Yes, it's true. After what has been in all honesty the single best year of my life by a very long way, I'm having to leave the Destructoid staff, as I've been offered a new job in journalism which is pulling me away from the site. Leaving Destructoid genuinely has been a very very hard decision to make for me, in fact at times it's felt like the prospect of cutting an arm off. This place has been my spiritual home for far longer even than I've been on staff, and it's given me more than I'd ever have dared to hope for, both professionally and personally.

I can't over-emphasise just how important my time at Destructoid has been to me. In under a year it's taken a guy from northern England who's dreamed of being a games journalist all his life and made that dream happen in the most fun and exciting way he could ever have imagined. After years adrift from my true aspirations, I'm now working in the world I've always wanted to be in, and along the way I've had the pleasure and honor of meeting some people who are now amongst my favorite in the world, both on the staff and throughout the community. In a very true sense, Destructoid has made my life, and while I'm now moving on to the next chapter of that life, Destructoid wrote it and every single one of you guys had a hand in that. Thank you all, from the bottom of my heart. 

But I won't be totally severing my links with Destructoid (How the Hell could I ever?). I seem to have noticed that we've got a rather good community here, and it's a community I very much want to stay a part of, so while I can't be on staff any more, I'll still be around as much as I can. Also, I'm now in the Destructoid Steam group (Steam name: Davestructoid), so if you ever see me online, hit me up for a game. I'll get you my gamertag when I get my 360 too, and of course, MySpace me up if I haven't already got you imprisoned in my list of digital souls.

But to mark my leaving Destructoid, I want to give you guys something to say thankyou. Over the last year, I've noticed a rather large pile of games swag appearing in my bedroom, which has now grown to the point where it blots out the light from my window and threatens to stop me even getting into and out of bed at all. So I want to give that pile of swag away to the Destructoid community, and that's exactly what I'm going to do. For details of the (admittedly variable) stash and how to get your hands on it, hit the jump. 

Way back in the mists of time (Well, only a couple of months ago, but I've never been one to stickle when there's an dramatic effect to be had) you might have read my post-Leipzig Games Convention story on Redspot Games, an independent German games publisher which sprang out of the Dreamcast-Scene Web community and now dedicates itself to putting out games on everyone's favorite prematurely dead format, as well as one or two others. Not only are these giving me cool new things to play on my Dreamcast, they're also a very cool and very fun bunch of people, and really helped my GC go with a swing this summer. I like them rather a lot.

After the jump you can find a longer interview with Redspot's Max Scharl and Nicky Werner which I conducted with the assistance of solid gold member of the Dtoid army Lukas '3R0T1C N3RD' Cerin, wherin we discuss Redspot's origins and future, the building of an international Web community with the assistance of Sega themselves, making the second best game on the GP2X, ad just how in the Hell you manage to sell games for a dead format anyway. 

And also, yes, Max has very kindly given me six copies of Redspot's recent side-on DC shooter Last Hope to give away to you lovely people. Details at the end of the interview, which in time-honored fashion, is after the jump.

I've been awaiting the chance to play through the final build of Clive Barker's Jericho with some degree of trepidation. You see on a personal level I've had rather a lot invested in the game since its announcement. Ever since my teens, Barker has been probably my favorite artist working in any medium, the level of intelligence, wonder, beauty and brutality he invests into his work striking a special chord with me whether the media be print, film or painting. As a result, his recent impassioned advocacy of gaming and expression of his desire to work heavily within it have excited me to fever pitch with the potential of its future results.

What's worried me though, is the fact that gaming is a medium in which, unlike literature or paint and canvas, Barker can't have total creative and production control over. While I've seen several times this year that Jericho is packed to the gills with his trademark nightmarish viscerality, I haven't been able to shake the nagging consideration that with large parts of development out of its creator's hands, the game could still very well turn out to be Barker in aesthetic alone, with its actual tone and gameplay content subject to the whims and abilities of others. 

