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FIDGIT ARCHIVE FOR September 2008
A poster by the name of Gliese 581 at Civfanatics has posted an example of how he can exploit Colonization's "liberty bell" system to easily win the game in less than 100 turns. He basically dismisses all his colonists once...
POSTED Tuesday, September 30, 2008
MSNBC posted a short video clip about Warhammer Online. The clip consists of about 40% CG cutscene, 30% gameplay, and 30% taking head footage of some of the developers at the Tokyo Game Show. Fortunately for the clip, one of...
POSTED Tuesday, September 30, 2008
In Multiwinia's TRON-like world, you move little dudes around as they spawn. That's mostly all there is to it. Some of the incidental rules vary. You might be trying to occupy victory locations, cart a statue back to your base,...
POSTED Tuesday, September 30, 2008
There's a big fat demo of Sacred 2 available now. It's a monster, coming in at 1.7GBs, and it's available from the usual hosts (Filefront and Fileshack, for instance). You can play a seraphim character up to level 10, although...
POSTED Tuesday, September 30, 2008
In 1746, three Spanish men-of-war are sighted off the coast on New Spain, bearing down on Southwatch, a fishing village built on a hill. Like all of my settlements, Southwatch is exceedingly well defended, with a fortress, at least three...
POSTED Monday, September 29, 2008
You won't be playing Fable II with your friends when it comes out next month, unless your friends come over to your house to play. And why would they do that, since they won't be able to use their characters?...
POSTED Monday, September 29, 2008
Yeah, sure, the new Nintendo DS with a pink breast cancer ribbon logo is a mostly a marketing gimmick. If you buy one, $5 of the $130 cost goes to Susan G Komen for the Cure, the largest breast cancer...
POSTED Monday, September 29, 2008
This was supposed to be a pretty exciting week for new games, with the release of Rise of the Argonauts, a promising RPG set in Ancient Greece; Sacred 2, the sequel to the cult hit German action RPG; and Project:...
POSTED Monday, September 29, 2008
The nearly finished Ghostbusters game that was going to be published by Sierra was canceled in the merger between Sierra and Activision. At this point, it seems the game will probably never see the light of day. Based on what...
POSTED Monday, September 29, 2008
There's a lot of paperwork when you have a revolution. No nation is born without spilling a lot of blood and ink (there's probably some saying in French to that effect). So first you declare independence -- in writing --...
POSTED Friday, September 26, 2008
Here's a great way to introduce the revelation at the end of a countdown timer:We hope you haven't dedicated too much time and stress to this 12-hour long countdown event.That's how Bungie introduced the revelation at the end of their...
POSTED Friday, September 26, 2008
Playstation 3 Burnout: Paradise players can now download the patch that adds trophy support to the game. Here's a list of the trophies. To developer Criterion's credit, they didn't just ape the Xbox 360 achievements. Instead, the trophies are their...
POSTED Friday, September 26, 2008
"Our level is real annoying." That's one of the comments from Kunal Patel and Zach Gage as they demo the Little Big Planet level their team created last weekend at the 24-hour game jam for the Parsons New School for...
POSTED Friday, September 26, 2008
It's the calm before the storm. Of independence. How's that sound? Is it better if I pause before the "of independence" part, or should I just say it all in one breath, like "storm of independence"? I'm running various catchphrases...
POSTED Thursday, September 25, 2008
Bejeweled is pretty awesome, isn't it? But to make it even more addicting, Popcap has built World of Warcraft around it, so that when you take a break from matching up gems, you can level up your troll or join...
POSTED Thursday, September 25, 2008
Gamespot reports that a California Spore player has filed a class action suit against Electronic Arts on the grounds that the game's copy protection scheme violates a state consumer protection law by not disclosing that it installs SecurROM onto your...
POSTED Thursday, September 25, 2008
This has been making the rounds, so make sure you're not left out. Yeah, sure, it looks like a silly ad for the latest Wario game on the Wii. And it is. At first....
POSTED Thursday, September 25, 2008
This just in:The forces of Destruction have proven victorious in the Road to WAR and to the victors go the spoils! The Inevitable City has been raised to Rank II on all servers unlocking new content within the cities and...
POSTED Thursday, September 25, 2008
My problem with the Arawak War was a lack of pre-war planning. But now I've wiped them out, I've got a new army, and I've got more cannons to spread among my settlements for defense. So I figure it's time...
