When Sniper: Ghost Warrior came out for the PC and Xbox 360 way back in the far-off month of June, developer City Interactive managed to package an exceedingly gratifying sniper experience with the gorgeous visuals of the jungles of Isla Trueno. And although the game sold rather well, absurdly perceptive AI enemies and tedious run-and-gun missions tempered its reception.

Now, Sergeant Tyler Wells and the rest of his sniping team deploy into new territory on February 8, 2011 with the PlayStation 3 port of Ghost Warrior. At a preview event last week, I got the opportunity to experience the taken-to-heart changes and fixes implemented in the new version, largely gathered from player feedback and past lessons.

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Recently, I graduated from UW Oshkosh and spent time job hunting during the summer months in between games of soccer with old high school buddies. After an interview with Game Informer -- located just three hours west of my tiny Wisconsin town -- left me with a missed opportunity in my journey to become a video game journalist, I received a call back from the Kodiak Daily Mirror.

With two loan payments looming and a quite empty checking account, I took the job. About six days, 4,400 driving miles and 200 boat miles later, I had made it across a good chunk of two countries and sailed the sea on a ferryboat to a place called Kodiak Island -- the Emerald Isle.

Welcome to Kodiak

The most important thing to understand is that the city has roughly 14,000 people. You won’t find a GamesStop, a Best Buy, or even a Target anywhere on the island. This leads me to the first hardship I faced by choosing to live here: there aren’t many places to buy games.

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Last month, I asked Bitmob writers to create a sequel for one of their favorite franchises in the Armchair Gamemaker writing challenge -- a challenge of nearly endless possibilities, with Halo, Final Fantasy, The Legend of Zelda, Rock Band, and hundreds of other games were on the table.

Three writers stood up and took the challenge. They eschewed the big modern franchises for classics from the 8-bit era, describing about how they would update them for a modern audience. Here are the entries.

Star Tropics 3 by Michael Edwards

Michael posted his entry on the dormant Nintendo franchise Star Tropics right after I announced the challenge. He must have already had this sequel planned out. He pines for a sequel to the Zelda-esque originals as a distant sequel that takes cues from God of War and Uncharted. But Michael does want one goodie that came with the first game to make a comeback: A letter that plays a role in solving one of the puzzles.

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Bruce Willis is a ghost, Snape kills Dumbledore, and Aeris dies....

I learned of each of these plot twists before watching The Sixth Sense, reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and playing Final Fantasy 7, though I wouldn't say the experiences were "spoiled" for me. Maybe I was a bit more observant on my first time through, but I wasn't in it for the twists alone. No one would care about a shocking plot revelation if the story wasn't compelling from the start. But what if they're not in it for the story?

Video games have a tougher time with spoilers, because, whether or not you care about story, a ruined surprise can deplete a lot of a game's fun. What's worse is that some of these twists are significant selling points begging the question "How do you draw attention to a game's surprise without spoiling it?"

Let's look at a few examples of games that succeeded and failed at blowing players' minds.

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If I owned a fledgling virtual world I don't think I would provide a separate lobby for the paying customers. Sony should give PlayStation Plus users amazing things and force them to run around making the peasants envious of what they can't have unless they hand over their credit card information. 

News Blips:

Sony is cordoning off an exclusive PlayStation Plus Private Members Club in Home for -- you guessed it -- PlayStation Plus members only. The space will offer several tables of Shed, a card game for two to four players. Naturally, like all things exclusive, the room is decked out in gold decor, with an intimidating bouncer at the front door to keep out the riff-raff. "The space also offers a couple of great ways to stay updated on all the latest PlayStation Plus news, either by reviewing a cocktail menu or watching the trailers running on the big screen," writes Alex Weekes, Home community lead at Sony Europe, on the PlayStation Blog. 

