PixlBit

Christ I've been away for a while, and believe me - I didn't mean to neglect you, Pixlbit, you minx, but I have been extremely busy with real life - vacation planning, working my ass off, and of course, working on Season 3 of Retro Rampage.

This is it!  The last episode until the next season starts (hopefully in a few weeks), and boy is it a doozy - Milon's Gaping Asshole Secret Castle.  The notoriously difficult and convoluted Hudson game featuring a little elf-like douche-waffle named Milon who shoots bubbles at an odd angle, has terrible inertia, and has to battle his way through hordes of goofy enemies in a castle filled with more trap doors and secret walls than even Dracula could come up with for even the most obnoxious Castlevania.  Yet still, we actually kind of enjoy this game.

With Episode 28 of Retro Rampage released, and episodes 29 and 30 trapped in post-processing-but-on-deck-for-release-soon, that 30th episode will mark the end of Season 2, and we'll be preparing for the third season. Since we love it here at PixlBit, and are using this as our second home away from home, we're going to give you some info on what we're planning on bringing to the table for the third season of Retro Rampage.

It's not a secret that I'm none too thrilled with the way big name companies handle their business and deal with their fans.  My love/hate relationship with SquareEnix has been on a downward spiral like a piece of soiled bathroom tissue in a toilet.  I don't understand why companies that have blockbuster intellectual properties do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WITH THEM.  And if they do end up doing something with them, they fuck it up horribly.  Now don't get me wrong, I understand that the games industry is an ever changing, living monster, that demands change and innovation, but for fucks sake, who said that a little throwback to the golden days is a bad thing?

As the years go by, we've seen games go from 8 and 16-bit sprites to full three dimensional models consisting of thousands of polygons, but can gaming continue advancing and innovating at the rate that it has been indefinitely?  Let's start by first taking a look at Moore's Law.

It's not uncommon for a company to forget about a great franchise, or ignore one that fans have been clamoring about for years, and it's not surprising that the company I'm talking about is one I spoke about before in Part 1.  Konami seems to have forgotten about a little gem that I had on the Sega Genesis called "Rocket Knight Adventures."  Yes, there was a lesser known sequel called "Sparkster" that for whatever reason changed the appearance of the main character, and the overall graphical style, in my opinion, was not up to par with the aforementioned.  Also, there was a PC/XBLA release of a Rocket Knight game in 2.5D that was actually quite enjoyable, but was only published by Konami, not developed, so it just didn't feel like a Rocket Knight game to me, though it was fairly fun.

So many games, so little time, but in this little amount of time, we have yet another entry into the Games That Get Ignored By Their Parent Companies, I mean, Games That Desperately Need Reboots... and stuff...

As I mentioned in an earlier post - I was the sexy and intelligent guest star on 1MoreCastle's PodCastle (listen to it here, it's pretty fantastic.)

There are many games and franchises that we all wish would come back, and just last week I covered the first of many that I wish would return - Zone of the Enders, but today I've got a game that I'm not sure many of you have heard of, but you may have seen this game on the shelves at an Electronics Boutique in 1998.

**NOTE:  This is the start of what will be a long re-uploading and re-releasing/tweaking of my previous articles.  This doesn't mean I won't have new material coming out as well, but if you see something strangely familiar, don't be alarmed - I'm simply getting my article archive put back out on the web for everyone's enjoyment :D