POSTED Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway opens with a "Previously…on Brother's in Arms" recap. I don't mean that figuratively. I mean that literally. Literally "literally" and not figuratively "literally". A voiceover dude literally says, with that episodic TV gravitas, "Previously…on Brothers...
POSTED Wednesday, September 24, 2008
What, the new multi-racial starting area in Vanguard , Sony Online's beleaguered MMO, wasn't enough to entice you into giving it a shot? How about a pair of Gnomish Rocket Boots? How's that sound? Still not sold? Okay, how about...
POSTED Wednesday, September 24, 2008
In a typical MMO, when you die, you respawn with a temporary experience point penalty, or maybe dinged equipment that has to be repaired. Maybe you're a ghost until you float back to your body. But mostly you're forgiven and...
POSTED Wednesday, September 24, 2008
In 1644, three cannons accompanied by a pair of veteran soldiers open fire on the Arawak settlement of Cubanacan. The tiny village falls in a single turn, leaving only the larger settlement of Boriken to the west. You'd think it...
POSTED Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Showing a characteristic cluelessness as to how polls and politics works, the Xbox Live press center trumpeted the following numbers based on "nearly 100,000 LIVE Americans [who] turned out to cast their “votes” in a poll over Xbox LIVE, making...
POSTED Tuesday, September 23, 2008
The picture above is one of the last things I saw in Warhammer Online before I died. There were about fifteen of us defending a dwarven keep. I mostly stood on the ramparts and fired my flintlock down into the...
POSTED Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Last year, 20th Century Fox optioned the movie rights to The Sims. After all, a franchise that big can't simply go unoptioned, can it? Note that "optioning" is in no way the same thing as "making a movie". It's just...
POSTED Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Greetings citizens of New Spain on this lovely day in 1644. We landed on these bountiful shores exactly one hundred and fifty years ago. Today, I stand before you, on the steps of the fully staffed New Madrid town hall...
POSTED Monday, September 22, 2008
Harmonix web director Jeff Chausse posted some of the community features in store for RockBand.com. The web site will be getting a complete overhaul. Among the new features is an online photo creator that lets you do photo shoots with...
POSTED Monday, September 22, 2008
The sustained elevated threat level to your wallet continues this week. Extreme caution is advised in the vicinity of Best Buys, Gamestops, Wal-Marts, and Targets. Prominent threats include big-name multiplatform titles Lego: Batman, the latest Brothers in Arms WWII shooter...
POSTED Monday, September 22, 2008
Codemasters announced their plans for downloadable content for GRID, which is the best racing game of the year…so far. Expect the "8 Ball pack" this fall, with a "V8 Supercars pack" later in the year. Both will be paid content...
POSTED Sunday, September 21, 2008
After successfully prosecuting the Incan War, do I press on against other nearby native settlements? Or do I disband my army and get down to the business of settling this New World? The name of the game is colonization, not...
POSTED Friday, September 19, 2008
Warhammer Online is out now. You know how much it sucks when you're on a server and there's well-coordinated group on the other team, slapping you down whenever you try to oppose them? No matter what you do, they've just...
POSTED Friday, September 19, 2008
Last week, I posted about a Castle Crashers-themed car at the LeMons 24-hour race in Toledo for cars that cost less than $500. The car in question had a lovely green castle crasher painted on the hood and a brick...
POSTED Friday, September 19, 2008
The new motorcycle patch is out for Burnout: Paradise, adding two-wheelers to Criterion's smash-em-up racing game. Unfortunately, the motorcycles drive by an entirely different set of rules. As soon as they wreck, the riders vanish. The actual motorcycles themselves are...
POSTED Friday, September 19, 2008
If Red Alert 3 is as good as this trailer, it will be the game of the year. Of course, a real time strategy game can't rely on slickly edited celebrities, or even Peter Stormare reprising "oh snap" from...
POSTED Friday, September 19, 2008
1563 is a turning point in two ways. My army avenges Beaver Dam by destroying the Incan settlement of Cuzco, capturing 103 gold, a valuable treasure worth another 803 gold once I get it back to Spain, and a native...
POSTED Thursday, September 18, 2008
This week saw two dramatic and simultaneous developments for Age of Conan, the struggling fantasy MMO. In the lastest patch, developer Funcom finally added the PvP (player vs. player) system, which was supposed to be one of the game's big...
POSTED Thursday, September 18, 2008
...online spaces like World of Warcraft are making some spooks, generals and Congressmen extremely nervous. They imagine terrorists rehearsing attacks in these worlds, just like the U.S. military trains with commercial shoot-em-up games. They worry that the massively multiplayer games...
