Fistful of Pixels is a bi-weekly improv comedy podcast about theoretical video games, and we have a new home right here on Sidequesting.com!

Here’s how it works: You send us your made up video game titles to @FistfulofPixels and we spend three to five minutes creating a video game pitch based on that title. Then we wrap it all up and you listen to it. With your ears. Both of em.

Show Notes:

Hosts:

Mike Bachmann, Ben Pack, Taylor Bliss, Adam Bash

This Week’s Titles:

Reasonable Robots, Supremacy of the Titans of Titanic Supremacy, Philosoboxing: Thinking in the Ring, Attack of the Zones, Gobling Hunterz, Seal Team Six: Secrets of the Deep, Darkstorm Chronicles, Burnt Rubber: Drive Fast or Go Home, Margaret Pennymarshall, Catwoman Isn’t In This Game, Army of Two: HD Collection, Spider Rider

Contributors: 

@bashkick, @VeritasUnae, @Shonen413, @agitamike, @paytongessel, @ChasebyKO, @Babylonian

Subscribe and rate us via iTunes, or click here for the direct feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/FistfulOfPixels

Direct MP3 Download

All this could be yours, Skylander

I’ve personally spent nearly $125 on the Skylanders figurines. Not only are they well-crafted collectibles, but they’re a bit like a narcotic: buy and appreciate one, and then buying more is only a matter of time. It also appears as though others have the same idea, snatching up millions of the figures as soon as they’re available.

The only surefire way to relieve ourselves of the addiction is to remove them from our sites. So, we’ve decided to pass the addiction onto you!

Enter our contest and have a chance to win Skylanders for the Nintendo 3DS, a Portal of Power, and an unopened Boomer figurine. Just leave a comment in this post and up to three others telling us what your addiction is, and use the hashtag #skylanders in the comment, like this:

The contest starts today, Thursday February 2nd, and ends on Sunday night, February 5th, at 11:59PM Pacific Time PDT.

Good Luck!

RULES

• The contest starts today, Thursday February 2nd, and ends on Sunday night, February 5th, at 11:59PM Pacific Time PDT.
• Leave a comment in this post and up to three others telling us what your addiction is, and use the hashtag #skylanders in the comment, for up to 4 chances to win.
• Winner selected by SideQuesting on Monday morning, February 6th, around 10:00AM EDT.
• Winner receives our review copy of Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure, an unopened Boomer Skylanders figure, and a 3DS Portal of Power.
• Available to US residents only
• Please see our official Contest Rules for more information.

During downtime, people will do things you'd never expect or want to see, ever.

I think it’s safe to call it “group-speak”. This language we used was almost hieroglyphic in use. We utilized what the game offered us to work with. It was a shorthand for strategy in the five-player dungeons, it saved lives. Without it the chat box was nothing but a venue for whining, bragging, arguing, and excessive caps lock use.

“Ready?” someone would ask just before we began our conquest into the enemy-infested halls of the dungeon. “Hold on,” the healer would quickly type into the chat bar while munching away on a quick meal to replenish his heath and mana bar.  After what feels like hours but was only mere seconds, the healer stands up, ready to go, without communicating his status to the rest of us. We wait a little longer until someone gets impatient and asks again, “ready?”. “Yep,” everyone answers in unison, but it shows up in order of connection quality on-screen.

“Pull,” we’d say just as a group of enemies, or “mobs”, were in the most tactical position to engage them. With competent groups the bruiser at the front, the tank, would be the one to pull, but in a lot of cases back then a misunderstanding of what pull meant was somehow widespread amongst all Hunters. Another seemingly widespread thing back then was the lack of quality internet connections, it felt like it was a requirement to have one of those poor souls in each group. These two problems caused less-than ideal results. The Hunter’s arrows wiz by, strikes one of the enemies in the group, effectively pulling them, and immediately following that dreaded moment of eye-rolling shock, the Hunter begins walking in place. As the group of baddies rushed toward the now four-person group, it was only a matter of time until someone uttered the phrase: “I think he d/ced,” and sure enough his character icon will darken, yes, he disconnected.

After a violent, outnumbered slaughter, or “wipe”, we re-group at the entrance of the dungeon, each of us burning holes into the greyed out icon of the player who lost connection to the server. It isn’t a a minute later and the Hunter comes back completely oblivious of what had just transpired. He asks, we explain. “Ready?”

Everything would go smoothly for a while until the healer would choose to say “oom” mid-battle, that means they’re out of mana, or, no more healing. They are the day-old bandages holding the group together, without them everything plummets into a frenzied chaos. The classes that couldn’t heal a dying plant drain their mana in some deranged confidence that they are capable of keeping the tank alive, while the classes that can’t, start toying with the idea of abandoning ship to avoid any kind of responsibilities. In short succession the group will be reduced to the Rogue standing in the corner, safe from his Vanish ability that makes him invisible to everyone but his teammates. It’s not until much later while sitting in the auction house selling off loot, the healer finds a mana potion in his inventory.

Breaking up is the hardest hurdle to overcome when participating in dungeons, everyone always has other things to do. In the event the group doesn’t fall apart out of frustration and patience, we give it another go. Morale is vital to World of Warcraft grouping, it can disappear in seconds. Seeing how we stuck together this far, the effort to pull the last few bundle of enemies feels like nothing. Most of the time those last few moments of combat before the final boss feel easier, because through the many mishaps you each feel strengthened.

Only through trial-and-error do you find the right speed to get the group working with efficiency. You have to run at each other until everything meshes and forms something solid. The patience required to do that is a rare trait in most players, many will leave after one failure.

WoW bosses are funny, sometimes they are unbelievably simple, and sometimes they are so annoyingly difficult it feels like a glitch. For the few times that happens, the group is done and there’s nothing you can do about it, often though,  the players accompanying you know the fights and will usually be nice enough to jot out the strategy in chat. “Ready?” they ask, “Go,” we say, and the boss is eradicated quicker than the Hunter’s downtime.

Experiences like the random five-player dungeon are the essence of an MMO, however irritating they are. They take you from a few anonymous pieces of a dynamic archetypal role system and bring each of you together in beautiful unison. It’s not even a matter of getting to know each other past what the game wants, it’s recognizing the roles at play and finding out how to compensate for the group’s weaknesses. They start out rough, but they end in triumph.

“Good group.” “Again?”

Do you need an idea? Need help writing a piece and looking for a new angle? Are you stuck and need some fresh thinking? Join a group of folks that are in the same boat, free-floating in the blue ocean, who want to help get some good ideas going.

Gamestorm is a no holds barred chat about gaming-related things that you’re working on, or would like to work on, but just need an extra push. Will the next great idea come from you? Join us tonight, January 31st from 9PM-10PM EDT (Eastern Time) in the SideQuesting Google HangOut as we work on our ideas together!

George RR Martin, Photo by Nick Briggs

Coming up next week we have an interview with one of our favorite authors, George RR Martin. If you follow SideQuesting long enough you’ll realize that A) we’re HUGE fans of A Song of Ice and Fire, and B) we go into some nefarious buildings. Stay out of the buildings and just stick to point A.

We’re sure that you have as many questions, if not more, than we do for Mr Martin, so feel free to drop a few of them in the comments. We’ll try to get to as many as possible.

Oh, and while we’re at it… Here’s the new EPIC trailer for A Game of Thrones season 2!

I’m the owner of over 60 domain names. I’m a bit of a whore when it comes to website creation. If I hear a good idea, or create one of my own, and there’s no website associated with it, I jump at the chance. Most of the time, the website never gets beyond “wouldn’t it be cool if,” but sometimes I end up with SideQuesting. Or with CarDesignFetish. Or MakLink. Sometimes that idea spurs a community or a job, opening up doors that I never knew existed and resulting in friendships that I cherish to this day.

When I first got into the video game website business it was with GoGamingGiant, which I created in 2008 and left in early 2009. Later that Spring I started SideQuesting because I wanted to try something a bit different. Since that time, SideQuesting got me into PAX, E3 (something that was always a nerd’s dream for me), and gave me unbridled access to a hobby that became a passion. It’s no surprise then, that friends and strangers ask me about how to do the same.

