The Elements of Gadgets and Gaming
Gaming in 2024 is just the pits. It seems like every day we’re bombarded with more negative news. Whether it’s layoffs, yet another broken release, low review scores, dead multiplayer titles, woke developers and journalists abusing gamers, predatory monetization, even more price hikes, mergers, frivolous lawsuits, the complete lack of customer service. The list just…
Video games have a big problem with gatekeeping, and not in the way the mainstream games press would like you to believe. Gamers have often been accused, among other things, of gatekeeping their hobby to prevent it from becoming “diverse” and “inclusive”. Whatever those mean. Nerds have long been excluded for mainstream society, and are…
Video games have flirted with controversy since their earliest days. Yet despite the medium being a mainstream pass time for over a decade now, the hobby continues to elicit side eyed glances. There’s one concern I’ve been seeing coming up a lot lately in both the mainstream and independent press. That’s whether video games are…
So, you’ll probably notice that I haven’t posted much in the way of new opinion pieces or gaming news lately. I’ll go through sporadic periods where I’ll write a ton of content, followed by long lulls. This site is also a hobby. I’ve never monetized it, and its number of visitors is pretty low, so…
On the morning of July 8th, 2022, a third of Canadians woke up to discover they had no access to internet or cell service. A misconfiguration done during routine maintenance quite literally brought the entire network to its knees. One which wasn’t fixed until late in the evening. This is a huge, festering problem, largely…
Sonic Mania is widely considered one of the best games in the series, if not one of the best 2D mascot platformers ever made. The game was considered a fine return to form after the Sonic franchise had wallowed in a seemingly endless sea of painfully average to outright broken releases. So naturally, this would…
Microtransactions. They may very well have replaced cheating and emulation as the most controversial topic within the gaming community. This past month alone, we’ve seen numerous releases that have gone hyper-aggressive on post-purchase monetization. Gran Turismo 7 perhaps being the most notorious of the lot, due thanks to its constant nickel and diming, despite being…
So, there’s been a lot of talk lately about the inclusion of politics in games. Activists working within the industry, along with their goons in the media, think this is a necessity. All art is inherently political, so we’re told. Even though all the art we’ve been receiving seems to be one sided propaganda for…
So, I’m old enough to remember a time before cell phones became ubiquitous. When they were mainly limited to a select few business users. It was the late 80’s, maybe early 90’s when my dad’s company bought him a car phone. He’s a civil engineer who frequently travelled to remote job sites, so this was…
So, I decided to take an internet detox break for a couple of weeks, just to clear my head of all the BS that has been happening lately. It’s something I highly recommend. However, it looks like a lot of major stories dropped in the gaming world during that time, and I’ve only just had…