An official Capcom video reveals Evil Ryu and Oni Akuma  for the arcade edition of Super Street Fighter 4. The trailer is a promo for the new arcade version that ends with art of Evil Ryu and Oni Akuma back-to-back. Previously, leaked Xbox 360 achievements suggested the existence of Evil Ryu, and this trailer seems to confirm that this is the case. It isn't clear how the new versions of these existing characters will fit into the current roster or if they will even be playable. The Street Fighter 3 twins Yun and Yang were confirmed in September, but Capcom remained vague about changes to the lineup beyond those two. It will be interesting to see how the hardcore community reacts if the addition Oni Akuma or Evil Ryu drastically disturbs the game's delicate balance.

Video-game-number-crunching website VGChartz uses the power of bar graphs to illustrate just how infrequently some game journalists practice journalism. The study took randomly selected chunks of posts from Kotaku, Joystiq, and Destructoid -- three of the popular punching bags for critics of games journalism -- and looked for a variety of things like editorializing in news posts. It turns out that 78 percent of the articles only had one source, which the VGChartz story insists is a problem. Of course, while it is a good rule of thumb to have more than one authority commenting on a subject, how many confirmations can there possibly be for "Rock Band 3 getting full Steely Dan catalog"? Another interesting tidbit from the study shows that "unrelated topics" were discussed nine percent of the time, which is second only to Electronic Arts. The article didn't make it clear who decides what is unrelated or if the author had separate definitions for "related topics" for the three different websites.  

About time! The theme from Civilization 4, "Baba Yetu" by composer Christopher Tin, has become the first piece of music composed for a video game to be nominated for a Grammy Award. "Baba Yetu" has been a fan favorite since Civ 4 was released in 2005. It was a featured song at Video Games Live and was one of the pieces used for the PBS recording of that show. If you haven't heard the song, you owe it to yourself to track it down. What took the Grammys so long to nominate this treasure? Tin only recently released his debut album, and apparently the Grammy voters are too busy listening to the 10,000 or so records that hit the shelves every year to play a video game. Now, it is only a matter of time before Rob Zombie's "Dragula" gets some type of gaming-music lifetime achievement award. [Gamasutra]

Got any hot news tips? Send 'em over to [email protected].

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Did you survive the insanity of Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year? More importantly, did your wallet?

We're feeling the effects ourselves, so we asked our followers on Facebook and Twitter to see what they purchased and what they missed out on. We also got some responses from our Bitmob staffers (we have to scrimp and save, too!) to see what demanded their gaming dollars.

Check out the answers below, and be sure to add your own purchases in the comments. (You know, because it's always fun to rub it in when you find a deal someone else didn't.) And don't forget to follow our Facebook and Twitter accounts to get a heads-up on news, articles, and contests. We do these Tweetbook Q&A articles every Friday, so if you want to be featured, keep an eye out and respond!

What games or gear did you score on Black Friday/Cyber Monday? What do you wish you could have bought?

Via Twitter:

@TheStoryboard: I managed to get Rhythm Heaven for $10. Fun game for me, but it was the first time my mom actually asked to borrow my DS. Victory.

@BrentonWalker: Assassin's Creed Brotherhood for $30 from Amazon. Had a $10 credit, and it was on sale for $40. Wish I would have picked up Fallout: New Vegas for $40.

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I'm pumped for Back to the Future: The Game, but this trailer leaves me puzzled: How can a standard-transmission DeLorean operate -- and travel through time -- without a driver?

Video Blips:

• Telltale Games plans to release episodes of Back to the Future: The Game in December, February, March, April, and "Finale." I assume that once they're done messing with the past, "Finale" will be the new name for the month of May. [GameTrailers]

Continue after the break for the debut of Ms. Splosion Man, a peek at Darkspore's multiplayer, and the latest map for Battlefield: Bad Company 2's Vietnam expansion.

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Freelance writers are all too familiar with the pitching process. In order to get any sort of freelance work, publications expect you to pitch rough article ideas to editors for approval. But the process doesn't end there: The angle and tone of the suggested article need discussion before writing even begins. The editing of a first draft is included in this to further fine-tune inconsistencies in tone and structure.