With this regular column, and with the site posting more content about getting into the biz, I’ll be giving away all of my secrets about starting a compelling website. All of them. Even the dirty ones. From the first ideas, to working with PR, to getting into E3, I hope to touch on as many facets as possible. It’ll take time (I DO want you to come back regularly) but it’ll be worth it… I promise. You may become the next Vox Games.

There are a lot of things that go into a starting any website, not just one geared at video games. It all starts with you asking yourself this simple question:

“Why?”

If you want to get into the gaming industry from whatever aspect, starting your own website isn’t always the best way. There are thousands upon thousands of websites already created that have good readership and consistent visitors. It’s probably easier to join one rather than start your own. In fact joining a website helps reduce almost all risk, like money and legal issues, inter-staff problems, and late late late nights of fixing server issues. And, you can leave almost whenever you’d like to try something bigger and better. But there are limitations. As a new addition to the staff you’re more than likely to be lower in the pecking order for reviews and industry event access, and you may need to build up your seniority for your opinions to have as much weight as members that have been there for years.

So why start a website, then?

If there is anything that creating a website offers most of is ownership. Creation leads to ultimate satisfaction, especially if the product that you create is something that becomes successful. The ability to see something blossom that you’ve built with your (virtual) hands is going to give you more fulfillment than you could probably imagine. Nothing is perfect, though, and you’re going to hit times that make you want to second-guess yourself, and maybe even pushing you to give up.

So again, why create a website if there are so many things to consider? Really, the decision is yours, but we can keep circling back to that sense of being proud of something that you’ve created, no matter how small.

Perhaps the most valuable thing that comes from owning a website is experience. You’ll make mistakes, learn from them, have success, and grow from it. And if you decide to try something new afterwards, you’ll already have gone through the bumps and bruises of a first-timer. You’ll be ready, you’ll be streamlined.

That’s what we hope to accomplish with LaunchPad, or whatever we call this regular feature. We’re going to share the mistakes we made and the advice we have, hoping to help you out a little along the way. We’ll feature other websites and people that started right where you are starting, with columns, articles, and a new podcast.

So tell me one more time: why do you want to start a video game website?

Next time: The Idea

Sometimes it really surprises me when I go back and watch older television shows. In my head I always tend to think that television has come a long way since I started watching it, and in some ways it has. CGI, for instance, took a noticeable leap forward in the 90s; just watch Star Trek: The Next Generation through and you can see where it happens. What I’m realizing now though is that the formula itself for most television hasn’t changed all that much. It’s starting to, but it’s only creeping forward a small bit at a time.

I’ve been kicking back and re-watching Sliders, and I’ve come to realize how difficult it is to marathon a show’s run the older it is. With the exception of sitcoms and, say, reality television, shows tend to start out by introducing the premise and then running with the ‘monster of the week’ formula. The shows that get popular enough almost invariably stray away from that security and start weaving in fairly intricate storylines.

Look at Supernatural. That was a show that went from a strict ‘every episode is an unconnected mystery’ to focusing more on an actual plot. You can probably pick a recent show and find the same thing with all of them. It’s just where television has gotten now: you hook the audience early on with episodes you can watch with no prior knowledge, and then go from there.

But man, back in the day? Apparently that idea hadn’t caught on yet. I’m a few episodes shy of the fourth season of Sliders and every single episode save one or two two-parters is a self-contained story. The overall theme that show has of trying to find their way back home rarely comes into play, and when it does it’s often in a quick dialogue exchange and then forgotten again. The bummer about that is if I keep watching (and I will) and find out an actual cohesive story starts to get told through season four and five it doesn’t really matter because I’m sitting right at the cusp of where most people say the show goes downhill.

It’s definitely something to think about. The problem might be the inability to hit a new kind of genre, like what seems to happen in other media formats, like music or video games. Take any genre of television show and chances are it has existed in one form or another since the dawn of the TV. Reality television feels like the newest, but even that has existed since the late 50s, and what most people think of as reality television today has existed since the 70s.

It makes for an odd sort of stagnation. A television show can play it completely safe, never pushing boundaries, and still be a complete success. With television it almost seems like the medium only grows as a whole when some genre show manages to break out into the mainstream, like Lost did.

Let’s be real here: That’s a kind of phenomenon that doesn’t occur often. Ask any average adult who isn’t a fan of science fiction to name their idea of popular science fiction shows, and you’re going to get answers like Lost, The X-Files, The Outer Limits, and The Twilight Zone. Lost is the most recent example of a show breaking out of its genre. The X-Files did it in the 90s, but both The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone were shows originally from the 50s and 60s. When it happens, it’s great. It gets people thinking in ways they never thought before. But even that becomes redundant after a while; The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits have been remade several times over.

I guess the issue is that there’s no real incentive for creativity, and huge penalties for failure. It costs a lot of money to make good television, and that’s really the bottom line. Networks want to make money off of their programs, and playing it safe is the best way to do it. There’s a reason why at any point in time you can find at least half a dozen police procedurals on air.

So let’s pose a real question here. Let’s say that you had the opportunity to make a television show. Let’s say budget isn’t an issue, and by some miracle you’ve been hired to make a fresh, amazing television show that can appeal to a mainstream audience. What would you do? What’s the television show you think should exist?

Welcome to the SideQuest, your semi-weekly podcast devoted to gaming, culture, and gaming culture, with the often tangent.

Episode 322 – Here we go again on another whirlwind adventure on The SideQuest. Your now regular hosts Dali, Steven, and Eric fill up on Microsoft rumors and details for the WiiU and games for the 3DS. Also discussed is some 2012 predictions that the guys would very much like to come true.

Show Notes:

Hosts:

Dali Dimovski, Eric Smith, Steven Strom

Segment 1:

Whatcha Playin’:

Eric: Starfox 64 3D, Quarrel
Dali: Dead Space 2, Pushmo, Sonic Generations, Puzzle Juice, Pocket Ninjas

Segment 2:

Steven: Deus Ex: Human Revolution – The Missing Link, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Bioshock 2 – Minerva’s Den, Syndicate, Puzzlejuice

News:

MS Points Rumors
WiiU and Nintendo details

Segment 3:

Nextbox Rumors

2012 predictions and expectations

Music:

Intro: Alright – Supergrass

Break: Super Meat Boy OST – Danny Baranowsky/Team Meat

Outro: Louder Than Ever – Cold War Kids

Mega!!1!

Subscribe and rate us via iTunes or, click here for the direct feed: http://sidequesting.podbean.com/feed

Direct MP3 Download

February is going to be INSANE. In fact, this whole year may be more epic than 2011, with hardware launches, ginormous sequels, and tons of new IPs. Yeah, pretty crazy, huh?!

Luckily, there are plenty of ways to maximize the value of your dollar before you spend it. Here are the pre-orders for the big releases of 2012, including all of the bonuses, collector’s editions, and pre-release price drops. Dates are subject to change.

NOTE: We’ll be updating this as new pre-orders become available. If you spot one, let us know in the comments!

Final Fantasy XIII-2 – January 31

Pre-order Final Fantasy XIII-2 and get the Omega boss battle, $20 Amazon credit, and digital strategy guide

$59.99 Xbox 360, Playstation 3

Collector’s Edition – $79.99 Xbox 360, Playstation 3

 

Mass Effect 3 – March 6

All versions: Pre-order Mass Effect 3 and get the M55 Argus Assault Rifle [watch video] and a $10 promotional credit, and release-day delivery

$59.99 Xbox 360, Playstation 3, PC
$53.99 PC Download

Collector’s Edition – $79.99 Playstation 3, PC

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning – February 7

All versions: Pre-order Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and receive The Ultimate Treasure Hunter Pack, The Fate Touched Weapons Pack and release-day delivery

$59.95 Xbox 360, Playstation 3, PC

$50.95 PC Download

 

Is Origin a good service? Right now, it is middling. Its future remains to be seen. Is it already improving? Sure. When Origin launched last June it was pretty basic. It was a little more than the EA Store in a different wrapper. Why did they tow the Origin name out of storage (for those that didn’t know, EA purchased Origin Systems in the early 1990s when Garriot and crew were on a large hot streak)? They needed a re-branding.

