The Mikey Man

  When you look at the Series S you either see an underpowered mistake made by Microsoft or you see a well-made move by Microsoft in making a next gen console for the low end. When I look at the Series S I see something much different. I see a purpose-built device that has been re-purposed due to market expectations and internal resources not being where they needed to be in order to be for the device to hit market as intended. To this day I think the Series S was built to be SOLELY a streaming device. Why do I think this way? Well, it is fairly simple. You only have to look at the specs of the device, which practically scream “I’m a streaming machine!” and some of the things that Microsoft themselves have said about the device to have similar thoughts. Let’s start with the specs, shall we? I am not going to rehash the spreadsheet because that has been done to exhaustion. I will just say that other than practically having CPU parity (it is clocked a bit slower) everything els...

          The Series X from Microsoft and Xbox is a fabulous piece of technology with some not so fabulous short comings. I will explain the short comings further later in the review, but first an initiation for those not familiar and a  refresher for those who are. The Series X is the more powerful of the two latest generation of video game consoles from Microsoft's Xbox division, it brings to the table a sizeable upgrade to the current consoles the Xbox one and Xbox one X. This upgrade is accomplished by moving to more powerful Zen 2 cores and a full RDNA2 architecture from the under powered jaguar cores and GCN architecture of the consoles they are replacing. This additional power along with the familiar architecture of the consoles (current and previous console generation are X86_64 architecture) allows for increased backwards compatibility, a strong suit of the Xbox ecosystem. This is also where one of the more glaring short comings is realized, w...

     So Atari is looking to go beyond the "GameBand" (did anyone actually buy one of these things? ) and release a console. Does anyone even care?  Is anyone around that still finds joy in hearing their name?  Or better yet has Atari fixed the problems that have made them fail in the past? And ultimately is there room for another console (yes but probably not from them).      Since sometime after E3 there has been this buzz about the Atari Box, for some reason people are genuinely excited about the prospect of a new console from Atari. As a former Jaguar owner I am not, I am cautiously optimistic because I do kinda have a few good memories of the Atari systems I owned but I also still feel the burn when they went down in flames numerous times by their own hand. Before people get excited about the prospect of a 4th console coming to the market maybe they should consider asking the following: What do we actually know about the hardware?...

     Most Gamers would agree that the current generation of consoles are for the most point underwhelming to this point, me included. This does not mean that they wont get better as they continue to mature especially given the "mid cycle refreshes" both consoles would have received by this holiday season. With that in mind you have to wonder why would anyone be even thinking about the next generation of consoles outside of the big 3, oh and Michael Pachter but that is expected when you are the tech equivalent of an oil speculator.       You would have to be crazy and living in denial to think that the big 3 have not started planning out the next gen as soon as the original PS4 and XB1 dropped in 2013 but no one should even think we would see the new systems anytime before holiday 2020/21.  I only say this because developers haven't even begun to push the base systems and they now have the extra horsepower of the PS4pro and Xbox1X t...

    I am a gamer, I like games period. I don't care what platform its on if I like it I will play it, I mean how else would you describe a person who actually bought a NEO GEO AES 3 times in his life! (ok maybe crazy came to mind but that is not what I was going for) I have been that way since my mom bought us (her) our Atari VCS (2600) way back in 1980. She I mean we have had just about every console out there and loved all of them for some what they were. Now I did have a soft spot for certain consoles but that had more to do with milestones in my life rather than a fanatical allegiance to a brand name. For example I love the SNES, why not because a specific game but because it was the first console I bought with my own hard earned cash. My TurboGrafx-16 First game system bought for me! Atari Jaguar..............ah TEMPEST 2000! I even remember my first PC gaming experience with a Microsoft online dogfighting game on an overclocked Celeron Gatew...