Has it been my hopes or my fears that have become crystallized in the final product now that I've been able to play the entirety of the PC version of the game? Well, a bit of both. To find out which side has come out dominant, hit the jump and read the full review. 

In what looks to be a new series of articles in the style of his talks with Sigestato Itoi, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata is conducting a series of interviews with the development team working on Super Mario Galaxy. Hosted over at the official Wii site, the first part of the article sees Iwata talking to game producer Shimizu and director Koizumi about the early development and conceptualization of Mario's latest, as well as covering their working relationship with Shigeru Miyamoto.

I love articles like this, I really do. While we all faun and laud over the artistic successes in our medium, the means by which those successes come about are often almost as stimulating. When a company as idiosyncratic yet rightfully creatively praised as Nintendo opens the doors on they way they create a title as already stunning as Super Mario Galaxy I'll always be listening, and while only a quarter of the way through its run, this interview has already hooked me in for the duration. 

What I found particularly surprising and refreshing was what seems to be the rather ballsy nature of the young team working on the game. After working only on games of the scale of Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat previously, when encouraged by Miyamoto to follow up with something a little bigger, the team claimed the next Mario game and decided to run with the previously thought-impossible to implement spherical platform concept which Shigs himself had been talking about for years. Nice work guys.

The interview also contains a couple of instances of the game's developers actually turning Miyamoto's own table-flipping antics upon him, - though they amusingly didn't work as well as planned - and covers the formula changes the team made to strike the balance between keeping the game within Nintendo's "Accessible for all" philosophy and maintaining a challenge. All in all, a good read, and I want more soon please. 

You might remember that a while ago I got rather excited about the prospect of a Sin City game based upon Frank Miller's original graphic novels. It was one of those deliciously frustrating announcements guaranteed to spin a comic fan's mind off into all kinds of daydreamed "Best game evaaar!" possibilities, but with no real details announced, the crushing concrete reality was that it was really very much a case of "Could go either way".

Now however, things are looking a little brighter with the announcement of the involvement of talent responsible for both The Chronicles Of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay and the Linde-approved The Red Star. It transpires that the game will be scripted and designed by Flint Dille, the chap who wrote the aforementioned videogame escapade of everyone's favorite gravel-voice, latently camp anti-hero, and that Union Entertainment, those responsible for the polishing duties on Activision's shooting/fighting hybrid and who also worked on The Darkness, will be taking charge of the game's production.

It is still of course, very early days, and this information alone is certainly not enough to warrant the commencement of rabid excitement, but with a fairly decent team pedigree revealed and Dille stating that he and Miller have been "having a party coming up with nasty stuff for the game", I'm tentatively looking forward to seeing and hearing more. 

Rapidly following the cell phone footage, NeoGAF strikes once again, this time giving us a clearer look at Capcom's upcoming Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix (What is it with all the excessively long titles today?) with an over-the-shoulder in-game photo. Once again, it's a shot of the classic Ryu Vs. Ken matchup running on the Xbox 360, and once again our boy from Japan seems to be taking a heavy whupping despite the home turf advantage.

There's been a bit of disagreement over the game recently since the initial spurt of excitement fell back down to earth with the inevitable dull splattering noise, many loving the new look of the game while others really don't like the artwork at all. Has this new shot changed any of your minds, or just confirmed what you were already thinking? And are we all still as excited about this now that SFIV has been announced? 

Hit the gallery for the full sized image.  

Games don't make us kill, maim or rape, or mentally retard us into small lumps of drooling pus. We all know that. But a new book by software developer Mark Prensky is rallying to our cause one further step by espousing the many positive side-effects of gaming to the world's less educated parents. It's message is summed up succintly in its title: Don't Bother Me Mom - I'm Learning.

In the book Prensky, who develops training software for folks such as IBM, Nokia, and the American Department of Defense, lists the many ways in which he sees gamer kids as having developmental advantages over non-gaming ones, amongst other things covering historical eduction via games such as the Civilization series, tactical planning, ethics and morality, and even management skills learned via the running of MMO guilds. He also cites Spore as a highly praise-worthy ambassador of what's good about our hobby and even defends violent games as having the hidden depths we've always known about underneath the superficial imagery which gets the non-thinking right so frequently and stupidly upset.

