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For those of you who have ever worked a job that had any kind of meeting this may actually resonate differently than those who haven’t. When video games are developed there are, surprisingly, a lot of meetings that occur. When we’re talking meetings we’re talking a lot of meetings. So many meetings that it’s actually kind of fascinating to think about. None of the below is really applicable to single developer games that don’t utilize outside contractors. Single developers naturally work entirely alone on their own game and purchase / generate all the assets and resources themselves. Single developers who contract out work still have meetings, interestingly enough. Meetings and Video Games So there’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen. You have the product team, that’s the developer and the game designer along with their associated analysts and support staff. You have a technical team that’s got a considerable…

Nippon Ichi Software, Inc. of Japan is one of my favorite companies out there. Their North American division is known as NIS America, Inc. or NISA. Their online store is the primary source of NIS games and it’s located here. There’s actually a lot to the store you should know and we’re going to dive into it. NIS America, Inc. Games – What style are they? So what do they sale? They’re best known for the Disgaea franchise. They’re also known for some weirder titles, isometric RPGs and visual novel style games. They also publish games for other developers as well. Some of the more recently known releases would include Crystar, MONARK, Blue Reflection: Second Light, etc. They’ve published games for Atlus and Spike Chunsoft. Fans of their most popular series will know the site well as it’s the absolute best place to secure a copy of a NIS game.…

There’s a lot going on right now in the world of video cards, but one of the hard truths that we have to face as gamers is that the actual super truth is that we’re hitting a point where the fidelity of games isn’t utilizing the entire graphics card power and thus, we’re looking at suffering in the video card market for a myriad of reasons and how people game is entirely one of them. People are quick to say “supply shortages” and “silicon shortages” as the reason for video card stock shortages and to a degree, it’s the simple answer, but what if I told you GTX 680s being viable today is probably a lot more involved in why there isn’t a rush to solve a what is now over a year long shortage in video cards. The Bargain Bin’s the Reason The biggest reason behind the ongoing video…

We wanted to put together an all in one resource on how to go out and find your next game purchase at the lowest price, for PC & console. The below guide covers the best deal site aggregators which let you search across multiple vendors and we also cover the best cash back rewards programs that you can leverage without any kind of credit card signup or formal card cash back program. You’d be surprised, sometimes you can get 8% back on a $300 purchase, which is $24 extra dollars back for doing nothing. The reason why is that it’s just easy to buy the game directly off of Steam or your console’s storefront. You search for the title and pay whatever they’re asking for. The problem is that with just a little bit of effort, you can find the game likely way cheaper. Then, on top of that, with…

Iron Harvest is a dieselpunk RTS based in an alternate 1930s where you get to ride around in giant diesel powered mechs which is pretty cool concept. This is more than welcome considering Rise of Nations was the last memorable steampunk RTS. The graphics, as you can see below are absolutely beautiful: It has a lot working for it. Good textures, very nice graphics and good gameplay built in. It’s actually something fun and unique for 2020. I’m not going to spoil the gameplay or nitpick the game mechanics, which I could do but that’s not really what my point is. The game is good enough that if this is your thing and you were to pick it up, you’d get your money out of it. If the aesthetic and the RTS genre is your thing you should snag it and enjoy the fact it’s something different. If you want…

GameStop is the last vestige of brick and mortar electronic gaming stores. It is a business of acquisitions, claiming most other large competitors and merging them into the fold and is on every YouTube and blog’s “Top 10 Companies Soon to Pull a Blockbuster” for the last six months to a year or so. Are they right? Is GameStop about to go under? I honestly am not some kind of market wizard, I can’t say if their current plans will save them or not, but we can talk about what’s gotten them to this point, in context of video game sales (not the whole who bought who what when and where, lots of that is already out there). So this chart pretty much tells a very, very interesting story. The company went public in 2002 at around $10 USD a share. In 2002, we were still in the world of…

Modern day VR started back in 2013 with the Oculus Dev Kit 1 (Oculus DK1), which was then updated and re-released in 2014 to backers as the DK2. In 2014 the retail Oculus was released and the Vive and the “Windows Mixed Reality” headsets soon followed. Originally, headsets were plagued by slow refresh screens or a myriad of issues that caused motion sickness in games and skeptical developers who didn’t want to develop for a platform that required $399 or more for a user to play, plus have a beefy PC gaming rig on top of that. So where are we in 2020? Well, in sort of an interesting and weird spot. VR is more alive than ever before, with VR experiences in real life being the “new arcades” and consumer VR headsets reaching mass adoption, but it’s not exactly a success down the line. Consumer VR Headsets (Oculus &…

Game Truth isn’t going to do an end of the year list or end of decade list because they’re just bad and boring. Game of the Year I guess is an alright concept, but only if there is some kind of panel that’s voting on it and it’s not just a single writers trite opinion or based off of some kind data-set pulled off of Steam and even then I honestly don’t care. You shouldn’t care either. Game of the Year is the game you most enjoyed, not some poll or some writer telling you what it is. Likewise, these lists come year after year and are as infectious as those “Top 30 Things You Didn’t Know You Couldn’t Live Without” which are long lists of Amazon referral links designed to get you to buy something, no matter what and then cash in on your other purchases as well. So…

Don’t Die, Minerva! (Steam / Xbox) has an early access release date: December 5, 2019. This is really cool for a myriad of reasons, the first being that it’s being developed and published by Xaviant, a gaming studio in Dawsonville, GA a short hop / skip / jump (and 3 exits) away from Dot Matrix Media. They’re known for the The Culling series, if you’ve ever heard of it and for being one of the few studios here in Georgia. The other cool thing about the game is that it’s a rouge-lite that takes Luigi’s Mansion and throws it into the spooky adventure horror genre that it belongs. You’ve got procedural generated dungeons, loot and enemies along with difficulty ranging from “I just want to see the pretty graphics and story” to “typical Dark Souls comment.” I mean, Dark Souls is pretty much a difficulty slider setting at this point.…