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FIDGIT ARCHIVE FOR August 2008
While down in the barrow of Haudh Iarchith, slashing and harping* my way through the undead, I occasionally come across an ancient vase. Whereas miners take their pick-axes to nodes of ore and farmers plant seeds to harvest crops, scholars...
POSTED Friday, August 29, 2008
Chris Kohler at Wired's gaming blog puttered around unenthusiastically with an import version of Captain Rainbow, the newest Wii game from Skip Ltd. Skip are the creators of Chibi-Robo, a brilliant and sadly overlooked Gamecube title. Chibi-Robo was about helping...
POSTED Friday, August 29, 2008
Lucasarts and Sony Online are bound and determined to get their hooks into you. Their latest attempt to appeal to your predilection for Star Wars is the Star War Galaxies Online Trading Card Game. Note the "Galaxies" in the title....
POSTED Friday, August 29, 2008
Here are a few more screenshots from the Mines of Moria expansion for Lord of the Rings Online. You can go here to get information about joining the beta for an early look. It's got to be a nerve-wracking time...
POSTED Friday, August 29, 2008
NPR's "All Things Considered" did a short piece on Braid, the mind-bending time-twisting platformer available on Xbox Live. After Robert Siegel tries to get his mouth around various trademarked videogaming phrases like "Xbox Live" and "Halo Combat Evolved", there's a...
POSTED Friday, August 29, 2008
The Rock Band version of Rush's album Moving Pictures, which was supposed to be available two days ago, won't be out for a few weeks. I really have nothing to add, but it's the sort of headline-inspiring irony you just...
POSTED Thursday, August 28, 2008
No matter how much butt you kick in World of Warcraft's PvP, you're never going to storm Ogrimmar with your Alliance character. Your Uruk-hai in Lord of the Rings Online is never going to bust out of the Ettenmoors to...
POSTED Thursday, August 28, 2008
I have made zero progress today. I blame the fishing. Read the Lord of the Rings Online game diary after the jump....
POSTED Thursday, August 28, 2008
Introversion has released into the wild a tutorial video for the "Capture the Statue" mode in Multiwinia, their real time strategy game based on the trippy cyber-world of Darwinia. Even in this short video, the company shows its penchant for...
POSTED Thursday, August 28, 2008
I was having a grand ol' time doing the new quests in the gleaming northern reaches of Farochel. So why am I, a 46th level elven minstrel, poking around the Barrow-Downs back in Bree, an area for 15th level characters?...
POSTED Wednesday, August 27, 2008
David Oilund, 16, a video game player who regularly plays online in Edmonton, said "creepers" have tried to chat with him while playing games. "You just leave and go somewhere else and play a different game or whatever," he said.Dude,...
POSTED Wednesday, August 27, 2008
A new video of the civilization stage of Spore makes it look remarkably like a real time strategy game, probably because it is. You can see units being recruited, cities being built, resources (geysers) being captured, battles being fought, and...
POSTED Wednesday, August 27, 2008
UK website Edge has posted an interview with Hellboy director Guillermo del Toro, pictured above (on the left). They call him a "wildly talented Mexican", which sounds a little odd to my ear. Maybe it's just a British thing, like...
POSTED Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Tolkein's books are full of lovely travelogues. Characters hike from one place to another for pages on end, often filling the time with singing. If the Fellowship had a car, The Lord of the Rings would probably be a buddy...
POSTED Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Star Trek Online developer Cryptic Studios elaborates a bit on their upcoming Star Trek MMO. They've posted to their site a Q&A with themselves. Unfortunately, they don't get all the answers right.Will I be able to trick out my Bird...
POSTED Tuesday, August 26, 2008
At the Leipzig Game Convention, Age of Conan product manager Erling Ellingson and someone named Torgen (?) gave a demonstration of the upcoming new content for the game. I wasn't there, but MMO site Massively has linked to a German...
POSTED Tuesday, August 26, 2008
A British web-comic artist named Chris Thomas recently paid a visit to Microsoft's offices in London. He then blogged a bit about the new Xbox Live dashboard, the avatars, how you scroll around the interface, the release date of Grand...
POSTED Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Back in Rivendell, Bilbo Baggins asks me to find Gollum's cave. Dude, I was just there. I even blogged about it on Fidgit.com! Man, if I had 5 copper pieces for every time that happened in an MMO, I could...
