PixlBit

Can I be excused? My brain is full.

The big kickoff to every QuakeCon is a keynote featuring id co-founder and all-around genius John Carmack. This year was no different, featuring Carmack’s musings on topics ranging all across the spectrum of programming and game development. Carmack got started after a few bits of news from id’s Creative Director Tim Willits and Bethesda’s VP of Marketing Pete Hines.

Read more »

I don’t even know what this game is, but I love it.

Nostalgia is a powerful force, pulling you towards memories of your youth that seem so charming and innocent. It’s something we love to bask in and dream about for hours. Hearing someone wax on about their own tales of yore can be less than thrilling, though, if you grew up in a different time or a different culture. We’ve all been stuck – bored – listening to endless droning about someone’s glory days that we just couldn’t relate to. Which is why I am completely baffled that the 1970s Japanese summer vacation nostalgia trip, Attack of the Friday Monsters, kept me engrossed from start to finish and filled me with the same warmth I feel when I look back on my own childhood memories.

Read more »

You are e-Sisyphus.

It seems like we’re all battling our backlogs these days, and with the Steam Summer Sale fast approaching, things are only going to get worse. Well, NeoGAF forum member SenseiJinx has provided us with a way to gauge how long it will take to complete our Steam catalogs.

Read more »

Brought to you by your seventy dollars, a series of in-game transactions, and your agreement to watch the occasional sponsored advertisement between rounds of golf. Now, please… LOADING…LOADING…LOADING…enjoy this year’s edition of Tiger Woods PGA Tour!

Yeah, I’ve golfed. Once. Does that make me qualified to critique a modern realistic golf game? You betcha! My sole golf outing was in high school with several people who knew their way around the fairways. What started off fun and with a lot of potential quickly turned to a disaster as the hours wore on. Balls were lost, tempers flared, and the idiot driving the golf cart I was in crashed into a brick pillar throwing me forward, stopping only when my shins slammed into the sharp dashboard of the cart. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14: Masters Historic Edition has lots of similarities to that fateful golf outing, and I’m hoping to keep someone else from getting plowed into a brick column.

Read more »

Critic-made game gets critiqued.

It’s easy to attach labels to games. We want to know if it’s a first person shooter or a platformer, but sometimes that’s a bad idea. We end up sticking games into categories which become their go-to description and don’t communicate what a game’s real essence is. For this reason, I’m not even going to try and compartmentalize Gunpoint because that would be doing it a huge disservice. Even though I have no idea what sort of game Gunpoint is, I know it’s a ton of fun to play.

Read more »