PixlBit

Alright Double Fine, I think we know how to fund Psychonauts 2 now. I will pledge sums of money for that game to be made.

What Travis said, we love you too Mike! You're a huge asset to the site and even though you typically write long posts, I read every one of them. I think you have a lot of interesting things to share and I love seeing feedback like that on the site. Like I said, it's all this kind of stuff that makes what we do totally worth it. Keep up the good work!

I'm probably some sort of terrible human being, but I really love XIII and I'm super excited for XIII-2, so the thought of a XIII-3 makes me kind of excited. I know, awful, but whatever.

If I had a few million to throw around, I'd gladly give it to them. I don't think it's a stretch to say that I want Psychonauts 2 more than just about any other game that could conceivably be made right now.

What is PixlBit? Such a loaded question, but I'm glad to answer. Before I get into answering each of your questions, let me first direct you to the retrospective I wrote about three-quarters of a year ago.

Since then we've come a long way and things have changed once again. Jesse Miller, who has been a long time friend of review writer, Stanton Daries joined the site, bringing with him an avid fan base, as well as a number of other great writers. Our numbers began rising once again, and since then we've been pushing for greater exposure around the internet.

As such, I think we're slowly migrating from enthusiast to a business-minded site with aspirations of something greater. That's not to say that we aren't still concerned about our community - that's our bread and butter. Truthfully, the only reason these blogs exist is because the community asked for them - same goes with the ability to reply to comments.

Now, to answer your questions:

1). This is a gamer launched website and a gamer run website - as of today we all do this for the love of it. We're also aspiring for greater though and I know I speak for the group when I say that we'd love to stand shoulder to shoulder with some of the biggest sites out there. Unlike those sites, everyone here understands the value of our readers and we're very concerned about your thoughts and feelings - we will take point on your suggestions to improve the site.

2). As implied in the last answer - we're all unpaid (including me). We make a small pittance on ads right now and trust me, it's nowhere near enough to keep the site running.

3). We don't always get games early, but occasionally we are lucky enough to get them ahead of release. We're expecting this to change soon, but we won't know until it happens.

4). Credit for the design goes to Vic Roman. He donated the design to the site ahead of actually coming on as our Graphic Designer. We owe him a lot - the site looks so much better than it ever has before. Stay tuned because we have a slightly updated template dropping soon, which should look even better!

Hope that answers some of your questions, but if you have more, lay them on me, I'm glad to answer them. Also glad to hear you're digging the site, hearing stuff like that makes it all worthwhile!

I haven't played Infinity Blade, but from what I've read about it, this does seem similar albeit with a bit less depth. I'd say it might not be a terrible game to grab in a drought, but yeah, it's definitely not a game worth rushing to the eShop to get.

This is crazy impressive. Would've likely been amazing if it were released back in the day.

Actually, all of those are Nintendo franchises. Not all of them were developed in house, but Nintendo owns every single one of those IPs. They can contract the same companies to develop them again or not, but one way or another, they own them. Much like Eternal Darkness, which Nintendo also fails to do anything with all of these years later...

That's my whole point though - people have no awareness that Nintendo has ownership of this stuff. They don't promote the games, they don't try to develop the franchises, and they continue to only let the original teams who made them work on them. There's some amazing stuff in there that just goes to waste. I didn't even get into all of the other weird Japanese stuff they produce that never has come here. No no no Puzzle Chai-rian was one of the best GBA games, but you'll never see anything that weird come here - there's no audience.

I think Nintendo really gets a bum rap on the new IP thing too. They actually make tons of new series and franchises, most of them just aren't as high profile so they're largely overlooked. Here's a quick list I put together of some of the more recent stuff off the top of my head - Starfy, Elite Beat Agents/Ouendan, Golden Sun, Hotel Dusk, Another Code, Rhythm Heaven, Battalion Wars, Endless Ocean, Excitebots, Sin & Punishment, Xenoblade Chronicles, Pandora's Tower, Art Style, Fluidity, Maboshi, Bonsai Barber, Steel Diver, Pushmo, Sakura Samurai, Dillon's Rolling Western, Line Attack Heroes, Snowpack Park, Eco Shooter, Magnetica, Polarium, Chibi Robo, Custom Robo, Kururin, ThruSpace.

I'm sure there are ways they can shake up some of the mainstays, but I don't think I'd want that for most of them. Many of the Mario spin-offs could definitely use some fresh talent, but the mainline games of the major franchises are all so great, I can't imagine someone else taking the helm for any reason when they could be working on something they've already proven they can do well. I'd rather see Nintendo divert some of their major talents towards creating a high profile game that people are excited about. So many of the franchises Nintendo creates go to waste, it would be great to see some of them resurrected by talented teams. 

Nintendo's issues are for a whole different set of reasons, not related to game performance, but their near dropping of Wii support, a botched 3DS launch, and the weak dollar to yen conversion. That's neither here nor there - their games are still highly rated and that's really the focus of the discussion - the games.

In any event, only a small portion of my response discussed the dark tone stuff. Like I said, I was trying to get at the root of the issue, which I'm not sure you guys ever arrived at. Seemed like there were a smattering of ideas, but no final conclusion on what the disconnect was. There's clearly one there and even in a two hour podcast, it's hard to cover the absolute enormous breadth of the situation. I just wanted to pinpoint one of my personal observations.