POSTED Thursday, September 18, 2008
Force Unleashed is a pretty terrible game, and I can't recommend playing it. It's sloppy and underdone, with a surprising number of glitches for a AAA release from a big publisher. However, it is also the best bit of Star...
POSTED Thursday, September 18, 2008
In a Rolling Stone interview, former Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash was asked about his involvement in Guitar Hero when he said:And they’re doing a Hendrix one, which is great.Oops. Us blogger types love celebrities who are clueless about NDAs....
POSTED Thursday, September 18, 2008
My intention is to build up my colonies to the point that I've got a healthy economy going, at which point I'll detach a pair of soldiers to accompany the cannons I've purchased from Spain. This will be the army...
POSTED Wednesday, September 17, 2008
It's easier to curse the darkness than light a candle. Actually, I might have butchered the saying, but that's the appropriate way to put it when it comes to the copy protection issues with Spore, Electronic Arts' amoeba-to-universe sim that...
POSTED Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Mike Griffith is the CEO of Activision Publishing (pictured above taking a flamethrower to your discretionary income). He doesn't make the company's games, but when he talks about ways to get more money from you, you better sit up and...
POSTED Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Hey, if you're going to be in Los Angeles to try to get onto the Rock Band reality TV show, you might as well go all-in and try to get into the Gears of War 2 reality TV show, too!...
POSTED Wednesday, September 17, 2008
The Pew Internet and American Life Project has just published a survey of kids aged 12-17 about their videogaming habits. The big surprise is that 99% of boys in that age group play videogames. Wow. Who knew that one in...
POSTED Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Multiwinia will be available later this week. But until then, I bring you horrifying images I've captured of virtual carnage from the front lines: futile marches into heavy turrets, air strikes, napalm, meteor showers, and plague. Fortunately, you can't hear...
POSTED Tuesday, September 16, 2008
In the games I've played of Civilization IV: Colonization so far, I played nice with the native Americans. They're invaluable trade partners, and with missionaries in place, they'll provide a steady stream of new colonists. Their settlements eat up a...
POSTED Tuesday, September 16, 2008
At the beginning of the year, there were two competing superhero MMOs on their way. Sony was developing DC Universe Online at their Austin MMO studio, and City of Heroes developer Cryptic Studios was making Marvel Universe Online. Talk about...
POSTED Tuesday, September 16, 2008
One of this holiday's final scheduling pegs has fallen into place: Blizzard has made it official that the Wrath of the Lich-King expansion for World of Warcraft will launch on November 13. Expect world-wide decreases in productivity and widespread internet...
POSTED Monday, September 15, 2008
So, a great big update to Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. Among the changes is the game's first multi-racial starting area. When you roll up a new character, you can either work your way through your race's unique starting area, or...
POSTED Monday, September 15, 2008
I don't see how people can play two MMOs. There simply aren't enough hours in the day. And with the "launch" of Warhammer Online this past weekend (the servers went live for people who've pre-ordered the collector's edition), I'm...
POSTED Monday, September 15, 2008
There are lots of middling threats to you wallet this week. Star Wars: Force Unleashed for every platform except the Sega Genesis. Pure, which is yet another ATV racing game (see our guide to telling one racing game from another)....
POSTED Monday, September 15, 2008
You're in for a lot of driving this holiday season. All the various racing games on the way might seem confusing. It can be hard to keep them straight based on bullet points about how many tracks, how many cars,...
POSTED Monday, September 15, 2008
I'm not sure which is an more odious idea: Rush Hour director Brett Ratner doing a Guitar Hero movie or producer Mark Burnett doing a Rock Band reality TV show. While the former is just Ratner shooting the breeze with...
POSTED Friday, September 12, 2008
If there's one thing Pain needs, it's sodomy by clown someplace new. This downloadable Playstation 3 game of ragdoll Jackassery has suffered from a lack of content since it came out a year ago. All you got for your money...
POSTED Friday, September 12, 2008
Rock Band 2 comes out this Sunday. Just like Spore came out last Sunday. And Mercenaries 2 the Sunday before it. Also this Sunday, the head start program for pre-orders of the Warhammer Online Collector's Edition begins, meaning the game...
POSTED Friday, September 12, 2008
A little hobbit burglar has sent me a tell while I'm ripping the tongues from brimstone leeches. He says we have a lot in common. At first, I think he's hitting on me (I am, after all, a hot elf...
