EFF to Preserve Online Play, Misses the Point
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/09/14 at 03:06 PM CT
I am not alone in my concerns regarding what happens to old videogames when their owners no longer find them profitable. This past week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation started making noise about creating a Digital Millennium Copyright Act exemption to allow circumvention of software security for the purpose of creating unofficial servers for games that are no longer officially supported.
If the EFF gets its way with this exemption request, the idea that games don’t have an online expiration date should hopefully catch hold of both the gaming public and the developers/publishers behind the creation of entertainment software. Giving the hardcore fans who already run unofficial servers for their favorite games explicit permission to do so is a significant win for consumer rights.
Unfortunately, the EFF doesn’t quite go far enough. The exemption request specifically states that the ability to run private servers for old games should NOT apply to massively-multiplayer games. …
Backlog: The Embiggening - November, 2014
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/01/14 at 03:11 PM CT
Welcome to another look into the near future. It’s November! Now that Halloween is in the rear-view mirror, capitalists have no other impediments in their quest to flood the market with the Crap the Came for Christmas. Thanksgiving? What’s that? In America, we’re not thankful for anything… except dupes to whom to sell shovelware!
Shovelware? Yes, there is a bit of it this mont… OH MY GOD IT’S OVERWHELMING!
It seems that some of the shovelware manufacturers – specifically Disney – have started reducing the pellet count in their shotgun blast releases in order to specifically target the vital organs of those most susceptible to buying such crappy licensed garbage. Thus the new “Penguins of Madagascar,” and “Planes: Fire & Rescue” are only targeting Nintendo platforms (what with Nintendo’s unshakable ‘kiddie’ reputation). Likewise, both Disney and 4Kids are bringing their new “Big Hero 6” and “Winx Club” games exclusively to Nintendo …
The Best of the Best: Where are the Physical Collections?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/25/14 at 02:29 PM CT
While it is true that I was extremely disappointed with “The Best of PlayStation Network Vol. 1,” my disappointment has little to do with the concept behind the product and everything to do with the execution. Steam and GOG.com have slowly been whittling away my insistence upon possessing a physical product tied to the gaming experience, yet both of those platforms only have a strong presence on PC (making PC much better for it). With digital (mostly Indie) games on consoles, the experience still boils down to paying far too much money for an ephemeral product that will only last as long as the current hardware generation.
What products like “The Best of PlayStation Network” should aim to do is create a more lasting product to stand as a testament to the quality of the Indie and small-budget games from a given time period. Instead of being hideously rare, such compilations should be so numerous as to fill an entire shelf with Internet-independent instances of these games. …
Vaguely Related Review: Game Fuel Redux
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/19/14 at 01:27 PM CT
It has been quite some time since I last had some Mountain Dew Game Fuel on hand way back in 2011. I’ve been well-stocked in Mello Yello and Sun Drop for so long that I haven’t really paid much attention to new Game Fuel releases. And since Game Fuel seems inextricably tied to releases of games I don’t even give half a fig about, I don’t even notice advertisements to let me know the stuff is around again.
Fortunately, I happened to notice a big Game Fuel endcap at my local Russ’ IGA while perusing the extra-buttery popcorn isle. Once again, Game Fuel is tied to the release of a new ‘Call of Duty’ game (I don’t even know – or care – which one… okay, the Game Fuel boxes say ‘Advanced Warfare’ for what it’s worth) and comes in two flavors. Cherry-citrus is back with a vengeance, but the companion flavor is something new and extremely Yellow… like so Yellow it would kill the Green Lantern on contact.
The new Yellow flavor of game fuel is, surprisingly, …
The Death of Saturday Morning Cartoons: Another Shared Experience Lost
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/12/14 at 02:42 PM CT
The first Saturday morning in October 2014 marked a depressing milestone for those of us who grew up and came of age in the 1980s and 1990s. It was the first Saturday morning to be completely bereft of cartoons on every non-cable broadcast network.
Sure, some of the networks still run a mixed block of animated and live-action children’s programming on Saturday mornings, but the majority of these shows are “edutainment” aimed at the pre-school crowd. The last holdouts in running Saturday morning cartoons were, for the most part, running popular shonen animes that are readily available on the cable animation outlet known as Cartoon Network. None of the last dregs of Saturday morning cartoons bear any resemblance to the once-great Saturday morning network exclusives that drove children to wake up insanely early on days when school was not in session.
