I believe that Marvel also retained most (if not all) of the merchandising rights, and pulled in a fair bit of profit from that. I know that’s the case when it comes to Sony and the Spider-Man license. Your basic point stands, though.

God, I’m tired of this argument. I have liked bad movies. Batman v Superman is not one of them. I legitimately believe that it is a good movie, and none of the criticisms I’ve seen have made a convincing case otherwise. Critics of this movie seem to have a pathological need to have their opinions upheld by everyone…

Doom 64 isn’t a port of the PC version. It’s a full sequel, with entirely different levels, changes to the monsters and the mechanics, and so on. And the levels are really well made, even if I personally don’t like some of the aesthetic changes (the redesigned monsters have never really done anything for me and I…

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.