If you didn’t know, I have an awesome wife. This is a generally true statement, except this past Thanksgiving she did something for me that was super awesome – something that genuinely expressed how she just wants me to be happy.

Hola, everyone! If you've read any of my more recent blogs, you would know that I've primarily been writing about board games. Since I've been doing so much of that recently, I've decided to start a humble board game blog called It's Made of Meeples!

It’s been a long time since my last blog here at PixlBit and my involvement in the site has been more minimal than it has been in the past.  There are two reasons for this.

As you are likely aware there is a kind of culture war going on within the gaming community.  I won’t bore any of you with the details because if you’re reading this, you most likely already know about the fiasco that’s going on; perhaps you’ve even “taken sides” on the whole debacle.

So with my interest in board games steadily increases, I’ve been drawn to the idea of crafting my own board game to play with friends and possibly to produce should it prove entertaining/smart enough.  This is by no means a quick thing to do and will go through the normal process that most games go through: Thematic Inception à Setting Mechanics à Prototype à Playtest

After seven years of development, Blizzard decided to officially pull the plug on their mysterious Project Titan; what many assumed was to be the successor to the king of all MMORPGs, World of Warcraft.  Since Titan was never officially announced, it’s doubtful that the game ever made it past the conceptual state, though we will likely never know how many resources had been dedicated to the project, or if it was ever even close to becoming anything more than vaporware.

Yup, buying a house is a bitch, don’t let anyone try to tell you any different.  The idea of buying a house is quite romantic; the prospect of ownership, the feeling of freedom, truly being the master of one’s domain – these are all appealing in theory – but the process to get to this magical state of ownership is one brimming with stress and emotional pain.

The thing that I love about Marvel as a movie studio is that they’ve been willing to pull out some of their lower tier characters and put them on a pedestal.  This is partly out of necessity of course; Spiderman and the X-men franchises are arguably the biggest cash cows in Marvel’s potential arsenal, and those franchises are tied up at Sony and Fox respectively.  Don’t get me wrong, Iron Man and Captain America are hardly B listers in the Marvel U, but they certainly aren’t the most recognizable faces in pop culture either (or at least they weren’t). 

When I was younger, one of the ways I bonded with my father was our weekly trips to the local comic shop, a now defunct joint called Comic Crusade. This was during the comic boom of the 90s, and my dad figured that collecting comics was a decent way to invest in a sort of college fund. Image and Valliant Comics had just broken out, and certain books were starting to be worth some decent bucks; especially the newly coined “variant” editions.

My first console was a Nintendo Entertainment System – a system I purchased in 1987 from months of saving allowance, birthday money, and various bribes from my parents.  My first videogame adventures were with Mario, Link, and Samus.  They say the first impressions are the longest left, and I tend to agree.  My first years of gaming were by far the most magical; shaping my perceptions of games and culture for years to come.

So…hey guys!  I know it’s been a long time, but I must implore that the rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.  My sabbatical from PixlBit has been of such a length that there are surely those out there who don’t even know who I am – something that I hope to remedy in the coming weeks.

At PixlBit we pride ourselves on reporting news and reviewing games with as little bias as humanly possible.  That being said, there are times when we don’t want to sit all quiet and polite and instead rage into the vastness that is the internet. In this installment, Jesse rages against Nintendo's self destructive death grip on IP image control.

Over the past few days, Sony has been teasing a big announcement via a series of tweeted images and cryptic messages. “When Worlds Collide, Heroes Will Return” we were told in the last cryptic message – a message that I may add, also linked Insomniac Games with whatever was to be announced.  Worlds colliding…could fans finally be treated to that long clamored for Jak and Ratchet crossover game? Nope, but what was finally revealed wasn’t too shabby either, as Ratchet and Clank will be returning in Ratchet and Clank: Into the Nexus on Sony’s PlayStation 3 later this fall.

The long anticipated Grand Theft Auto Gameplay Trailer was released earlier this morning, and it’s safe to say that it likely left many a gamer wide eyed, with their jaws firmly planted on the ground.  The sheer epic mass that is the newly designed Los Santos is breathtaking.  The trailer depicts a plethora of environments - from high rises to the great outdoors and everywhere in between – and it becomes clear that we’ll likely get lost more than once in this beautiful world that Rockstar has built for us.

It’s been a little over a year since Kickstarter kicked down the door of the video game industry and introduced itself.  Double Fine’s then untitled adventure game utilized the crowd funding site to finance a game in a genre that most have presumed dead, or at least mostly dead (which means a little alive), for quite some time now.  No reasonable publisher would hand money over to a studio not known to be especially financially successful, for an unproven IP in a genre that some younger gamers may not even know exists – and it’s hard to blame them.

I've had my 3DS since shortly after the system was released and to this day I have literally zero 3DS friends.  

If you didn't see Nick's tweet last night, I'd like to let you all know that anonymous comments are no longer possible here at PixlBit!  This is something that we internally (and by we, I'm pretty sure it may have just been me) have been bugging Nick to implement for quite some time.  In what has now been a string of site improvements this one has finally come to fruition.  We encourage civil discourse here at PixlBit, but now you'll have to have an account in order to participate.  While we've had the occasional positive or constructive anonymous comment, the mask of total anonymity has mostly been used by trolls wishing to spew their vitriol on the rest of us. 

With the next two installments of the Super Smash Bros. series being officially outed just a couple of weeks ago, it’s about time that we get together and start making bold proclamations and wild guesses as to who gets an invite to the big dance and who gets left at home, sobbing into a pillow.

So Microsoft is now backtracking on some of the Xbox One's "Key Features" by stating that they are no longer going to impose DRM, always online, restrictions on lending/reselling, etc...