The EA Store was a real piece of crap. Purchasing extra licenses for $5 to re-download the game you already purchased, horrible customer service, and an overall poor experience was to be had whenever you had to connect to the EA Store. So, EA recognizing their shortcomings called an audible and threw some muscle behind a new client and store: Origin. Origin is already leaps and bounds better than the EA Store, so that is already a small victory. Next step, is it better than Steam?

Not at the moment. Steam is a powerhouse. Steam is the ’86 Celtics of the digital distribution world. The content that they hold is unmatched and the Steam user experience has few flaws (few, but they do exist for some). Friends, groups, and great deals; the Steam experience is very tight. That said, Steam absolutely does not have to exist in a bubble. Competition only makes for better products.

Origin can easily become a top tier digital distribution store. How many of you remember Steam before and just after the launch of Half-Life 2? It really wasn’t any good. As a matter of fact, people reacted to the introduction of Steam in a similar way they are reacting to Origin.

Steam gained a head of steam in a hurry. Within five years they were pulling in publishers from all over the place. However, it took them nearly four years to make a distribution deal with another publisher. Even when those initial deals were made in 2006, it was very limited, not until mid-2007 did Steam as a major distribution platform really take off.

Origin is going to make its own way by bringing you content that you want. EA is already pulling in other publishers; THQ, Warner Brothers, Capcom, Paradox, CD Projekt Red, and many more already find themselves in EA’s house ready for the party. Soon, the rest of the industry’s major publishers will be joining them all at the dinner table (except for Valve).

I think that Origin can hit it big. They had a rocky launch that dropped the public perception of them out of the gate. The way Crysis 2 was unceremoniously ripped from Steam along with some harsh words towards Valve regarding their DLC policies put off the PC gaming community from taking a liking to the new platform. EA and several other developers including Mojang (of Minecraft fame) have said that the nature of Steam’s DLC policies don’t mesh with their content releases. Over the years EA has had a hard time getting out their downloadable content on Steam without trouble. Complaints ring out on forums for every game from The Sims to Dragon Age.

Any new platform will have its share of wrinkles. What EA does with Origin moving forward will prove whether or not it is viable for long-time use. I am confident that Origin will eventually clean itself up and be an excellent service for those looking to expand their digital distribution horizons Perhaps Origin will do well enough to match Steam’s popularity.

We’ve got a bunch of codes for Pocket Ninjas for your favorite iOS device (iPod, iPhone, and iPad… it’s universal!) and we’d love to give them away. The problem, though, is that we don’t know how. Maybe we’re just lazy, but we’ll do an ultra-simple Twitter contest instead.

Just tweet the following message:

We’ll choose our six (6!) favorites at COMPLETE RANDOMNESS and each will get a code for the game.

So yeah, help us out!

RULES

• Contest starts today (Friday, January 27th) and runs through Sunday, January 29th at 1:59PM EDT Eastern (10:59AM PDT Pacific).
• Tweet the message above up to once per day, Friday through Sunday, for a total of 3 chances to win.
• Winners selected by SideQuesting on Sunday afternoon, around 2:00PM EDT.
• Available to US residents only
• Please see our official Contest Rules for more information.

I think it was impatience that drove me to cheat. I wasn’t angry, nor was I frustrated, I think it was the MMO drive to play with the big boys. I had friends that would be amazed at the stories I could tell and the equipment I could display. I would tell them, “I have been to the depths of the Outlands; I have defeated the monstrosities that call it their home!” I had no intention of going as deep as I did.

Finding a venue to act out my fantasy was much more difficult than I thought it would be. Hundreds of private servers begged me to join with descriptors like “Fun Server” and “Blizzlike”, I didn’t realize what I had gotten into. It turns out Blizzlike servers are similar to the official Blizzard ones as the name implies, meaning the rate of gaining levels was only slightly tweaked up. Fun Servers were the opposite, everything that had a multiplier was ratcheted up as far as possible. I saw values like 300 times the speed of Blizzard’s servers and higher. Some of them even had entirely custom content, the one I remember in particular took the largest dungeon in the game and shoved in a long line of enemies that you could slaughter from the beginning (level 1) to the end (level 70), it brought a new meaning to “streamlined”.

Most of the servers were completely unreliable. Plagued with atrocious server lag and bugs, they were nothing like the curated experience Blizzard offered. Hacking was much easier without Blizzard’s built in security system, it wasn’t surprising to see players flying around or walking by with giant-like proportions. Sometimes I’d log on with items missing, ability bars rearranged, even characters gone. It was a disaster, but somehow the times where everything went smoothly outweighed the chaos surrounding it.

It wasn’t long after my glorious discovery that I quit officially playing World of Warcraft. Private servers held all the excitement I desired to occupy my time with. Not only did I get to witness what it was like at max level, but I had the ability to see things I never eventually did after years of playing WoW officially. I mean look at that, a phoenix mount!

I fell down the private server hold every now and then during my WoW campaign. One time I found one I liked so much I applied for the role of a Game Master. My job was to police the bedlam I mentioned earlier, but that story is fit for a completely separate Remembering Warcraft addition.

Years later my Battle.net account was hacked because of my trips into the back alleys of private servers. Everything was returned with an added bonus (the hacker’s 15,000 gold from gold selling was mailed to me along with a few leftover extremely valuable items). I haven’t touched one since.

When Quarrel hit on iOS last year it was a mega hit. The simple design worked well with touchscreens allowing for players to play it in quick bursts or to binge for hours. However, the complaint developer Denki heard from many was “Where is the multiplayer?” In this Xbox Live Arcade re-release of the title, they have answered.

For those that didn’t pick up the well-regarded game on iOS last year, Quarrel is an easy one to understand: Risk, meet Scrabble. Now, I must admit that is almost exactly how the game is pitched, and when I was told that I said “Okay, sure.” Then I played it, and I thought “Ohhhh, yea. Totally.”

Eight letters at a time (with each new battle, or quarrel, we get eight new letters) we battle up to three opponents on a small map that is sectioned off like a single continent in Risk (think Risk Factions). Each section can have up to eight troops, each one representing a letter we can use in our battling word. Example: with three troops, a three letter word is our max. So if we plan on attacking or defending with fewer troops, we better make sure our brain is functioning so we can maximize our score.

Attacking works in the same way as Risk; to advance we must defeat the enemy, but are required leave a troop behind to hold the spot that we’ve won. Creating anagrams with all eight letters and collecting treasure from our victories allows for extra reinforcements. If we feel we need one of these reinforcements when leading into a battle, we tap “X” on our gamepad and a troop drops in to give us that extra letter availability.

If we are playing a match with more than two people, the others will inevitably face off. When that happens we will have a chance to earn more points towards reinforcements by getting the same letter board as the two battling and creating a word. We have to be quick though, as time will quickly expire on this opportunity.

Besides basic matches against the AI, several challenge modes allow us to keep our minds spinning as well. Coming back against an AI opponent from one square to owning them all, to taking a certain number of prisoners (prisoners are taken by winning a battle against an opponent with more troops on a space) are just some of the challenge games held within Quarrel. The “Showdown” mode is a boss rush against the nine opponent AIs going from least to most difficult. Rounding them out is the “Domination” mode, in which we seek to conquer every one of the 12 maps in Quarrel.

I didn’t clock much time in with Quarrel on iOS, but I did prefer the controls on that platform. Cycling through letters with the analog stick is not as easy as using a touchscreen, but it isn’t a problem in the big picture. The added multiplayer and Challenge mode more than make up for any control shortcomings.