The article over at Fox News unsurprisingly uses every other paragraph to contrive every possible "But what if he's wrong!?" counter-point, but if you can ignore those bits and just pay attention to Prensky himself it's a rather good read. Now let's get a recommended reading list together for parents shall we, and put this guy on it. 

Some new scans from Famitsu (Who else?) have appeared on the ever useful NeoGAF forums, showing off some new images of Square-Enix's Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles: The Small King And The Promised Land, and they're looking none too shabby at all, quite frankly. The game, not to be confused with Squenix's other Wii Crystal Chronicles title The Crystal Bearers, is the house of Cloud's entry to Nintendo's early WiiWare downloadable game collection, and from current knowledge seems to be a blend of RPG and town building simulator.

Players take on the role of King Leo - who is indeed little - as he sends more battle-ready classes out into the wilderness to collect the elements needed to build and strengthen his kingdom. Depending on the direction in which the city is built (war-mongering, magic-oriented, etc.) new character classes will become available as the realm's personality developes. 

After the horror of last night's Pop revelation, these screens are a sight for sore, tearful, bleeding eyes, and definitely go a long way to re-associating the WiiWare service with happy and hopeful thoughts. They do raise two fairly important questions though. Firstly, what have Nintendo got up their collective sleeves to make games this pretty work with the extremely limited storage capacity of the Wii? And secondly, why is a $15 downloadable title looking this good when most current full-price third party Wii games still look well below par? Super Mario Galaxy, the aesthetic ass kicking you will bring to Wii developers cannot come soon enough. 

December the 4th, 2007. Mark it in your diaries and burn it into your skin, Squenix fans, for that is the date upon which Distant Worlds: music from Final Fantasy, a new global tour of symphonic FF concerts kicks off, coinciding as it does with the twentieth anniversary of the release of the first game in the series. Honestly, sometimes you'd think they planned these things ...

The new show is a co-production between series composer Nobuo Uematsu and AWR Music Productions, and will be conducted by Arnie Roth, the same guy who waved the magic stick on 2005's Final Fantasy-themed VOICES concert in Tokyo. It's set to premier in Sweden with the Royal Stockholme Philharmonic providing the strings and brass and the Allmänna Sången choir expelling the vocal duties, before moving on around the world throughout 2008. 

So far only two dates have been announced, namely the above and a show in Chicago next March, but more are planned and will no doubt be announced on the production's site as and when they appear. We will of course, bring you more details on this one as it goes on. 

Hmmm, December though ... If it snows I'm definitely going to turn up in my home-made Magitek armor for complete purism. 

[Oh Golden Donut, whatever will we do with you?] 

And Nintendo's WiiWare roster continues to grow in the run up to the system's March 2008 launch, adding another new third party title to the announced line-up today. Is it another game from Square-Enix? Is it the Wii's Geometry Wars, the game which will click with millions world-wide and really sell Nintendo's XBLA equivalent to the masses? Is it exciting in any way imaginable whatsoever?

Well no. It's a game in which you pop bubbles. And then you pop some more. 

Seriously. Don't be coming to me asking for the big twist or the clever, genre-flipping gimmick that will turn the noble art of bubble popping on its head forever. Bubble popping's what you get. That's all. Bubbles come along and you pop them. You point at them, press A, and they pop. There are some details on the game's site regarding combos, score multipliers and the like, and the ability to inflate the bubbles for extra points and play with up to four people, but essentially it's all about popping those bubbles, and popping them good. 

Now hit the jump for a - hopefully very early - trailer which will show you exactly how those bubbles are popped.

