It’s time to check out the best gamers online magazine again.The Blue Skittle for this month brings you a load of cool reads and some very interesting articles, interviews and graphics.

Check out The Blue Skittle latest issue as Foo Mo Jive was featured in a special article again this month. Check out all the PAX talk by our writers and some of the best articles yet.

I would like to take the oportunity to thank Ooopy, Kiki and all the staff from TBS that was representing not only TBS but also Podtacular at PAX.

Thanks guys. You guys Rock!!!!

It’s hard to escape the concept of repetition in entertainment, especially in gaming. While the word “repetetive” itself is often used as a criticism (hello Halo 1’s interiors) games are designed to be played repeatedly, and incorporate repetetive elements into their designs.

It’s understandable. As an object lesson in entertainment economics, look at the DVD player. Widely hailed as the fastest-adopted new entertainment technology, it is built on the foundation of repetition; the idea that people will want to play the movies and television shows they love over and over. Given that game console hardware and software are both about three times as expensive as DVD players and DVD discs, they have to be at least as repeat-friendly to warrant that kind of investment.

There a lot of different ways to extend a game’s useful lifetime and give gamers more bang for their buck by allowing for repeat plays; the Halo series, as well as many other games, provide excellent examples of this.

Since the nature of online multiplayer itself is repetition– short competetive matches played with a seemingly endless revolving door of random opponents– we’ll leave that aside for the moment. Many games don’t have multiplayer at all, and even most that do don’t encompass all of their purchasers in online matches. However, there are many ways that repetition is used in designing a single-player campaign that can remain interesting after many playthroughs.

Click “read more” from the front page for the complete text.

read more

Combination Halo fansite and gaming group The Hushed Casket is celebrating its fifth anniversary; head on over and check out Midnight‘s recap of the past year, as well as their more exhaustive site history.

Australia’s PALGN has posted a review of Freeverse’s XBLA port of Marathon: Durandal. Their verdict:

Marathon: Durandal is one of the best value games on the XBLA. You could spend more time playing through this than Halo, and at a fraction of the cost. There are aspects of the game that are archaic and it’s not a good game in short bursts, however, it provides a mysterious and lengthy experience for anyone who is willing to immerse themselves.

They did say it’s too easy to get lost, but there’s always the Marathon Spoiler Guide if you do.

Godfree at Gamertag Radio just informed us that Gamertag Radio has been shut down without warning by his hosting company and held at ransom to bring it live again. Here’s the email they sent him:

Your site gamertagradio.com was suspended because it consumed an
excessive amount of resources.
One of our techs was doing a routine check on the server, and your
site was consuming
more than 4.62% of the servers RAM, more than 1.93% of the server CPU
and more than 14% of the server MySQL resources.
Our policy is 10% of the entire servers resources.

O RLY? Maybe you could have told him about this hidden fee so he could decide whether he could afford the price hike before you instantly dropped his site after four years and demanded more money to bring it back up? That’s what I call extortion. If you’re with me, why not contact midphase and leave them a poignant note about their shady business practices?