So you may be wondering why it's been two months since you last heard from us, and I'd be happy to tell you, but first, go ahead and play this YouTube video. Trust me.
It's an all-vocal episode of Digital Mystery Tour this week! Julian brings you seven songs composed and performed exclusively for video games. From the burning spirit of some special rangers to the sour grapes of an evil AI and an opera that will take your breath away, this collection of music really shows the incredible range that can be found in video games. Enjoy, and come back next week when we kick off Battle Themes month. You won't want to miss it!
Let’s face it, the Xbox One Reveal and all of the events that followed it have been disastrous. Not only has it enraged many gamers and the online community, but it has also caused many of the Microsoft fans to jump aboard the Sony Train.
Hello again! Patrick is on vacation in New York City this week, so it's up to Julian and new third chair Angelo to hold down the fort. Somehow, they manage to ramble on for two hours about this, that, and the other thing.
Sometimes I want to play games where I can summon Ifrit and fight enemies on the sides of buildings. Other times I want to leap across moving platforms, flatten enemies with my butt, and collect shiny stuff. But then there’re times when I want to play a game where I get dysentery and have to crawl through the woods inch by inch following the sound of buzzing flies to a dead body so I can loot it for supplies.
If you enjoy fighting games, you probably know a little something about the EVOlution Championship Series. Even if you don’t, you might want to, as the tournament is not only entertaining to veterans, but also great for newcomers to see what kinds of fighting experiences are out there. This year in particular has a huge amount of variety, with NINE different games being played. Whether you’re into 2D fighters, 3D fighters, super heroes, or technical execution based games, there is something for everyone.
This week, Julian takes you on a strange trip, highlighting some of the most bizarre games to ever grace home consoles. These games often break with conventions and defy description, and they have little in common apart from making people scratch their heads. And that's what makes them great. So buckle up, Dorothy, because Kansas is going bye-bye!
Unfortunately Jesse was unable to join us this week, but the show must go on. In his place PSTC welcomes Backloggers Anonymous host Angelo Grant and staff newcomer Justin Matkowski. Justin gets a chance to introduce himself to the community while the cast takes a look at a smorgasbord of topics including Nintendo’s recent actions, the insane success of EVO and summer gaming.
Welcome to the first ever Nerds Without Pants spoilercast. We've picked a doozy of a game to cover, too! Julian, Patrick, and special guest JD come together to talk about all things The Last of Us. No stone is unturned, as the Pantsless Ones take you through the entire story.
With over two decades of experience making games and a record of being independent before indie games were a trend in the gaming world, Spiderweb Software is the hardcore for the hardcore. Makers of such classic series as Geneforge, Avernum, and now Avadon, the company focuses on old school RPG experiences that most publishers and developers have abandoned.. While they primarily focus on the PC and Mac platforms, they recently experimented with mobile development, releasing Avadon and Avernum to iOS and Android with stunning success. It seems classic games are classic no matter what system they’re played on.
Sometimes, amazing graphics and great gameplay just aren't enough. You need to be able to set the scene just right, and a lot of times the perfect piece of music will do just that. This week on Digital Mystery Tour, Julian brings you some songs that excel at setting the mood for the moment or level that the appear in. From ethereal trance music to something that will run a chill up your spine, these songs are all about ambiance.
At PixlBit we pride ourselves on reporting news and reviewing games with as little bias as humanly possible. That being said, there are times when we don’t want to sit all quiet and polite and instead rage into the vastness that is the internet. In this installment, Jesse rages against Nintendo's self destructive death grip on IP image control.
It's a somber week for video games, as we have lost a titan. Ryan Davis, host of the Giant Bombcast has passed away, and Julian and Patrick start this episode of Nerds Without Pants by talking about how important Ryan was, and how much he's influenced NWP.
