Backlog: The Embiggening – May, 2019
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/28/19 at 02:53 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! April showers (of watery fecal matter) bring May flowers (turd blossoms), so as the Spring quarter begins to wind down, let’s take a look at what the Industry is leaving for us to squabble over as the Summer Game Drought looms on the horizon.
Shovel-ready doo-doo is light on the ground in May. We’ve got one super-casual non-game, in the form of “Little Friends: Dogs & Cats,” which is clearly trying to take up slack in the absence of a new ‘NintendDogs’ title. Then we’ve got two licensed trash fires, one based on the stoner comedy by Cartoon Network’s ‘Rick & Morty’ team, “Trover Saves the Universe;” then we’ve got a compilation port of other licensed drek from Cartoon Network. Nothing I love (read: hate) more than ports of shovelware.
And, boy, do we have ports coming in May! 17, all told… and unsurprisingly, the Switch is still leading the way, as desperate rats try to save themselves by bailing on …
The New Ascetics
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/21/19 at 03:49 PM CT
This weekend, while Jews the world over celebrate the avoidance of a plague by the smearing of sheep’s blood on their door lintels, and Christians celebrate the agonizing physical abuse, torment, and death heaped upon the god-man at the center of their mythology, here I am thinking about games. But really, I’m thinking about games AND religion.
As a Classicist, there are actually very few times when I’m NOT thinking about religion from an outside, unattached perspective. With great dismay, I see all the time how stupid people do stupid or horrific things in the name of Faith. Indeed, the thing that first dislodged my own faith, and placed me on the True Path of heathendom, was a college course I took as a sophomore on the writings of the early Church Fathers. The Christianity I grew up with was supposed to be a faith of forgiveness, freedom from fear, and the end of superstition. What I read about in the Church Fathers was, instead, a Christianity steeped in anxiety, …
The Post-Steam World: A Speculative Fiction
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/14/19 at 04:32 PM CT
With the Epic Games Store’s recent endeavors to curry favoritism amongst publishers and lock-down exclusive distribution of a handful of big titles for limited time windows via the use of monetary incentives paid to said publishers (colloquially known as “money-hatting,” but traditionally known as “bribery”), the pro-Epic corporate shills and garden variety Internet Trolls have been out in full-force, declaring the DOOM of Valve Softworks’ Steam store. According to these self-styled prophets, the pro-corporation moves made by the Epic Store – beginning with their founding features of taking a smaller cut of sales made through their store than Steam does and the waiving of the Unreal Engine licensing fee on games built using Epic’s own Unreal Engine (i.e., about half of all modern games); then culminating in the money-hatting of “Metro: Exodus,” “The Outer Worlds,” “Journey,” and “Borderlands 3” – has lead the upstart game retailer to ‘great …
“Labo VR” Arrives Right on Schedule
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/07/19 at 02:34 PM CT
I first declared “Reality” to be the hot hardware gimmick way back in 2014, when Oculus and Sony were pushing Virtual Reality and Microsoft and Nintendo were pushing Augmented Reality. Over the course of the intervening years, Valve and HTC jumped into the VR arena, and Microsoft’s AR merged with VR to form the Voltron-esque Mixed Reality of the Hololens. Meanwhile, other (non-gaming) companies, like Samsung and Google, experimented with VR on smartphones, typically by strapping said devices to the user’s face.
In view of these trends, I have been speculating in private (and on other Internet fora) for several years now that when Nintendo decided to throw its hat into the VR arena, it would likely do so in a manner modeled on the mobile paradigm set by Google and Samsung rather than the PC/Console paradigm set by everyone else. In fact, when Nintendo first released its “Labo” cardboard origami sets for the Switch, I immediately declared that a Google Cardboard-style VR …
View Archive