POSTED Monday, August 25, 2008
Alone in the Dark developer Eden Studio went all out with the mea culpas at the Games Convention in Leipzig. Eurogamer reports on some changes being made to the upcoming Playstation 3 version. It's mostly a matter of tidying up...
POSTED Monday, August 25, 2008
Now that the whole Sasquatch thing has been cleared up (spoiler: it was a hoax), it's time to move on to a bigger mystery: What's the deal with Lego Universe, the upcoming Lego-themed massively multiplayer online game in which players,...
POSTED Monday, August 25, 2008
Paradox Interactive, one of the last great creators of epic strategy games no one but me and a few other guys play, promised to announce their next big project at the Games Conference in Leipzig. What would it be, me...
POSTED Monday, August 25, 2008
Enjoy this week, because we're headed into weeks on end of bright, red, pulsing wallet threat levels. I'm talking throbbing red, like a headache or hemorrhoids commercial. And probably with a klaxon sound effect like on Star Trek when someone...
POSTED Monday, August 25, 2008
Relic has posted an official Dawn of War 2 trailer showing off various Tyranids in action. I don't see a single thing in this video that couldn't have been done in the original Dawn of War engine, which belies the...
POSTED Friday, August 22, 2008
It started with this message:Want to see where Golum held up for years and kept the ring of power, send invite to adventure in Goblin Town. Read the Lord of the Rings Online game diary after the jump....
POSTED Friday, August 22, 2008
The folks at Rock the Vote have teamed up with Microsoft not only for a presence on Xbox Live, but also to enable online voter registration over Xbox Live. How cool is that, right? Actually, when you think about, this...
POSTED Friday, August 22, 2008
Sales data, like math, is hard. So bully for the new Top Global Markets Report, which will come along and simply announce the winners of the world*. This new report assembles figures from sales data in various countries and lists...
POSTED Friday, August 22, 2008
Harmonix explained how they're implementing the promised feature of Rock Band 1 owners being able to play that game's song in Rock Band 2: by charging you a fee to cover the complicated licensing issues. Because I'm sure Harmonix wasn't...
POSTED Friday, August 22, 2008
When Lord of the Rings Online came out a year and a half ago, it got it hooks into me deep. Deeper than any other MMO. It was a combination of factors: I was finally getting into the lore, the...
POSTED Thursday, August 21, 2008
G4 has figured out the best way to harness the energy of Will Wright. Besides getting him to make a game, of course, which Electronic Arts has already figured out. Instead, G4 has set up a camera in front of...
POSTED Thursday, August 21, 2008
As I've mentioned before, if you pre-order Warhammer Online from one of the retailers listed on this page, you'll get into the open beta on September 7th. Shortly thereafter, all your hard-/played hours will be erased when the beta ends....
POSTED Thursday, August 21, 2008
The Force Unleashed demo is available now from the Playstation Store and Xbox Live Marketplace, allowing you to get a taste of Lucasarts upcoming Dark Side Force sim, due out September 16th. If you've seen footage of the game, you...
POSTED Thursday, August 21, 2008
It wouldn't be a Command & Conquer game without lavishly filmed live action cut scenes featuring recognizable actors speaking terrible dialogue and looking slightly lost. Electronic Arts promises not to disappoint in Red Alert 3. They've announced the rest of...
POSTED Thursday, August 21, 2008
Last but not least, say hello to the newest combatants in the world of Red Alert, the Empire of the Rising Sun. Or "Japanese", for short. These guys are flexible, but they're easily the most difficult to play, requiring a...
POSTED Wednesday, August 20, 2008
If you missed the first-come/first-served round of Blizzcon tickets, which meant being parked in front of a "server down" screen wildly slapping the F5 key, here's your last chance to get tickets. Between now and Sunday night, go into your...
POSTED Wednesday, August 20, 2008
It's hard to imagine Blizzard caring when they're so busy counting their money, but the Zerg are finally coming home to roost. Everyone's favorite icky alien race from Starcraft was obviously inspired by the Tyranids from the Warhammer universe. There...
POSTED Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Over at Cake Wrecks, an amusing chronicle of cakes gone wrong, you'll find this attempt to kick anti-violent game crusader Jack Thompson back into action to protect the children of America. Unfortunately, the comments section pretty quickly debunked it as...
