Did the Overwatch 2 Spotlight Save Overwatch?

 Overwatch 2 has been in a precarious position ever since the release of Marvel Rivals. Did the team at Blizzard show off enough to save the once titan of gaming? Brian discusses the additions to the game coming in 2025 in this video! 

What is Happening with Warner Brothers Games?

 In his latest Video Essay, Brian discusses how rough 2024 was for Warner Brothers Games and tries to understand what the future might hold. From the highs of Hogwarts Legacy to the lows of Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League Brian covers it all in this video! 

Sony Won't Say Why PSN was Down, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 Controversy and Valve is Pro Consumer

Brian brings you the latest nerdy news in a new episode of Fake Nerd Updates. On the docket today: 

It was a disappointing weekend for PlayStation users as they weren't able to access their game libraries from Friday afternoon until Saturday evening. Worst still Sony won't say what caused the outage in the first place. Then Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 faced some controversy in it's debut weekend but still managed to sell over a million copies in 24 hours. Finally Valve banned games that force players to watch advertisements in game. Check out the video for all of the details! 

Survivor Is Dead and Jeff Probst Killed It

There was a moment during the “New Era” of Survivor where I accepted that the show I loved was dead. In its place was a new game wearing the skin of the game I had fallen in love with. A game that I had sunk countless hours into, rewatching old episodes, trolling message boards and facebook groups. A game I would eventually blog and podcast about, sharing the knowledge and opinions I had built up over the 20 year run of what I considered the greatest reality show of all time. 

Survivor went away after their 40th installment Winners at War. Covid delayed the filming of the 41st season and when it returned it had changed forever. Some changes were great, more diversity in casting, an initiative spearheaded by alumni who met with Jeff Probst and other producers in the wake of the George Floyd protests was much needed. However the game itself was different. 

When Jeff Probst returned to my screen in 2021 he peeled back the curtains showing viewers how the sausage was made. He launched a podcast On Fire With Jeff Probst which invited listeners in on the behind the scenes conversations and thought processes that went into the various changes. I was quite excited to hear Jeff’s thoughts and understand why certain decisions were made. Certainly the man who had a front row seat to every iconic moment that the show had produced would have a deep understanding of what made the show great. Unfortunately I quickly discovered a fact that has hung over me while watching the show and the show itself as it is produced. Jeff Probst does not understand Survivor. 

Perhaps even more damning it seems that no one wants to push back against the four time Emmy award winning host. The “New Era” has introduced many twists that have been perplexing but one stands above the rest. Players losing their vote. It’s easy to see how this became a staple of the “New Era”, in the 40th Season the show introduced Fire Tokens, a currency that enabled players to buy certain advantages throughout the course of the game. Indeed it seemed that this would become a mainstay of the series in the same way that Immunity Idols introduced in Season 11 Guatemala and seen in each subsequent season have. Perhaps if Covid had never happened it would have, but it did and in the intervening time Jeff Probst got on a call with Mike White. 

White is a former player and creator of The White Lotus television show. White dissuaded Probst from pursuing his grand vision for a Survivor economy and I believe the show is better for it. Or at least it would be if Probst dropped the idea of implementing a currency at all. I’m not against games involving a currency system, The Devil’s Plan on Netflix showed that if you build the game around that mechanic you can find success. The problem is Survivor has firmly established itself as a social game, the drama and intrigue is driven by the players and their relationships to each other. This is represented by their votes, conversations and promises aren’t real in Survivor, nothing is until the player is in the voting booth putting pen to parchment. 

That’s when you see which plans are real and where everyone truly stands. Unfortunately Fire Tokens have been replaced by votes, players have to risk votes to gain advantages and worse are oftentimes put into positions where they lose their votes simply for finishing in too low a placement during a challenge. We saw four players at risk of losing their votes this past episode, which hamstrung the remaining six players as they were in a strategic purgatory unsure of who would retain their vote and as such who they could incorporate into their plans. 

I won’t deny that the pre-tribal council scramble this delay caused was entertaining. Watching the players positioned and repositioned themselves in order to try to end up on the right side of the votes and enact their own agency as the light slowly faded on Beka beach added a great deal of excitement. Then we went to tribal council and discovered that things were still not set in stone, players were getting up and talking in what has come to be known as a “live tribal”. Eventually Sol was voted out 8-1 and as I thought about it the more I was left with a feeling that this mad scramble strayed closer to artifice than reality. The game was dictating the actions of the players as much as the players were dictating the game. It just reminded me that this isn’t the show it was, and probably won’t ever be again, unless Probst allows the players to play and lets up on the twists. For the record it has now been six episodes since Aysha was voted out in episode 3, six episodes since everyone attending a tribal council was able to vote at it. To me, a long time viewer and Superfan that is not Survivor, Survivor is dead. 

If you enjoyed this blog please check out the Podcast The Blindsiders where I complain about modern Survivor with my co hosts Ben and Dylan. 

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Scalpers are Struggling to Flip The PlayStation 5 Pro

Every time a new piece of tech drops there’s always a lot of excitement but oftentimes that excitement is undercut by the distant lack of respect by certain customers for others. These people who frequently aren’t even fans of the product itself but instead are fans of the promise of money that their products come with ruin the launch of many products. I’m talking about scalpers of course. Three years ago I made a video called scalpers are ruining everything where I lamented the fact that the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 were being bought up and immediately relisted for sale on third party sites at a steep increase. But we live in a very different world now, economic factors have overlapped with a feeling that the upgraded PlayStation 5 Pro offers very little in the way of meaningful benefits. Which has finally caused scalpers to get their just deserts. 

