We would like to thank all the fine folks who made it out to San Francisco this past Friday evening for our first-ever (and definitely not last) Bitmob Community Meet-Up.

People came from far (Reno, Sacramento, Connecticut, Ohio...even Montreal!) and not so far (Managing Editor Greg Ford lives a few blocks away). You people are seriously nuts for wanting to come out to see us.

Unfortunately, I did not do a good job of taking a lot of pictures -- I never really think to do so until my girlfriend reminds me. And then I have to deal with the public embarassment of having to use her pink camera since I don't have one.

Regardless, I have a bunch more shots up on our Bitmob Facebook page, so please stop by, check them out, and tag yourselves (and please join as a fan if you haven't already). Here's a sampling (check out the third photo, with a special message that someone left for us gamers in the men's bathroom)...and expect some more photos and videos from our community friends that were there.

Update: Community member Jeff Grubb's update is up!

Game reviewers all have giant targets on their heads: Offer an opinion or score of any sort, and someone somewhere is going to want to kill you.

Or at the very least, tear down your character like it was a dollar-store piñata. During my 13 years in gaming media, I've been called biased for and against so many games and companies, I actually think they've all balanced out, and I'm technically back at "neutral."

In more recent years, however, due to the high review scores I've given to Halo 3 and Gears of War (10 out of 10 for both), I've been accused of being a Microsoft/Xbox fanboy by some message board folks. Well, damn...if I'm going to be called a fanboy, at least let me steer everyone in the right direction.

Sure, I've sat at my TV before, casually playing Halo by myself, studying maps, weapon locations and respawn times, jumping angles, and worst, the dispersing of shotgun pellets at various distances. (You'd think my game was better than it actually is....)

That's nothing, though. If I'm a fanboy of anything, it'd be these five games or series below. You want to see crazy? And unreasonable obsessions? Read on...but more importantly, tell us your stories on Bitmob (tag: "fanboy confessions") or in the comments below.

Hey everyone,

The Internet is great. It lets us access information instantly, communicate with far-away loved ones without having to actually speak to them, and view an infinite amount of adult content.

The Internet also sucks. It eats up our free time, fills our heads full of nonsense, and desensitizes us to a normal sexual lifestyle.

Inspired by OMG Lists' 9 Good Things the Internet Has Ruined Forever, we came up with our own Top 10 Bad Things the Internet Brought to Gaming Journalism. And don't worry -- even though we just ran Matthew Erazo's Top 10 Hardest Games of All Time last week, this won't be a regular thing for us. We won't be miring down the Internet with endless, inane Top X Lists. Who needs all that traffic anyways?

And regarding our list below, for the record, we're on this same Internet. We may very well be contributing to some of these problems. No glass houses here -- hell, we'll even cite some examples from Bitmob.

2K Games saw how popular our previous giveaway was for the BioShock: Breaking the Mold - Developer's Edition Art Book, they kindly sent us another one to give out to our community.

If we had done a 21 Random Qs interview with the EGM staff back in the day, our answers would've pretty much looked the same as Ted Price's. The CEO and Founder of Insomniac Games (developers of Resistance and Ratchet & Clank) likes the same movies we do, watches the same TV show we'd watch during deadline dinners, and most importantly, thinks the same game deserves the "best of all time" title as we did.

We might as well call this piece "The Price is Right." (It's cool...you can all groan now. We hear ya.)

Currently, Price is working on the upcoming Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time for the PS3 in the executive producer role ("Which means that I pretend to be useful while a lot of very talented folks here bust their asses to make our best game yet," he says). That means he had plenty of free time to fulfill our very last-minute request for this interview.

So let's get to know...Ted Price.

You ever play a game and notice something that you're sure no one else really cares about, yet it means so much to you? We're talking about the small, seemingly insignificant features that would never make it to a press release, preview/review, or the back of the box.

I'm sorry to announce that after 13 years and three months as a games journalist, I've finally sold out. A developer indirectly bribed me into covering its game, and I took the bait and accepted.

It's not that I don't think Madballs In...Babo: Invasion is worth covering. The upcoming Xbox Live Arcade game actually seems pretty darn fun from the half-hour demo that we got, and that's the real me talking, not the one who sold out.

No, the me who sold out took an offer from the developer to make a special Madballs edition of our logo. (You remember those classic -- not classy -- grotesque squishy-ball toys, don't you?) They didn't even ask for anything in return, but here I am, writing a story about their game, just because they made this awesomeness for us:

(wallpaper-sized version here)

OK, fine -- they win. Let's talk about the game some, but I'm going to give you three legitimate and honest reasons why you should care about it (and one why you shouldn't...which you've probably figured out already).

Congratulations to Bitmob member Matt Wood for winning the BioShock art book giveaway. We'll contact you via the email you registered with to get your mailing address, and our generous anonymous donor will ship the prize to you directly.

We've got some cool stuff planned for Bitmob 1.1, 1.2, etc., but we could really use the help of a developer who is awesome with PHP and CSS. Ideally, it'd be one person who could do both, but we can take two different people as well.

When we put the call out for Infamous and Prototype write-ups from the community, we had a slight suspicion that one of those requests would be met with more enthusiasm than the other. Well, we ended up getting about three times more Infamous articles than Prototype...representative of the relative fondness over the two titles, perhaps?

You've seen the community's reaction to Infamous; now see what you guys have to say about Prototype on its own, as well as how the two match up. It's an epic showdown that will go down in history alongside other legendary coinciding releases in entertainment history (who can ever forget the great battle between 1997's Dante's Peak vs. 1997's Volcano?).

My girlfriend and I were getting ready to head down to Nintendo's Redwood City, CA offices for a Wii Sports Resort demo, and the competitive ass in me decided to flare up. In preparation for a casual-gaming war against her, I wore a loose shirt, shorts, and tennis shoes for maneuverability -- I even took a few extra swipes of deodorant. Believe me, if I had access to old-school tennis short-shorts and a sweatband for my head, I would've worn them.

I privately scoffed at her outfit of choice -- skirt and heels -- not wanting to alert her to the wardrobe advantage I was holding. On the way there, we stopped at McDonald's for a quick first meal of the day, but she wasn't hungry, so I mentally congratulated myself for yet another upper-hand move. Surely having food in my system will keep me going when she's fading under the weight of malnutrition and those heavy Wiimotes.

Turned out a Quarter Pounder with Cheese and fries don't supply you with energy-packed carbs. And tennis shoes may not be better than high heels in Wii Sports Resort's eyes after all. Or maybe I just stink. Because throughout our hour-long demo, my girlfriend thoroughly kicked my ass. Here's how it went down.

Found via Ubisoft Montreal Creative Director Clint Hocking's Twitter, an Augmented Reality tech demo for iPhone (keep watching...):

Last week, we asked you to post your thoughts on Infamous. Many of you recalled the greatness that was Crackdown, Spider-Man 2, and Grand Theft Auto -- and it looks like you feel Infamous belongs in the same league...the league of extraordinary open-world games.

Yeah, sorry -- that was a bit cheesy. But we would like to do two things with this story: highlight the most interesting excerpts from the articles that you've submitted and prove that the world will not end if we write it "Infamous" and not "inFAMOUS."

Read on to see what the Bitmob community thought about the game, and don't forget...in a completely independent event from this article, we're coincidentally giving away two copies of Infamous in our live chat later today.