Rundown (11/18-11/24) Natalie’s Adventures with Streaming
Two weeks ago, prior to having a bit of a meltdown over the sheer amount of things I need to do, I played through the first stretch of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey using Google’s Project Stream service. While I personally found the game to be the same sort of highly detailed yet ultimately unmemorable open world fluff that has come to define so much of AAA gaming, and positively groaned as I briefly sifted through the microtransaction riddled storefront, I did find the performance of the game over my 50 mbps internet to be quite impressive. While I could tell that there was some degree of latency with my actions, the quality of the service did convince me that streaming is a viable option for gaming in the future, as, well, it worked.
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Rundown (9/23-9/29) No One Can Stop The Koopa Queen!
You know how they say you cannot have too much of a good thing? Yeah, that is complete nonsense. After last week’s rundown, where I was positively ecstatic about how Bowsette blew up, it completely went wild after a while, with thousands of people “jumping on the bandwagon” and drawing their own interpretations of the character, including some especially well known artists. Things went completely nuts once Japan found the fan art, and proceeded to turn Bowsette into the highest trending topic on Japanese Twitter, and continued to flood Twitter, Pixiv, and more with an absolute deluge of art.
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Rundown (7/08-7/14) No Child Can Understand the Past
Something that I noticed as being common sentiment amongst a few burgeoning adults whom I follow for their work is the idea that children of the culture and modern day will be and are unable to understand aspects of the past. Claiming that the idea of modern conveniences such as smartphones, the internet, and various services will be so ubiquitous with everyday life that they will be incapable of understanding an earlier era in human history. It is a notion that has always annoyed me, as it runs contrary to my experience as a young child, where I was able to understand the idea of a world without things like washing machines, electricity, and grocery stores from an early age. It was not a full understanding, but I was able to imagine what that was like and gained some understanding. I mean, if there is one thing about children that you should not underestimate, it’s their imaginations.
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Rundown (6/12) E3 2018: Exhaustion and Exertion
Once more, the bulk of E3 news has been unveiled, and the press conferences have all come to a close. Meaning I am left both exhausted and exerted, while still holding a feeling of immense excitement in my heart of hearts after the blitz of news that occurred over the past few days. I would call it a bittersweet feeling, but after doing this for 6 years now, I know that is not the case. It’s a sweet feeling.
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Rundown (6/03-6/09) PRE3 2018: Darkness Rising
Ah yes, the fabled time of bliss and joy amongst the greater western video gaming community is finally here. While the event has been made obsolete to a certain degree thanks to the digital age and preeminent announcements, E3 is always a time of great powerhouse excitement for those who follow the gaming industry, with a plethora of announcements and various bits of news to be taken in.
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Rundown (5/27-6/02) Much Ado About Pokemon and Info Dumps
I mentioned before that I utterly love gaming history, and all of the odd bits that come attached with it, and one of the greatest fascinations for me as a child was the development of the second Pokemon game, originally entitled Pokemon 2, before being renamed Gold and Silver. Basically, the game was extensively delayed, reworked, and refined over three years before it finally came out, and a lot of things changed in that time, with said changes being evident thanks to a 1997 Space World demo. Well, said demo founds its way onto the internet… 21 years later, and a lot of details about the original rendition of the game were made available, including map data and many unused Pokemon designs.
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Rundown (5/13-5/19) No Nep-Nep for Me
I recently purchased Cyberdimension Neptunia: Four Goddesses Online, because while I am rather critical of the Neptunia series, I genuinely like them, and cannot justify skipping out on a title. I managed to squeeze a spot for it into my schedule, but as I went to start it up on Friday night, I quickly ran into issues where the game simply did not work. The Steam forums were not enough to help me with my endeavors, as all methods I could find proved to be ineffective. The game runs, barely, but I can neither play nor refund it, so I guess I’ll need to wait until I get a new PC in order to try again, because Idea Factory is certainly not going to patch this game…
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