Video Games Chronicle has an article by Chris Scullion where Chris talks about the trouble scalpers are having moving the PS5 Pro due to low demand. The biggest difference between the launch of the PS5 and the Pro is that if you want a Pro you can very easily just buy one at any online retailer. This is in sharp contrast to the state of things with the PS5 launched where you would have to queue up online at certain times and hope that you were able to get lucky enough to beat the bots to the punch. This availability at market price is leaving the scalpers who purchased the console under the assumption that there would be a similar shortage in the lurch. From the article 

“A number of sellers currently have Buy It Now consoles on sale for £680-£700, while others have auctions currently sitting between £510 and £670 – while these auctions will likely rise before they end, it seems less likely that they will surpass the console’s £700 retail price.” 

There are many reasons for the PS5 Pro not performing as well as the initial PS5. For instance many people around the world are feeling the pressure of inflation and the $699.99 price tag is generally off putting. The fact that the showcase for the console left many players wondering what exactly they would be paying such a high price for couldn’t have helped. Then you have to take into account that many players have only just upgraded to the next gen consoles in the last couple of years, when supply chain issues caused by Covid finally let up and the consoles were made more readily available. Finally, while it is a meme that this current generation has been severely lacking when it comes to new titles, that doesn’t make the statement any less true. Why would a player spend $700 to upgrade when there isn’t a premium title that would benefit from the new console? 

To conclude I don’t think anyone is going to weep for these poor resellers. On the contrary I’ve already seen other videos and articles poking fun at their predicament. Life is tough and the console war rages ever on but for one moment all gamers can come together and say get fucked scalpers! Thanks for reading.

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Xbox is So Back!

Neville Chamberlain once said “In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.” I’d like to riff on this timeless quote in my blog about the Xbox if you’ll allow it dear reader. In the console war there are no winners only losers, specifically those who hold much stock in the idea of a console war are the greatest losers. This is all to set the stage of the blog you’re reading. As silly as the concept of taking sides in a war between two major companies that care little for their supporters beyond their wallets and even less for the developers who work for them (See the recent round of layoffs by Microsoft) it is undeniable that Sony and Microsoft are engaged in a decades long battle for sales. 

Microsoft struck hard and fast with the Xbox 360 dominating the early part of the seventh generation before Sony was able to claw all the way back and eventually overtake them in sales by the time the generation ended. Once the Playstation 3 overtook the 360 in sales Sony has never looked back. Winning the eighth generation and continuing their success with the Playstation 5. Microsoft and Xbox have attempted to woo the average gamer back to their platform with Game Pass, a membership service that allows subscribers to play hundreds of games for one low cost every month. It seems that it didn't move the needle in the way they hoped, ultimately it isn’t the breadth of games a company offers but instead the quality of the titles available. 

Nintendo knows this well, instead of competing head to head with Sony and Microsoft they doubled down on what worked. Recognizable titles buoyed by the well earned prestige Nintendo has accrued over the years. So too did Sony embrace the path of quality exclusives, The Last of Us, God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn among others that made the Playstation 5 the next gen console of choice for someone with $500 burning a hole in their pocket. If third party games ran more or less equally on both the PS5 and Series X then it made sense for the average consumer to choose the platform that also offered better exclusives. So the Xbox brand was at an impasse, with no homegrown titles of prominence or acclaim they solved their problem as any American company would, by throwing insane amounts of money at it. 

In March of 2021 the company bought Bethesda, creators of The Elder Scrolls and Fallout Series since Fallout 3, and publishers of Wolfenstein and Doom for a cool $7.5 billion. Then in January of 2022 they bought gaming behemoth Activision Blizzard for an even cooler $68.7 billion. With that purchase came classics like World of Warcraft and Diablo as well as Call of Duty and Overwatch. Thanks to the almighty power of the dollar Microsoft was poised to make a run at the title of console king. However making video games is a slow process, add in some antitrust lawsuits to navigate and things get even slower. 

This all brings us to Summer Games Fest 2024 where Xbox was set to deliver a showcase that many were not expecting much from. Given Microsoft’s recent history of underdelivering and the current state of the video game industry could you really blame gamers for their tepid excitement? Personally I didn’t even watch live, long gone are the days of Fake Nerds on the main youtube channel and this blog had sat dormant for more than three years so I had nothing compelling me to deliver my hot takes. This would end up being a shame really as the Xbox showcase easily surpassed the low expectations that most gamers had and set the company up to actually compete with Sony going forward. 

There was a little something for everyone on display. The Gears of War prequel Gears of War: E-Day which welcomes back fan favorites Marcus Phoenix and Dom Santiago is most exciting to my bro-ish sensibilities. Which were developed most earnestly the first time I fired up my 360 in 2007 and took in the sights and sounds of Sera. Doom: The Dark Ages stole the show with its bloody action and the addition of a gun that fires pieces of skulls. Fable and Call of Duty also excited gamers as did the gameplay trailer Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. For the first time in a while those who claim to be part of the Xbox army rejoiced, while still being losers they can nevertheless be excited about what’s to come. As can the rest of us who just want quality titles and maybe have a soft spot for the Xbox but not in a console war way but in a detached blogger sort of way. Which I assure you is much cooler. 

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The Movies That Got Me Through 2020

With 2020 in the rearview mirror I’m looking back on the media that got me through it. Unfortunately it was a hard year for theaters, with reports that the biggest chain in the United States AMC needs $750 million to stay in business in 2021. With how things are going with covid that seems unlikely which is disappointing. AMC A-List was a great service, in 2018 and 2019 I saw at least one movie a week, I really took that for granted. I love going to the movies, the last two films I saw in theaters were Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and Little Woman, one of those two was truly great while the other was Star Wars. Making the transition to home only viewing was different, I bought a project and tried my best to recreate the feeling. To be honest I really enjoy having my own makeshift theater, but it isn’t the same. So without further ado here are the movies that got me through 2020.