You may recall a post back in the day where I lauded the amazing Live from Bonnaroo 2007 album by Rx Bandits. It only recently occurred to me in my car this weekend while listening to the aforementioned album just why it is so good and why the Bandits are so good in general. You see, back when I was reading the Wikipedia page for the Bandits albums The Resignation and …And the Battle Begun I noticed an interesting little tidbit: ...

Deep from the trenches, it’s time for your Monday video feature: Embedded Reporter. In their continued quest to create the most hilarious videos for each character class in Team Fortress 2, we had the debut of the Meet the Sniper video last week. What can I say? Valve just oozes brilliance from every pore. If I’m not mistaken, the only classes we have left now are the Spy and Medic and the possibilities for both of those classes should be hilarious. I just love that the new class designs allow for such individual characterization. The new art style was a brilliant idea. ...

Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen. Due to some poor life decisions, I find myself stranded for five weeks without any video games. What’s a guy to do, right? Well, rather than just giving you some of the headlines from the week’s video game news in lieu of what I was planning to be gameplay impressions, reviews, and the like, I’ve instead started a five week “All-Stars” feature. Each week we’re going to look at a video game era and spotlight my top three games from that era. Each of these games will also receive a place setting at the prestigious “Table of Honor” feature that I’m working on. Here’s the weekly plan: ...

This final runner-up was the smash success sequel to a radical idea from Nintendo that, surprisingly, almost didn’t even see the light of day on US soil. Today we examine the best-selling game on the Gamecube, Super Smash Bros. Melee. Runner-up: Super Smash Bros. Melee The idea was so brilliant, I’m surprised no one came up with it earlier. Take the most famous, recognizable characters from Nintendo’s varied franchises and toss them all together in a game where they can pummel the crap out of each other. Melee refines the concepts first introduced in the N64 classic by adding in dodges, another special move, more dynamic stages, and way more characters. ...

You’ve probably heard the saying that hindsight is 20/20 on Monday morning, so just imagine how well I can call ’em two days later on Wednesday. That’s right, it’s time for Wednesday Morning Quarterback, your weekly sports round-up. Once Florida managed to turn their rough road trip around and take two of three from Philadelphia, we got ourselves tripped up by the stellar Tampa Bay Rays, taking only one win out of the three in that series. Now our hopes of landing in first place lie solely in our ability to trounce the MLB’s worst team, the Seattle Mariners, while the Phillies hopefully lose to one of the best, the Boston Red Sox. ...

Our continuing examination of the best games of the post 16-bit, pre-current gen, we will be looking at two PS2 RPGs that I particularly enjoyed. Our first game was a groundbreaking collaboration between two entirely unrelated, gigantic companies that were leaders in their industry. What resulted was a great game that wasn’t quite simple or clean, but was surprisingly interesting and fun despite its flaws. That’s right, the game is the multi-million-selling Squaresoft and Disney collaboration, Kingdom Hearts. ...

Deep from the trenches, it’s time for your Monday video feature: Embedded Reporter. After a week of mentioning Metal Gear Solid 4 at least once in every post, I’m sure you’re getting damn near sick of hearing about Kojima’s latest masterpiece (or so I hear, can’t play yet :sob:). Let’s close off the MGS4 references for the short term with the video reviews posted by both Gametrailers and IGN. Enjoy! ...

There were certainly a lot of games between the 16-bit era and the current gen, but I, surprisingly, don’t have a whole lot of games on the list. It’s not that the medium entered a dark age or anything like that, it’s more that following the SNES era, I didn’t have the systems that were releasing all the AAA titles. This is why you’ll have to forgive me for missing highly-acclaimed masterpieces like Ico or Shadow of the Colossus, I just haven’t played them. ...

Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen. Due to some poor life decisions, I find myself stranded for five weeks without any video games. What’s a guy to do, right? Well, rather than just giving you some of the headlines from the week’s video game news in lieu of what I was planning to be gameplay impressions, reviews, and the like, I’ve instead started a five week “All-Stars” feature. Each week we’re going to look at a video game era and spotlight my top three games from that era. Each of these games will also receive a place setting at the prestigious “Table of Honor” feature that I’m working on. Here’s the weekly plan: ...

Here we are at the last of the 16-bit era’s all-stars that couldn’t quite crack the top three. This game is distinctly famous for Shigeru Miyamoto claiming that this game “proves that players will put up with mediocre gameplay as long as the art is good,” which he later apologized for claiming that he was expressing some frustration at Nintendo pressuring him to make changes to Yoshi’s Island to make it look more like this game. Another, more obvious clue, is that I talked about this game in my instruction manual editorial. Our last runner-up is Donkey Kong Country. ...