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I'm scared, you guys.

Up until now, movies based on video games haven't bothered me. Resident Evil? Who cares. Silent Hill? Meh. Tomb Raider? Whatevs. Those are series I don't really have a huge emotional attachment to, so I didn't fret when their big-screen counterparts turned out to be awful.

But Shadow of the Colossus? That's a game too dear to my heart -- something I don't want inevitably ruined by the machine of Hollywood. No matter how much the director says he likes the game. 

So, Hollywood executives, if I could just pull you away from your cocaine for one moment, I have a single suggestion for your film: Use Koh Otani's original soundtrack.

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Nothing says "immediate action" over handling dwindling resources better than expending more resources on shooting, blowing up, and knocking over other things expending resources. Humanity: Our bodies reached for the stars, but not our brains.

Video Blips:

• Fun fact: Pairing "The Ride of the Valkyries" with footage of heavy air combat is totally original. Thankfully, PlanetSide 2's impressively super-scaled shootouts compensates my bout of chronic sarcasm.

Continue after the break for crashing a party assassin-style in Hitman: Absolution's Sniper Challenge and defending more motherland in a content update for Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad.

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I only have two memories of my early childhood.

The first, and probably the most prevalent, is of playing t-ball with my dad as my coach. We were the first team to ever score a double play in the league (which they threw out as being “against the spirit of tee-ball”). The second memory, while certainly less amazing (and traumatizing), is of sitting at my grandmother’s house and playing video games with my oldest brother. He had received a Super Nintendo and Super Mario World for his birthday, and we sat there all day playing until our eyes hurt and he got tired enough that it was affecting his performance (the scientific studies of fatigue and its effect on motor skills obviously didn’t exist in the far-away time of the ‘90s).

That memory is one of the driving forces behind my love of video games. My dad had passed away a year or so before that and my ability to get close to anyone had been seriously hindered. Sitting there with my brother and helping him navigate the Mushroom Kingdom allowed me to bond with someone. It was a type of reverse aversion therapy; If I wanted to experience and help with the game, I’d have to talk and interact with another human being. After that, I inherited the NES (which had been collecting dust in my brother’s bedroom) and the trove of games that came with it. Playing those (and sneaking into my brother’s bedroom to play his SNES when he wasn’t around), allowed me to have a reason to talk to other kids my age. Oddly enough, video games gave me a social life and made me less of an outcast...weird, right?

Fast forward to a more recent weekend and I’m sitting down to finally dig into Fable Heroes. I’ve never been an enormous fan of the Fable series, but I've always enjoyed the hack-and-slash genre. Besides, I was given the game in exchange for this article (thanks, Bitmob!), so what’s the worst that could come of it?

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I know you're all busy hunting hoards of demons and monsters on your epic quest to rid the world of evil, but I suggest you take a breather and read some community reviews. You need to give that clicking finger a break.

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Diablo III: It's diabolically good
By William Schink

You've probably heard from plenty of people how good Diablo III is, but William's voice is a bit unique because he didn't like Diablo II. Despite his lack of love for the second installment of Blizzard's action role-playing series, the third entry won him over. Read his review to find out why.

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Review: Metro 2033
By Ryan Juel

I know you're all excited about those shiny new releases, but Ryan wants to tell you about 2010's underappreciated Metro 2033. I mean, you aren't going to find very many other shooters based off of Russian novels, so you should give his write-up a look.

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Max Payne 3: The tale of the angry, pill-popping gringo
By Danny Mercado

Danny shovels a lot of praise upon Max Payne 3's altar, giving extra props to the shooter's multiplayer experience. I've been too busy to playing Diablo III to give this game a try yet despite all of the excellent things people like Danny have said about it. Right after I kill Diablo, I swear.

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Back in the swinging sixties, you couldn't walk 10 feet through the American mid-West without tripping over an Italian film crew working on a spaghetti western. Tales of stolen gold, corrupt lawmen, and ugly Mexicans by people like Sergio Leone were ridiculously popular and continued to be for a good twenty years before the films dipped out of fashion. There have been a few noteworthy westerns in recent years, The Proposition, 3:10 to Yuma, True Grit, and so on, but so few western games and fewer still good ones.

The previous generations aren't the most given to gaming; if you were one of the lucky people who saw A Fist Full of Dollars at the cinema on its release date, you're likely mystified by all these floating shapes on your grandson's magic tablet thing right now.

Though recent western films feel vaguely archaic, there's clearly still a market for them, so why are there so few video games set in this kind of plot landscape?

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A month ago, when publisher Activision announced 007 Legends, a first-person shooter incorporating six of secret agent James Bond's greatest missions (including Skyfall, the upcoming film), the potential seemed endless. People immediately started making up their wish lists and then sat back, fingers crossed, and waited for their dreams to come true.

Cut to this week, when Activision revealed the first of Bond's "greatest hits": Moonraker.

Granted, we can't really expect the makers of Legends to lead with the big guns. They do have to save something for the Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show in a couple weeks, after all. But still...Moonraker? Really?

