The earliest installments were all parodies of the sort of infomercials you might find on local TV at 4 AM in the morning. They’ve kind of strayed from that a bit recently (likely starting with the success of Too Many Cooks), but the basic premise is broadly the same: they’re supposed to look largely innocuous at…

I had a nutrionist once who suggested that my type-1 diabetes was related to my consumption of pasteurized milk as a child. She didn’t oversell the point, mind you: it was more of an idle conversation after I mentioned that I (apparently unusually for type-1 diabetics) had no family history of the disease.

Yep. The people complaining about shovelware never seem to have any trouble finding the high-quality, high-budget AAA games on Steam’s storefront, so it remains a curiously hypothetical problem. The actual challenges faced by a digital storefront are quite a bit different from those faced by a physical storefront, and…

Er, you do realize there were four consoles in 1983, right? The Atari 2600, the Atari 5200, the Intellivision, and the Colecovision? And that’s leaving aside various personal computers with a significant gaming audience (the Apple II family, the IBM/PC, the Commodore 64, etc.). And since all these had to worry about…

While we can certainly debate whether or not there’s a problem with Steam’s current model, the comparisons to the crash of ‘83 are way off base. The biggest issue facing the industry in the early 1980s were primarily about manufacturing. When you put out thousands of shovelware cartridges and sell only a small…

Why, oh why does Square Enix still refuse to add controller support to their Android ports? I can live with the questionable graphics changes, even the poor support whenever an OS update hits, but this irks me to no end.

They might consider it, but only after they change it into an action RPG. And it’ll take fifteen years to develop.

Bethesda won’t start rolling out mods for consoles until they’ve at least released the official modding tools. All of the mods so far are cobbled together using tools originally developed for previous Bethesda titles and aren’t really supported (insofar as mods are ever “supported”) by Bethesda. They even tried to…

Even in its golden age, Interplay had a ton of problems. When Brian Fargo was still in charge, the company did a decent job of hiding those problems from the general public. The company certainly didn’t pull of the sketchy, money-grabbing nonsense that’s become synonymous with the brand since Titus Software/Herve Caen…

Interestingly, there’s no mention of “Tobe Hooper’s Spider-Man” in this list....

For me, it’s not that I’m worried about the aesthetic quality. It’s a port of a game that’s over fifteen years old, in any case. But Square Enix’s track record means that it’s likely going to use the touch screen interface even for the PC version, and that’s as unfortunate as it was for Final Fantasy III through Final…

I’ve been playing the Final Fantasy series since the first one of the NES. My favorite is probably the original Famicom Final Fantasy III (but the DS remake is trash). Final Fantasy VIII is a close runner up, and would probably take the crown save for the mishandled revelation about GFs, which strains credibility and…

I was wondering if Shadowrun: Dragonfall was being excluded because it’s actually a “standalone expansion” (i.e., not actually an expansion at all). If not, it absolutely deserves a mention.

In terms of game quality, perhaps. But neither company was “doing fine,” business wise. Square was flirting with bankruptcy after the disastrous Square Pictures/Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within fiasco. Enix’s situation wasn’t as immediately precarious (and, technically and legally, the merger was Enix absorbing…

In addition to the loading times, there are some weird trade-offs made for the translation. It’s the same localization as the SNES release... except that it limits the length of monster names in the battle screen to one fewer characters than the the US SNES release. That’s in keeping with the Japanese original, but it…

There are some terminal entries talking about how Maxson signed a treaty with the Outcasts shortly after becoming Elder. So, formally speaking, the FO4 Brotherhood of Steel is the reunited Lyons’ Brotherhood and Brotherhood Outcasts.

Sooo, would that make our universe (given its rough similarity to the Fallout universe) a daedric plane? Weird. And possible, I guess, but if I were Bethesda I don’t think I’d touch the implications of that with a ten foot pole.

I’m not the one making the argument that magic makes Tamrielic civilization, well, civilized. You, however, do seem to making the argument that they’re uncivilized, either because of magic, or because it works in the service of a fan theory that has no basis whatsoever in the lore of either the TES or Fallout…

No one on Earth has ever taken a rocket ship to the sun, but we’re pretty solid on what it is and how it works anyway. Since the stars are the source of magic in the TES universe, and there are dozens of groups who study magic very, very seriously and have done so for millenia, there’s a good chance they have some…

Nope. Canonically those are holes in the universe caused by fleeing Aedra. They just look like stars. In the context of the TES universe, this is all well-trod science, not mythology.