Regardless of whether or not you're looking to break into the enthusiast press, these are skills all writers should have. Brainstorming ideas and refining them into a finished product helps focus your initial concept while also allowing you to adjust your approach as the article forms -- especially when you have to work within the framework of a larger predetermined theme. This is where the December Writing Challenge comes in: It's time to put all your good ideas to the test!

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Back in July, I had a rather strange visit from my future self. He created a time machine using the controller from Steel Battalion and Mountain Dew Gamer Fuel and decided to visit me and answer your questions about gaming's future. To be honest, the guy was a bit of a weirdo, and I was glad to be rid of him when he left to stockpile on out-of-production sodas.

Well, he's back, and he insists once again on answering your questions. Please do send some. Hopefully it will appease him and he'll leave me alone again. I'm going to rip my ears off if I have to sit through another dull robotic apocalypse story. Also, he refuses to take off his Mudkip costume, which is starting to weird me out.

My future self says he wears this Mudkip costume for his own protection. From what? Your guess is as good as mine.

Here are his guidelines for your questions.

• Only questions about video games. Don't go asking him about global warming or nuclear holocausts.
• He doesn't want to tell me how old he is -- I guess I become really shy in the future -- but he is placing a limit of no more than 30 years into the future for your questions.
• Be polite. My future self is a bit cranky and won't respond well to rude questions.
• He still doesn't want any questions about monkeys. He was very adamant about this. Monkey must really be a bitch in the future.

Send your questions to [email protected], and I'll make sure he sees them. He'll be answering them next Wednesday, so get them to me ASAP!

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Chris England is 24 years old. He works in finance. But he's also dedicated $50,000 of his own cash to development of Xenonauts, a strategy game that aims to recapture the excitement of the Gollop brothers' masterpiece: X-Com: UFO Defense.

But England doesn't run a traditional studio -- he manages his core team of freelance programmers, artists, modelers, and animators remotely from his London flat, which isn't unlike how we do things here at Bitmob. ("The glamorous life of a video-game designer, eh?" says England.)

England's never meet his team members face-to-face, nor has he even held so much as Skype call (due to his computer's aging hardware and lack of a microphone) with anyone. But he's confident that this Internet-facilitated managerial model could be the golden ticket into the industry.

And in that spirit, I "sat down" with England via email to discuss how this series of tubes made Xenonauts' development possible, the troubles with mysteriously disappearing team members, and avoiding the "arrogant and semi-illiterate Internet kiddies" of the mod scene.

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I remember when games were hard. And not "hard" like the Xbox generation thinks of the word. I'm thinking of an era before checkpoint heroes like Gordon Freeman and Master Chief. I'm thinking of a time when retrying chapters -- like in Devil May Cry 3 and Bayonetta -- was a far-off dream. I remember when games were really, truly, abusively difficult.

I'm talking about endeavoring to play ceaselessly punishing titles like Bionic Commando while balancing on the teetering edge of a blue-screen-prone NES with a failing 72-pin connector. I'm talking about the moment when I landed a jump onto the two-pixel-wide eye of an alligator in Pitfall! on my 2600. Or when I beat Contra without the Konami code. I'm talking about going toe to toe with “Iron” Mike Tyson himself and coming out the winner. And best of all, I'm talking about Super Meat Boy.

But let's back up: I don't want to give Super Meat Boy a specious title. People have mistakenly rushed to name Super Meat Boy the hardest game of the last few years. It's not. It's very likely that many Meat Boy fans are totally unaware of the number of like-minded indie developers that the creators pay respect to in the game -- a few of whom have engineered titles that are just as (or more) difficult than Meat Boy itself.

So, in service to those interested, here are a few self-flagellating experiences -- directly referenced in Super Meat Boy -- that are sure to make you head into the kitchen and bring a knife to your two favorite opposable digits.
 And for anyone looking to wuss out...a bit of motivational music to get you started: 

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My favorite part of the first two hours of Epic Mickey was the part I didn't play.

