Vaguely Related Review: Game Fuel Re-Redux
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/19/17 at 01:20 PM CT
I’m pretty sure Mountain Dew Game Fuel flavors come to grocery stores nationwide every year during Autumn, when the big annual Mainstream videogame releases drop, but as I said the last time I tasted and talked about Game Fuel back in 2014, the tie-in titles are so far outside my wheelhouse that relying on any form of in-game advertising or commercials run during televised sporting events is a sure-fire way for me to not know about a new round of custom Mountain Dew flavors.
As so happened last time, I didn’t so much seek-out Game Fuel, but serendipitously came upon it while shopping for Mello Yello at my local Russ’ IGA. The store was running a 4 fridge packs for $10 deal, but they only had 2 packs of MY left… so I filled in the rest of the slots with the two new Mountain Dew Game Fuel flavors.
In 2017, Cherry Citrus is out. Neither Game Fuel flavor is red in any way. Instead, this time around we’ve got yellow Tropical Smash and blue Arctic Burst. Unsurprisingly, …
New-Old Competitor, Intel, to Shake-Up the Discrete GPU Market
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/12/17 at 02:17 PM CT
After killing off their discrete GPU architecture, dubbed ‘Larrabee,’ way back in 2010, Intel has performed a complete 180, announcing that they will be diving back into the stand-alone GPU market, and giving Nvidia some much-needed competition. While AMD, the CPU maker that bought-up GPU maker ATI in 2006, has never really disappeared from the GPU market space, their products haven’t been particularly compelling – except possibly as bargain-basement alternatives for people who can’t afford the ‘good’ option from Nvidia – for a long, long time.
With Intel jumping back into the race, the GPU landscape stands to be shaken-up quite severely. Nvidia has grown complacent as the ‘best choice’ competitor, while AMD has continuously failed to apply any paradigm shifting breakthroughs of their own. Throwing a wild-card like Intel into the mix could dislodge both existing competitors from their dismal status-quo mire.
Interestingly, Intel already owns, according to …
Strike Your Colors and Prepare to be Boarded: Dev Torrents and Disappearing Denuvo
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/05/17 at 02:05 PM CT
Quite some time ago, I addressed the concept of DRM and praised ‘pirates,’ those anonymous hackers who strip DRM out of videogames and distribute them in gray/black channels for free, as saviors of old games – truly elite archivists whose preservation of gaming culture far outweighs the small financial damages their activities cause immediately. In the intervening years since I first wrote about pirates and DRM in 2011, a number of smaller developers seem to have come around to this more enlightened way of thinking. Instead of fighting pirates, they’re using pirates and torrent sites as an advertising venue.
Most recently in August of this year, developer Acid Wizard released their game, “Darkwood,” on The Pirate Bay (the galaxy’s most resilient BitTorrent tracker). “Darkwood” joins a long succession of games that have been ‘officially torrented’ by their makers, including “HFHO2,” and “Hotline Miami.” Other developers have taken a more duplicitous …
Backlog: The Embiggening – November, 2017
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/29/17 at 08:16 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! ‘Twas the month before Christmas and all through the aisles, 45 games were released, but ‘tweren’t greeted with smiles. At least by me, because it’s another month flooded with crap.
10 shovels full of filth are inbound for November. Of the 6 new pieces of licensed swill, we’re getting a new ‘.Hack//’ title based on the anime, “Star Wars: Battlefront 2” based on the movie franchise, “LEGO Marvel Super Heroes 2” based on both Marvel comics and LEGO bricks, “America’s Greatest Gameshows: Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!” based on… those things, and a delayed game that I’m actually glad was delayed (AGAIN) since it allows me to correct a horrible mistake on my part: It turns out that “Ken Follet’s Pillars of the Earth” is based on a series of young adult novels – not a stand-alone new IP, as I thought – and therefore qualifies as shovel-ready. The final new shovelware title is yet another …
Desura’s Back! … Sort Of?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/21/17 at 05:27 PM CT
Earlier this week, Desura, the Little Indie Gaming Client That Couldn’t, which was bought-out by Danish keytailer and digital game rental outfit, Oneplay, miraculously came back online after months of straight-up nonexistence. When OnePlay’s placeholder page for Desura disappeared earlier this year, I figured the site and service were gone for good. Color me surprised to see it back amongst the living!
Err… sort of.
While the site is back online, and my old login credentials still work, bringing me to my profile that only ‘owns’ “The fall of gods,” “Monster RPG 2,” and the free open-source “Flare,” the download links for the Desura client as well as ALL THE GAMES lead to 404 errors at the time of writing. Unfortunately, when I refreshed my Windows install a while back, I didn’t reinstall the Desura client, so there’s no way for me to test whether or not extant copies of it are working at all.
