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 …
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