Puzzle and board games are some of my favorite genres, and Quarrel really scratches that itch for me. Other than not trusting any other user online (anyone could use an anagram site to cheat), I find it to be an enjoyable and immensely satisfying game. While there is no local multiplayer, my brother and I had an excellent time sitting down and trying to pull the longest word as quick as possible. I recommend Quarrel to anyone looking for a new twist on a word game.

This review is based on a review code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher, UTV Ignition. Quarrel is available for 400 MSP on the Xbox Live Marketplace

But oh-ho! There are many more things you can do with Swapnote than just swap notes! The Streetpass and Spotpass features really open up the app to some useful and fun concepts. I’ve compiled a wonderful list of some things that I’ve tried, and plan on doing, that have nicely extended what can be done with the fun little service. Feel free to follow along and do the same, or drop your own suggestions in the comments.

Self Promotion

Thanks to the app’s Streetpass capabilities, it’s very easy to promote your self. Think of it like a virtual business card with a few added benefits. Write in your website info, Twitter handle, gamertag, contact info, and more.

For musicians, including a short clip of your music with your contact info could be a nice viral treat for folks who walk by. The same can be said with photographers and artists, who can include their work (even with non-3D images that they’ve uploaded to their 3DS memory cards) like a mini portfolio.

Dating

More Streetpass usage abounds with the app that you can use to your advantage come the next gaming/comic/geek convention. Throw your photo, quick audio “hello”, likes and dislikes, and contact info in a few Swapnote slides and HOPE AND PRAY that some like-minded attractive person of the opposite sex has their 3DS with them and gets your ping. You could even carry on communicating, pen pal style, via the app afterwards. Who knows… it could be love.

Scavenger Hunts

The random cool things that pop up when Streetpass is turned on can be pretty exciting. Whenever a new Mii enters my plaza and gives me puzzle pieces, for instance, I feel like Santa just dropped by. Think of how cool it would be if you were out shopping when the Streetpass notification pops on for Swapnote, and inside is a photograph of a hidden stash of rare Skylanders figures at your local Target in the women’s shoes section? The next time you’re out shopping or at the movies, leave a (friendly) surprise for some lucky stranger. Draw a map and drop in a photo of a treasure that they could find. Or, maybe it’s a note of how to get a great deal at the store they are in. Say the “secret password” and get 10% off of your latte.

It’s kind of like a lite geocaching. With PAX coming up in April, there are plenty of opportunities to have some fun. I can already imagine publishers walking the floor at expos, sending out little notes for people to visit their booths to get free swag for mentioning a secret phrase.

Streetpass Flash Mobs

“On January 30th, everyone get in front of WalMart and do the Captain Lou Albano Mario Dance.”

Flash mobs happen all the time, even though they are soooo 2008. Swapnote can be used to set a time and place, using Streetpass to virally pass along the info. Instead of dancing, I suggest maybe getting people together to play Mario Kart 7 or Starfox 64 3D. Unless you actually DO know the Mario dance, then we’ll pretend to not know you. Ever.

Giveaways & Contests

This one is easy. Got a contest running or an extra code for Castle Crashers? Ask a trivia question to your friends, with the first correct answer recieved winning the code. Or, just give away stuff to random people on Streetpass.

Games… WITH FRIENDS!

I rarely used the DS’s Pictochat, but when I did manage to get a few friends together we almost always played hangman through it. There are a ton of games you can play through the app, depending on how involved you want to get. Tic-Tac-Toe, quizzes, “boxes & lines”, Hang Man, and even Battleship can be played.

For something like Battleship create a simple board of squares, 5 boxes tall by 5 boxes wide, and label each box from A-Y. You’ll probably need two of these boards, one to track your ships and one to track your hits or misses with your friend. Send your playing board to your friend via Spotpass. Now, sketch in 2 ships of 2 squares wide and 2 ships of 3 squares wide on the board (don’t send it this time) to use as your own board. Reply back and forth with the letter and the result — I use the messages “MISS” or “HIT” — until someone wins.

Drink & food recipes

This one is pretty enjoyable, and easy to do. Take a photo of something you’ve made — food or drink — and include it in the already provided “dish” stationary. On the 2nd page and onwards detail the recipe with ingredients and steps to make it.

Art contests

This one is probably the easiest way to interact with friends on Swapnote. You’re already sending sketches of 3D boners, so why not make an actual art out of it? Minus the boners. Pick a subject, send it to your friends, and let everyone sketch their interpretation of it. Or, take a 3D photo and have a caption contest. Daily doodles (like what Google does with their log) are fun to do, and can act like a simple visual journal.

Poetry & group writing

We’ve all done the “four word story” type of thing on message forums, so this should be no surprise. Start a sentence with 4 words on a slide, send it to your friends, and have them reply one by one. A second option: team poetry, with each person taking a line.

“Lite” animation

Even though the sketching is limited, there are ways to do some simple animation within Swapnote because of the way that the app renders the individual strokes in order. Falling water, shooting stars, and rockets exploding into fireworks are easy enough to do. My favorite: a fish jumping in and out of water, across both of the levels of 3D. With a little practice and a creativity animations can be really interesting.

By using dotted lines, you can make a simple animated fireworks explosion

ARG

Hosting an alternate reality game can be quite fun, and can get your friends to reply often, especially as a group. Start with an audio message that sounds like a phone call, and have your friends “call” back. Leave tasks for people to do, like take photos or solve puzzles, and have your friends work together to solve them. Think of this like a deeper, more narrative version of the scavenger hunt I mentioned above.

Dungeons & Dragons RPG

When we first heard of people hosting RPGs via Swapnote, we were somewhat intrigued. Could someone make an engaging experience in such a short form? Perhaps it may just require a different approach to accomplish, or a separate sheet of paper. The interaction could be done completely through Swapnote, with simulated dice rolls and group battles.

————–

We’re sure there are plenty more ways to enjoy Swapnote, and the uses will adapt and grow over time as more people begin to use it. We’ll just keep looking for more things to do that don’t involve sketching our balls.

Welcome to the SideQuest, your semi-weekly podcast devoted to gaming, culture, and gaming culture, with the often tangent.

Episode 321 – GOTY 2011: Dali, Steven, and Eric start off 2012 with a bang on this episode of The SideQuest. Besides Steven’s massive list of games he played over winter break, your hosts speak about SideQuesting’s GOTY awards for 2011. From ten to one the guys run down every game on the list and deal out the appropriate amount of praise. Check it out!

Hosts:
Dali Dimovski, Eric Smith, Steven Strom

Segments:

Intro and Whatcha Playin’ (Beginning – 1:07:00)

Game of the Year Discussion (1:08:45 – End)

Whatcha Playin’:

Eric: Dirt 3, MW3, Apples to Apples, Blitz, CoD Elite

Dali: Dragon Quest VI, Uncharted 3(d), VVVVVV, 3D DICKS

Steven: Killzone 3, Trine, Space Marine, Shadows of the Damned, Bastion, Serious Sam HD, Dark Souls, Halo 3: Orbital Drop Shock Trooper, Assassins Creed: Revelations, Saints Row: The Third, Red Faction: Armageddon, Atom Zombie Smasher, Rage, Jamestown, Iron Brigade, The Gunstringer, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Greed Corp, Defense Grid: Awakening, Fable 3, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, Infinity Blade 2, Orcs Must Die, Deus Ex: Human Revolution – The Missing Link, Metroid Fusion, Super Mario 3D Land, Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, Battlefield 3?

Music:

Intro: Alive with the Glory of Love – Say Anything

Break: You’re So Right – The Strokes

Outro: The Golden Age – The Asteroids Galaxy Tour

Mega!!1!

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Direct MP3 Download Here

Apologies on the slight tardiness of this week’s TVQuesting. Before I wrote anything about Alcatraz I wanted to catch the third episode: three episodes of a show is quite often a good barometer of how a show is going to go. A great example is Terra Nova: the first episode was phenomenal, but the second and third episode took a serious dip in quality and ingenuity. You could guess that show would become rote then and there.