It was the second half of the opening cut-scene, the part that comes after sorcerer Yen Sid's narration. I won't spoil the action for you if you haven't seen it. And anyway, the action is not what impressed me.

What I loved about the scene was the range of emotion and storytelling it conveyed without saying a word. Sure, Mickey made a couple squeaks here and there, but for the most part the direction, tone, and facial animations told you everything you needed to know.

It was so effective that I was actually disappointed when I had to start playing.

That's not to say I haven't enjoyed the gameplay so far. Splashing paint and thinner around is great fun, especially when you watch enemies become friendly or dissolve. But once Mickey and his Gremlin guides started spouting boxes of text, they definitely lost some of their charm. And it made me wonder how many other games could benefit from a vow of silence.

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Remember how great GoldenEye 007's multiplayer was? It seemed like all my friends and I would talk about in fifth grade were Golden Guns, remote mines, paintball mode, Oddjob, dual-wielding, and Moonrakers. Most people I know around my age still speak fondly about the game, but I doubt many of them have revisited it over the last decade. Otherwise, all they would talk about now is circle strafing, unbalanced levels, obsolete weapons, a left-handed trigger, and that creepy way characters slide around when they're crouched.

People credit GoldenEye with helping to establish first-person shooters as the dominant multiplayer experience on consoles, but it can't stand toe-to-toe with today's gun games. Naturally, developer Eurocom had a serious challenge updating the Nintendo 64 classic for the Wii (confusingly named GoldenEye 007 as well). Unfortunately, Eurocom chose to emulate the Call of Duty experience and abandoned the one element the original GoldenEye still has going for it: a unique and fun single-player campaign.

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I wonder if Hollywood has learned its lesson when it comes to treating video-game stories with the proper respect. Let's find out, shall we?

News Blips:

Director David O. Russell lifts the lid on some of the story details for the upcoming Uncharted movie. Speaking with the L.A. Times on the set of his new movie The Fighter, Russell said his plans are to expand the plot to accommodate the extended family of protagonist Nathan Drake (who will be played by Mark Wahlberg). "This idea really turns me on that there's a family that's a force to be reckoned with in the world of international art and antiquities...[a family] that deals with heads of state and heads of museums and metes out justice," he said. Russell also mentioned that he's halfway done with the script, calling the movie's progress "a locomotive." Great. Another entry in the shaky game-to-movie genre that strays from the game's story. Where have I heard that one before?

The industry needs to be further educated on the downloadable games market for it to evolve, says Arthur Houtman, chief executive officer of Vanguard Entertainment Group (Greed Corp). "I feel it's a little bit stagnant where we are with the consoles, and even the console market," Houtman said in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz. "I know that the manufacturers are trying to figure out where to go from here, and so I can only imagine that they need to evolve a little bit into that space. They are trying to figure it out -- but I think one of the big things is the education of the industry." He went on to encourage developers to explore more diverse pricing options for their games instead of routinely marking them with an 800 or 1200 Microsoft Points price. Of course, more diverse gameplay could also help, but that's probably just crazy journalist talk.

Microsoft hails 2010 as "one of our biggest years ever." Speaking to an audience at the Credit Suisse Group Technology Conference, Microsoft Interactive Entertainment Division CEO Dennis Durkin credited Xbox Live subscriptions and the recently launched Kinect for the company's fiscal growth. "Of our 25 million members, about half of them are subscribers for the business and pay us about $60 a year for that," he said. "[Kinect] was an amazing launch, amazing momentum, and it's something we're very, very excited about, still very committed to our 5 million number for the holiday, well on path for that." It would appear that Microsoft's knack for stellar subscriber numbers is still alive and kicking.