The last remaining Saturday morning cartoons have been a pale imitation of the Silver Era for a long, long time. Looking back …
Backlog: The Embiggening - October, 2014
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/02/14 at 07:18 PM CT
Welcome to another look into the near future. Now that the Summer Game Drought is well and truly past once again, it is time for game publishers to start ramping up the hype for the annual sales onslaught that is the Holiday Shopping Season. With only three short months left to make back all of the outrageous sums of money they gave their development teams to work on “AAA” games, publishers look to be starting with a massive push, as October will have more game releases than the entire Summer season combined.
Of course, when there are a lot of releases, as anyone capable of observing and recognizing patterns will realize, there are a lot of shovelware releases. October has far too many of them, sprayed as so much buckshot into the guts of consumers worldwide. There is a new ‘Alien’ tie-in (despite the lack of an ‘Alien’ movie since “Prometheus”), a “Duck Dynasty” game (because we definitely need a game about religiously backwards duck-call crafters), a port of …
Japan Still the Only Country Giving Xbox the Respect it Deserves
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/25/14 at 01:39 PM CT
On September 3, the XBONE launched in Japan, nearly a year after launching in the West. Of course, the fact that Microsoft delayed the release of their new console in the Land of the Rising Sun makes little difference, as Japanese gamers have historically cared very little about the “too Western” Dudebro games that have choked the Xbox library since the original Xbox began ruining things in the 6th Generation.
The Xbox 360 was an unequivocal disaster in Japan, barely moving any consoles and moving so few copies of hot-in-the-West games that there’s no way anyone made a profit off localization efforts. With the small-scale Japanese XBONE launch parties looking more like modern art installations of a World Without Humans, it appears that nothing will be changing any time soon.
The chasm between Eastern and Western developers is only growing deeper, as the West adopts the Hollywood model of remaking popular things with increasingly bigger budgets, while Japan continues to do …
Who are the Real Pirates?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/21/14 at 01:15 PM CT
Editor's Note: This article originally ran on the now-defunct Ology.com back in 2011.
Recently, Sony has made the move of putting PlayStation 2 games up for download on the PlayStation Network Store. Anyone who hasn’t been anticipating this move since Sony removed PlayStation 2 compatibility from the PlayStation 3 needs to be slapped: This is how the software distribution world now operates. Instead of re-introducing full PlayStation 2 compatibility, this piecemeal compatibility with specific digital releases allows Sony to re-sell us games that we already own.
It used to be that re-releases of old games came with upgrades (and that is still the case, to an extent, with Sony’s ‘HD Remaster’ series). When Nintendo released “Super Mario All-Stars” on the SNES, not only did we get 3 NES games and 1 unreleased NES game on one cartridge, we got graphical updates that really made these old titles look sharp. When Nintendo re-released these games AGAIN, “Super Mario …
Player, Benchmark Thyself
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/14/14 at 01:11 PM CT
The “Glorious” PC Gaming Master race loves their benchmarks. Sometimes, I think this particular variety of games enthusiast is actually more enthusiastic about fiddling with hardware, spending ridiculous amounts of money on pointless upgrades, and, yes, running benchmarking software than they actually are about playing games.
Interestingly, way back in 2007, shortly after the start of the 7th Generation, the Human Benchmark project began, aiming to gather information about the dreaded input lag and display lag that gamers love to blame for their own inadequacies. Now, over 10 million tests later, the Human Benchmark project’s website has recently undergone its third revision and has plenty of tasty, tasty stats available for lag haters to agonize over. What the project has discovered in its years of testing is that human beings, in general, have a reaction time of around 250 milliseconds (my own initial results were 264 ms).
Thus, in the grand scheme of things, min/maxing …
Backlog: The Embiggening - September, 2014
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 09/04/14 at 02:24 PM CT
Welcome to another look into the near future. Gamers across the world have survived yet another parching Summer Game Drought. Hopefully everyone else had better luck reducing the size of their backlogs than I did. Regardless of whether I made any progress in playing through my game collection, September is bringing a refreshing downpour of a lot of new titles. Once again, the biggest, most stupidly-over-hyped title is a FPS with an online component, “Destiny,” however this FPS actually looks like an attempt to appeal to a broader audience than the typical military shooters and space marine fantasies we typically get.
Onto the shovelware! Unfortunately, it is back in full-force this month, leaving us with a significant pile of licensed crap. There is a new “Sherlock Holmes” game (because he is so popular right now), “Lord of the Rings” game that is based as tenuously on the source material as possible, “Falling Skies: The Game” which will definitely be spectacular …
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