PixlBit

Open the door, get on the floor, everyone do the Buck Bumble! ...wait.

It's time to hit the dance floor! Let Julian be your DJ as he takes you through an audio journey of thumping base and funky beats. If you can't dance don't worry--just find an abandoned warehouse and dance your frustrations away, Footloose-style!

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Begin a musical journey with PixlBit!

Welcome to another excellent podcast from PixlBit! I guess once you've been bitten by the podcasting bug you feel this need to create interesting and entertaining shows, and with that in mind, I decided to spearhead Sound in Action: PixlBit's gaming music podcast!

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Oh, I need to press the GLOWING BUTTON in the room with nothing else in it? Thanks for telling me...I NEVER would have figured that out on my own!

As I was moving into the end game of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, I was tasked with finding three power couplings to unlock a door. It was a simple enough job, but in a game that had been almost entirely a linear affair, I was glad to have the rails taken off if even for a small section. It turned out that this wasn’t the case; any time I got remotely close to one of the power couplings Doktor would chime in on my codec to inform me that I was near my objective. Frowning, I destroyed the coupling and repeated the task with Doktor telling me exactly where to go and what to do. It made me realize just how much game design has changed in recent years, and what needs to be done to combat the need for constant hand holding that game designers have developed.

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Yeah, E3 is becoming a dinosaur, but it can become something new and important.

Nintendo made waves in the gaming industry recently when they announced that they wouldn’t be participating in a traditional press conference at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo. Right off the bat, people started in with the doom and gloom. Oh, Nintendo is fading fast! Nintendo doesn’t have anything to show! Rhetoric like this was prominent --as was talk that the entire E3 conference is a dinosaur -- and perhaps Nintendo is reading the writing on the wall and is beginning to part ways with the trade show. This sentiment has been circulating for years, and even though I believe that E3 is vital to the gaming industry, it’s high time that the show evolved.

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Kneel before Cyberpunk Odin!

In this age of long preview cycles and aggressive PR and marketing campaigns, it can be easy for the video game hype train to go so fast that it flies off the rails. The bigger the game, the bigger the hype, and few titles can ever hope to live up to it. Too Human was a game built on over ten years of increasing hyperbole, and when the game was finally released in 2008 the backlash from gamers and games writers far outpaced the merits of the actual finished product. I’d much rather evaluate games based on their actual strengths and weaknesses as opposed to what they were expected to do, and getting far enough removed from the initial hype allows for that. No, Too Human couldn’t live up to its lofty promises, but it’s also not the atrocity that some people painted it to be.

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