UPDATE: And that does it for round three, folks!  Voting is now closed!  Keep your eyes peeled for the championship round going up a little later today!

UPDATE: And that does it for round two, folks!  Keep your eyes peeled for round 3, which will be starting very soon.  Excitement!

In this exciting installment of PStC the guys talk about Lara's abrupt character arc in the new Tomb Raider, discuss evolving game review scores, and somehow end up on the subject of movies that made them cry as children.  Check the machismo at the door and prepare to get your cry on now, on Push Start to Continue.

They failed SimCity, caused gamers mis'ry! EA Fails! Woo ooh! Every day they're out not making game sales! Woo ooh! Sales not faring, do-bad, and they suck-sales!

UPDATE: Voting has been closed for round 1!  We're tallying votes and will be posting the results today along with round 2 matchups.  Even though you'll still be able to vote here (we don't have the means to close voting on the polls completely at this time), no new votes will be counted from here on out - so check out round 2 instead!

I'm kicking off a new segment where I talk about game music, and I wanted to do something special to introduce it. There's a lot of information in the YouTube description you might find interesting about the video itself, but I don't see any value in repeating that a second time here. Instead, I'll give you a little behind the scenes story about how I came up with this.

Irrational has honed their gameplay to new levels with each of their releases, from System Shock 2 to the upcoming BioShock Infinite. The defining elements of Irrational’s game design started off in a much more basic form with System Shock 2. When looking back at the success of that first game and its initially groundbreaking fighting mechanics, it becomes a little difficult to watch and replay today, considering how far Irrational games has come. However, the once simplistic mechanics from System Shock 2 has evolved into a refined railway shooter in BioShock Infinite. So let’s take a look at where Irrational has been as we look forward to where they are going.

Hello, and welcome to a very special edition of Nerds Without Pants! Patrick takes the helm this week for the holiday that was named after him. That...may not be an accurate statement, but the name of the game is all sorts of clever tricks and cons in the world of video games.

The Monster Hunting may be done for now, but there is more opportunity in the near future. Expect more streaming tomorrow!

I’m not a particularly angry person. Oh sure, stuff gets me upset every now and again, but when it comes to games I don’t see the point in getting out-and-out angry over stuff. I mean these are games, right? Sometimes though, things just collide in such a way where my honest reaction is anger; and right now I’m there.

We're digging into another game from our backlog:  Ninja Theory's Enslaved. We start by getting Julian's take on backlogged games from 2012, then we talk about what kind of a game Enslaved is.

With all my love for RPGs, fighting games, and big dumb action titles, it would probably come as a surprise that I have a large part of my heart reserved for music games. I’ve spent countless hours honing my skills on PaRappa the Rapper, Bust a Groove, and of course Guitar Hero. I even owned Britney’s Dance Beat because it was the closest thing Americans could get to a Bust a Groove 3, having been developed by the same team. However, one music game stands above them all in my eyes, and it’s the one that criminally never got a sequel. That game is Gitaroo Man, and I’m spending this edition of MIA to give some much needed love to a true diamond in the rough.

Something that has become commonplace in gaming’s new world is the infamous day one patch. Because development cycles are so incredibly tight games often have to go to the production line in an incomplete state, leaving the developer in a position to complete the bug fixing post-production, but pre-release. In many instances, the day one patch still isn’t enough to shore up the various bugs, leaving players with a game that may not even work properly on their machines. This raises the question – is it ethical to put a game on the production line that’s incomplete?

When it was announced that Tomb Raider was getting the reboot treatment a few years ago, plenty of people – yours truly included – made it clear that Lara should pay close attention to that other tomb raiding franchise headlined by Nolan North – errr - Nathan Drake.  The point is many people looked at Uncharted as Tomb Raider for the current generation.  The guys at Crystal Dynamics had their work cut out for them if they didn’t want to be square in the middle of Naughty Dogs giant shadow.

