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I like to bring my Nintendo DS with me when I'm out and about. Playing my DS not only helps me relax, it also helps me prevent my neurotic mind from pitching an anxiety fit while I'm waiting for things such as medical appointments (I'm so neurotic that I think the doctor's going to tell me that I have cancer even if I'm only there for a checkup). I especially enjoy bringing it with me when I travel. I'm far too much of a workaholic to take vacations, but since the economy has conspired to put me on an "extended vacation," the wife and I decided to take a short jaunt to Reno this past weekend.

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We don't blame Sony for keeping the PS3's price high. Why drop it when people aren't willing to buy it at its steep asking point? Giving consumers what they want -- such a silly concept.

News Blips:

• Cut it out: Sony says no price drop for PS3 anytime soon. You'd think with the crappy economy and the bloated price tag of the PS3, Sony would consider dropping its digits to boost some sales. Smart idea, eh? Apparently not to Sony -- the president of Sony Europe told MCV the PS3 price will drop when the time is right. OK, how about now. No? Now? Still no, huh? Fine. That's cool. We can wai -- OK, now? Dammit. [MCV]

• Movie-like videogame getting videogame-like movie. Yeah, yeah -- most game movies suck (just like how most movie games suck), but this one could totally chew: Hollywood Reporter is, uh, reporting an Uncharted flick is in the works. Pretty good fit considering the first game practically tried to be a movie. Now hopefully the big screen adaptation will attempt to mimic Uncharted by featuring tons of awkwardly long gun fights followed by lots (and lots) of climbing. Then more gun fights. Then more climbing. Then a sex scene (hey -- gotta break it up somewhere!) followed by gun fights while climbing. [Hollywood Reporter]

• Square Enix thinks something is important, puts clock on website. Here we go again: Role-playing game whizzes Square Enix have put up a countdown clock on their website to remind us waiting is annoying. Thanks for the reminder, Square Enix. Now wake us up when your damn game is officially announced. [Kotaku]

• Gearbox confirms War Hero is real, won't save you from the oversaturated military market, however. Borderlands developer Gearbox confirmed the trademarks they filed for War Hero is in fact real, but they (obviously) can't talk about it at the moment. If it doesn't involve capes and/or plastic instruments, we will be very, very disappointed. [Shacknews]

Hit the jump for some video blips, including an awakening Dawn of War 2 battle, multiplayer in the Wild Wild West, bottle cap Mario, and...more.

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As someone who has had to review dozens of bad movie-licensed games over the years, I think it's safe to say that I'm generally terrified of them. For me, having an open mind about a game based on a movie is less "Let's see what this game has to offer" and more "I hope this game doesn't make me want to quit my job."

Given my jaded position on the genre, it's kind of freaking me out that I'm interested in playing not one, but two movie-licensed games: Transformers and Ghostbusters. I don't think that I'm quite ready to roll the dice on both games at once, so I'm going to list my personal pros and cons for each to determine a winner. Once I make my decision I'll rent the game, play it to completion, and share my experience with you next week.

This is my version of game-reviewer therapy and you're invited along for the ride. Let's take a look at the two candidates:

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We always thought magic was involved in the making of Tetris blocks. Or aliens -- you can never rule out those guys. But a factory assembly line? Come on! That's too pedestrian. Unless magic-practicing aliens own the factory. Then it's all makes sense. Oh, and here's the video [via Offworld]:

In other block-related news, check out this adorable Tetris-themed Be@rbrick [via Offworld]:

We just want to strategically place this little guy on our shelf next to the other toys we never touch.

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My girlfriend and I were getting ready to head down to Nintendo's Redwood City, CA offices for a Wii Sports Resort demo, and the competitive ass in me decided to flare up. In preparation for a casual-gaming war against her, I wore a loose shirt, shorts, and tennis shoes for maneuverability -- I even took a few extra swipes of deodorant. Believe me, if I had access to old-school tennis short-shorts and a sweatband for my head, I would've worn them.

I privately scoffed at her outfit of choice -- skirt and heels -- not wanting to alert her to the wardrobe advantage I was holding. On the way there, we stopped at McDonald's for a quick first meal of the day, but she wasn't hungry, so I mentally congratulated myself for yet another upper-hand move. Surely having food in my system will keep me going when she's fading under the weight of malnutrition and those heavy Wiimotes.