POSTED Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Did you ever get a game and deduce that it was really terrible, and then later realize…oops…you were playing it wrong? Well, I'm here to tell you that Bangai-O Spirits is really terrible…oh, wait, I was playing it wrong. Read...
POSTED Wednesday, August 20, 2008
It's just under a month away from the launch of Warhammer Online, the new massively multiplayer online RPG from Mythic, the folks who made Dark Age of Camelot. Way back in the Dark Ages of MMOs, back in the ancient...
POSTED Tuesday, August 19, 2008
In case you're one of the people who's getting a head start amassing his wealth in Fable 2 by playing the Pub Games available in advance, now you're really going to be rolling in dough. The Pub Games are apparently...
POSTED Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Yesterday you met the Allies. Up now are the Russians. Just a brief note: These introductions are taken from the open beta for Red Alert 3, which I've been playing for the last week or so. Since it's a beta,...
POSTED Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Regardless of what I think of Too Human as an action RPG*, there's no denying that it contains some of the most memorable writing in a computer game since Richter barged in on Dracula and was told something about a...
POSTED Tuesday, August 19, 2008
The implosion of Flagship Studios was the most dramatic developer failure since Ion Storm plummeted from the penthouse suite of a Dallas skyscraper. 1up has posted an exhaustive interview with Flagship co-founder and frontman Bill Roper, who discusses the collapse...
POSTED Monday, August 18, 2008
Over the next three days, we'll introduce you to the factions from Red Alert 3, the upcoming alternate history real time strategy game in which Einstein went back in history and assassinated Hitler. Or some such thing. I'm a bit...
POSTED Monday, August 18, 2008
Braid developer Jonathan Blow was recently quoted in the Wall Street Journal:…like principled adherents of punk, Mr. Blow is known for maintaining his artistic vision in the face of criticism. He says that Microsoft asked him to add clues after...
POSTED Monday, August 18, 2008
What a great week for your wallet! The only notable release is Too Human, the action RPG for the Xbox 360. Instead of actually buying it, you could just download the demo and play it over and over for fifteen...
POSTED Monday, August 18, 2008
It's a great time to be a fan of action RPGs. But not because of stinkers like Space Siege and Too Human. Instead, Monster Madness: Grave Danger is an update of last year's underappreciated monster-mashing hack-and-slash teens vs. zombies undeathmatch....
POSTED Monday, August 18, 2008
Lego Batman will be along on September 23rd for all your light-hearted Schumacher-esque Batman needs: Robin, Poison Ivy, Mr. Freeze, bright colors, Danny Elfman soundtrack, and so forth (with a little more detail on the character model, we might have...
POSTED Friday, August 15, 2008
If you got your copy of Civilization Revolution from Best Buy, Gamestop, or Target, it might have come with a little slip of paper that has a code written on it. That code was useless. Until now. Go here, type...
POSTED Friday, August 15, 2008
Lord of the Rings Online developer Turbine released the above surveillance footage of a bunch of stinky dwarves milling around outside the entrance to Moria, unable to read the sign, much less figure out that the password is "friend". Ha...
POSTED Friday, August 15, 2008
If you want to videogame the 2008 Summer Olympics, don't fall for some cheap official game with a Metacritic rating of 60%. Instead, here are 15 games that can help you capture the experience the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing....
POSTED Friday, August 15, 2008
If you don't have Rock Band 1 and you're holding out for Rock Band 2, you might have to hold out for an extra month. The original release date for the Xbox 360 version of the full game was September...
POSTED Thursday, August 14, 2008
According to the Nielsen Company (yes, the same folks who have determined that American Idol and Dancing with the Stars are as good as TV gets), at least 17 percent of the people who bought Grand Theft Auto IV were...
POSTED Thursday, August 14, 2008
Soulcalibur IV is the latest in a 12-year tradition of ridiculous breasts, ridiculous beatdowns, and ridiculous Engrish storylines. As a fighting game, it's not as absurd as DOA, but it's not as revered as Street Fighter. It's not as technical...
POSTED Thursday, August 14, 2008
Although Fable II won't be out for another two months, you can start playing today. Sort of. Ante up $10 worth of Microsoft points to download the Fable II Pub Games, which consist of a dice game, a slot machine,...