Alcatraz, in my opinion, started out rather weak. It introduced the premise of convicts being time travelled out of Alcatraz in the 60s and winding up in the present day, and from there it jumps through the usual hoops. Almost a full episode of cops racing against the clock to catch a bad guy, with the final minutes dedicated to slowly pushing forward the hook of the show. That hook being that once the bad guys have been caught the secretive G-man takes them to some out of the way recreation of Alcatraz, as opposed to just, y’know, killing them.

I’m no expert on time travel, but I do think about it a lot. The whole premise of returning the prisoners to a version of Alcatraz is going to need to have an incredible reason behind it, because otherwise it doesn’t really make sense. Do you know what you call a group of individuals who were once alive in the 60s and then suddenly weren’t there anymore? Most people would call them ‘dead’. When you’re dealing with time travel the issues arrive when you deal with travel to the past. Travelling to the past opens up the possibility of paradoxes, whereas a (seemingly) one way ticket to the future is basically just a TV version of linear time. They’d still be headed in the same direction if they had never vanished in the first place.

So why not just off them and dump them somewhere? They’re out there killing people, and if a criminal is armed and dangerous chances are they’re going to get popped. I almost feel like there’s going to be a future episode that deals with one of these people getting iced in a way that the body can’t be recovered and it causing some weird time travel problems down the road because he isn’t back in their deep woods Alcatraz re-creation.

Jorge Garcia is another nit I have to pick. As far as the rest of the casting goes it seems fairly fine. The criminals being cast seem to fit the type. The lead actress makes a fine enough cop. The creepy old dude makes a good creepy old dude. Jorge Garcia doesn’t really fit the super genius archetype. He delivers the lines well enough; he just doesn’t look the part. The rest of the character’s background seems forced in to give viewers something to relate with. Oh, hey, here’s one of the few people from that other J.J. Abrams show that is immediately recognizable anywhere, exhibiting a lot of the same mannerisms he had there, and boy does he love comic books, except now he’s a genius and an authority on Alcatraz.

It could be that I don’t think he works because I wasn’t a fan of Lost. With Lost my suspension of disbelief was shattered somewhere during the second season. Between a whole second half of survivors from the plane crash and the idea that Hurley seemed incapable of losing weight on a deserted island I just quit watching. Not completely egregious offensives from a sci-fi television show, I know, but they were the proverbial straw.

So here he is again in a more upfront capacity, as hefty as ever, and they want me to believe that he’s the perfect partner for an ex-cop whose sole responsibility is often literally chasing down criminals? In the second episode at one point they have the creepy old dude, the ex-cop, and Hurley show up at two very, very tall buildings. The criminal is at the top of one of the buildings, so the old guy gets to the top of the first building while the ex-cop heads for the other.

The old dude manages to get all the way to the top of his building, walk out to the roof, realize he’s at the wrong building, go all the way back down to street level, cross the distance to the other building and make it all the way to the roof in time to help apprehend the convict, and that is more believable to me than had, in all that time, Garcia’s character somehow arrived on the roof.

Yes, I realize the character is supposed to be a researcher. He’s an expert on the criminals of Alcatraz. So, why exactly is he accompanying the cop on the field at all? It would be just as effective to the viewer to cut to him in front of a big, complicated computer talking and have the cop wear an ear-piece.

Those quibbles aside, I haven’t wrote the show completely off yet. The problems I have with it aren’t as egregious as they need to be for me to give it up, and honestly I need to see the payoff of the top secret prison the end of every episode shows. That’s the clincher on whether or not this is a good show or simply another crime drama with a twist.

What about you guys? We’re three episodes in, so you guys must have an opinion on how it’s treating you. Hit up the comments and let’s chat. What are your feelings on the show, your predictions, whether or not it exists in the same universe as Person of Interest, or whatever else? I am decidedly interested to see what anybody else is thinking.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) have lost a lot of ground in the previous week. With politicians, corporations and the ESA all pulling their support for the legislation in the wake of the largest online protest in history, voting on the bills has finally been postponed indefinitely. But that doesn’t mean that the danger has passed just yet. Ordinary gamers, in particular, must continue to stand up for themselves until the egregious laws are put to rest for good.

Many people know that the bills will be detrimental to the internet in many different ways (if you didn’t already know that, you probably wouldn’t be reading this article). But what exactly will SOPA and PIPA mean specifically for the video game industry?

As gamers, how will SOPA/PIPA affect us?

The video game industry has seen a pretty sizable explosion in content over the past few years. In large part, that’s because of how much easier and profitable the industry has become for independent developers. Minecraft was created by a single man with an idea. Now, two years after the game first launched into an open alpha, the game has earned millions of dollars and funded an entirely new development team.

"Organizations like Google helped to protest SOPA."

But how do millions of people pick up a game and bring it up to sensation-status when the game has literally zero funds in terms of marketing and publicity? Well, that’s where we came in.

Gamers, bloggers and journalists manned their media siege engines and showed everyone just how wonderful Minecraft was. Videos showcasing fan-made tutorials, scale-models of the Enterprise-D and simulated computers within games within computers set the likes of Youtube and gaming blogs ablaze. Rarely before had so many fallen in love with something brought to them by so few.

And that’s exactly the sort of communal spirit what SOPA and PIPA would destroy.

You see, word of mouth is a very powerful thing. Minecraft isn’t the only indie sensation that can attest to that. However, word of mouth also relies on one’s ability to actually spread the word. Things like Twitter, Reddit, Wikipedia, Facebook, Youtube, gaming blogs, N4G, LinkedIn, Stumble Upon and just about the entire goddamn internet make this easier than ever. However, SOPA and PIPA would make spreading the word about anything tangible without the express permission of those behind the product in question illegal. Not only that, but it would make the service that allowed something as tragic as free promotion to pass without question liable.

Smaller games that rely on all of those precious stories and videos could be silenced in the shockwave caused by some blitzkrieg CEO that doesn’t like what someone said about the latest Madden game on Youtube or even a news blog like Joystiq or Kotaku.

It’s also true that our homegrown video games wouldn’t bear the brunt of the damage. That’s because the legislators behind SOPA and PIPA have decided to veil their ridiculous bills behind the xenophobic notion that those barbarian hordes known as ‘foreigners’ are somehow more liable to be pirates than us here in the States. SOPA and PIPA are technically only supposed to be able to block content from other countries. The trouble is, most gamers these days aren’t old enough to even remember what a Regan looks like. Tons of games, big and small, good and bad, come from all corners of the globe. On average, foreign games tend to rely a lot more heavily on word of mouth than domestic stock. Not only that, but (and this may be a surprise to the kind of people writing these kinds of laws) not every country in the world is run like the United States. If some nation out there does things a little bit differently than those behind SOPA/PIPA would like, they could potentially restrict access to content from that country. That means we might never hear about games like The Witcher 2, which was developed in Poland and managed to crack SideQuesting’s own 2011 Game of the Year list.

"Lamar Smith – author of SOPA."

Obviously, journalists and developers depend on people being able to know about video games. However, so do all of the gamers out there that rely on healthy competition and innovation to ensure the best possible quality for the products that they spend money on. If television stations were to lampoon a FOX property, the government wouldn’t be able shut down every other network but FOX. I’m pretty sure that this is the case since I still don’t watch Fox News (that being said, I don’t watch a lot of network television period).

So if you thought that SOPA and PIPA were only dangerous to pirates or the film and music industries, you were wrong. These bills are dangerous to just about everyone; possibly to gamers most of all.

That’s okay. It’s not always wrong to be wrong and it’s never too late to make things right.

Recent protests have made a lot of headway in terms of shutting down the threat of SOPA and PIPA. The internet has shown a lot of solidarity in pushing the bills back to their wrinkly, Gold Bond-soaked hives. The bills are likely in for some major overhauls before voting finally begins. But the fight isn’t over. You can still support the cause, as well as your hobby and yourself, by contacting your local representatives and telling them that they shouldn’t support these draconian laws in their current states, or not at all unless drastic changes are made.

It’s not too late for them to be right too.