POSTED Friday, September 12, 2008
MY SISTERS SWORD There it is in the "Looking for Fellowship" chat channel, in all caps. Some guy looking for help with a quest called My Sister's Sword. He gets no response. A few minutes later: MY SISTERS SWORD Someone...
POSTED Thursday, September 11, 2008
Games Radar has a painful comparison of Mercenaries 2 on the latest console systems and on the venerable Playstation 2. On one hand, I'm sure Playstation 2 owners are happy for whatever new games they can get their hands on....
POSTED Thursday, September 11, 2008
There aren't any screenshots available yet for Kivi's Underworld, the next action RPG from the creators of Depths of Peril. So instead, I've posted a screenshot of the game I'm reminded of when Kivi's Underworld developer Steven Peeler talks about...
POSTED Thursday, September 11, 2008
As you probably already know, the 24-hour LeMons race is this weekend at the Toledo Speedway. The LeMons, not to be confused with the LeMans, is limited to cars worth $500 and under. No, I'm not missing a zero. This...
POSTED Thursday, September 11, 2008
Titled Mill announced a new mini-expansion for their Ancient Egyptian city builder, Children of the Nile. The expansion adds an Alexandria campaign consisting of three scenarios centering around the construction of the Great Lighthouse and the Library of Alexandria. Right...
POSTED Thursday, September 11, 2008
I am a level 48 elven minstrel who is, if I do say so myself, pretty bad-ass. But even bad-ass elven minstrels have days when they should have just stayed home. Read about it after the jump....
POSTED Wednesday, September 10, 2008
In a press release titled "EA's Madden NFL 09 Tackles Top Movie Releases in August", Electronic Arts boasted that fake football beats real movies.Madden NFL, the best-selling sports franchise in videogame history, launched on August 12 and registered approximately $133.5...
POSTED Wednesday, September 10, 2008
You've seen what famous people do with Spore. Now check out what they do with Bangai-O Spirits. Unfortunately, the average celebrity won't be able to wrap his or her pretty head around Treasure's latest puzzle shooter. So you'll have to...
POSTED Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Microsoft will shut down Ensemble Studios, which they acquired in 2001, as soon as Halo Wars ships early next year. In an official statement to Gamespot, the company called it "a fiscally rooted decision that keeps [Microsoft Game Studios] on...
POSTED Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Oh man, you Arawak guys have no idea what you've just gotten yourselves into. On September 23rd, Civilization IV: Colonization will plant its Old World flag on retail shelves. Look for our exclusive Colonization game diaries to begin one week...
POSTED Tuesday, September 9, 2008
It's the ancient times before Google maps and I'm looking for a stolen gold ingot some dwarf carried away to Orod Laden. Orod Laden? Where the heck is that? I can't see hide nor hair of anything called "Orod Laden"...
POSTED Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Electronic Arts is one of the most draconian publishers when it comes to intrusive copy protection for their PC games. Like many of the big publishers, they take digital rights management seriously, often to the detriment of paying customers. It's...
POSTED Tuesday, September 9, 2008
This election has been super easy for me, since I became a single-issue voter on March 20, 2003. But many of you don't have that luxury. You might actually have to weigh the candidates' positions on multiple issues. That can...
POSTED Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Sometimes I'm happy to be wrong. This is one such case. I had some reservations about whether the Wii was up to the task of bringing as many zombies to the slaughter as Dead Rising really needed. The original game...
POSTED Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Can you see Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin in the above screenshot of me and Elrond hanging out and talking about the Presidential election? Does it help if I zoom in on the hotbar like so? If you play...
POSTED Monday, September 8, 2008
By day, David Randall of Saginaw, Texas writes software for the F-35 Lightning II, the advanced stealth fighter from the Joint Strike Fighter program. But by night, he ports old games to unlikely platforms. He just recently finished a full...
POSTED Monday, September 8, 2008
This topic has already been covered extensively in the media. This new story repeats old information, and contains rumors and innuendo from anonymous sources, attempting to create a new sensational angle, and is highly irresponsible. This was Microsoft's response to...
POSTED Monday, September 8, 2008
So Spore is out this week. Finally! Now you, too, can find out what this game is all about. But should you? I suppose you could go read a review somewhere and base that on whether or not to buy...