Over the past few days, Sony has been teasing a big announcement via a series of tweeted images and cryptic messages. “When Worlds Collide, Heroes Will Return” we were told in the last cryptic message – a message that I may add, also linked Insomniac Games with whatever was to be announced. Worlds colliding…could fans finally be treated to that long clamored for Jak and Ratchet crossover game? Nope, but what was finally revealed wasn’t too shabby either, as Ratchet and Clank will be returning in Ratchet and Clank: Into the Nexus on Sony’s PlayStation 3 later this fall.
The long anticipated Grand Theft Auto Gameplay Trailer was released earlier this morning, and it’s safe to say that it likely left many a gamer wide eyed, with their jaws firmly planted on the ground. The sheer epic mass that is the newly designed Los Santos is breathtaking. The trailer depicts a plethora of environments - from high rises to the great outdoors and everywhere in between – and it becomes clear that we’ll likely get lost more than once in this beautiful world that Rockstar has built for us.
People are always saying to me that they can’t game on their PC because it’s not powerful enough, or it doesn’t have this, or it doesn’t have that. Well, I’m here to tell you that might not be true. While playing AAA games and other major releases may require hardcore gaming rigs, there are a lot of lower budget indie games available that are cheap and easily playable on the most basic of systems.
It’s been a little over a year since Kickstarter kicked down the door of the video game industry and introduced itself. Double Fine’s then untitled adventure game utilized the crowd funding site to finance a game in a genre that most have presumed dead, or at least mostly dead (which means a little alive), for quite some time now. No reasonable publisher would hand money over to a studio not known to be especially financially successful, for an unproven IP in a genre that some younger gamers may not even know exists – and it’s hard to blame them.
It's happened to all of us, well the music lovers anyway. We boot up a game we're excited to play, settle in for the opening few moments, and at some point the game asks us to do one of the easiest things in the world: Press Start. And the music is so good, we just can't do it.
A great tragedy has befallen PixlBit. Through the instability and craziness that is technology, all previous episodes of Push Start to Continue have been lost. This calamity not only affects the denizens of PixlBit, but is considered a great loss to humanity as a whole. We are all a little worse off because of it.
Welcome! Please come in and make yourselves comfortable. It's all about that down home feeling this week, and Julian has a wonderful selection of songs that should make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Hi, we’re Nerds Without Pants, and we would like to bring you this podcast that you can never share with anyone you know, and for the low, low price of 499.99. If you don’t like that, you can listen to the radio. Actually, never mind. Feel free to share this with anyone and everyone. We’re sorry. (In case you didn’t figure it out, this week is all about the Xbox One.)
Link has jumped from one generation to the next while reinventing his style for saving princess Zelda with every iteration. Unfortunately, the most recent games have been much less groundbreaking than the golden age from the original through Ocarina of Time. Whereas the player had become accustomed to at least a few new mechanics and drastically different artistic styles between each installment, recently players have been fed mostly regurgitated ideas. Even so, the new technological capabilities of Nintendo’s 3DS and Wii U should provide plenty of new places to take the franchise.
We’ve let the dust settle and even waited long enough for some of the controversial policies to get reversed since E3 wrapped up, but we’ve got plenty of opinions about this year’s show. Each of us came into it with slightly different expectations and varying levels of optimism and negativity. Some of us were pleasantly surprised and others were given the huge serving of “meh” we anticipated. Read through each of the PixlBit staff’s impressions of E3 2013 and see whose opinions most closely align with yours.
They say that 1998 was the greatest year for gaming, and it's hard to argue that point! Julian certainly doesn't try, as he highlights some music from some of the biggest games of that fabled year. Enjoy this episode of Sound in Action, and let us know some of the songs and games you think of from 1998.
Final Fantasy. Just saying the name conjures up all manner of conflicting thoughts these days. Square Enix is not the company it once was, and its flagship RPG series has encountered a lot of negativity and lukewarm receptions in recent years. Don’t count this legendary franchise out just yet though; there are plenty of interesting developments for the series coming from E3, including more than one mea culpa from the development side of the equation. With games coming down the pipeline from FF X to XV, I think it’s best that we tackle them in Roman numerical order, don’t you?