We were actually really surprised with the results. The best game we came up with was a Root Beer Tapper clone. You played as a bartender and you’ve been chatting up this cute girl at the bar all night. The problem is that all the bros at the bar have their eye on her as well. As the game progresses, these bros are sliding down the bar, getting closer and closer to the girl in an attempt to woo her with how much they can bench or how many shots they can do in a row. So what you do is you start slipping things into the bros’ drinks as you slide them down the bar so that they pass out on the floor before they get to her. If you’re quick on your feet and true of heart you can cock-block guys for the entire night and go home with the girl, stepping over a massive pile of unconscious bros as you leave the bar. The game was called “Roofie Tapper”.

It was just after we finished coming up with that idea that I realized it would be a great idea for a podcast. Three or four people take short phrases and spend a minimal amount of time brainstorming a game idea based on that phrase. It was easy, sustainable, and to my knowledge, no one was doing anything quite like it. About a month later, A Fistful of Pixels was born. I had no idea how to make a podcast, no recording equipment, and no idea where to start. And to tell the truth, the internet was not much help. I found only generic unhelpful advice like “Make sure you have an original idea” or “believe in yourself”. As a result of this lack of information, I made a lot of mistakes.

Mock cover art for one of Fistful of Pixels early titles, courtesy of Ben Pack.

1. Branding

When I started the podcast with my co-hosts Ben Pack and Russ Walsh, we just threw it together real quick. Ben came up with the name, A Fistful of Pixels, and Russ sat there quietly while we did all the work. I didn’t really think more than thirty people tops would listen, so the last thing on my mind was branding. Here’s a tip: When deciding on a name for your podcast or website or whatever, grab everything you can with that name. I’m talking the domain, twitter, relevant email addresses, a Facebook page, whatever you can think of. Do that even if you don’t think you’ll use them. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, you want to have a presence in as many places as possible to make it easy for people to find you. Second, it helps you decide if your name is sustainable.

This became a problem for the podcast when I tried to create a twitter feed and realized “@AFistfulofPixels” was too long by just one character so I had to shorten it to “@FistfulofPixels”. Later on, I found that the domain “www.afistfulofpixels.com” was already taken, forcing me to settle for “www.fistfulofpixels.net”. Those kinds of difference, even though they seem small can mean the difference between a potential listener finding your podcast or not. The moral here is uniformity.

2. The RSS Feed

One of the things we wanted to do in creating a website was to start hosting the podcast ourselves. We had been using Podomatic which is a nice service for a podcast starting out but as the show started picking up steam, the service left a lot to be desired. For one, Podomatic’s stat tracking is extremely limited. Unless you’re a pro member ($9.99 a month minimum), you can only see the previous day’s statistics. Even when we became a pro member, sometimes the stats would be down for days at a time. Also, we started hitting our bandwidth cap and had to pay for additional bandwidth each month. That’s reasonable but we were already paying for unlimited bandwidth for our website. It seemed silly to buy something we already had.

This next part is a little inside baseball, but important all the same. In order to begin hosting the show ourselves, we had to be able to tell iTunes where to find it going forward. The biggest problem was that in order to change the RSS feed (read: The listing of episodes that iTunes or similar services use to distribute your show to listeners) in iTunes, you have to include a tag in the actual RSS file itself with the new URL of the show. Podomatic, for good reason mind you, doesn’t allow it’s users to edit that file directly. Obviously we could just submit a new RSS feed to iTunes but then we would run the risk of losing a lot of our subscribers.

We’re still figuring out the solution to this problem but if I had the foresight, I would have used a service like Google Feedburner. Think of it like a proxy RSS feed. Using the Podomatic example, I would just plug in the URL of my Podomatic feed into Feedburner, and then submit the resulting RSS feed that Feedburner provides to iTunes. Then later on when I wanted to change where I’m hosting the podcast, I would just plug in the new RSS feed into Feedburner and iTunes would never know the difference. Knowing that early on would have saved me an enormous headache.

3. Overzealous editing

That’s all big picture stuff, but obviously the most important part is the content, right? When I first started, I had this grand image of what I wanted the format of the show to be. I was cutting out every little “um” or pause or joke that I didn’t think was quite funny enough. Suffice it to say I was being a little overzealous. I wanted the show to be perfect. The thing you need to realize is that you’re always your own worst critic. Everyone I’ve talked to who’s tried to start their own indie podcast and quit has done so because of the massive undertaking that editing brings.

The answer to this is to pick your battles. As I said, I wanted the show to be perfect, but I also wanted to release an episode every week. It was very difficult to maintain and it wasn’t long before I was going a week here or a month there without releasing an episode. Without a regular release schedule it’s easy for listeners to forget your show exists. That could have been easily avoided by either releasing biweekly or just being a little more relaxed when editing the show.

Needless to say, starting my own podcast has been a learning experience. In the next couple of weeks the show will be going through something of a relaunch phase while we put what we’ve learned to good use. Admittedly, had we known these things from the outset we could have saved a lot of hassle, so hopefully anyone else hoping to start their own indie podcast can learn from the experience. Starting Fistful of Pixels was definitely a huge highlight for me in 2011 and I’m excited to see where it will go in 2012.

Fistful of Pixels is an improvisational comedy podcast about theoretical video games soon to be found right here on Sidequesting. Past episodes can be found on iTunes or at http://bit.ly/afistfulofpixels.

To the Moon is an indie game you probably missed. Released in late November, a time where the people paid to write and talk about games are typically butting heads over “Game of the Year” deliberations, To the Moon sunk underneath all the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Star Wars: The Old Republic talk. It received a few bits of recognition here and there, including a nomination for the Independent Games Festival awards for “Excellence in Audio” that will hopefully lure a few more to try it out.

For what To the Moon lacks in gameplay, it more than makes up for it with a touching narrative about a man’s last wish, merely days before his death. Inception similarities abound, the game follows two scientists as they travel through the man’s memories, slightly changing them to cause his life to lead up to his final wish: going to the moon. Each memory sequence requires you (the scientists) to find mementos that provide morsels of information about the man’s life. After exhausting the recollection, you use a special memento that exists in multiple memories to travel back to earlier ones. The premise is excitingly clever as you follow the man all the way back to his childhood, along the way you find out why his trip to the moon isn’t so bizarre.

Most of To the Moon consists of dialogue and clicking on important objects, you must complete a tile-reversal puzzle before you recede deeper into the old man’s memories, but they’re very simple. The critical reception of Freebird Games’ 16-bit styled adventure game is very high, but many critics pointed out its lack of gameplay.

“I don’t believe that To the Moon’s approach of excising gameplay in favor of visual novel-style storytelling is necessarily the answer to the “interactivity vs. narrative” argument developers have struggled with lo these many years, but there are enough flashes of brilliance inside To the Moon’s shell to give one the impression that such a breakthrough might be on the horizon.” – Alex Navarro, Giant Bomb

“It’s a top-down adventure that frames itself visually as a 1990s Japanese role-playing game, while snipping out all the bits that define that genre. In fact, it omits most of what would define any game. Its interactivity is largely confined to the exploration of the man’s memories, in which you identify key items before completing – rather perplexingly – a tile-reversal puzzle which allows you to travel further into his past.” – Lewis Denby, Eurogamer

“The weak attempts at puzzle and exploration gameplay aren’t why I played the six or so hours of To the Moon, though. I rushed through these parts in order to get to the next scene or extended dialogue sequence that would clue me in to the minds and hearts of the characters. Some games are utterly mindless and carried by the action or gameplay, but To the Moon’s gameplay moments are reliant on the excellent plot.” – Anthony Gallegos, IGN

“To the Moon’s purpose is to tell a stirring story, not to deliver a compelling gameplay experience.” – Kevin VanOrd, Gamespot

“As a point-and-click adventure, To the Moon is more of an interactive tale than a full-on game, yet it is so engaging that the lack of quests, boss fights or bullets becomes irrelevant.” – Jessica Conditt, Joystiq

“I think [storytelling] is important to exist somewhere, but not important to have in every single game,” Kan Gao, To the Moon’s Director and Composer told me in a recent interview, “There are so many things games can do and so many ways to do them in; I just made what I personally enjoyed, and hoped that there existed others who shared that liking.”

