PixlBit

... and here's to 9 more!

It appears PixlBit's anniversary is upon us once again! This time we celebrate the site's final year in the single digits; trucking forward towards a full decade of PixlBit. Looking back, it's been a chaotic and interesting ride full of ups and downs. Over the past few years, I'll admit, it's been generally quiet around here. But with a new year of PixlBit beginning, I feel a renewed drive to push content out to you, our faithful fans and readers. Even in the times where the staff has been quiet, all of you have managed to keep PixlBit afloat with your blogs and comments and strong sense of community. Without you folks, I doubt I'd have the fortitude to continue on after all these years.

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A little NWP is better than no NWP, amirite?

Welcome to a slapdash special edition of Nerds Without Pants! Scheduling and tech woes have kept us from recording a proper episode, but instead of leaving our wonderful audience high and dry, Julian has cobbled together this impromptu resurrection  of Digital Mystery Tour, our failed video game music podcast from...4 years ago? Sheesh. Anyway, we hope you enjoy!

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Just one more level...

20XX, despite being thoroughly inspired by Mega Man X, manages to distinguish itself by throwing away a good portion of that formula for something much more chaotic. The team at Batterystaple Games has managed to recreate the feel of Mega Man X, in both its control and enemy design, but mashes it into a roguelike design that includes randomly generated levels and temporal upgrades that are gained and constrained to your given run through the game. Each pass you’ll encounter different power ups, approach bosses in a different order and apply different approaches to make your way through. Level and boss design, as well as their relative challenge, will even vary based on how deep into a run you are. Progress can be slow, but somewhere along the way, 20XX will get its hooks into you and you’ll be unable to resist the pull of taking on another level or starting up a new run in an effort to make it to the end.

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It's like Groundhog Day, in video game form.

At first blush, it’s easy to pass judgment on Fox n Forests as just another retro-throwback pixel-based platformer, but unlike many other games that adopt that style, it’s actually faithful to the time period. The color palettes, music, gameplay, and even the menus will convince you that this is actually an SNES/Genesis game that’s been lost in time. While the audio/visual experience is fantastically retro, the controls and gameplay both are as well. This means character movement can feel sluggish and janky at times and level designs are such that they thoroughly punish player mistakes.

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It's the sequel that no one wanted!

It’s another hefty episode of Nerds Without Pants this week that flirts with the 3-hour barrier. Hey, let it never be said that NWP is a poor value proposition!

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