Backlog: The Embiggening – December, 2017
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/26/17 at 02:37 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Yule, and all of its syncretic Abrahamic holidays are just around the corner. What last-minute releases can we look forward to before the end of the first year of the Trump Administration? Let’s see!
What’s this? NO SHOVELWARE for December?! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! Well… I guess I do have one correction to make from prior months. Remember “Battle Chasers: Night War”? Well, it’s getting ported to the Switch… and it’s apparently based on an obscure comic book/graphic novel. Therefore, it must be shovelware, despite the fact that it actually looks decent. There’s also a port of an annual “WWE” wrestling release on the Switch… so there’s that.
Of course, even that one barely-laden shovel this month is full of ports, because ports seem to be all we get anymore. The Switch is leading the way again this month, with ports of a butt-load of Indie titles (which are apparently being called ‘Nindies’ …
Vaguely Related Review: Game Fuel Re-Redux
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/19/17 at 01:20 PM CT
I’m pretty sure Mountain Dew Game Fuel flavors come to grocery stores nationwide every year during Autumn, when the big annual Mainstream videogame releases drop, but as I said the last time I tasted and talked about Game Fuel back in 2014, the tie-in titles are so far outside my wheelhouse that relying on any form of in-game advertising or commercials run during televised sporting events is a sure-fire way for me to not know about a new round of custom Mountain Dew flavors.
As so happened last time, I didn’t so much seek-out Game Fuel, but serendipitously came upon it while shopping for Mello Yello at my local Russ’ IGA. The store was running a 4 fridge packs for $10 deal, but they only had 2 packs of MY left… so I filled in the rest of the slots with the two new Mountain Dew Game Fuel flavors.
In 2017, Cherry Citrus is out. Neither Game Fuel flavor is red in any way. Instead, this time around we’ve got yellow Tropical Smash and blue Arctic Burst. Unsurprisingly, …
New-Old Competitor, Intel, to Shake-Up the Discrete GPU Market
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/12/17 at 02:17 PM CT
After killing off their discrete GPU architecture, dubbed ‘Larrabee,’ way back in 2010, Intel has performed a complete 180, announcing that they will be diving back into the stand-alone GPU market, and giving Nvidia some much-needed competition. While AMD, the CPU maker that bought-up GPU maker ATI in 2006, has never really disappeared from the GPU market space, their products haven’t been particularly compelling – except possibly as bargain-basement alternatives for people who can’t afford the ‘good’ option from Nvidia – for a long, long time.
With Intel jumping back into the race, the GPU landscape stands to be shaken-up quite severely. Nvidia has grown complacent as the ‘best choice’ competitor, while AMD has continuously failed to apply any paradigm shifting breakthroughs of their own. Throwing a wild-card like Intel into the mix could dislodge both existing competitors from their dismal status-quo mire.
Interestingly, Intel already owns, according to …
Strike Your Colors and Prepare to be Boarded: Dev Torrents and Disappearing Denuvo
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/05/17 at 02:05 PM CT
Quite some time ago, I addressed the concept of DRM and praised ‘pirates,’ those anonymous hackers who strip DRM out of videogames and distribute them in gray/black channels for free, as saviors of old games – truly elite archivists whose preservation of gaming culture far outweighs the small financial damages their activities cause immediately. In the intervening years since I first wrote about pirates and DRM in 2011, a number of smaller developers seem to have come around to this more enlightened way of thinking. Instead of fighting pirates, they’re using pirates and torrent sites as an advertising venue.
Most recently in August of this year, developer Acid Wizard released their game, “Darkwood,” on The Pirate Bay (the galaxy’s most resilient BitTorrent tracker). “Darkwood” joins a long succession of games that have been ‘officially torrented’ by their makers, including “HFHO2,” and “Hotline Miami.” Other developers have taken a more duplicitous …
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