Kristian Segerstråle, founder of social gaming developer Playfish, says the best is yet to come for the genre. "I don't believe we've seen the Super Mario or the Halo of this platform yet," he said to CNBC. "We've barely scratched the surface of what's possible." Segerstråle also warned that "companies without franchises will be in an increasingly precarious position," saying, "The winner overall -- the company that's going to be remembered for forging this market -- will be the one that creates a truly inspirational product for social interaction, competition, cooperation and exchange across a lot of platforms." As long as I'm not assaulted with a cheap knockoff of FarmVille's purple cows every time I log onto Facebook, things should be fine.

Got any hot news tips? Send 'em over to [email protected].

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It’s only three weeks until Christmas -- that means the holiday release schedule is almost done! Epic Mickey landed on Tuesday, and World of Warcraft: Cataclysm hits next week.

Epic Mickey, the long-awaited title from Warren Spector (Wing Commander, Deus Ex) and his Junction Point Studios, is out for the Wii...and has earned mixed reviews. Some outlets are giving it a thumbs-up, while others are giving it the big “ho hum.”

Blizzard did the entire video game industry a favor by scheduling a December release for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. While millions of players already factor the monthly subscription fee into their budgets, they’ve been able to actually play a few other games lately. That extra play time comes to an abrupt end on December 7, when the latest expansion for the world’s most popular MMO hits stores.

We're looking for front-page-worthy stories for both of these games -- make them creative, insightful, and clever. If you want to do reviews, that's cool, too -- those get rounded up in our Reviews Spotlights.
   
Don't forget to use the appropriate tags for your article (use the full game names as written above).
       
And try to get your post up as soon as you can. Timely articles really grab our attention and are more likely to hit the front page.

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Futurist Michio Kaku should take a page from Binary Domain's book and modify his typically cheery preambles to "In the future, heartless robots will ruthlessly hunt their mortal creators in the bowels of a utopian city that stretches into the clouds."

Video Blips:

• Squad-based shooter Binary Domain blurs the line between good and evil in with a war for survival between robots and humans. Cole Train clone aside, can someone explain to me why English-speaking soldiers are apparently fighting in Tokyo?

Continue after the break for the manful Unbound Saga Xbox Live Arcade launch trailer, an impromptu NBA Jam arcade gaming session, and a rundown of Tron: Evolution's busy multiplayer.

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What's an Indie Games Winter Uprising, you may be wondering. Well, it's a flurry of quality Xbox Live Indie Games worth your space bucks, which kicked off with the release of Epic Dungeon on Tuesday and doesn't stop until another dozen or so games come out over the first week of December. Keep reading to see what some of XBLIG’s premiere developers have in store for you!

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The Geekbox — Episode 94 (2010-12-01)
Wherein we discuss The Walking Dead (spoiler warning!), Inception: The Video Game, Black Friday, Pac-Man Championship Edition DX, Geometry Wars, Super Mario All-Stars, Zelda wars, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Super Mario Bros. 2 launch day, Epic Mickey, Tron, the secret history of Cowboys and Aliens, bait-and-switch toys, Young Justice, Transformers Prime, and World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. Starring Ryan Scott, Ray Barnholt, Justin Haywald, and Ryan Higgins.
Running Time: 1h 14m 59s

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The mod scene seems like a great way for aspiring game developers to break into the industry, and it is -- but Chris England, the project lead of X-Com spiritual successor Xenonauts, told me in an interview, "Mods do have their dark side."

Just look at the ongoing saga with Valve's employment of DotA All-Stars developer IceFrog to helm DOTA 2, a stand-alone game that will expand the popular Defense of the Ancients mod for Blizzard's Warcraft 3. Controversy surrounds the title; just a little more than a month ago, an anonymous poster claiming to be a Valve employee alleged that IceFrog may have stolen assets from previous employers Riot Games and S2 Games.

England's quick to point out that the mod scene isn't all like that, but he also provided some insight into the underbelly of hobbyist programming.

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I'm going to keep this simple: Microsoft and Bungie just released the Halo: Reach Noble Map Pack, and we've got eight free download codes to hand out. Here's your chance to check out new multiplayer battlegrounds Tempest, Anchor 9, and Breakpoint for free. All you have to do is...

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