jeff's Articles

KYD77-YQHMQ-V3429-TCMJR-JTF7Z Free to good home! Alan Wake for 360/ONE!

Hi, friends! I've been cleaning up around the house and I found this small stack of Nuclear Throne codes for Steam and now they are yours for the taking! Best of luck!

I want to take a longer look at the Amiga and what sets it apart today, but it’s hard to be impressed by what people seem to claim as the “best” Amiga games at this point, mostly because a lot of those games are ports and better or equal versions of the game were available elsewhere. So if you care about the Amiga, I’m curious to know: what’s worth looking at in 2015? Are there versions of game...

Reap the benefits of me ending up getting the AC Unity Season Pass on a PC and already owning all the free games they offered!

Hello! We got a few Destiny Expansion 1 codes for PS3/PS4 and aren't going to use them all. It's almost like the people who were going to play it already bought it and most of the staff has zero interest in it or something! So take 'em if you want 'em and please post below if you end up getting them so people know not to keep trying, OK? Thanks for using the site and being around and being deep...

My membership renewed yesterday and I got a new discount code for our store. I'm not going to use it, but if anyone wants $15 off, here's the code: 0a66c6fe9342-s3f3e74c Enjoy? I guess post a comment if you end up using it so that other people know that it's already been cashed in, cool? See ya soon.

OK, so... New Nintendo 3DS Looks like they're making a Game Boy Color but for the 3DS. I think the name is pretty unfortunate and potentially confusing, personally, but whatever. Games that run exclusively on the New Nintendo 3DS should be tagged to this platform. 3DS games that have "enhanced functionality" when plugged into a New Nintendo 3DS should be tagged to both this and the "old" 3DS pl...

Given the way that character relationships tend to twist and turn in video games, I'm finding that our current ability to create character-to-character relationships on a "friend" or "enemy" list to be a little outmoded. Would anyone object to bringing those two lists together into one that's simply called Related Characters?

Spent some time digging around some of the older wrestling games and character pages on the site to find that people have tagged many of the Fire Pro Wrestling games with characters who actually aren't in the games. Just a note that just because a company is trying to make a character in Randy Savage's likeness does not mean that Randy Savage is in the game. We want actual, "real" appearances w...

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So I turned on my 360 for the first time in awhile to discover a set of increasingly angry messages from someone that "appeared" in a recent Quick Look. It starts with "yo man I heard you were talking shit about me in a video" and then escalates to "I AM GONNA SUE U" over the course of, like, three hours. As if this guy is completely incapable of seeing that I wasn't online when he sent the mes...

Hey guys! Thinking about producing a set of "how to properly edit the wiki" videos to show people how the tools work and how to navigate the murky waters of some of our deeper pages. I already want to do one for Credits and one for Releases. Are there any other sections you'd really like some further explanation about? I'll probably try to get this going after E3 (though if time permits, I may...

So here's something I don't think I've encountered before. When I get a good look at a wide open area in the 360 version of Crysis 3, the audio completely dies. But when I pan back over to the wall or down to the ground, it kicks back in. Weeeeeeeird. Has anyone else encountered this? This might be the weirdest glitch I've encountered since the "headshot causes game to freeze for 5-8 seconds" b...

Hey, so we've been getting a handful of questions from people who have heard about the internal kerfuffle between our parent company and CNET over CNET's Best of CES awards. I'm actually not really sure what to say about it. People are looking for me to comment on this stuff, but CNET's Lindsey Turrentine has already laid out the timeline of events over on CNET itself . It sounds like a bad sit...

Spent some time today putting together the framework and getting some entries laid out for a Wiki rules/tips/help guide. http://www.giantbomb.com/guides/giant-bombs-guide-to-wiki-editing/2422/ Sheckatow and let me know if there are other entries that you think need to be there.

Now that the first North American Vita games have appeared in Sony's online store (even though they're only available if you search directly for them) and we've had a chance to see how they'll surface, I've made a new platform page to cover digital releases on the PlayStation Vita. It's "PlayStation Network (Vita)" or "PSNV." This platform tag is to be used for games that appear in the PlayStat...

Thinking about deleting the "2.5D" concept page. Honestly, I'm a bit surprised it exists at all. Considering nearly all games are polygonal these days, it's enough to say that the game takes place on a 2D plane. A term for "this has polygonal graphics but has flat gameplay" is almost totally unnecessary. Graphical style and gameplay style are two things that, in this case, don't really need to...