Turned out a Quarter Pounder with Cheese and fries don't supply you with energy-packed carbs. And tennis shoes may not be better than high heels in Wii Sports Resort's eyes after all. Or maybe I just stink. Because throughout our hour-long demo, my girlfriend thoroughly kicked my ass. Here's how it went down.

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June's been a pretty good month for games...but instead of playing them we've been reading your e-mails. You know, the ones you send to [email protected]. Oh look, here's a few of them right here...just under this perfectly fine looking picture:

Hey Bitmob,

I have been listening to your podcast weekly. I had an odd compulsion to sketch the Bitmob staff that I could not control, resulting in the above picture.

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Editor's Note: Can you feel that? That odd tingling is called anticipation. All we ask is that you attempt to contain it. Futile, we know, but the Bitmob meet-up will happen whether you're ready or not. -Greg

Well, Bitmobbers, the details have finally been set in stone for the upcoming Community Meet Up. So without further ado, here's what we came up with:

Where: Buckshot Bar & Gameroom

When: Friday July 10th @ 7 pm

Who: All of you hopefully!

Why: For a chance for everyone to meet, talk, drink, and be merry of course.

What and How: We've set up a Facebook event to answer all these questions and give more details, so please confirm if you are coming:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=102838080975

Really hope to see everyone there!  Audio and video recording of some type will most likely be taking place, maybe even some sort of "live" episode of Pixel Revolt. See you in two weeks!

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Editor's note: Poindexters, set your brains to "analyze." Andrew Hiscock comes back with another ridiculously researched piece that is quite interesting if you take the time to follow it through. Which you should! -Greg

If you've checked out some of my more statistics-focused articles (NeoGAF charts and Critically Acclaimed Retail Bombs), you know that I enjoy playing around with numbers. My last such article had me knee deep in gamerankings.com numbers. This work made me ask a series of questions that were irrelevant to my purposes at the time, so this time out, I decided to see if I could find those answers. First, I wanted to know how the games for each console are doing four years into the current generation. Secondly, I wanted to know how these games are doing over time. With this in mind, I ran out and got the gamerankings scores for every single current generation console game (with 5 reviews or more), and played around with the numbers a bit. The results are below.

Aggregate Aggregator

Fig. 1: Average review aggregate scores by console, year by year

The first figure represents the average review aggregates for all games (5 reviews or more) in a given year for each console. This includes everything for each console that has received 5 or more reviews -- retail releases, downloads, retro games, everything. The raw numbers are given below.

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Found via Ubisoft Montreal Creative Director Clint Hocking's Twitter, an Augmented Reality tech demo for iPhone (keep watching...):

DSi...where you at? Oh yeah, here, with Ghostwire:

A lot of funky new gaming ideas are coming!

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This week, the Geekbox crew, helmed by former 1UP/Computer Gaming World editor and current GameSpy editor Ryan Scott, talks TV, then some games, express excitment for some movies, and then hits on a few random tangents. Oh, right, they do that every week -- anyway, more details below.

The Geekbox -- Episode 20 (2009-06-25)
Wherein we discuss vapid reality TV shows, King Koopa’s love life, Burn Notice episode 3×03, Fitch’s impending European vacation, what makes us so great (or not), Imax movies, and more driving-related nonsense. Starring Ryan Scott, Karen Chu, Andrew Fitch, Greg Ford, and Ryan Higgins.
Running Time: 1h 17m 48s

Zune link

Direct Download (right click to save as)

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Naming games in a series is tough. Especially when a new edition comes out every year. If there was only a way to solve this problem. Like some other long-running series we could look to for reference. Too bad there's none. Well, guess of Modern Warfare 2 is screwed.