POSTED Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Valve is extending their update love to the heavy gunner in Team Fortress 2. Over the next week, they'll announce here the various details of the upcoming "Heavy Update", which goes live next Tuesday, August 19th. In addition to new...
POSTED Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Braid is an absolutely brilliant game and quite possibly a work of genius. I don't like it one bit. Read the review of this fiendishly smart and subversive 2D platformer after the jump....
POSTED Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Sick of blowing out walls and knocking over trees in the pursuit/defense of those same gold crates over and over again in Battlefield: Bad Company? Now you can download a free update that modifies four of the existing maps to...
POSTED Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People: Episode 1 Homestar Ruiner is available now for PC and from the WiiWare channel of downloadable games for the Nintendo Wii. The first episode will cost $10 for the Wii or $8.95 for...
POSTED Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Some of you might be suffering post-traumatic stress disorder from yesterday's link to the Soulcalibur IV cosplay. I apologize for that. To make up for it, here's a link to 1up's collection of the best examples of what people have...
POSTED Tuesday, August 12, 2008
And so Siren screeches to an inglorious end. After 11 episodes of mostly middling gameplay interspersed with intriguing storytelling, the twelfth episode has effectively killed the game for me, leaving me with no desire to get to the end. Episode...
POSTED Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Personally, I don't think these little guys ever went out of style, but it's nice to see them validated by people who know what's hip. Granted, when it comes to haute couture, Japan isn't quite Paris, but it'll do. Even...
POSTED Tuesday, August 12, 2008
What a terrible episode. Lots of fumbling around in the dark with unclear objectives and almost no story elements. And instead of a cliffhanger before the final episodes, there was an almost laughable "huh?" moment involving a giant fuzzy headless...
POSTED Monday, August 11, 2008
Continuing today's theme of Not Safe For Work posts (it's Monday, you didn't want that job anyway…), check out Legend of Neil, Sandeep Parikh's funny and profane live-action take on Legend of Zelda. Yeah, yeah, it sounds really lame, but...
POSTED Monday, August 11, 2008
In what game can you don a bikini, a feather boa, and a cowboy hat to kill zombies with a katana? Besides Dead Rising, I mean. That's the premise [sic] of Onechanbara, which is Japanese for "makes no sense whatsoever"....
POSTED Monday, August 11, 2008
I'm not sure what it says about a site that's willing to trade the dignity of its readers for traffic. But I want you to know, dear readers, I'll never do you that way. However, I will happily perpetuate Destructoid's...
POSTED Monday, August 11, 2008
Many of you may not realize that John Madden isn't just the guy who directed 1999's multiple Academy Award winner, Shakespeare in Love. He's also something of a sports celebrity, whose name and likeness are used in Madden!, Electronic Arts'...
POSTED Monday, August 11, 2008
At a Star Trek convention in Las Vegas this weekend, developer Cryptic Studios unveiled more details about the upcoming Star Trek Online, including a trailer, and about twenty minutes of Q&A with the audience. On the whole, the model seems...
POSTED Monday, August 11, 2008
Okay, I finally got what I wanted. An open ended area to play. And it really wasn't all that. The gameplay consists mostly of stealth until you get a good weapon, and then combat. Neither is very good. As a...
POSTED Friday, August 8, 2008
According to Shacknews, an un-cited newsletter includes comments from Warren Ellis to the effect that he was hired by Electronic Arts to contribute to Dead Space, the upcoming sci-fi survival horror game. Ellis confessed that he had no idea how...
POSTED Friday, August 8, 2008
In all the news coming out of ComicCon last week, an important announcement was widely overlooked, probably because it was presented at a limited closed-door press conference: There's a big screen adaptation of the first Zork in the works! Read...
POSTED Friday, August 8, 2008
As the October release of BioShock lumbers slowly closer like a Big Daddy whose helmet is still glowing green, those of us who played on our PCs and Xbox 360s are wondering what the differences will be from the BioShock...
POSTED Friday, August 8, 2008
The first part of episode 9 seemed to offer a couple of different ways to progress, and I somehow managed to circumvent an entire set of goals. I wish there was more of this in Siren. The gameplay is starting...