Hey guys. We're trying to fit in some time to lay down more effective wiki data editing guidelines and page styling techniques and since the "which games do you want to see on TNT?" discussion went so well (except for you lunatics who want Mount & Blade, of course), I figured I'd check in and ask you guys about what you'd like to see addressed. The page styling stuff is less about telling you h...

OK, it's suggestion time. We're kind of sick of playing first-person shooters on TNT. They require too much concentration, which rarely works in the "let's sit on the couch and talk shit while we play games" format. And they're stupid repetitive. Two hours of corridor crawling and headshots isn't always compelling to watch. So which multiplayer games would you like to see us play? We're conside...

Or, if not a new PC, a fresh OS install. Take old PC, get it up on network with all drives shared and ready for remote desktop Migrate giant inbox containing 13 years of e-mail. Install iTunes, move library across to new PC, taking care not to reset ratings yet again Install Steam, download a bunch of games I'll rarely play Remember where the "show file extentions, I'm not an idiot" toggle is....

While weird concept pages will always be my first love, character pages are definitely up there. It's cool to see where a character's been, especially some of these guys that get around, either on their own like Mario or as a result of making a bunch of weird cameos like Isaac Clarke . Anyway, our partners in site-crime are especially focused on characters right now, and since media is all, lik...

With it being a new year and all, I figure it's a good time to review some wiki policies. Specifically, I'm talking about in-browser games. I'd be willing to find a better way to get these into our system (with a proper platform page, rather than just lazily tagging them to PC and Mac), but I feel like we need better guidelines about what we accept. Ideally, we'd just be able to say that we all...

Since i get a lot of the same questions over and over again, I thought that maybe I could sign up for Formspring--which lets people ask questions in an organized way and gives me a list that I can answer from--and deal with it. Close to 700 answers later, this has clearly gone way, way wrong. But hey, I need something to do when I can't sleep in Ryan's car on the way in every other morning, so....

Hello! I'm writing this to serve as a semi-permenant resource for those of you who often say you're "waiting for the podcast to show up on iTunes." If you're one of those people, chances are you're DOING IT WRONG . After the podcast goes up, we update the RSS feed that points to our podcast immediately. Automatically, even! If you're subscribed to our podcast in iTunes, your computer hits our s...

So I'm doing a little clean-up on the Rock Band 3 credits right now and I noticed that Ozzy and a bunch of other musicans were attached to the credits. Licensed musicians do not qualify for Person pages. Likewise, musicains who have appeared in games in other capacities (Mike Patton in The Darkness, for example) should not be attached to games that license their music. We are not tracking licen...

I've taken to clearing out a few of the more ridiculous lists of aliases on the site, and here's a helpful tip about why we have that field in the first place. The alias field is there SOLELY for search purposes . It's meant to catch cases where people are searching for one thing ("girlfriend mode") when we have a page that covers that topic under a different name (" asymmetrical co-op "). It's...

Just had it reconfirmed that those "Ads by Google" ads that have been showing up on the site are NOT supposed to be there. We're in contact with the guys we're partnered with for advertising and they should be gone shortly. Thanks to those who brought it up. Though, I have to say, this one that Brad found is pretty fucking hilarious: NOBLE SIX, PLEASE REPORT. NOBLE SIX, RESPOND! NOBLE SIIIIIIXX...

I just had to make some updates to a new page on the site for inFAMOUS 2 , which technically hasn't even been announced yet. It's already dicey for us to even have an inFAMOUS 2 page, since it hasn't been confirmed, but since that Portuguese magazine has been so obvious with its next cover, we'll let that part slide. But don't do this. Don't assume that a sequel is going to have the same traits...

Pretty happy with the quest system so far. Totally not posting this just to complete the blog post quest.

None of the stuff Microsoft is adding to the 360 is a particularly bad idea, but the implementation of most of it is kind of awful. For starters, the current 360 dashboard (the good ol' NXE) is getting more and more cluttered and it's getting harder to simply get to stuff on it. It's also a bad way to present features that should be more integrated. Like Netflix before it, all of the new stuff...

OK, I've spent the evening taking a longer look at the way Sony provides data, and my early conclusion is that there are some games that will never show up on the public version of your profile. By public, I mean the page you'll see if you view your profile while NOT LOGGED IN to playstation.com. If you're logged in, everything that the server side knows about will be displayed on YOUR profile,...

