What’s Going on at Kotaku?!
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/16/24 at 02:58 PM CT
Kotaku used to be the definitive place for Games Journalism in the 20- ‘00s. Every game, every discussion, every gaming tangential subject – you name it, if you Google’d it, all roads lead to Kotaku, and they were – with heavy emphasis on the past tense part of the statement – a comprehensive and good place to read about videogames. Kotaku’s ability, as a digital-only platform, to react to rapidly emerging and changing environment of the Games Industry effectively dealt the death blow to print gaming magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly. But as we’ve been seeing in the Post-Dot-Com-Bubble era, tech monopolies are fertile fields for corruption and decadence.
In the last decade, Kotaku has gone from the de-facto source for information about videogames to a punchline after many years of creeping activism that saw the site’s focus shift dramatically from covering every tidbit of gaming news before any other outlet could produce an article about it, to berating and …
Nintendo’s Draconian IP Enforcement Just Got Worse
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/10/24 at 02:20 PM CT
Oh, Nintendo. We love Nintendo, don’t we folks? Yeah, they were the company that rebuilt console gaming after the 1983 Crash. They were the company whose developers, led by the likes of Shigeru Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata, created some of the best, brightest, and most memorable IPs in gaming, frequently carving out whole new genres, but always, at least, iterating on what came before in novel and positive ways.
That Nintendo is a relic of the past, however. Today’s Nintendo isn’t a Good Guy or a company that produces great games out of a passion for entertaining. Rather, it’s just another corporate monolith, fussing over money and possessed by an insane obsession with wringing every nickel possible out of the things created by its most passionate (and frequently ex- or late) employees.
Thus we come to the latest news out of Nintendoland that the company is introducing a music streaming app to its already bloated, poorly-designed, and overpriced stable of subscription …
Vaguely Related Review: DragonLance Destinies Vol. 3 “Dragons of Eternity”
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/03/24 at 02:13 PM CT
It’s hard to believe that it has already been two years since we first learned that the DragonLance Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting wasn’t permanently dead. Rather, we learned that the series progenitors, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, were coming back to the series, perhaps in a cynical and legalistic attempt to maintain copyright and trademark ownership of their original IP, perhaps in a genuine effort to rekindle the light of THE definitive Fantasy series of the 1980s.
Volume 1 of the new DragonLance Destinies left me cold, as it appeared that Weis and Hickman were bending the knee to Woke influences in tabletop gaming and pop media in general. However, in hindsight, I think that may have been some deadpan satire played a bit too closely to the chest. After all, Volume 2 completely redeemed the shortcomings of Volume 1 while also fleshing out the details of one of the series’ most famous historical battles… which didn’t previously have a lot of narrative …
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