In an unscientific poll I conducted among my feelings and emotions, Moonraker ranks somewhere between "accidentally sitting on my balls" and "watching puppies get run over." It's a cheesy, stupid film, a low point for the franchise in which the filmmakers tried too late to cash in on Star Wars and ended up with a ridiculous farce in which a maniac tries to eradicate the entire human race with space lasers and replace them with people who look like they were kicked out of the auditions for Blue Lagoon for being too stupid.

Basically, I'm not a fan.

I'm sure the other movies in the game will be better than Moonraker (they'd have to be; science says so), but I have a crazy section of my brain that heard that announcement and wondered what would happen if Eurocom (the developer of Legends) allowed Moonraker to set the pace for the rest of their selections. What I ended up with might be the most terrible licensed game ever made, which is saying something in a world in which Charlie's Angels exists.

Let's see how bad the last four choices can get.

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Once again, we peer into the future and...hey, are those lottery numbers?

Two weeks from today, game-industry trade show Electronic Entertainment Expo will wind down, and the survivors will limp off into the night like escaped slaves from a Krispy Kreme factory. But here in the pre-awesome glow of not-yet-E3, we can all still feel our feet and dreamily swoon (read: ceaselessly bitch that BioShock Infinite won't be at the show) over the endless possibilities. And since last year's E3 predictions nailed every last detail, let's spoil those possibilities. Because we care.

What say you, panel of experts? What's on tap for the biggest week in gaming?

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“A’course, we a-bringin’ the Wii U and alla our new third-party support! Wah-HOO! So we gonna have-a the EA, we gonna have-a the you-be-soft, and oh, f*** me, I can't keep-a the straight face. No, it’s a-gonna be Family, capice? Me, a-Pikmin, Smash Bros., alla the made guys. Maybe we bring-a the new kid, Star Fox. Hey! He’s almost-a 20 years old! Time to getta him puke-drunk and make him a man!”

- Mario, Super Mario Galaxy

 

 

“I'm taking revengence on whoever invented the word ‘revengence.’”

- Raiden, Metal Gear Rising: Revengence

 

 

 

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We’ve all seen them -- xXx1337SN!P3RxXx, ysosrsface, SilentAssassin69, and other horrible usernames. It seems like they’re everywhere nowadays (kind of like the cursing 12-year-olds in Call of Duty multiplayer), and we can't do a whole lot about that.

We can, however, try to prevent future cases by informing people how to choose a username, and that's why I put this list together.

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1) DON’T randomly mash keys because you can’t think of anything

I know this one is easy to do, but you’re going to look pretty ridiculous with a name like skdjvfs7672.

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2) DO pick something unique

The best usernames are always unique -- something no one else would think of. Avoid clichés and check around the Internet before you pick. Chances are, if it’s taken, then it’s not as clever as you think.

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It came from eBay often focuses on weird and ridiculously overpriced auctions on eBay, but today's item is a little more affordable -- it's just useless.

This weird game-development trinket is a GameCube NR (not retail) disc. If you've ever seen a debug console or pre-release build of a game, it was likely on one of these. It's simply a branded burnable disc. In the GameCube's case, anything put on an NR was actually primed for testing and debugging, but only the NR reader could boot up information in this format. 

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The Nintendo 3DS is taking one step closer toward the world of modern gaming consoles. Developer Wayforward Technologies is releasing an update to its most recent 2D platformer for the handheld, Mighty Switch Force. Technically, this is downloadable content, a first for the 3DS, even if the method is a little unorthodox.

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This weekend is the 2012 installment of the Blip Festival, where a score of the world’s finest chiptune artists will commandeer The Gramercy Theater on 23rd Street in the Big Apple and manipulate old Atari 2600s and NES sound boards to create beautiful compositions for those primitive input devices you call ears.

For the uninitiated, chiptune is a style of music that uses the simple sound processors found in classic-gaming devices as original instruments. It's like if dubstep could only be created using the same technology that the Mega Man soundtrack used.

This year’s lineup includes MisfitChris, Danimal Cannon, and Chipocrite. The full lineup and schedule can be found on the concert’s official website.

I really want all of you to go, then come back and tell me who I should be listening to. Ever since I stumbled into the Jamspace at PAX East, I’ve been way into the blippity and the bloopity. And yes, I realize that makes me sound like an uncool dad far on the other side of the generation gap.

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We asked, and like an end-of-act boss dropping rare loot, you delivered.

Our intrepid Bitmob community writers took on the task of writing about Diablo III in our latest Bitmob Wants You challenge. And they came through in a big way -- many of these articles have already hit the front page of Bitmob (and GamesBeat, too!). We list all the entries below. 

Thanks to everyone who participated!

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Diablo III: It's diabolically good
By William Schink

"I have played 20 minutes of Diablo II, and disliked all of those minutes," William writes. But after playing Diablo III, he started singing a different tune. Read on for his review. (And go Team Monk!)

In defense of Diablo III's skill system
By Lachlan Knibb

One criticism series fans have leveled at Diablo III is that its character building lacks the permanence of previous games. Lachlan argues that the current, more fluid system is superior because of the difference between "perceived choice" and "actual choice." Interesting take.

Hit the jump for more articles.

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