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 letters@bitmob.com. 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.
Read more >>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.
Read more >>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!
Read more >>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.
Direct Download (right click to save as)
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.
Read more >>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
Direct Download (right click save as)
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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?
Read more >>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.
Read more >>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.
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.
Read more >>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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