[Golden Donut, Golden Donut, marry my daughters. All of them]

It was only announced yesterday, and already opinions are highly divided on Capcom's Bionic Commando remake. So far voices tend to fall on either side of a binary split, either gushing with the misty-eyed enthusiasm of a nostalgic cockney Blitz-survivor, or becoming instantly disheartened and holding fast to the "emo game is emo" maxim as they gaze upon the update's new dark and gritty (yawn) stylings. 

That latter camp have certainly got a point. There's a small happy shard of light still left in a corner of my heart that remembers when games were like, you know, fun, and as such I'm sick to the back teeth of this current self-defeating need to appear "mature" via the use of inherently juvenile obsessions with violence and dark, grizzled anti-heroes. But who knows, maybe I'm just a big frilly ponce.

Either way, BC's trailer - which first apeared earlier today before being hastily pulled - provides us with all the necessary ticked boxes. Over-acted, gruff and despairing voice-over? Check. Scenes of gray urban destruction? Check. The same clunky, lived-in, militaristic sci-fi art style as around eight million other games out there right now? Check, check, check.

But it's not all bad. While what I assume to be the gameplay sections in the trailer's second half positively reek of a re-skinned Spider-Man game, some of the wrecked city architecture looks pretty epic in places, the forest areas on show towards the end are suitably lush, and you can't completely hate a trailer that ends with a giant robo-snake fight. Just please Capcom. let's get out of the grey city and into the countryside quick, and ideally, could you throw in a few song and dance routines and/or kittens in clown suits too? That'd be great.

[Golden Donut, you're invited to Christmas dinner at my house this year]

I like the guys from Running With Scissors. Far from being the baby-eating, kitten-punching corrupters of children that certain quarters would paint them as, I've always found them to be thoroughly funny and intelligent people, passionate but down to Earth, considered but with an anarchic sense of fun, and always willing to throw a sick joke into even the most serious conversation. In short, my kind of people.

After myself and Jim spoke to Postal 3 Product Manager Mike Jaret a while back we kept in touch, and finding that both Destructoid and RWS were going to be at this year's Leipzig Games Convention, we decided to make the time to meet up. And thus, a tad weary and battered by the onslaught of the GC, myself, Mike, and company CEO Vince Desi found ourselves taking refuge in the sanctuary of the convention center's cafeteria to take a break from the madness for half an hour, and you can find the resulting conversation after the jump. 

It was a fun and worthwhile talk, conducted days after Manhunt 2's eventual approval by the ESRB while the game's UK release remained up in the air, - a situation which sadly still hasn't changed - during which we took in the Postal games, the joys of comedy violence in the media, the failings of both the ESRB and Take2, over-complicated and patronizing games ratings systems and of course, Harry Potter's sexual problems. Hit the jump. You know you want to. 

Having vague and hazy recollections of this week's Games Media Awards, I found myself quite looking forward to going over the photos and video from the night so that I could piece together everything that went on. Alas my friends, I was sadly disappointed, as the GMA was not an event which promoted coherence, and the snatched recordings we came away with were no match for debauched power of the evening.

If you came to this post looking for a comprehensive document of the logistical workings of a games press event, I'm afraid you're going to be as disappointed as I. If however, you've spent your weekend thus far pondering the question "I wonder just how much nightmarish lunacy the British side of the Dtoid team can get into over the course of a drunken night in London?", then by staggeringly fortuitous coincidence this is exactly the story for you. I tried to make sense of it, I really did, but despite my BA-qualified moving image skills, not even my own dexterous editing prowess could build a sensible narrative out of Thursday night.

What I can present you with though, is a whirlwind of rag-tag nonsensical imagery, which in a roundabout, ironic way, sums up the tone of the night far better than something more coherent ever could have. I will warn you now though that the video has been labeled with a hard NSFW certificate for frequent medium to fearsome swearing, simulated scenes of a sexual nature, burlesque dancing, general debauchery, and my awful, awful, on-stage Guitar Hero III performance after too many glasses of wine. I learnt the important lesson that night that joining a world record gaming attempt in a room with a free bar on a game that you can't play on hard mode even while sober is not a recipe for success, and I included the - thankfully blurry - footage as an example to us all.