Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Ring Fit Adventure released just shy of a year ago at this point, and it is only now finally reliably available in stores. As a result of several of us finally getting our hands on it we talk a little bit about the experience of using it. From there we talk about the PS5 Price Reveal and pre-order debacle. This moves into discussing the RTX 3080 launch as well and the application of bots from Bounce Alerts snagging most of the stock in both cases. Hades from Supergiant games has finally officially released and we are talking about the game that was described by Tam as an “Escape Room”. From there Tam talks about finding gold in the Steam suggestion queue in Swords n Magic n Stuff. Finally we talk a bit more about Final Fantasy XVI and speculate on when we might actually get to see it.
There are a couple different versions of this “quiz” floating around social media. I saw the very truncated version on the left first and later a more complete version circulated on the right. However it got me thinking about consoles and the generations that they belong to. Essentially for a long time now I have heard people refer to a specific console as being part of the third, the seventh , or even now that we are entering the ninth generation. I wanted to know more about this and as a result it sent me down a rabbit hole that I am now sharing with you. Of course you can just read this handy wikipedia page I found in my travels and be done with it, but I figure if you have made it this far into the post you are probably going to continue down to the end.
Generation One – The Single Game Units
Generation one for the first part were the pong clones. The above is an image of the unit that I remember playing as a kid but unfortunately I didn’t get to play very much of it. My nephew had borrowed it and apparently left the image up on screen all night and burned it into the very expensive zenith cabinet television that my grandparents had, and from that point forward it was only used with the utmost of caution and under full supervision. Even as we entered the Nintendo era of gaming, said Grandparents refused to let me hook any game consoles up to any of their televisions. For the most part the consoles in this generation were a single game, or a number of game modes that were switchable on unit.
Generation Two – The Era of Cartridges
This is the era that was the counter effect of the arcade boom and in my memory was dominated by the Atari 2600. The defining feature of this generation was the inclusion of some way of swapping games, usually through a cartridge slot. For the most part, even though I played a pong clone… the Atari 2600 was the first video game system that I considered to be mine. I remember a few friends had the Intellivision or the ColecoVision… and a very rare few had an Atari 5200… but the vast majority were 2600 kids. I won’t lie I have a certain nostalgia for the wood grain era of gaming, and I really would have loved to have seen a Vectrex in its prime.
Generation Three – The 8-Bit Era
The second generation was exceptionally long, not necessarily because it was still booming but more that video games crashed hard in the late 70s and early 80s. This generation was largely heralded by the introduction of better 8 bit graphics into the equation. It was not until the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System that this marketplace revived, and with it was a change to start treating these things as toys rather than living room computers. For me 1987 was the “Nintendo Christmas”, and I remember it being legitimately the only thing I wanted that year and I was scared to death when nothing vaguely Nintendo shaped showed up under the Christmas tree. I remember the consoles being in extremely short supply, but ultimately I got the set I wanted with the all important Super Mario Bros. The folks left out in the cold here were the kids who ended up getting a Sega Master System, because they couldn’t quite join in the recess huddles talking about game strategy, and absolutely couldn’t participate in swapping cartridges.
Generation Four – The 16-Bit Era
This era is really my favorite and the one I am the most nostalgic for, but it was also a really odd generation. It is largely signified by the inclusion of 16 bit graphics, but as a result you have a few odd cases where technically the Sega Genesis and the Turbografx 16 were contemporaries of both the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Super Nintendo. Ultimately this generation will forever be marked by the competition between the SNES and the Genesis and the various advertising campaigns fomenting this. The staggered nature of the generation was a bit odd because even though the Genesis and Turbografx released in 1989, they wouldn’t really have much impact in toppling the older 8 Bit NES. This was also the first generation when I owned more than one console, as I got a used Genesis Model 1 pretty late in the cycle.