Despite having little gameplay, To the Moon’s story propels it past the argument of whether or not it’s a game. It takes a powerful devotion to storytelling to win over the most seasoned of game reviewers. Many games will opt for a vague narrative, hinting and alluding to things but never giving thorough explanations, instead To the Moon keeps everything tightly woven together. “[Ethereal storytelling] can be wonderfully fun when you’re in the mood, but painstakingly awful when you’re not,” Gao said. “I personally love it, though; a short free game of mine, The Mirror Lied, was my attempt at it. The only thing is that pretense is always around the corner with something like this.”

Gao’s attention to detail plays a large part in making To the Moon’s story feel so well presented. “My preference of art style is probably between that and the painted look of Bastion. In the case of To the Moon, though, I think the 16-bit look add to the nostalgia factor, which is rather appropriate for the story,” he said. The game deviously uses its playful visuals to make you feel welcome while occasionally using them as a weak spot leading right to your emotions. By the end of the game it’s clear Gao knows how to manipulate your feelings.

Even the score has strong ties to the narrative. Gao composed the music almost simultaneously as he wrote each scene, making each one almost its own piece, evoking different feelings depending on the situation. He explained, “Sometimes, when I get stuck writing a scene, I’d work on the music first. After the background music’s done, I’d play it in the background and go back to writing it, and everything flows a lot better. It’s like a buffer between what I want to convey in my head and what gets written down.”

Slight story spoilers follow, read at your own risk!

As soon as the credits roll, it’s revealed that To the Moon is episode one of a series of games. The two scientists will have more dying wishes to aid in, Gao told me. “The foundation of the next episode has already been laid out, and I’m very excited to start officially working on it,” he said. If you pay close attention a few plot threads are started and left unresolved. One example is the male scientist Dr. Watts and his suggested addiction to painkillers. The female scientist Dr. Rosalene offers him help but he nervously declines. Gao would only hint at it, but it’s probably safe to assume some of the minor plot points will come up in future episodes.

To the Moon’s structure, jumping into the latest memory and working back, won’t necessarily be the same in upcoming episodes Gao said. He also plans to get the games on Steam in the future, provided “things go well.”

On paper it sounds antithetical to create a game without the game parts, however large parts of the audience want the gameplay to remain unobtrusive, “content tourism” as some define it. Much of Heavy Rain game designer David Cage’s work reflects this new genre of video game auteurism, where games like the Uncharted series try to combine the two with some mixed results. It’s reaching out to bigger games like Mass Effect 3 where a new “Story Mode” puts a larger emphasis on the dialogue choices than the shooter gameplay. To the Moon may defy what the traditional definition of a “game” is, but it still grabbed the hearts and attention of many players; even bringing some to tears.

To the Moon is available for $12 on the Freebird Games website.

Kan Gao’s (IGF nominated, and beautiful!) soundtrack is available on Bandcamp for an optional price starting at $5 – 50% of the profit goes toward charities for autism too!

Kevin Dent has been floating about the gaming industry for over 10 years now. His LinkedIn page describes his focus: “to help developers and content creators tell their story by driving deals and creating strategic visions.” This direction lead him to his current position as the head of IGDA Mobile Special Interests Group. IGDA, or the International Game Development Association, is a non-profit organization that helps out game developers. “My mission is to make games better,” Dent’s Twitter bio reads.

Clearly, Dent seems to be all for the growth of the industry, if he had something important to say, a lot of people would be listening. And they did when he lit a fuse with this tweet late Saturday night.

Warhammer 40K is an important franchise to THQ. Not only have the past real-time strategy games been successful, but Relic’s latest entry Space Marine was a strong influence on THQ’s sales the second quarter of its 2012 fiscal year (July through September), according to the CEO Brian Farrell it “exceeded expectations”.

As soon as Relic Entertainment finished Space Marine they were free to lend help to on the Warhammer 40K MMO Dark Millenium Online Vigil Games has been working on publicly since March 2007.

It’s important to understand just how much work goes into an MMO, and how much of a risk it is. Massively is in the name, these games have to be huge to accommodate thousands of players at a time. Typically they have a lengthy leveling experience to introduce players to the world, and end-game content with high-level enemies that require groups to take down. It’s a lot of assets and design work, and that’s if you want to mimic what Blizzard has already done with World of Warcraft. EA spent roughly $125-$200 million on Star Wars: The Old Republic, it garnered more than a few pre-orders and hasn’t had any signs of dropping in player count, yet. WoW may be slightly dropping, but it still holds a large active player count; the market has very little room for alternatives.

So why cancel something that’s been in development for at least 5 years? Dent offered this as a potential reason:

He’s referring to early December last year when THQ lowered its earning forecast down approximately 25 percent due to the uDraw tablets unsuccessful performance during the third quarter of its 2012 fiscal year. He mentions the month of June because that’s when THQ’s second quarter ends.

I spent Sunday morning digging for more information as I wrote up a post for my personal blog. I found someone close to Relic that was willing to talk about the fate of Dark Millenium Online. The source claimed nothing had been said of its cancellations, even calling Dent’s original tweet “baseless”. Not long after, more reports of denials came in supporting my source’s comments.

Then the gravity of the situation grew, Dark Millenium Online was just the beginning according to Dent.

Dent’s alluding to THQ saving up money to potentially sell. Were THQ to go through with it, the future of the unannounced project former Assassin Creed designer Patrice Désilets is working on in the new Montreal-based studio, the joint operation of Crytek and Kaos Studios on a Homefront sequel, and possibly many other games would be cut short. For someone like Dent to feel confident enough to say that a big publisher like THQ is planning on selling, his sources must have been incredibly trustworthy.

A few hours later Kotaku published an official statement from THQ.

“THQ has not cancelled its 2014 line-up, and has not made any decisions regarding the planned MMO. As part of the ongoing review of our business, we have made decisions to ensure that the company is strategically addressing the most attractive markets. As we have previously announced, we have dramatically reduced our commitment to the kids’ boxed games sector which leads to a significantly more focused release schedule moving forward. Our slate for calendar 2012 and beyond is focused on high-quality core games and continues to build our digital platform and business. We are excited for our pipeline of original and high-quality content along with our relationships with some of the best talent in the industry.

Additionally, we are thrilled with the great performance of Saints Row: The Third, which on a like for like period in North America has tripled in sell-through from Saints Row 2. In addition, WWE ’12′s worldwide sell-through sales are up almost 40% year-over-year for the same sales period with fewer platforms. According to NPD, for the month of December and the 2011 year, THQ was the #5 publisher overall, #4 third party, with reported sell through growing over 18% in a market that was down almost 6%. And coming up next, we have two great titles for the first half of the year including UFC Undisputed 3 and Darksiders 2.”

Through careful wording, THQ’s statement maneuvers around a definitive answer for Dark Millenium Online, it simply says “not made any decisions”. THQ wanted to quell the rumors, a denial doesn’t necessarily mean nothing will happen to the MMO in the future. As for the 2014 cancellations, THQ comes off firm, but again, it doesn’t mean that some games won’t be cut from the roster.

It could have gotten a lot worse if THQ never issued a statement, it did, and have caused the rumors to die down to a low simmer. Dent still believes what he heard, and he’s right to do so, we haven’t heard enough solid evidence that Dark Millenium Online or any other games won’t be cancelled eventually. For now, we have to wait and see. We still have games like Metro: Last Light, Darksiders 2, the newly announced South Park game, Guillermo del Toro’s inSANE, Devil’s Third and Saints Row 4. I don’t even want to know what this world would be like without another Saints Row.

Does anyone remember Nick Arcade? Back in 1992, a prototype version of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was featured on the show. In that version, Emerald Hill Zone played the Star Light Zone music. I would later find out that the music was a placeholder, but as a kid I was infuriated at what I thought was an unforgivable screw-up by corporate blowhards that just don’t understand video games. I had forgotten what that feeling was like until today.