Reviewing games isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do. Boiling down exactly how you feel about an experience while providing an objective assessment of the game’s components is a delicate balancing act. With the introduction of always-online games, specifically Sim City, this fragile process has been put to the test. As editor-in-chief of this website, I have to consider how this new component of gaming is factored into our review policies and make a call about how the game’s score is affected.

Holy crap! This has to be PStC’s most random episode yet!  We start off with some talk on Tomb Raider, Red Dead Assassins (or Assassins Creed 4), and Monday Night Combat – Segue into some Ninja Turtles talk – get serious with some talk on games in/as education – and then finish it off with some weird Sims social experimentation.

People complain about the plethora of Modern Warfare first person shooters these days, but those same people forget that every few years there’s some genre that dominates the gaming landscape. We’ve gone through the survival horror phase, the RPG obsession, the fighting game craze, and of course the beat ‘em up era. During that time, one of the most popular and legendary brawlers was the Streets of Rage series. It’s been nearly 20 years since Sega’s personal head crackers had a new adventure, so it’s time to dust off this franchise and resurrect it.

You may have heard the news that F-Zero AX was discovered inside F-Zero GX. That news inspired a brief bit of talk about other places where things were hidden pretty deep inside a few games from the past, mostly on the N64. Naturally, SimCity took up a lot of time, too, and Issue 118 closes with some of Julian's Final Fantasy piece. Be sure to listen to the beginning to catch a few more details about the Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate Community week! Click through for listening and download links!

A certain inability to walk into a normal life pervades the player’s thirst for playful violence after taking down the Patriots in the Metal Gear series. The Winds of Destruction will have to fill that void. Some, like Sundowner, claim we surround the Self with violence, because of the feeling instilled when you kill your enemies and liberate the less fortunate and able. Others maintain that we argue philosophy as a way of waking up the beast inside of the Self. Regardless of the means, these musings have persisted through the Metal Gear franchise from the beginning. With Metal Gear Rising, they mesh high and low culture together in allusions that complicate our reason for loving to play.

I'm gonna keep this brief because frankly, I'm not feeling so great. We finished Darksiders. We had more fun talking about it than we did with the back half of the game. We get into some pretty weird things to talk about like sound effects and... horse physics. Maybe my fever started earlier than I thought.

When Jesse Miller, our resident features guru, asked if I would be interested in doing a Final Fantasy retrospective for the series’ 25^th anniversary last year my answer was a resounding “yes!” In the months that followed, I poured all of my love and dedication into a five part series detailing the 14 core Final Fantasy games. It was a labor of love for me; no series of games has been more influential or important to me as a gamer. I’m a staunch defender of these games, even when they go into weird territory like iOS time-wasters. That doesn’t mean that I’m blind to the fact that the series isn’t what it once was, however. As excited as I am for the future of Final Fantasy, I think that the fine folks over at Square Enix need to take a good long look at where the series stands. To that end, I have 5 things that I think could help immensely as we move forward into the next generation.

Hello again! This week on Nerds Without Pants Julian and Patrick give all of their love to the PlayStation 4. There’s been a ton of negative talk swirling around the new Sony console, and the Pantsless Ones bring a refreshing amount of positive vibes to the discussion. But before that—games!

That's right, EA gets a lot of attention in this week's PB & Jason. Why? Well, for starters, SimCity has always-on DRM that's preventing a lot of people from playing the game. Beyond that, rumors of an unsuccessful Dead Space 3 & the cancellation of a Dead Space 4 has drawn ire, whether these rumors are true or not! On top of all this, we've got a couple user blogs focused, some discussion on in-game promotions of some video game media outlets, a special mention of Epic Mickey for some of my favorite listeners, Japanese eShop rules, and a lot of talk about the upcoming Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate community event. PB & Jason is recorded in front of a live studio audience every Wednesday, weather permitting. Click through for listening and download links!

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.

What is this?! Two MIA features in a single week?!  This is madness…no.  This is PixlBit!