I don't know that anyone out there thought that we would still be going strong on these Persona 4 Endurance Run videos after ten weeks. I don't really know if I'd ever considered doing them for this long when we first started doing them. I figured someone (you or us) would lose interest, or perhaps we'd ruffle some feathers over at Atlus and they'd politely ask us to stop broadcasting their gam...

The only thing that could make Street Fighter IV more awesome is the inclusion of SKULLOMANIA . Actually, I'd love to see all those EX guys back one more time, if not as official additions to the SFIV roster than as some sort of new spin-off game. C. Jack is better than C. Viper any day.

Motorsports is a new theme in the database that can be applied at the game level. I'll be going back to my last blog post about genres and themes and adding ones that seem meaningful in the near future. (So consider this post a second chance to suggest some). Additionally, we will be moving to a new maximum of one genre per game. This means, obviously, that we will be adding a lot of genres to...

Hey, looking for a fact check from someone with a European copy of Sony's Formula One 06 or Formula One Champion Edition for PS2 and/or PSP. Do me a solid! Look in the credits and tell me if this Keeley Hazell chick is actually credited in the manual or in the in-game credits. "Marketing models" typically aren't credited and this page is up for deletion. Scans/photos of the manuals/on-screen cr...

I went in and fixed a problem that was preventing the Killzone 2 page from accepting updates. Had to cut a couple of images while I was cleaning it up, but that page could really use some clean-up. There's some out-of-date info in there, some typos... all kinds of stuff. Anyone up to the challenge of (re-)writing a kick-ass KZ2 page?

Have we, as a society, become so pathetically insecure that we now must rely on fake praise in order to avoid the crippling grip of depression and convince ourselves that everything is going to be OK? Unless they're buying it as a joke, who gets this? Who decides "heeeeey, I could really use a little pick-me-up in my life!" and gets a CD full of people clapping to play when they feel down? And...

Steam tossed out a news post yesterday stating that you can register your retail Unreal Tournament 3 key with Steam and effectively integrate it into your Steam account. Just did that, totally redownloading UT3 now via Steam. It's cool when developers work to make all this stuff play together nicely, rather than separate the disc users and Steam users. Now I can get Steam acheviements in UT3......

Though I came in through one corporate merger and left via another, for a brief time I was a Zifff Davis employee. Or ZDNet, technically. I sort of forget how all the names changed and how all the mergers went down as a part of that process. That was the period of time when I feel like I really came into my own and started doing this for a living, instead of just blindly showing up to a job and...

I'm having a really hard time not making this a Top 11 list. But that's a slippery slope, because then you're suddenly spitting out a Top 20 list or something stupid like that. So let's keep it simple, keep it clean, and keep it pure with my top 10 games of 2008. But I actually screwed up and misnumbered it a bit, and accidentlaly posted a Top 9 list. So I get to add Audiosurf after all! It's a...

Dear Trivia Authors! You might want to stop writing a bunch of true or false questions. We've got a ton of them, and most of them are pretty bad. They almost all seem to talk about some weirdly specific thing from a game that a person just couldn't make up. And the answer is (almost) always true. My advice would be to right a bunch of convincing-sounding false questions or... better yet... put...

Well, last night I finally broke down and slapped a fresh install of Vista onto a new drive. Then I immediately remember how much of a pain in the ass getting a fresh install back up to speed really is. So far, I've mainly been messing around my with iTunes library. It's the most annoying thing so far, because the drive that music is currently on seems to be junk. It's a pity, too, because it's...

Troubleshooting PC issues has probably become one of my least favorite things in the world. Things go wrong for seemingly no reason, and figuring out exactly what's up is usually a supreme pain in the ass. Over the years I've replaced motherboards, painstakingly salvaged data off of failing hard drives, and spent hours staring at a PC that wouldn't POST only to finally realize it was because th...

Hey, if you happen to have a 360voice account, there's a group over there for Giant Bomb users. It's right here ! Join up and we shall pool our points and crush all other groups into dust. DUST! Here's my profile , too, in case you're interested in seeing that.

Turrican is one of those weird series of games that seem to be huge in Europe but have a limited following here in the States. I only really played the version that was released on the Genesis, and I thought it was kind of terrible. Do any of you like the Turrican series? What do you like about it? Was it just one of those "right place, right time" sort of games?

Dear UK/EU, Please stop abbreviating Resident Evil as "Resi." It's somehow more annoying than "Ninty." XOXO, Jeff

So I'm working on an achievement guide for a certain little game that comes out this Friday. Currently sitting here, watching multiplayer bot matches stalemate against a dead controller to see if that's a good way to rack up "rounds played" while you sleep. After a bit of this, I'll check out a couple of other shortcut ideas I have. Also not answering 360 chat requests from people who probably...

