PixlBit

Following the announcement of the Vita's North American release date, details on the PlayStation Vita have been filtering out. These include PSP games transferring and which ones can, PSone classics, your PSN account, and the memory cards. When the new Sony portable was announced, I was excited that Sony was going to try again. You see, I like the PSP and although it didn't sell that well and I ended up playing ports on the handheld, I enjoyed its versatility and design. When the portable was revealed to be the Vita, I wasn't crazy about the name but it grew on me and now I think it's a pretty good name. Then the price was announced. Considering all that the Vita is promising, it was a steal at $250. However, since these details have been discovered by various news outlets and the such, my excitement for the Vita has plummeted drastically, because with the exception of one story about the price of digital versions of Vita games, it's been all bad.

Hey, hello, hi! Comrade Colorwind here and I've had such a varied and crazy week. Lets start with some PixlBit news. We have some new people joining our family here. First up is Dan Galloway aka Evil Dan or Darth Kill. An avid member of 1up's community, I'm glad to see him come aboard. He has the kind of insight that in my opinion is knee jerk honest feedback that will help bring the community we're trying to create more approachable. He also coined another nickname for me, Big Cuevas. I don't know why but there you go. I'll answer to that now so mission accomplished. Another new member is Vic Roman, who should be no stranger to anyone, especially if you visit the site. He created our newest layout as a service to us and now is a full fledged member of the PixlBit staff. He'll be helping out with design matters to my knowledge, as well as posting his blogs on the site as well so be sure to check that out. In addition to new members, we also have a contest going on! If you want a free copy of Lord of the Rings: War in the North, check out the rules to see how. Free games are nothing to scoff at so be sure to enter. Finally, a quick plug. My review of Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games is live so check it out. Particularly, I'm not too kind to the London Party mode in the game.

Our Holiday Buyer's Guides are going up on the site and I hope you'll read mine but I thought I would write about what I would want for Christmas. You see, gamers like me who are super into retro gaming and have different tastes are hard to shop for. Actually, I'm personally just hard to shop for period because I'm super picky. Needless to say, I get a lot of gift cards. So I thought I would post what someone like me would like. (read: buy me this stuff).

So Sunday saw me doing some serious gaming, something I haven't done in awhile. I played some Half-Life 2 for about an hour and was actually having a decent time. That game must've been amazing when it first came out but now, I find it to be so outdated. I tend to love old school games so for me to say that is really telling. To be fair though, I'm not a big first person shooter fan, which is to say it's just not my favorite genre, not that I dislike the genre. I would constantly die in the worse spots and then the last checkpoint dropped me off where I didn't have much health left and I found myself dying over and over at the same spots until I figured out a way to manipulate the path in some way to either get me out of the area or give me a better position in a firefight. Worse of all is where I stopped for the day. I'm in the boat thing going through the sewers and I just finished blowing up two tanks that were shooting me but now there's nowhere to go. I do see a opening in the wall into a sewer pipe or something and across from the hole is a wooden ramp. My guess is to build speed and use the ramp to jump up and land in the hole so I can continue on. However, there's no way to get to the ramp as far as I can tell. There appears to be a way to it underneath the pier that's being held by tree trunks but there's no way to get underneath it and I can't destroy the trunks. I drove around the area trying to find someway to bypass it but after 15 minutes or so, I gave up.