POSTED Monday, September 8, 2008
Believe it or not, it's a slow week. The threat level is mildly elevated for Playstation 2 owners desperate for something new. Be on the alert for a sequel to Yakuza, an awkward Japanese gangster game that tried hard to...
POSTED Monday, September 8, 2008
Joe Santulli would probably laugh at the closet where you keep your games. He's got an entire warehouse of games. You can just smell the musty 80s as he walks along the shelves of cartridges and past the row of...
POSTED Friday, September 5, 2008
One of the MMOs I'm most curious about, but that I freely admit I will probably never ever ever play in a thousand years, is Eve Online. This sci-fi MMO from Iceland is a fascinating social experiment that I'm content...
POSTED Friday, September 5, 2008
If you're under 30, you can just skip this entry. I think there's something down there about Viva Pinata or Mercenaries 2 you can go read. But if you're over 30 and you remember the days of yore before Peter...
POSTED Friday, September 5, 2008
Have you heard of this Spore thing? It's apparently a game where you make a creature and then post a little movie of it on YouTube. I think it might do some other stuff, too, but no one can really...
POSTED Friday, September 5, 2008
One of the main selling points for Rock Band 2 is that it'll let you play almost all of your Rock Band 1 songs*. The "almost" refers to developer Harmonix's caveat that not all of the songs from the Rock...
POSTED Thursday, September 4, 2008
I was recently given Thalronn, a powerful club more effective than Doom of Gurzmat, the sword I'd been using for as long as I can remember. Gloin gave me Doom of Gurzmat after I'd killed a goblin leader named Gurzmat...
POSTED Thursday, September 4, 2008
Developer Edge of Reality and publisher Sega just released a 500MB update for the Xbox 360 version of their Incredible Hulk game, adding multiplayer support to the game. Now two Hulks at a time can jump around in contained city...
POSTED Thursday, September 4, 2008
While reading this Gaming Nexus interview with one of the developers of >Pure, it struck me that there's nothing quite so boring as someone talking about a racing game. Yadda yadda yadda heightfield technology yadda yadda yadda vehicle customization yadda...
POSTED Thursday, September 4, 2008
Wait, hold on! Don't buy an Xbox 360 today! Phew, that was close. Did I get you in time? I just wanted to make sure you knew the Xbox 360 gets $50 cheaper tomorrow. The one with the big hard...
POSTED Thursday, September 4, 2008
Today I did the 'I'm just going to log in real quick and check something in the auction house' thing. And then I played for four hours. I was at the auction house trying to assemble two optimized sets of...
POSTED Wednesday, September 3, 2008
In response to my tulip problems, thanks to Balasarius for referring me to Pinata Island, the Viva Pinata wiki. It's still a work in progress in terms of the specifics for Trouble in Paradise, the latest Viva Pinata that just...
POSTED Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Matt Peckham at PC World has poked around a few websites and concluded that it's going to be a high-and-dry holiday season for the Nintendo Wii. He also notes from the latest sales figures:[Are the July sales figures] setting the...
POSTED Wednesday, September 3, 2008
I'm driving parrots from one end of a winding mountain road to another. It's my third attempt. It seems the Venezuelan army really doesn't want these parrots to get to their destination. They've suddenly stationed heavily armed guards all over...
POSTED Wednesday, September 3, 2008
See that picture up there? That's me with a pick-up group. We're fighting a Nazgul. That's right. A Nazgul. Among the usual quests in Lord of the Rings Online are quests arranged into books and chapters. They tell stories that...
POSTED Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Stardock just announced Entrenchment, the first of three planned "micro-expansions" for the excellent real time strategy game, Sins of a Solar Empire. Entrenchment will add new planetary defenses, including turret upgrades, mine fields, and subspace inhibitors that slow down nearby...
POSTED Tuesday, September 2, 2008
And so it begins. Your wallet will is in dire peril between now and Thanksgiving. Tighten your belt, take out a second mortgage, and sell the kids. Fortunately, this week's really exciting release, Mercenaries 2 (above, in a rare moment...
POSTED Tuesday, September 2, 2008
I want one thing from Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise, the sequel to the garden sim from developer Rare. Just one thing. A snow garden swarming with penguins. Waddling, cavorting, swimming, honking penguins like the ones in the penguin tank...
POSTED Tuesday, September 2, 2008
"Castle Crashers is a buggy mess!" At least that's what I'd heard. It's apparently not quite ready for prime time when it comes to playing online, and the developers seem to know it. A patch is on the way. So...
POSTED Tuesday, September 2, 2008
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