Backlog: The Embiggening – March, 2022
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/20/22 at 04:02 PM CT
With the coming of March, Spring is officially sprung. You know that that means: The crappy games will start replicating like rabbits. Let’s take a look at what Fiscal Year 2022 is going to lead off with from our beloved corporate overlords in the Games Industry.
There is, unfortunately, some shovelware popping up above the soil as the Winter freeze bleeds away. Four such titles are assaulting us in March, with half of them falling into both the Licensed Swill and Annualized Swill buckets: The (in)gloriously-titled “Monster Energy Supercross – The Official Videogame 5” (at least Monster is attaching its name to a videogame, after suing Ubisoft out of using “Gods and Monsters” as a title for a completely unrelated game) and “WWE 2k22” are both set to rape the wallets of the ignorant. Meanwhile, two 2Cazual2Live titles are getting ported from their original platforms to offend a wider audience: “Instant Sports Paradise” and “Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security …
5 Amazing, Irreplaceable, Discontinued Pieces of Hardware
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/13/22 at 03:47 PM CT
Hardware comes and hardware goes, usually with a new-and-improved version replacing older tech as it’s phased-out and discontinued. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work that way, and with increasing frequency, incredible, novel pieces of hardware are quietly discontinued, vanishing off store shelves and out of Amazon warehouses, with no apparent successor intended to replace them. Here’s a short list of the most traumatizing discontinuations that have affected me, personally.
5. Gyration Airmouse
The Gyration Airmouse isn’t officially “discontinued,” however, the company that invented it – Gyration – has been bought-out by another company – Adesso – which seems more interested in security cameras than wireless, gyroscopic computer mice. The Gyration Airmouse is now “legacy” hardware, which means it’s not getting any R&D money dumped on it, and there won’t be any newer, better versions. As far as I’m concerned, this is THE best way to interact with …
WTF? Sony to Buy Bungie
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/06/22 at 03:24 PM CT
It seems like only a couple weeks ago that we were all expressing shock and bemusement over Microsoft’s announced intentions to buy Activision for 69 billion dollars. Oh, wait that was only a couple weeks ago!
Hot on the heels of Microsoft’s massive corporate bulldozing, Sony felt the need to participate as well, by purchasing Bungie – the original developers of Microsoft’s ‘Halo’ FPS series, who jumped ship from the Xbox Division after the parent company gave the ‘Halo’ IP to 343 Games, went to Activision, then jumped ship again to be ‘independent’ with their ‘Destiny’ IP – for a less-than-staggering $4 billion.
Yes, there are already memes.
Furthermore, Sony has already announced their plans for Bungie – for whom $1.2 billion of that acquisition cost allegedly went into retention fees to make sure Bungie’s employees didn’t bail (as they have been shown to do) to start their own Indie-indie studio – and, unsurprisingly, Sony’s plans …
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