’s share of gaming’s demographic is going Back to School... yet now is the time that game publishers have – after four months of barren, desolate drought – decided to flood store shelves with a large quantity of releases. Why do publishers do this when they know very well that their potential customers will have much less free time to play games and much less disposable cash to spend on them once they’re back in school instead of lazing about at their part-time Summer jobs? My guess is that it’s the same reason the game industry does a lot of questionable thing: Stupidity and/or Greed.
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There is a LOT of shovelware this month. Of course, only a small quantity of the stuff is based on other IPs. In that particular sub-set of shovelware, we have a new LEGO game (because, why not?!) and a game based on the new “Mad Max” movie (which Chris says is awesome) blasting as many platforms as possible, while a new …
OUYA to be Sacrificed by the Cult of Razer
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/22/15 at 03:30 PM CT
OUYA, the Independent, Kickstarter-funded company behind the Little Indie Console That Couldn’t has finally given up and sold out to another company. After months of increasingly dismal news, starting with bribing OUYA owners with free money and whoring out the OUYA storefront to the likes of Mad Catz, OUYA has, as of the beginning of August 2015, sold themselves body and soul to Razer, the company most widely known for producing low-durability, high-priced PC peripherals.
Of course, I’m familiar with Razer primarily through my exposure to the Razer Hydra – a (now discontinued) motion controller designed by Sixense but manufactured by Razer. Sixense’s partnership with Razer didn’t appear to actually go anywhere, as the default Razer drivers included with the Hydra are a joke, requiring a separate download from Sixense’s own website to unlock the motion controller’s true, glorious potential. With the Hydra’s wireless successor, the STEM, Sixense has broken away from …
Windstream <i>Delenda Est</i>.
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/16/15 at 06:32 PM CT
This week, Jon Brodkin of Ars Technica (one of my favorite tech blogs) published an article about the plight of the rural residents of the United States who find it difficult – if not impossible – to get modern telecommunications monopolies to throw them a bone and provide telephone and Internet service that is up to anyone’s standards. This article hit very close to home and I can completely relate to the subject’s situation… because the subject is indeed me.
I wrote to Ars this summer and – at the suggestion of MeltedJoystick’s erstwhile video/photo-grapher, Matt – submitted my plight as a news tip to see if Ars was interested in exposing Windstream for the villain it is. One phone interview and several e-mails later, my story has been added to the annals of the history of Terrible Internet in America.
Some readers may be surprised to learn that I am a farmer. However, farming and videogame critique go incredibly well together, as farming allows for an …
Rehash, Reiterate, Remaster
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/09/15 at 05:40 PM CT
Almost exactly one year ago, I lamented the banal state of the 8th Generation with its unnatural love of ‘remastering’ non-old games in order to pull further profits out of them. While last year’s Sony proclaimed that “You can't have too many of these things, otherwise next-gen just looks like rehashed last-gen,” this year’s Sony has changed its tune. So in honor of Sony’s newfound commitment to remasters, I’m going to rehash my disappointment with the 8th Gen’s lack of originality (now with 40% new content!).
As far as I can tell, I am the first person to come up with the term ‘remasterbation’ – a simple portmanteau of ‘remaster’ and ‘masturbation’ – to refer to Sony’s self-pleasuring act of releasing last-gen content under the guise of ‘new.’ Despite the fact that Sony claims they are beating their last-gen meat for the pleasure of the 40% of PS4 owners who didn’t own a PS3, we all know that they are really doing it to make money, since …
Backlog: The Embiggening - August, 2015
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/02/15 at 01:20 PM CT
It’s August! Happy Birthday to me! Or not… especially if I wanted a new game or two as gifts (which I do NOT, looking at the releases below).
After a month of absence in July, the shovelware has returned in droves. The undisputed King of Shovelware would have to be the third rendition of “Disney Infinity,” which cleverly attempts to sell videogames by getting kids hooked on a series of collectable, overpriced figurines. Aside from that, there are a lot of licensed shovelware exclusives, which is mind-blowing in that it undermines the general purpose of shovelware to saturate the market with releases on every platform. The PS4 is getting a new ‘One Piece’ game, while the 3DS is getting a whopping THREE licensed games based on the ‘Paddington Bear’ movie (a little late on that one, guys), the ‘Garfield’ comic strip (which has been irrelevant for years), and tiny-robot battling anime ‘LBX.’ All that exclusive shovelware is really going to hurt the 3DS’ …
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