The ad features the invincibility/Super Sonic music from Sonic the Hedgehog 3, but as you can see, Sonic is clearly not invincible nor is he very super. Whether this is due to a lack of the necessary seven chaos emeralds or he’s just a few rings short of 50 is irrelevant. There is no excuse for this kind of oversight. If you are as outraged as I was over this blunder, I urge you to call or write a letter to Progressive Insurance DEMANDING that they correct the issue.

Good Old Games continues to live up to its name as on January 19th they will begin selling the PC classic Syndicate for the non-oppressive price of $5.99.

In a time before first-person shooters infiltrated the hearts and minds of our youth — with sweet promises of power armor and regenerating health — there were games like Syndicate. Games that focused less on shooting aliens and more on mass oppression. That is to say, the original Syndicate, not this fancy-pants, new, dubstep simulator that come out in February. I’m talking about the one that Peter Molyneux made.

GOG has even been nice enough to begin a contest over Twitter giving away free copies of the game to some of the best Syndicate teams. We here at SideQuesting intend to participate in the contest, of course. However, we might have a tough time communicating gameplay strategies while harmonizing a non-stop rendition of Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World”.

[Source: GOG.com]

So a couple of new television shows debuted today; Alcatraz and Smash. While it probably would have made for a more interesting piece if I had watched them and could write a little something about them, I must sadly admit that I did neither.

I spent the entire day catching up on One Piece.

Let me be absolutely clear here: I’m not a big fan of anime. I’ve seen the usual suspects over the course of my life, of course. Trigun, Evangelion, and Initial D are a few that jump to mind. But in my weird ass group of friends and surrogate family I was never the anime guy. That honor fell to my best friend/ might-as-well-be-brother, and I just sort of tagged along for the adventure when he would find some new show to watch.

So the reason I’m catching up on One Piece isn’t because I’m some great lover of the eastern animation. It’s actually because it’s a cartoon about pirates, and goddammit, I love pirates. There’s a Jolly Roger hanging in front of me, draped above my computer monitor and television. I’ve had it for so long, and through some weird times – there’s years old blood staining the top of the skull, and just an extra smudge below the eye.

Pirates are so awesome that for a long time my friends and I had a meticulously detailed plan to steal the Bluenose and roll down to the Caribbean with it. When the zombocalypse hits there is an even more detailed plan to escape to the sea. If you walked up to me with a TARDIS and said, “Hey man, I got a time machine,” before you could finish the sentence I would have already blurted out the word ‘pirates’ and jumped inside.

So it’s sort of a given that I’d be a fan of One Piece. It’s a world where people can get super powers and most of the planet is ocean, and everybody is either a pirate or a marine. And because it’s an anime it could have gone one or two ways: a twenty-odd episode season that  would have covered the entire story or an endless run only limited by how quickly the comic it’s based on can be written. This show happens to be the latter, and is currently a good clip past five hundred episodes.

When I first started watching One Piece I decided to marathon the entire thing. Over something like a week I watched something like four hundred and fifty episodes before hitting the end of what had been released. So, that done, I took a break and moved on to other things. Having come back years later there are almost a hundred additional episodes to watch.

But what is the cartoon about, some of you may be wondering. The boiled down summary is that the main character eats a piece of magic fruit that turns him into rubber. He can stretch his limbs and bounce bullets, can’t swim, and wants to be the king of the pirates. So he sets out, assembles a crew, and fights a bunch of other pirates and the world’s navy in the process. Think Dragonball Z style fights, except no ridiculous strings of episodes where dudes just power up.

The thing is: I’m coming at it from a super biased place. I’ve made my position on pirates pretty clear: they’re kind of the coolest thing ever. I can sit here and watch every episode of a show about pirates and enjoy the ride. So, this week I’m posing a three part question to everybody reading this piece.

First: How awesome are pirates? They’re pretty much the best, right? Second: Is my love of pirates clouding my judgment on One Piece, or is it definitely a pretty cool cartoon? Third: Are there any other awesome pirate shows out there I may have never heard of? I’m not talking movies here; I’ve probably seen all of those. But shows about pirates seem kind of rare.

It’s a difficult task to top a nearly-perfect gaming experience. Excellent storytelling, engaging characters, and thrilling puzzles are already a rare combination, and one that is usually impossible to follow up in a sequel. In fact, it becomes very easy to be let down by a sequel to a game we love as a less-than-stellar sequel can ruin our impressions of the first.

Valve Software has an incredulous record of sequels that top their predecessors (when they actually release, that is), so when they announced that the wonderful Portal would receive one the entire Internet let out an excitedly happy “whoop” without knowing a lick of what the game would encompass. The initial expectations were massive; how would the beloved game’s simple brilliance of mechanic and snappy, humor-filled plot translate to this new game, and would it need to be similar to the original or something completely new?

The development team quickly let fans know that the core of the game — shooting portals — would remain, while new mechanics and physics-based puzzles would be added. Further on, cooperative play was announced and a wonderful voice cast was revealed, and even Steam integration for the game would come to the Playstation 3. The game seemed to be pushing all of the right buttons leading up to its release, but the niggling feeling remained: would Portal 2 actually live up to the hype?

OH. HELL. YES.

It’s not just the “When Nature Calls” version of Portal. Yes, it carries over many of the same constructs of the first game — notably, the mind-mending puzzle structure and the humor — but it uses them as a pedestal to jump from instead of copying. The new mechanics that result from the gels, vortexes, jump platforms and gravity lifts allow for some of the greatest puzzles in video game history, almost always resulting in “oohs” and “ahhs” and “holy shit, it worked” responses when playing. What may seem like an accidental solution is almost always the one that Valve intended. We are supposed to figure this out, in any way possible, even if we’re meant to break the game.

The co-operative play is itself an amazing feat. It isn’t just an extension of known Portal 2 levels, or a clone of it’s magnificent plot, but an entirely separate game on the same disc. Heck, it’s perhaps a better experience than the single-player mode.

And speaking of the plot: the character development and several narrative twists throughout the adventure are simple, yet extremely fulfilling. It’s not a new plot, by any means, but the delivery is magic. Wheatley, voiced by Stephen Merchant, may be the greatest bumbling sidekick in video game history, and his rise within the game’s plot left us hoping to see him again post-Portal.

Valve created a true masterpiece that should be played over, and over, and over again, with and without friends, for everything it has to offer. It’s better than a sequel should be, even for an already-beloved classic, and sits alongside Bioshock and Uncharted 2 as the greatest games of this generation. Quite simply put, Portal 2 was an easy selection for Game of the Year.

We live in a world where videogames are now constantly being scrutinized to see if they are ‘art.’ Some games go out of their way to provide you with a somewhat dull experience just so they can provide what they think is an artful tale of woe and wonder. None of these games are Saints Row: The Third.

Saints Row: The Third is a game that follows in the shoes of Bayonetta. It is nothing alike it in structure nor story, but it is exactly like it in the way that it is pure insanity. In one moment I went from diving out of a plane to rescue a crew member, to letting go of that crew member so I could smash through the front window of the same plane, to flying out the back and returning to my falling crew member once again. Not to mention the whole time I had to dodge the excessive amount of junk flying from plane while shooting copious amounts of bad guys. So why did I just spoil the craziest part of Saints Row: The Third? Well, I didn’t. This is the second mission and nearly tame to the badassery that happens throughout the game. VTOL jets, jet bikes, Atari style tanks…the list would go on for hours. The amount of stuff worth your while in this game is simply staggering.

Saints Row: The Third may not be artful, moral, or even appropriate for anyone of any age, but it is FUN. I have not had a more fun time playing a videogame in a long time, and Saints does very little wrong in my eyes. Even the open world jank that is in the game is unoffensive because it feels like it was put there for a reason (even if it wasn’t).

Saints Row: The Third should not be taken seriously, but as a pure videogame, I could not have been happier. That is why it is SideQuesting’s second favorite game of 2011.