Backlog: The Embiggening – June, 2021
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/24/21 at 12:07 AM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! June is right around the corner, and gamers everywhere are huddling in their makeshift shelters, awaiting the annual coming of the Summer Games Drought: That dreaded multi-month stretch where the big “AAA” publishers barely manage to poop out anything, while smaller “A,” “B,” and Indie developers still haven’t figured out that a large swatch of time in which the big competition is dormant and the largest sector of the target audience (school kids) has nothing better to do that buy and play a bunch of new games…
…
…
But wait! What’s this?! Some strange, supernatural phenomenon – also known as the COVID-19 Coronavirus – has caused a great disturbance in The Farce, and June of 2021 is positively jam-packed with releases. Should gamers everywhere start running through the streets, throwing our hats into the air in celebration of the shattering of the hobby’s longest and most enduring …
Let’s Play: “Guess What Lord GabeN is Rambling About!”
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/16/21 at 01:07 AM CT
New Zealand is home to a number of elusive, quirky, rotund forms of life: The Kiwi Bird, the Kakapo, Gabe Newell…
Yes, our favorite expatriate to the land down-under Down-Under, has opened his beard-bedecked mouth again, and, as usual, cryptic, idiosyncratic prophecies about the future of Gaming have flown out. Answering a question from a Kiwi schoolkid about whether Steam would start to do more with consoles, Newell replied that, by the end of the year (2021), we will receive an “unexpected” answer and say, “Aha!” to ourselves.
So let’s play a game of “Guess What Lord GabeN is Rambling About!”
Guess 1: Steam Machines are Coming Back
Back in 2013, Lord GabeN promised to take the console world by storm with the release of a line of small-form-factor gaming PCs with a Linux-based custom OS designed for couch gaming. Alongside the Steam Machines initiative, which left the development of the actual console/PC hybrid hardware in the hands of disinterested …
I Really Want a DecaGear…
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/08/21 at 10:42 PM CT
Late last year, I was excited about the prospect of finally pulling the trigger on a VR setup to usher in the new 9th Generation of consoles… devices I will continue to steadfastly ignore unless something drastic changes. Of course, last year, we didn’t know there was going to be an earthshattering silicon chip shortage, causing the newgen consoles, new PC hardware, cars, and, yes, VR headsets to become somewhat scarce.
However, while reading up on VR a bit to see what the best 2021 options for the tech happened to be, I learned of a new contender in the VR headset space: Deca.
While Valve, HTC, and Facebook’s Oculus are the established names in the young VR space (with PlayStation VR and Microsoft’s Hololens coming across more as afterthoughts), in such a new technological space, there’s plenty of room for new contenders to appear, and so far, Deca seems to be quite impressive.
First, the company itself is a multi-national group with facilities in Thailand, …
The Never-Ending Chip Shortage
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/02/21 at 03:40 PM CT
If you haven’t managed to snag a 9th Gen console or a new PC graphics card for anywhere close to the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, you might be SoL at this point. According to numerous big players in the silicon microchip industry, things don’t look like they’ll improve until sometime in 2023. Yes, that’s TWO YEARS away!
I managed to snag the new hardware I needed to refresh my 9-year-old gaming PC for a mix of prices. While I was able to get the CPU and all the other components for the MSRP (No sales, rebates, or discounts to be found, alas!), I ended up paying triple-MSRP for my graphics card, much to my annoyance. If I had pulled the trigger a couple months earlier, I could have had it for merely DOUBLE the MSRP, which at this point feels like a huge savings. Of course, learning that the chip supply, and thus the prices of hardware, would continue to be out-of-whack until the Summer or Autumn of 2021 was what ultimately spurred me into action instead of …
Backlog: The Embiggening – May, 2021
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/24/21 at 09:12 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! April showers (of watery diarrhea) bring May flowers (or maybe some sort of fungus that grows in manure), and Games Industry watchers are getting settled-in for one last month of copious releases before the onset of the annual Summer Games Drought. Though in a post-COVID world, it’s possible some of these ‘traditions’ may have been shunted out of alignment due to last year’s lockdown of… pretty much everything. Onto the crap!
We’ve got shovelware, oh yes we do! Though, thankfully, we don’t have very much… and it seems that the purveyors of such drivel are targeting Nintendo, like they think it’s still the Blue Ocean Wii era, or something. Anyway, we’ve got a crappy valet-themed party game called “Very Very Valet,” and Nintendo is resurrecting the corpse of the 3DS’s social non-game, “Miitopia” for another round on the treadmill.
