Trees are decorated, delicious cookies are baked, tacky sweaters from your grandmother are worn mainly to not look like a jerk, gifts are given and multicolored lights make certain neighborhoods visible from space. But we gamers know that there’s another important part of the holiday season: using that extra time off work (or school) to get in some quality game time. We’re in a bit of a festive mood here at Snackbar, and we want to help you get into one, too! Here are some of the best levels to do it. READ MORE
Gaming hardware history can arguably be broken down into three distinct categories. First, we have the victors, the ones that rose above the competition to become timeless titans that will remain fondly in gamers’ memories. These are your NESs, PlayStations or 2600s, the ones that many retro aficionados keep plugged into their TVs at all times. Next, we have the forgotten. These systems simply never were able to stand up to the others, and were just swept away by the tides of time, leaving almost no impact on the market. These are your SuperGrafxes, and Atari XEGSes. There’s nothing to show for their existence; they were hardly even a blip on the radar. Finally, we have likely the most interesting category, the infamous. READ MORE
There is a constant struggle I face whenever I sit down to play a game. It gnaws at me, and sometimes even paralyzes me into a mental state in which I’m unable to play anything. I constantly fight the battle in my head: do I want to play something from my current backlog of games or spend more time in a persistent game world? The current games battling for my attention are Final Fantasy XIV and Hearthstone, but with a recent upswing in my time playing Heroes of the Storm (recently released into open beta), my problem just keeps getting worse. READ MORE
One of the biggest mistakes a console maker can make is putting a technological gimmick before the hardware itself. The dawn of optical media was a perilous point in games hardware history, with several platform creators rushing to take advantage of the new technology before the big players – Nintendo and Sega – could do it first. One such competitor, Pioneer, attempted to leverage an obscure medium while piggybacking on its more successful competitors to secure victory, but never obtained any compelling software. I’ll say it until I’m blue in the face: Software trumps hardware every time. The Pioneer LaserActive learned this the hard way. READ MORE
It promised a revolution. It promised a common consumer’s upheaval to the traditional console market: taking down the last stronghold against democratizing the creation and sale of video games, the home console market. It promised that the future wars of gaming would be fought with ideas, not hardware specifications. Ouya promised a lot when it first showed itself to the world. READ MORE
