Neal Sayatovich, a.k.a. the Skirmisher, takes his gaming seriously. He will talk about where the industry is going, and why it might be in a good or bad direction.
Our Skirmisher columnist has not played a basketball game since 2009. But the pandemic has really made him want to play sports. So he gave NBA 2K21 a try on the Nintendo Switch. It wasn’t quite the slam dunk he was hoping for, but it wasn’t a washout either.
The Skirmisher talks about how the Super Mario 3D All-Stars release has been a slap in the face to fans of the series. Not only is this being put out in limited release to artificially inflate interest, but used copies are being sold for hundreds of dollars. Come on Nintendo. There is a pandemic and gamers deserve better than this.
The Skirmisher is concerned that the new diskless consoles will become the norm one day, leading to inflated prices for games and an elimination of the secondary market that many less wealthy players rely on.
Like most big-time sports fans, Skirmisher Sayatovich is having a disappointing year. Thankfully, there are lots of great sports games out there right now to help tide everyone over. And if things continue the way they are, it might be the best we can get for a long time.
Playing SpongeBob: Battle For Bikini Bottom Rehydrated got Neal remembering his love of the so-called collectathon games from yesteryear. He theorizes what happened to the former giants of Banjo-Kazooie, Spyro and other similar type titles in modern times.
This week The Skirmisher is letting his powder dry. Instead of griping about something, he breaks out some amazing games of yesteryear and tries to forget all about his troubles. Could these forgotten classics lift your spirits too?
Skirmisher Sayatovich settled in for the Ubisoft Forward presentation this week. And while the revealed games looked pretty good overall, he was disappointed that they seemed to follow the same old formula once again.
In the old days, armies of play testers had to make sure that games were nearly perfect at launch, because patching them was next to impossible. Today, early buyers of games have become unpaid play testers, patches come out frequently, and The Skirmisher thinks it’s weakening videogames.
Due to many circumstances beyond his control, Neal missed out on most of the current generation of consoles and the war between PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. He instead settled for a Switch. But now, he’ll be able to get one of the new consoles when they launch. The question is, which one?
Like most of us, Neal is celebrating some of the remastered titles that are in the pipeline for us, like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2. But as cool as remakes have become, wouldn’t it just be better if we had full backwards compatibility?