So I've been trying to get in a good, long SOCOM session for the past five days or so, now, and I've still been unable to do so. If the player stats on my account are correct (and they're not), I've played around five games since it launched. The rest of the time was spent looking at screens that say "NETWORK INITIALIZATION FAILED" or "UNABLE TO CONNECT" or some other variant of the same. Even...

Immediately upon skipping all of the publisher/developer screens, the Saints Row 2 title screen immedaitely started blaring Apache's Gangsta Bitch at me. This game is already awesome.

So I emerged from a dark room where I've spent the last two days playing a very exciting soon-to-be-released video game to hear all about Nintendo's new stuff from the rest of the guys. I don't have much to say about it other than... Hell yeah, Von Kaiser . Holy crap, Sin & Punishment 2 . I hope Punch-Out!! is more than just a nostalgia trip. I don't need King Hippo in order to have a good time...

It took me an hour or two of fumbling around until I got a feel for it, but I'm really liking Warhammer so far. The Public Quest stuff is smart and fun, and all the achievements and titles and little stuff that keeps unlocking is interesting, too. I really feel like the beginning of the game could be a little more clear about things, though. Aside from reviewing Auto Assault, I don't think I've...

I was cooling out in a Best Buy the other day, waiting for a dude to go in the back and find me a copy of TNA iMPACT! when I was startled by a familiar logo. Acclaim? Run!!!! I believe I even jumped a bit when I saw this $25 game time card for any of Acclaim's games sitting on a hook surrounded by other, similar cards. It's one thing to know that the Acclaim name has been resurrected into a new...

I'm a bit curious to see if diggin' up any of our stories will do anything meaningful for us. I have to admit I've never been a heavy user of digg, so I'm not sure how many diggs is meaningful or whatever. But I tossed up a link to the Age of Booty preview that ran tonight, as I'm quite excited about how it turned out. Vinny did a great job with the video and it was actually a fun little thing...

Between losing my progress multiple times and the online being completely boned, I'm totally crushed by Castle Crashers. What should have been a moment of triumph for all that is Behemoth has ended up making me totally sad. It's like I'm afraid to play the game now, because I'm worried that I'll lose my progress for a fourth time.

This arrived in the mail today: Some have said he was weaned on chicken milk and cocaine This is the latest and greatest book from Achewood , capturing the strips and some of the surrounding fiction regarding the Great Outdoor Fight. I am extremely excited about said product, even though I've already read the strips. It's a well-made book, for sure. Plus? It smells nice . Chris Onstad, the crea...

I've seen a lot of people talking mess about Jenny McCarthy, but I totally don't get it. It's not like Kari Wuhrer was some serious, kick-ass actress or anything when she was in a C&C game. I'm sure Jenny McCarthy will do just fine.

Hey everyone. Now that the site's been up and kicking for a few weeks here and many of you have gotten used to using it, I wanted to see what you thought about our list of genres and themes. Are we missing anything? If so, make a case for it in the comments section for this post and we'll take it under consideration. Thanks! (Bonus points if anyone can come up with good, easy-to-understand term...

I want to play more Braid. Thinking about playing it with a walkthrough. I don't really need to solve in-game puzzles to feel good about myself, and after watching Ryan play the game over the past couple of days, I've already seen most of them get solved. I just know if I don't play through it soon, I'll never play through it. Lots of games coming out over the next few months.

Check out this sweet Google Maps street view of Akihabara. Saw it on Kotaku, who saw it on Gizmodo, apparently. I didn't go to Tokyo Game Show last year, and I'm really looking forward to getting back to Japan later this year. The street view of the map is pretty cool, though it's probably only really cool if you've been there and sort of know how to navigate. If you head north from the startin...

Here's the first gameplay footage from skate 2. Looks like IGN got the exclusive reveal on it on Friday. Everyone else is sitting on their skate 2 info until 3PM Monday, so check back then and I'll tell you what I thought about it!

I had a dream the other night that Bungie was working on some kind of extreme football game. Weird.

IGN's reporting that it was a "last-minute development delay" or something. Something about all this seems fishy. Anyone wanna take bets that this is all due to MS flipping Geometry Wars 2 up a week and delaying BCR with total disregard for Capcom's promise of a July release date? I've heard enough random gripes from enough different publishers to know that the XBLA process has been a real pain...