Generation Five – The CD-ROM ERA
Things get a little squirrely with this generation as well as you ended up with a mix of “32 bit” and “64 bit” graphical processing, or at least that was the advertising at the time. In the case of Nintendo it was a 32 bit CPU and a 128 bit graphical processor… and apparently they averaged these numbers to get 64? The Nintendo 64 and the Atari Jaguar clung to the more expensive to manufacturer and more limited space of the cartridge, but the vast majority of consoles in this generation made the leap to the new and exciting CD-Rom technology. This is also the era of the Modchip and rampant console piracy with many offerings in this generation having little to no protection other than the thought that at the time CD Burners were terribly expensive. The most popular consoles of this generation were the Sony PlayStation, Nintendo 64 and the Sega Saturn. The strangest consoles of this generation were likely the 3DO and the Atari Jaguar… which did some interesting things but never really caught on and looking back have very few games that would be considered as classics.
Generation Six – The DVD Era
I am calling it the DVD Era because that was the new hotness and every single console above uses some sort of DVD drive technology, with the Dreamcast and the Gamecube going to lengths to obfuscate this fact. However for me there are really two key things that happened. First it was the death of Sega, with the Dreamcast failing to gain traction and being more or less killed by piracy. This meant with it the death of the old Sega versus Nintendo Rivalry, but as that banner fell the next generation of Microsoft versus Sony stepped in to take its place. This also more or less begins the era of Nintendo not really trying to compete directly with the other consoles and doing its own thing, which is a strategy that have served them well throughout the generations. The Sony PlayStation was the clear winner of the generation, but the Dreamcast will always hold a special place in my heart. While I never owned one the Xbox was essentially a PC in a black plastic box and I remember all of my friends that had them modding and doing all sorts of nonsense to dump games to the hard drive.
Generation Seven – The Online Gaming Era
This is a weird generation, because looking back the highest selling console is also the least relevant to the direction in which gaming has moved. The Nintendo Wii sold over 100 million consoles and became a craze with folks who you absolutely did not expect to own one playing Wii Bowling. The thing is… it didn’t convert people into core gamers and I know so many people who bought a Wii and never played anything other than the sports pack in disc. I think a truer representation of this generation and how it moved things forward is that this is the era in which online gaming dominated the platforms. Sure the Dreamcast offered pretty reasonable online play, and you could get a PS2 or Saturn online with a lot of hoops to jump through… but the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 were internet native consoles and finally knew how the hell to handle this interaction with Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network. Nintendo still to this day doesn’t entirely know what the hell to do with the internet. This is also the generation where severe mistakes were made and Sony had the hubris to expect to dominate this generation the way they had the previous and unintendedly made a machine that was hell to develop for.
Generation Eight – The Digital Distribution Era
Sure you could download games on the Xbox 360, Wii and the PlayStation 3… but it was only specific games and often times limited to ports of older generations or independent games. It was during the Eighth generation that we figured out digital distribution in the proper way, with the ability to buy any game that was being released on day one from the comfort of your home and often times have it downloaded well ahead of time and unlocked at midnight. This is a generation that saw the biggest console flop in years in the form of the WiiU and the effective reboot of the same games to critical acclaim in the form of the exceptionally versatile Nintendo Switch. Microsoft started the generation leaning entirely too heavily on trying to go back to the era of being the “Livingroom PC” that did everything including watch television for you. However after this misstep they carved a really solid path forward with Games with Live and now Game Pass. PlayStation on the other hand rode into the generation with the exceptional value of PlayStation Plus that they used to turn around the previous generation, and more or less squandered that. PlayStation however still stands strong on its exclusives that have only recently been making their way to the PC. The PlayStation 4 has sold the most units, but I feel like Nintendo with the Switch will eventually surpass that.
Generation Nine – ???