POSTED Thursday, August 7, 2008
It's easy enough to jump into Soulcaliber IV, whale away on the buttons, and make things happen. You'll mostly win. At first. But then you'll start losing. Particularly if you try to make any progress in the Tower of Lost...
POSTED Thursday, August 7, 2008
Sometimes even a blind squirrel will dig up an acorn. That's the adage that comes to mind when you consider a Malaysian gaming magazine printed on its cover speculation that Grand Theft Auto IV was coming to the PC. Never...
POSTED Thursday, August 7, 2008
So I've decided to stop calling them zombies. Something very different is going on here, and even though one character makes a zombie reference in episode 8, that's clearly not what these things are. They run, they use weapons, they...
POSTED Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Before Angband, before Trade Wars, and before Nethack, there was Star Trek. Before Pong, even. In fact, the original series had only been off the air for two years when Mike Mayfield, a high school student, made his Star Trek...
POSTED Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Braid is out today on Xbox Live Marketplace for $15. If you don't know what Braid is, well, you're in roughly the same boat as me after I've played through it. I say "played through it", but that doesn't begin...
POSTED Wednesday, August 6, 2008
If you plunk your money down now, Electronic Arts will let you play Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning in about a month, if not a little sooner. In addition to announcing the official September 18th launch, the publisher says they'll...
POSTED Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Cracked.com has posted a list of six old-school videogames "just as brutal as Grand Theft Auto IV", although some of them definitely out-GTA GTA. Most of them existed under the radar of the average gamer. Did you know there was...
POSTED Tuesday, August 5, 2008
The mapping function in Siren: Blood Curse is a model for how ingame maps should be done. At any point, you can pause the game and peruse a clean 2D representation of the level. Every doorway is marked, so it's...
POSTED Tuesday, August 5, 2008
You know how you can break down your opponent's blocking power to put him into soul crush mode, at which point you can respond to an attempted block with a carefully timed press of A+B+K+G to achieve a critical finish,...
POSTED Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Lots of people are reluctant to apply hardware mods, especially to console games. However, after the jump, I'll provide step-by-step instructions for how to mod Geometry Wars 2 to improve your scores. It will not invalidate your warranty, it doesn't...
POSTED Tuesday, August 5, 2008
If you've been watching Generation Kill or playing Battlefield: Bad Company, you know soldiers can't very well boot up a laptop in the heat of battle to give commands to their robot sidekicks. Doug Few at the University of Washington...
POSTED Tuesday, August 5, 2008
If you're a game developer who's going to implode in a sudden and dramatic flameout, probably the best time to do it is during E3, when everyone else is busy talking about all the big news. But Flagship Studios, the...
POSTED Monday, August 4, 2008
One of the problems with the episodic structure is the way each character has to "reset" between episodes. For instance, I had a character whose first task during the level is to find a weapon. The problem is that he...
POSTED Monday, August 4, 2008
After being delayed by unspecified bugs that apparently don't affect Playstation 3's, the "Cagney" patch is out today for the 360 version of Burnout: Paradise, the deliriously fast racing/wrecking extravaganza from Criterion Games. Up next from the developer is a...
POSTED Monday, August 4, 2008
I reinstalled Diablo 2 recently and plinked around at it before running out of steam. I recognize its greatness, but times change. Games change. Our expectations change. Even something as wonderful and generous as Diablo can run its course. I...
POSTED Monday, August 4, 2008
Let's say you had a hundred dollars and you absolutely had to spend it on new releases within the week. This would be the worst week for that to happen. You'd end up blowing your money on GRID for the...
POSTED Monday, August 4, 2008
The Silent Hill style contrivances are starting to muscle their way front and center. First there's a contrived point-by-point handheld trip through a cramped area clogged with zombies, then there's a contrived point-by-point handheld trip through an open area clogged...
POSTED Friday, August 1, 2008
If I wasn't at Quake Con, here's what I would be doing all day today. There's only so much you can do with the basic frantic goodness of Geometry Wars, but Bizarre Creations seems to be doing it even more...
POSTED Friday, August 1, 2008
Speaking of Geometry Wars, Multiwinia lives in a very similar space: an eerie cyberworld where the graphics are no less strange for being simple. Instead of simulating something you know, these games imagine something you've never seen. The priority is...
POSTED Friday, August 1, 2008
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