The Nerd Next Door

The Nintendo Playstation sounds to the common gamer like a statement that a troll on reddit or Twitter would come up with as joke. But many hardcore gamers know the story that Nintendo and Sony initially were going to make both a CD add-on for the Super Nintendo and an all in one console called the Nintendo Playstation. The project died in 1991 and has been regarded as Nintendo's worst failure, giving rise to their own competition. But what if I told you that through emulation and flash carts, the Super Nintendo CD lives in a very odd fashion? It's an odd thing, I'll need to explain further. We need to go back to the original SNES CD concept and how it sprouted from the Super Nintendo development. In 1988, Sony approached Nintendo with a brand new audio chip for the upcoming Super Nintendo project, a chip created by future Playstation creator Ken Kutaragi. Nintendo bought the chip, which allowed for sample based music to be created and boosted the SNES' audio bey...

With 3D Platformers coming back into vogue with Crash, Spyro, and Mario Odyssey, I decided to take a look at a Playstation 2 Platformer that my brother in law tries to get me to play, Jak and Daxter. Developed by Naughty Dog, the same team behind the original Crash Bandicoot games, this was actually their spiritual sequel to Crash after they finished Crash Team Racing on PS1. But that leads to a question, how does this spiritual sequel from 2001 hold up in 2019? Stand amongst the cream of the crop? Or is it just a dated relic of the times? The first thing to note is that Jak and Daxter has aged pretty well presentation wise. It's artstyle and graphics hold up pretty well, something I attribute to the cartoony style that Naughty Dog went for. Music is sort of a mixed bag, it does it's job but is just kind of forgettable, more atmospheric than head bopping with some exceptions, like the final boss theme. The environments are also nice and varied, from snowy peaks to boggy s...

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 ...