So here we sit on the precipice of the ninth console generation, and I have no idea what the eventual hallmark of this generation will be. I think the challenge with this generation is that it doesn’t feel like it is a significant leap forward. As we have moved each generational leap has felt smaller, and largely just being indicated by slightly higher resolutions and graphical fidelity. Maybe ray tracing will be a game changer, or maybe this will be the generation finally capable of delivering virtual reality for the masses. Right now however both consoles that release in November are deeply unproven as to how exactly they are going to make their mark. They are both effectively the same PC being sold under different brands, because at the end of the day the difference between the hardware being offered is marginal.
Yesterday was a bit of a cluster, as is the days that most console pre-orders go live. I was expecting something calm and orderly as it seemed to be with Sony’s system of signing up to pre-order, but that was not the case. Above is a link to the PlayStation 5 show that started at 3 pm my time and finally dropped the official price and release dates of the console. The all digital version I had been wanting would be going for $399 and the disc version for $499 and both consoles would be available starting November 12th. The consoles were to go up for pre-order on the 17th… aka today as I am writing this. That however is not at all what happened.
GameStop stores started doing in person pre-orders as the show as going on, and Walmart started their pre-order machine around 5:30 pm my time and was sold out before I had even managed to put one in my cart. Target dropped their pre-orders around 6:30 my time, and I had one in the cart but it sold out before I managed to successfully check out. Best Buy followed suit around 7 pm and once again I had one in the cart but they sold out while I was attempting to check out. Game Stop started online pre-orders around that time and by the time I even got the link they were sold out for both units. My last and only chance was Amazon and seemingly they started pre-orders at 10:30 last night… whereas I went to bed around 10:20 and once again missed the boat.
The logical part of my brain is telling me that there won’t be a single title that HAS to be played on the console until at least summer of 2021. However I am more than a little disappointed because I skipped upgrading to the PlayStation Pro thinking that the PS5 was just around the corner. As a result there is a huge backlog of PlayStation 4 era games that I have been waiting on diving into because I wanted to be able to play them in 4k. Once you get used to 4k there really is no going back, and I have been playing my PC Titles at that resolution for quite some time. Going back to the base PlayStation 4 just feels bad. Maybe I can snag a restock at some point along the line, but it seems like it is just not in the cards for me to get a PlayStation 5 this year.
So you remember that nonsense of signing up for the chance to pre-order through Sony? Well it turns out those emails also went out yesterday around 9 pm, with a second wave going out around 10 pm. I did not get an email in either case so that seemingly turned out to be nothing. This lottery is also not a guarantee, but instead you are given a unique URL that you then have to click on and try and order along with everyone else doing the same thing on Friday at 10 am Pacific Time. This too will sell out, so even if you did manage to be among the chosen by Sony, it is likely going to be another cast of fastest fingers first.
In the proud tradition of assholes flipping pre-orders, at the time of writing this there are 1919 sold listings for a PlayStation 5 on Ebay. I knew that more or less based on past experience that it would be secure a pre-order or just not have access to a PlayStation 5 this calendar year. In the past I was always one of those folks trying to get them after they were already long sold out. The first console I remember having extreme shortages for was the Nintendo Entertainment System, but the first I actively sought out was the Nintendo 64. It was the summer of the next calendar year before I was able to find one that was in store and available for purchase. With the PlayStation 2 I completely missed the boat and lucked into someone who had effectively bankrupted themselves buying it in the first place and picked it up second hand. Nintendo Wii and Nintendo Switch… I want to say I managed to pick them both up a good 4 or 5 months after the release as the major restock waves hit.
The frustrating part is that I probably could have easily scored a disc model if I wanted that. However I have been focused on trying to get one of the elusive unicorn all digital models. I say they are illusive because in all of the cases I talked about above, the Digital was the first to completely sell out. This seems to be because Sony maybe underestimated the demand for those who are like me and have zero use for a physical drive. So far I have been seeing reports that retailers are getting roughly 20% of the number of Digital units that they are physical units. In the case of GameStop this was reported to be an allocation of 10 physical units and 2 digital units per store.
