Isn’t the actual Tegra used in the Switch much older than the console, making it more like 7-8 years out of date? 

I never went to a LAN party, per se, but my first experience in “online” gaming involved an Xbox in the living area of our dorm suite in college. We would play Halo against folks in other dorms on campus over the power of the mighty T-1 LAN connection: in 2003, the first access I ever had to “high speed internet” (it…

In the most extreme agrarian regions of the rural South, quality produce can be quite hard to come by. The local stuff goes somewhere else before some of it comes back to Wal-Mart.

Growing up in rural Coastal GA, I never looked at a video game magazine until around 95-96 when I started going to a private school with rich kids one county over.

I didn’t really care about multiple launchers until I got my Steam Deck. Heroic works ok for Epic and GOG, but, damn, trying to run my Epic copy of RDR2 on the Deck ain’t happening unless I can get the stupid Rockstar Launcher to cooperate. Now that I have the Deck, I buy all my games from Steam; I’m even rebuying (on…

What’s the difference between zombies and personified rats? I’m not into Warhammer at all, but Vermintide 2 set the bar pretty high for the niche that this game is trying for. The rogue like/procedural generation aspect is also concerning; part of the progression of these games is learning the maps to best exploit…

American-style zoning has contributed greatly to the climate crisis and quality-of-life crisis in our country.

Oh that’s a quaint village...until it gets totally destroyed a few moments later. 14yo me didn’t get it all at the time, but I loved that game. The battle system. The music. The settings. The constant nihilism. I got onto the second disc before one of my little brothers got a hold of my memory card...never had the…

Yeah, I would love to see what Kojima would do if he had a chance to remake 3 & 4. A director's cut in which he uses modern hardware to produce the games he wanted to make but couldn't. The first two games just need a new coat of paint; changing the perspective and gameplay of those games just wouldn't work. 

The last console generation, with their woeful netbook-class CPUs, and, thus, less demanding PC specs, made PC gaming quite cheap and sustainable until the pandemic and a new, exponentially more powerful generation of consoles hit. Folks like me, who have gotten long legs out of cards such as my 970, were suddenly…

The Steam Deck has impressed me so much that I think that it won’t be long before we have AMD APUs that are competitive options for mainstream gamers. Perhaps Nvidia sees the writing on the wall in the sub-$500 market and is waiting to see what AMD does on the APU front and how readily the Intel cards are accepted.

Have you tried Cheddar’s Monte Cristo? It was a franchise chain but was recently acquired by Darden, so I expect Cheddar’s to be ubiquitous nationwide at some point. The Monte Cristo isn’t my thing, but it was a very popular item when I served there  

Considering the mass adoption of smart phones, and their becoming a necessity for having even the lowest-tier service job, I think we are well on our way to the dystopic vision. Eventually, we will be largely economically stratified by the technology we can afford and have access to. My students are already doing…

The self-order kiosks have been a massive failure. I don't think McD's will be automating the kitchen any time soon. 

Having recently gotten a Steam Deck, I jumped back into the game before the anime, as the experience on my desktop with a GTX 970 was less than ideal. The genius efficiency of the Steam Deck’s RDNA2 core and hardware-level FSR makes for a really smooth experience.

That Franz Ferdinand album blew my mind in 2004; I was up late at my now-wife’s house and saw the video for “Take Me Out” on MTV. I was already dabbling in an interest in post-punk-adjacent bands like early U2, REM, and Television. After Franz Ferdinand, that interest became an obsession, and I went backwards to bands…

No 4.0, no go. My first car was a ‘96 barebones 4-door with the I6. What an engine! When I got to college (2003), a few of my friends were surprised that it was so easy to spin out on rocks, sand, or gravel. They weren’t used to having so much torque on their rear wheels. Between me and my brother, we pushed that one…

Are you saying there might be a Gargoyles crossover with The Hunchback of Notre Dame? Hmmm... 

SMB 2-2 for me. Growing up, I was obsessed with swimming underwater, and, if I could make it to the 1-2 warp zone and spend time in 2-2, I was usually satisfied with my play session. When I was little, seeing the next stage is what kept me playing, so I didn't care if I was good at Mario or not, I just wanted to see…

Yes, a fairly deep U2 cut. “Pop” is a cruelly dismissed album, with the exception of “Miami” and “The Playboy Mansion,” a pair of songs which cannot be rated low enough. On the other hand, “Gone” and “Last Day on Earth” are two of U2's absolute best tunes, and “If You Wear that Velvet Dress” is the closest U2 ever got…