Essentially, the site appears to be in a transitional …
It’s Time to Give Up on Physical Media
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/15/17 at 04:01 PM CT
I bring you dismal news, MeltedJoystick readers. Sadly, the physical distribution of videogames has reached the end of its usefulness. As much as it pains me – as a staunch proponent of physical media and perpetual software ownership – I have to admit that physical media in videogames is no longer what it once was. Cartridges and discs have remained largely the same in structure, but the ways in which they are currently used largely negate their original purpose. What happened to bring us to this point? Read on to find out.
5. Games Require Installs, No Longer Run Off the Install Media.
Thanks to Microsoft and the OG Xbox, the concept of games requiring hard disk installs was shoveled from the PC side of gaming to the console side of gaming in the 6th Gen. While the OG Xbox never got a whole lot of respect from gamers outside the ghetto, other console makers took note of its ability to snag PC game ports… thus every Sony and MS console since has followed the same paradigm. …
New DIRECTV Commercial Inadvertently Mocks ‘Dark Souls’ Fanbase
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/06/17 at 02:46 PM CT
I’m not going to give DIRECTV, the satellite pay TV company, credit for knowing anything about the videogames industry or the contemporary gaming zeitgeist. However, this ad, which started airing on network TV last month, seems to express a sarcastic awareness of the fact that there are some people out there who ‘enjoy’ unpleasant things.
The first time I saw this ad on TV, I nearly fell out of my chair laughing, as the fools contained therein instantly brought to mind the tiny-yet-rabid Cult of From, whose ‘favorite’ games are all reminiscent of banging one’s head repeatedly against a ceiling joist or intentionally sleeping under a pile of poison ivy. Would I rather play ‘Dark Souls’ for an hour or have my arm stuck in a vending machine for an hour? Hmmm… that’s a H.A.R.D. choice…
Backlog: The Embiggening – October, 2017
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/01/17 at 04:58 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! October is here, and that mean’s Halloween is officially old news (as of August), and the Christmas/Holiday Season is ready to kick-off with a bunch of crap bewildered parents and grandparents are supposed to buy for their demanding Second-Run Millennials. There are a WHOPPING 57 game releases coming in October – FIFTY-SEVEN! – but once you filter through the crap, with my sage and experienced assistance, you’ll find but a tiny number of titles worth caring about. It’s like bobbing for apples in a barrel of sewage… and most of the apples have been replaced with turds.
Fourteen – count, ‘em, 14! – new pieces of shovelware will be gracing us with their presence in October. Pay attention, and you might learn something about the varieties of shovelware of which you must maintain constant awareness. The first, and easiest to identify, variety of shovelware we’ll look at this month is Licensed Swill: That is, games …
Why ‘Final Fantasy’ Sucks Now
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/23/17 at 02:33 PM CT
A picture is worth a thousand words, right? Well, Square Enix, the company that in 2012 was considered a ‘complete failure’ is still failing away. We thought the “Final Fantasy 13” Trilogy was bad enough, but “Final Fantasy Versus 13 15” has really taken things to a whole new level (so much so that neither Chris nor I, both long time ‘FF’ fans, have any plans to touch it). Smartphones and luxury sedans in a FANTASY game? Square Enix seems to have nothing but contempt for its audience at this point, pandering to the lowest common denominator whose banal minds can’t conceive of a world without smartphones and instant communication.
Many plot tropes used in both Fantasy and historical fiction are completely subverted by the presence of instant, long-distance communication, which will cause the writing to become more tortured than it already has been for decades. On the other hand, limited forms of instant communication have existed in Fantasy Role-Playing since …
The House Wins; We All Lose
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/16/17 at 05:34 PM CT
Over the last several years, I’ve found myself harping on the evils of DLC and microtransactions, completely dismayed at the success of these predatory, unscrupulous, and consumer hostile practices in the videogames industry that are significantly influenced by the nascent mobile apps industry. Unfortunately, instead of slowing down as consumers balk and push-back against these practices, they’re only gaining Steam… yes, with a capital “S,” as even Valve’s PC gaming marketplace, once an exclusive club where only the most virtuous developers and publishers could peddle their wares, has been caught up in this ‘new’ economy where free games make profits off of microtransactions that merely buy the chance that a useful item might pop out of a randomized loot container. Third party websites even went so far as to construct an elaborate system of full-blown gambling, where competitors could bet real cash on the outcome of opening a Valve loot box (which was purchased from …
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