Vaguely Related Review: Game Fuel
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/25/11 at 04:19 PM CT
This is the first in what I hope to make an irregularly-recurring column in which I (or one of the other MeltedJoystick staff) review a product that is related to gaming but isn’t an actual videogame or console. This week the product in question is Pepsi’s “Game Fuel” varieties of Mountain Dew.
Game Fuel first made an appearance in 2007 as a tie-in promotion for the release of “Halo 3.” I didn’t get in on this because the promotion period was so short (and because I don’t give a fig about “Halo 3” HA!). When this cherry-citrus flavor returned in 2009 to promote “World of Warcraft,” I managed to snag some (despite also not giving a fig about “World of Warcraft” HA!).
The two “WoW” tie in flavors were Orc Red and Elf Blue, with cherry-citrus red and a blue-raspberry blue that tasted very similar to Mountain Dew Voltage. Both flavors were incredibly tasty, but the red flavor disappeared after the promotion ended while the blue flavor lived on as …
The Hidden Genre in Games
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/20/11 at 05:03 PM CT
Videogames are a perpetually evolving form of media. While literature and film have largely passed through their respective coming-of-age periods and have settled into a series of well-defined pigeonholes, videogames are still a bit more ambiguous. In all other forms of media, the genre describes the basic setting in which the characters and plot are revealed. While ‘genre’ is considered a dirty word among certain uppity English professors who think Literary Fiction is the only kind of writing worth reading, ‘Literary’ has itself become a genre (and one of the worst, at that).
Scanning the shelves at a bookstore will reveal: Literary, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Steampunk, Post-Modern, and a variety of other setting-based descriptions that give the potential reader a hint of what lies between the covers. Movies likewise cram their pegs into these same holes, despite the fact that the fit isn’t quite right. In film there’s also the style in which the narrative …
Veterans Day
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/13/11 at 03:32 PM CT
This Veterans Day weekend, millions of gamers will celebrate the sacrifices made by the United States military by shooting each other in the head, teabagging the corpses of their fallen adversaries, and screaming obscenities into wireless headsets, thanks to the recent release of “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.” To these millions of gamers, many of whom are too young to understand its horrors, war is a form of entertainment.
While it may no longer be cool to hate on “Call of Duty,” lack of coolness has never stopped me from doing things in the past. Why do people (and in this instance, ‘people’ refers to ‘mainstream gamers’) find war entertaining? While conflict is necessary to drive the plot of any good story (and it’s debatable whether or not “CoD’s” 8-hour single-player mode qualifies as ‘good’), what is the infatuation with bringing home the horrors of modern warfare to our living rooms under the guise of ‘entertainment?’ These games aren’t …
In Praise of Nothing
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/06/11 at 03:42 PM CT
The Seventh Generation of videogame consoles has spawned numerous changes in the way videogaming works. While there has been little innovation in the games themselves, our interaction with them has changed immensely. And most of these changes were initially forced upon us by Microsoft, a company that never should have become entangled in the game console industry.
I have already discussed the fact that persistent online connections and built-in hard drives (first implemented by MS in the original Xbox) have allowed the slapdash PC game development model of ‘release it now, fix it later’ to migrate to consoles. But that’s just an example of something old and bad being allowed to stick around instead of being regulated out of existence. Persistent online connections also allowed Microsoft to come up with a new poison to taint videogames: Achievements.
Of course, Achievements aren’t exactly new either. There has always been e-peen waggling and one-upmanship amongst gamers. …
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