Backlog: The Embiggening – December, 2016
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/27/16 at 02:09 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Holiday crunch time is officially upon us, once again. Developers and publishers have pushed most of what they plan to push for the year, leaving us with a meager 12 releases in December. Let’s see if any of them are worth getting excited about!
Last minute shovelware is very light and also very non-licensed. “Stern Pinball Arcade” got pushed back – to no one’s sorrow – as did “We Sing.”
In ports and remasters, Sony is, surprisingly, only getting one: A port from PC to PS4 for “Deponia.” The rest of the porting is going to… Nintendo, of all outfits, with “Super Mario Maker” and “Dragon Quest 8” unnecessarily gracing the 3DS (who would want to play either of those games in 10-minute bursts?) and “Minecraft: Story Mode” getting a physical release on the officially-dead WiiU.
Of the three multi-plat releases, two are looking intriguing. “Steep” is, of course, an uninspired snowboarding …
5 Ways the Switch Could Sink
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/20/16 at 01:59 PM CT
With Nintendo playing coy regarding details about their upcoming Switch hybrid console/handheld hardware, speculation is rampant. Obviously, gamers have a lot of questions about this upcoming device, and Nintendo is simply refusing to answer them, instead remaining stonily silent until the company’s pre-determined time to release more information, which is coming up in a few months.
Where there’s speculation, of course, there is fear. Some of the hardest-core Nintendo fanboys have found themselves wringing their hands, fretting that the reason for Nintendo’s silence is some sort of bad news tied to the Switch that will abruptly cause the entire concept to tank in the collective eyes of the consumer public. With that in mind, here are five ways the Switch could go horribly wrong.
5. Media Bias
While the mainstream media loves to talk about Nintendo (and Apple) products, this is likely because the last time they actively thought about videogames, Nintendo had a …
WiiU is Officially Dead
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/13/16 at 03:00 PM CT
Last Thursday, Nintendo of Japan made official statements regarding the state of their current last home console, the WiiU. Japanese production of the console is coming to an end, and all remaining WiiU hardware available in North America has already been shipped to retail. It’s official: The WiiU is no more.
When MeltedJoystick buried my WiiU in a mock funeral attended by all manner of console dignitaries back in 2013, we did so in a tongue-in-cheek manner. We didn’t want to see the WiiU fail and die. We explicitly ended that video with the WiiU Gamepad lighting up inside its coffin as a symbol of hope, leaving the potential for Nintendo to get it together with the WiiU like they did with the 3DS.
As we all know now, that never happened. The WiiU launched a failure, remained a failure, and died a failure. But why?
The first problem lined up against the WiiU was Nintendo’s split focus on two devices with different games. The 3DS launched as a failure, and in a …
Backlog: The Embiggening – November, 2016
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/06/16 at 02:29 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Now that Halloween is over, once again, Americans will look forward to that next great commercial holiday. No! Not Thanksgiving, as most Americans don’t have anything to be thankful for (as illustrated by the election travesty that is currently going on between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton). Black Friday and Christmas will be here in but a few short weeks, forcing game publishers to rush things out the door, regardless of their state of readiness, in order to meet arbitrary deadlines. The result is, as usual, a LOT of game releases. But many of them will suffer quality control issues.
The shovelware is relatively tame for November. Someone made a ‘Digimon’ MMO, Nordic Games is channeling Ubisoft and releasing yet another unwanted/unneeded “We Sing” karaoke ‘game,’ and “Cartoon Network: Battle Crashers” seems to be a ‘Smash Bros.’ inspired Beat ‘Em Up. There’s another ‘Sword Art Online’ game based …
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