The Nerd Next Door

  Recently I've been playing the 2020 indie hit Hades quite a bit. It takes me a while to get adjusted to a new game but I found the addictive groove of Hades ' rougelike and random design to my liking. It's also a great game on Steam Deck, when I've got 30 minutes to kill at work I power up the Deck and go for a quick playthrough.  But the more and more I played through Hades' story the more I began noticing similarities to another rougelike I've played, Returnal . With Hades II announced and the PC port of Returnal out I figured it would be a perfect time to talk about how the two master one thing very well, story integration. Namely how the two games integrate story into the design to tell two radically different tales in terms of tone. The first is Hades , casting the player as the titular lord of the dead's son, Zagreus, as he tries to escape his father's domain. Problem with that is he keeps dying; the good news is that as an immortal Zagreus just...

Both Sony and Microsoft announced game consoles today, one was vague and was more of "hey this is coming" sort of thing and the other was "yep, this is a thing, buy it now." Both are interesting and I feel like this is a great time to talk about both it and the future of the games industry as a whole. Sony today dropped the "this is coming" news with the announcement of the Playstation 5, a brand new games console from Sony that runs AMD's Zen 2 architecture and NAVI GPU and promises backwards compatibility with PS4 games, raytracing, use of SSD's, and up to 8K support. So let's unpack all of this. I appreciate the use of PS4 games on the PS5, that was something missing from the PS4 that upset a lot of folks and only a little bit of it made sense; the lack of PS3 BC made sense because the PS3 was an archeticual nightmare but not even having PS1 or PS2 support just felt wack. SSD's are always appreciated and are slowly becoming the way ...