News Blips:

• Who knew: Lame Call of Duty rip-off actually a Call of Duty Game? Apparently dumping the "Call of Duty" moniker off of Modern Warfare 2 is causing confusion amongst fans of terrorist-shooting games, as the awareness for the title has dropped 20%. You mean Modern Warfare 2 is a Call of Duty game? This is definitely news to us. But we also thought New Super Mario Bros. Wii was a new Super Mario Bros. game for the Wii, so what do we know? Wait, it is? Man, gaming titles are so confusing nowadays. [Gamasutra]

• Angry gamer casts "Lawsuitaga" on Square Enix. Seems like Esther Leong didn't read the fine print -- the San Francisco native is suing the role-playing game maker for 5 million (yes, million!) gil because of apparent false business practices used for the massively multiplayer online game Final Fantasy 11. Good luck winning that one, Leong. Hell, he has a better chance suing for false advertising based on the fact that this so-called "Final" Fantasy series never officially ends. Just try and explain that one, Square Enix! [1UP]

• Someone upset the man-god: The King of Fighters 12 delayed. The eye-pleasing 2D fighter looks like it won't be hitting its original release date of mid July, or so says Kotaku. We don't want to say blame former EGMer Shane Bettenhausen (now director of business development at KOF12's publisher Ignition), but, hell, what are we saying: blame Shane! [Kotaku]

• This bad, bad, you know it: New Michael Jackson game in the works? OK, this news is probably about as real as Jacko's mug, but apparently the King of Pop is creating a new videogame to coincide with his return performances in London. That alone sounds bogus, but this piece of intel truly grabs truth's crotch: Apparently the game is in development for all current consoles except the 360. Yeah, there's not enough "Jesus juice" in the world to make us believe this scuttlebutt. [Actiontrip]

Hit the jump for some video blips, including Megan Fox looking hot talking about some game or something, Jack Black looking OK for a dude talking about some game he's in or something, a StarCraft cake, and...more.

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Rebel FM's Game Club for Hitman: Blood Money continues. The gang seems to get a thrill through comparing the ways they kill. Helpful video after the jump!

Game Club: Hitman: Blood Money -- Episode 2

We are like a well-oiled machine! That murders people for money.

That sounded less creepy in my head.

We're back with round two of our Game Club series on Hitman: Blood Money! For this episode, we covered acts 5 through 7: A New Life, The Murder of Crows, and You Better Watch Out. Again, the video below covers some of the possible exploits that we cover this episode. If you want your comments or e-mail read on next week's show, be sure to get them in by Monday afternoon.

-Arthur

Zune link

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We don't know what's weirder -- Kanye West naming a song after the amazing 80's action flick RoboCop (which Shoe still hasn't seen, by the way), or the pixel-making pro who constructed this badass 8-bit-inspired video for the ditty. Instead of answering of our own question, we'll just let you decide for us:

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Editor's Note: If Brett Bates isn't a pack rat, we'd be awfully shocked. He is very passionate about the subject of archiving games, having written about it a few times here on Bitmob. But here's an interesting new story about the dark underworld or archiving that very few of us knew about. -Shoe

A dark archivist preserves the Atari 2600 game Adventure.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the dark arts. Not the kind of dark arts your level 70 blood elf shoots from his fingertips in World of WarCraft: These dark arts are artistic works like videogames that enter archives across the country, but due to legal problems typically involving copyright, are never seen or heard from again.

They won't appear on any list of archival collections. If asked about their existence, staff librarians will shake their head and profess ignorance. But in dimly lit, temperature-controlled back rooms, archivists are hard at work preserving these materials. It's just that Joe Q. Public isn't allowed to see them now, if ever. So why do it then?

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Editor's note: I'd never played an interactive fiction 'game' before trying Alabaster -- it's kind of like a well-written Choose Your Own Adventure book meets Zork. Take a break from explosions and space marines and check it out. -Demian

If there is one genre of games that I've never understood, it's interactive fiction. I've never been able to get into a game where my only interaction with it is rudimentary text commands saying "pick up the key" or "travel north." I'm not saying the genre is bad, it just wasn't my cup of tea. I attribute this to the lack of a graphical interface and a story which never pulled me in, since I spent most of the time stumbling in the dark, quite literally.

Enter Alabaster. The description calls it "a fractured fairy tale" and presents you with the familiar tale of Snow White but with a sinister twist. You play a woodsman who is tasked by the Queen to take her daughter into the forest and take her heart. As you reach the forest though, Snow White informs you that she has a safe haven prepared -- all you need to do is untie her. What follows is a battle of wits, truths, lies, and riddles, and you must decide to kill her, let her go, or maybe something entirely different.

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In the indie gaming scene, I've heard Cave Story referred to as a classic, and I wanted to find out why. Rather than cast my net wide for this installment and gather up a bunch of "C" games to try out, I delved into this single game.