Yesterday Microsoft threw a not insignificant amount of shade at the fiasco going on with the PlayStation 5 pre-orders. They begin taking pre-orders next Tuesday and are promising that they will all go live at the same time and folks will know exactly when that times is. I guess time will tell if they can somehow manage to wrangle all of the third party vendors into following the company line. I expect that it will be just as chaotic as the PlayStation mess turned out to be. Fortunately or unfortunately depending on the point of view, I will not be participating because the new Microsoft console doesn’t really do much for me personally. I think it is a phenomenal deal if you are a console only gamer, but I have a PC and I have access to pretty much all of the same games. The PlayStation has always been about exclusive titles and I have a backlog of those that I had been wanting to wait and play in a higher resolution.
The Ninth Generation of consoles has begun like so many before it as a chaotic train wreck. I expect that I will be able to get a PlayStation 5 next March once the supply loosens up a bit. Maybe by then there will be some exclusive titles to play on it. March seems to be when I get new consoles, I remember getting my PlayStation 4 right after Infamous Second Son released in 2014. If you were hunting a pre-order I hope you got one, but I have a feeling that most of us will not have. As we try and snipe any restocks… may the odds be ever in your favor.
I am not sure exactly what it is about World of Warcraft that causes me to constantly return to it. It could be the fact that I know the expansion is impending, or the fact that my friend Grace is back and leveling again, or it could just be that I find the rhythm of this game comforting in this time of uncertainty. Whatever the case I am largely focused on trying to get this elemental boy to 120 before the impending pre-patch. It is starting to look more and more like said patch is landing next Tuesday the 22nd, and with that disappears the Winds of Wisdom buff that I have been abusing to level all the things. I will truly miss you nonsense leveling speed because it was super fun to run up an army of alts horde side.
I still am not sure what bit flipped in my brain that suddenly allows for playing a caster to be enjoyable. I have long chided the “finger wigglers” of the world, claiming that it was not a thing that Bel’s do. However I am finding the pace and flow of leveling a caster to be terribly enjoyable of late. I don’t think it is enough that I will probably swap to one as a main, but it is still an interesting diversion. Right now I can legitimately say that I enjoy both the Elemental Shaman and various specs of the Warlock. I think Mage may still be a bit too squishy for my tastes, but the fact that I can heal myself up mid fight I think is what adds to the love of this Shaman.
With the pre-patch comes a slew of activities and a return of the scourge trying to invade Azeroth. Unfortunately gone are the really cool Judgement reskin armor sets from the Wrath of the Lich King event, and in its place are a bunch of reskins of the existing Warfront gear. The Alliance are getting brand new colors, and it appears that the horde are getting the same damned set we have had previously which sucks a little bit. Mostly for me I am looking at this as a way of gearing out characters prior to the patch since I have a feeling even with the squish this is ultimately going to be better gear than my alts are currently wearing.
WowHead has a guide to everything that has changed with the pre-patch and more importantly a guide to all of the Scourge Invasion events that I have been snipping images from. I have to admit the part that interests me the most is hanging around in Icecrown and farming the various World Bosses that are available. The base armor available for the event is item level 100 which is supposedly the “squished” version of 430 gear that comes from Normal mode Ny’alotha. I’ve heard that some items can be obtained at a 110 level, but I am not seeing this in the Wowhead Guide. The item that is probably going to be of the most interest is that Bronjahm is dropping an updated version of his bag that is 34 slots.
I am a sucker for pre-patches. I ground the hell out of the one that came with Legion and loved doing those Burning Crusade invasions. In that cause they also served as a really damned fast way to level a bunch of alts, and I remember doing this to catch up all of my Alliance characters at the time to level 100. It does not sound like the Undead Invasions are going to have this fringe benefit, but I do want to spend a little bit of time on my Alliance characters if for no reason other than to try and collect some of the unique armor appearances. As it stands my goals this week are to finish the shaman and prepare myself for a bunch of event nonsense starting next week. The launch of an expansion always brings out a sudden mania, but I will do my best to keep my cool.
