Why I’m Not Buying a PlayStation 4
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/24/13 at 03:41 PM CT
It’s official: All of the 8th Generation consoles are in the wild and ready for purchase by legions of feverish fanboys. While the Xbox One (henceforth referred to only as XBONE) has been received with little fanfare and much hostility (finally bringing the general gaming public’s opinion toward Microsoft’s gaming division in line with my own), the PlayStation 4 is seemingly being hailed as some sort of gaming messiah. Yet I have absolutely zero interest in Sony’s latest gaming machine.
Unlike other gaming media outlets, MeltedJoystick doesn’t take bribes in exchange for positive reviews. We purchase games and hardware with our own funds and review them on our own time. We may never produce reviews days or weeks ahead of a product’s release, but when we do produce a review, you can be guaranteed that the reviewer actually wanted to experience the product in question (which makes negative reviews all the more condemning). Of course, my lack of interest in the PS4 and …
Media as the First Post-Scarcity Society
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/17/13 at 02:32 PM CT
Anyone who has ever enjoyed an episode of “Star Trek” probably has fantasized at least once about how much better life must be in the world of the 24th Century. With replicator technology and near-limitless clean energy, humans (and humanoid aliens) no longer need to work for a living, but can instead focus their lives on the things they love. The result is a universe in which most people seem to be perpetually retired, pursuing hobbies or obsessions without fear of being unable to pay for food or utility bills.
Whether or not the real world will mimic “Star Trek” is still an open question. Many of the key technologies are still firmly in the realm of fiction, while others – such as the ability for anything to travel faster than the speed of light – increasingly appear to be impossible. Yet there is one area of our modern day economy that does closely resemble the whole of Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future: Media. With the conversion from analog, physical media …
Backlog: The Embiggening - November, 2013
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/09/13 at 03:28 PM CT
Welcome to another look into the near future. The trend I observed last month – that the build-up to Holiday 2013 is featuring a single massively-mainstream release per month that overshadows everything else released that month to the detriment of gaming as a whole – is continuing into November with the destined-to-be-record-breaking release of “Call of Duty: Ghosts.” In addition to that guaranteed earner, November is also the release month for Sony’s and Microsoft’s 8th Generation hardware, with all the exclusives that come with that… except the PS4 and XBONE don’t really appear to have all that many exclusives, with their launch libraries instead dominated by multiplatform releases of November games (that are also available on Sony’s and MS’ 7th Generation hardware) and day- late- dollar- short ports of other 7th Generation games that were released in the past few months. Why should we be excited about the 8th Gen, again?
As Christmas draws ever nearer, the …
Vaguely Related Review: Desura
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/02/13 at 04:32 PM CT
It has been close to two years since those heroes of modern PC gaming, GOG and Steam, dragged me kicking and screaming back into the realm of spending the largest chunk of my gaming time on a Windows box instead of a console. Of course, the antics of Microsoft, Sony, and the Big Three publishers helped…
With nothing but happy experiences buoying me, I decided to look into yet another PC gaming hub – one that gets a significant amount of praise from Linux fans: Desura. I first ran across the name Desura being spouted by “Free as in Free Speech, not Free as in Free Beer” software proponents. Apparently, Desura was supposed to be some kind of home for small-time Indie games that couldn’t bear the thought of being shackled with Steam’s DRM (or, more than likely, didn’t have the backing to make it into Steam directly and didn’t have the quality to attract enough Greenlight votes). Based upon this hearsay, I had no real desire to look into Desura. I may like Indie games, …
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