And speaking of things being dragged out of storage and plopped on the …
You Think You “OWN” PlayStation Games? Think Again!
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/17/21 at 08:36 PM CT
I still occasionally see a particularly depraved breed of console fanboy crusading on the Internet against the inexorable tide that is PC gaming. And, of course, one of the old chestnuts that gets dragged out, dusted off, considered, and stored again for another day is always the fact that physical PC games don’t really exist anymore and that the True Faithful of gaming will always buy physical media so they can replay their crusty, old games again in 20 years when they need a nostalgia hit. To these Console Justice Warriors, PC gaming is nothing but DRM and evil, while their magical game-playing boxes are the archetype of purity and will never fail them.
Thus, I was filled to overflowing with schadenfreude when Sony shutting down digital services for the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, and PlayStation Vita brought to light a truly ugly secret that Sony fanboys have willfully ignored for a good many years, even after it was revealed by the hacking and modding scene.
It …
Three Years Later, the Epic Store is Still a Failure
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/11/21 at 02:20 PM CT
Back in 2018, the MJ Crew was tentatively excited about a new competitor entering the PC gaming digital distribution market. Unfortunately, we had to walk that assessment back very quickly, as Epic Games didn’t have their doo-doo together in 2018…
… or 2019…
… or the Plague Year of 2020.
Here we are today, in 2021, and the Epic Games Store is still a joke. Here’s why:
4. Chinese Control
Chinese megacorporation, Tencent, is a big name in videogames… at least globally. Things that aren’t relevant anywhere else in the world can become “globally” relevant merely by pandering to China due to that nation’s stupidly oversized population and the fact that the entire population is, by and large, herded by its government into using specific businesses and services to the exclusion of all others. Naturally the businesses the Chinese Communist Party wants its Citizens to use are all Chinese businesses owned (at least in part) by the Chinese Communist Party. How …
‘Sunsetting’ Has Been Sunset: Top Legendary Weapon Picks for “Destiny 2.”
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/03/21 at 11:35 PM CT
A mere 4 months after implementing the wildly unpopular ‘Sunsetting’ mechanic, which put an expiration date on every piece of Legendary rarity loot in the game, “Destiny 2’s” developer, Bungie, partially reversed the move, leaving already Sunset weapons out of the game’s future loot pool, but removing that ticking timer on all currently viable loot and future loot moving forward. Sunsetting had a profoundly negative effect on my opinion of the game, and I was quite ready and willing to stop playing altogether until the next major expansion pack because all of the grinding and repetition would only earn very temporary rewards.
But with Sunsetting having ridden off into the sunset (or, more accurately, having been tarred and feathered, and driven out of town on a rail), “Destiny 2’s” loot system has been given a second lease on life and actually feels mildly rewarding again. Of course, with so many weapons in the game, and with so many of them Sunset into …
Backlog: The Embiggening – April, 2021
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/28/21 at 02:48 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! April, as always, is for fools, and the continued impact of the pandemic, combined with a silicon chip shortage, has all of us playing the part. But the Games Industry is content to continue churning its mechanism to produce lots of new products for ‘us’ to buy. Let’s take a look at what the next month has in store…
Not only is there a chip shortage, there’s a shovelware shortage! Other than two officially licensed Racing games that are barely different from their entire line of predecessors – “WRC 9” and “Monster Energy Supercross 4” – there’s nothing to panic about!
Unfortunately, there are still plenty of ports, remasters, remakes, and rehashes to panic about. In April 2021, for the first time since 2018, the Nintendo Switch is not the main target for this column’s port shaming, as the Industry’s gaze has turned to rest more heavily on the new greener pastures of the PlayStation 5 now that the …
PlayStation VR Not Dead; Motion Controls Neither
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/21/21 at 04:04 PM CT
This week, Sony revealed their new generation of PlayStation VR equipment for the PlayStation 5. The most impressive piece of the reveal was the new generation of motion controllers that go along with the new VR headset. These controllers are clearly modeled upon the Oculus Touch VR controllers that have been available for PC for a while now, but Sony confirmed that there are no external tracking devices required, and that these new motion controllers are tracked by the VR helmet itself, similar to how Microsoft’s Mixed Reality Hololens works.
While it is good news that someone other than our brilliant and visionary Lord GabeN is still thinking about VR in the gaming space, I’m significantly disappointed that Sony’s new motion controllers aren’t VR agnostic like their old PlayStation Move controllers were. The only non-VR motion controller systems on the market that are anywhere near viable are the aging (and discontinued) Razer Hydra and the aging (and discontinued) …
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