Backlog: The Embiggening – November, 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/31/20 at 06:04 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into… the past. Where dead games receive new life in the form of ports, remakes, and remasters, in the hope that the new generation of gamers is stupid (they are) enough to buy them when their forerunners (who were also generally quite stupid) weren’t. With the onset of November, we’re into what was traditionally Holiday Season territory, but with 2020 being the Year of COVID and nothing following its traditional cycle, everything is subject to change without notice. Usually we’d see publishers squeezing out some last-ditch panic-turds in order to get them on store shelves early enough to confuse grandparents shopping for Little Timmy and Suzy. Now, those grandparents are likely dead of COVID and Little Timmy and Suzy are out in the streets because their parents lost their jobs and spent the$200 they had in their savings account.
Yet, in spite of the fact that, more than ever, only the privileged upper crust of society has any disposable …
10 Reasons Why I Plan to Buy a VR Headset Next Gen
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/25/20 at 04:12 PM CT
The 8th Generation is coming to its inevitable close, and that means it’s time to start thinking about new system purchases. While I have little-to-no interest in either the PlayStation 5 or the Xbox SeX, thanks in large part to rumors of useful functionality turning out to be false, sometime next year, after COVID-19 is under control and the hardware has finished dribbling into the market, I’ll be gutting my old, reliable Steambox I built in 2012 and filling it with shiny, new parts, most likely including an AMD Zen3 CPU, an Nvidia RTX 3060ti GPU, and 32GB of DDR4 RAM.
However, those thoughts are still for another day, as the old workhorse is still trucking along admirably, demonstrating a longevity that PC gamers of the ‘90s would have believed impossible. Yet the one thing that my current gaming PC can’t do and that I’m not bold/foolish enough to throw away money in attempting, is Virtual Reality. Last Winter, before the pandemic started, the MJ Crew went to a local …
Gateway Drug, HeroQuest, is Back to Claim a New Generation
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/18/20 at 03:18 PM CT
I have already written in-depth about the late-‘80s collaboration between Milton-Bradley and Games Workshop known as “HeroQuest,” and my eternal admiration and respect for the hybrid board game/role-playing game that introduced me, and my entire generational cohort, to the wondrous world of Fantasy Role-Playing and Adventure. Indeed, the original game’s tagline, highlighted in its 1991 TV spot, “Once you get into it, you’ll never be the same!” could not be more apt.
Even as a relic of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, HeroQuest is still relevant to the MJ Crew to this very day, as, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve been playing this classic of our youth in “Tabletop Simulator” in lieu of getting together in person every week. And I managed to convince someone else to take on the role of Zargon the Game Master, so I can have a much-needed reprieve from running nearly a decade’s worth of Dungeons & Dragons games.
Of course, the game designer in me …
Nintendo to “Nope Out” of Mobile Gaming
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/11/20 at 01:59 PM CT
While it may have gotten lost in the shuffle of other news, including both the COVID-19 pandemic and the months-long E3 substitute presentations by game developers and platform holders, one of the most interesting nuggets of information to appear over the course of Summer 2020 is a report that Nintendo has “chilled” on the concept of mobile gaming, and will be retreating from that market instead of marching forward boldly in order to claim its piece of the multi-billion-dollar mobile pie.
Nintendo was a latecomer to mobile gaming, only bothering to acknowledge the lucrative teat at which so many corrupt new gaming businesses were suckling and growing morbidly bloated with their cancerous gains, in 2016, with the release of “Super Mario Run,” nearly a decade after the platform went mainstream with the release of the iPhone and its accompanying App Store. Much of Nintendo’s half-hearted mobile efforts were done in collaboration with Japanese mobile powerhouse, DeNA. …
With Zenimax Purchase, Microsoft Got the Band Back Together
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/04/20 at 04:27 PM CT
Two years ago, when Microsoft started gobbling up the small-time Single “A” developers that popped-up like so many nomadic tribes after the collapse of the Pre-Columbian Latin American empires, I pointed out that these shattered fragments of the once-great InterPlay – the only publisher from gaming’s Golden Age that made both Western games and PC games worth thinking about – were now reunited in the Happy House that Gates Built, and that the only thing missing from a complete reconciliation was the IP purchased by Bethesda Softworks.
Well, as of last week, Microsoft has officially gotten the band back together, when the tech megacorporation purchased Bethesda’s parent company, Zenimax Media, for $7.5 billion. That may seem like a lot of money just to give ‘Fallout’ back to Brian Fargo, but MS got so much more out of the purchase than just Bethesda, since Zenimax had gone on a buying spree of its own over the last several years, and was also the parent company of id …
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