C:

Cave Story (PC, free...and soon to WiiWare)

Playing Cave Story, I can understand how it earned its reputation -- it does well by its mix of platforming and exploration. You start in a strange island world in the shoes of a small hero with only nuggets of information. After acquiring a gun and breaking free from a cave, you encounter a race of rabbit-like creatures called Mimigas who just don't seem to trust you.

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I suffer from a mild case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Before I go to bed, I need to check that the doors are locked (my wife, god love her, locks the door when she gets home from work in an attempt to make an end run around my condition). I can't walk away from my car without hitting the lock button on the key fob several times -- even after I hear the horn honk after the doors lock.

As a fan of role-playing games, my OCD takes control of my gaming on a regular basis. I recently got to the point where I can actually pass up items that I don't need in action-RPGs such as Sacred 2 (sadly, I still feel compelled to get every item in standard RPGs, like Neverwinter Nights 2). I'm still working on the Icewind Dale series; while I've beaten the games, I still haven't beaten them with every character class in the series. Yes, I'm that OCD about my RPGs.

But after playing Red Faction: Guerrilla for a couple of days, I'm afraid -- very afraid. This game's sending my OCD into overdrive.

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Editor's Note: A really fun, heart-warming romp through one's childhood -- in this case, Matt Davis', though I suspect a lot of you can share his stories. Brings back some memories for me, except I Nintendid during the 80s and 90s (loved Matt's description of the 16-bit console wars below).

Also, what's the deal with the flurry of GoldenEye 007 talk this week? Click "Read more" for the whole trip. -Shoe

There are moments and experiences in everyone's life that will shape and define them as an individual. Gaming is a form of entertainment that has produced as many different niches and genres as any other media in existence, allowing for a wide variety of experiences. I have been gaming for nearly a quarter century now, and I would like to share some of the defining moments of my gaming life with you, and I would encourage others to do the same below!

In mostly chronological order:

Playing The Legend of Zelda with my dad (1987): My parents caved and purchased an NES for my brother and me as a Christmas present after much pestering. As an added bonus, they gave me an additional game, The Legend of Zelda (some of you may have heard of it). My five-year-old brain was unsuspecting of the awesomeness about to be bestowed by the title, and somehow I survived my mind being blown. The game was difficult, tricky, often mentally punishing -- and I loved every second of it.

Armed with nothing but my foldout map, I pushed stones, burned bushes, and stabbed everything in my path that dared to move a pixel. However, none of this would have been possible if not for the patience and help from my Father, who would watch me play for hours, helping me fill in the empty spaces of the map and making note of discovered secrets. That map is one of my most prized possessions and will forever be a reminder of arguably the best experience in my gamer life.

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We're glad the 360 is becoming more like a personal computer. All it needs is porn, and our PC's will be obsolete. Haha! Just kidding. That's digusting. Plus, the hard drive isn't big enough. Ahem.

News Blips:

• Analyst thinks E3 social networking announcements more important than spastic limb-waving. Outspoken videogame analyst Michael Pachter told Gamasutra that Microsoft's biggest announcement at E3 wasn't its motion-control doohickey Project Natal, but the reveal of social sites Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm. We gotta agree. Tweeting about playing videogames on a videogame console is like a game, but waaay better. [Gamasutra]

• Jack White hates making money, blames gamers. Snobby White Stripes frontman Jack White recently complained about having to put his music in Guitar Hero. Well, Jack, we hate listening to your music. It's so boring -- you don't even push any buttons. [Eurogamer]

• World of WarCraft pride march makes us gay. All you happy folks out there probably know June is Gay Pride month, but you may not have known about a special World of WarCraft pride march that went down a few months ago. Sounded fun, but it's a shame they didn't wait to schedule it during the official month-long celebration. Guess calendars are rare loot in Azeroth. [GayGamer]

• Aye Carumba: AAA Lucha Libre videojuego coming to America? Really? Yes, really -- Mexico's long-running Lucha Libre fed is getting its own game, AAA: El Videojuego, thanks to upstart publisher Slang. For those of you (other than Mexico/Michael Donahoe) who care about Mexican wrestling. Yep, no one -- just like we thought. [GameSpot]

Hit the jump for some video blips, including intel on Alpha Protocol, random Gary Busey laughter, a old-timey PS3, and...more.

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