With another milestone reached it's time to look back at the articles that have brought us here to the big 2-0-0-0 entries mark.  As I have done in the past, allow me to guide you back through my favorite moments from the last five hundred PTB articles.  You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll rage, and maybe - just maybe - you'll learn something worthwhile about yourself.

• Sheppard And McKay Play "The Game" (Stargate: Atlantis meets SimCity)
• Beyond Beeps: Rockin' Kats (Hey punk!  I'll get you yet!)
• What Could Possibly Go Wrong? (This pilot for a Bubsy cartoon is just painful)
• Keeping The Smash Bros. Brawl Secrets A Secret (Not my most popular idea)
• Steamed (Everything worked out in the end, thankfully)
• The Great Goldeneye Debacle of 2008 (Too many license-holders spoil the fun)
• Endless Ocean Is All Wet (I think I've seen that eel somewhere before)
• Tattoo Assassins?  Seriously? (DeLoreanality!)
• Beyond Beeps: A Boy and His Blob (Not all Beyond Beeps articles feature good music)
• Mega Man's Missed Menu Opportunity (Maybe it's impractical, but I still like it)
• Secret Origins: Aero the Acro-bat 2 (The best thing to come out of the vacation from hell)
• The Remembered (Update on forgotten games; most are still in limbo)

It's Friday which means that it's time for another episode of Kombo Breaker, the recently relaunched podcast on which I and three of my fellow Kombo staff member buddies talk about recent happenings in the video game industry.  This week we touch on topics such as our predictions for 2009, whether or not a handheld game could ever possibly hope to win a top Game of the Year award over a home console title, the high hopes riding on Ghostbusters: The Video Game, and interesting trends from the new NPD sales report for December.  Better yet, this week I have a new microphone so my voice should sound clearer than last week's experiment involving broadcasting from the year 1976.  Either download the MP3 file directly from Kombo or subscribe to the show on iTunes (if you like what you hear, don't be shy about writing a review on iTunes), and don't forget to tell us what you think of the show. 

Electronic Arts is preparing to spring The Godfather II on the Sony PlayStation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360, and PC in February which means that the hype train is pulling out of the station.  I thoroughly enjoyed the original Godfather game when I played the Nintendo Wii version nearly two years ago, so I'm definitely looking forward to this sequel even if I won't be able to physically choke my rivals with the Wii's nunchuk cord this time around.  One of the new gameplay elements featured in Godfather II involves performing favors for your fellow mob Family members and, in turn, convincing others to do favors for you.  What's involved in completing these little missions, you ask?  The Godfather II Creative Director Michael Perry fills us in on the facts behind the favors with this PTB-exclusive explanation.

As Don Vito Corleone once said to Bonasera, "Someday, and that day may never come, I'll call upon you to do a service for me." A Favor is a currency in a mob Family, one that can be called in at any time. In the Godfather II game, Favors come in two forms: Favors from Corrupt Officials, and Favors from people asking for help.

Corrupt Officials exist in every city, and it pays to keep them in your Back Pocket (as Sollozzo once said to Don Vito, about "all of those politicians that you carry around in your pocket like so many nickels and dimes.") When you first meet a Corrupt Official, they'll ask a Favor of you, such as roughing up a rival politician or stealing evidence from a safe. In return, they'll give you a Favor that you can keep in your Back Pocket. These returned Favors include things like putting a Sting on a rival Made Man to lock him up for a few days, rebuilding your bombed businesses, and even springing your Made Men from jail if they happened to get arrested. You can call in a Favor from your Back Pocket at any time, so it is very worthwhile to make deals with every Corrupt Official you find.

Favors are also asked of you by people you meet in the city. You might be asked to smash up a shop, assassinate someone, or even blow up a business. People will have an icon over their head that indicates what they will return in exchange for a Favor. They will offer either Cash or Kill Conditions for Made Men. Doing Favors for Cash is a great way to raise money to spend on Skill Upgrades for you and your Family. There are an unlimited number of Favors available, so you can always raise Cash whenever you need it. And if someone asks you to do a Favor that you'd rather not do, simply decline it or cancel it and do a Favor for someone else.

Sometimes, you might be asked to blow up or smash up one of your own rackets! You could always decline to do the favor, but in the mob world, this is known as insurance fraud. Payouts can be quite nice. In fact, you'll bring in a lot more money from a bombing than you would from that day's racket income. And if you have a "Rebuild Bombed Businesses" Favor in your Back Pocket, it'll be as if nothing happened.

In a previous blog post about Made Men, I described how to kill Made Men permanently by using the appropriate Kill Condition. By doing Favors for people you meet in the cities, you can learn the Kill Conditions for every single Made Man in the game. Remember, it's all about the Made Men in the Godfather II game, so stock up on Kill Condition Favors and put a Hit on every Made Man that you can find.

It's a relief to hear that there are unlimited opportunities for favors available.  All too often I've hit the metaphorical wall with these kinds of objectives in that I need to complete that one last seemingly impossible mission before the next dozen or so goals become available.  Botch a favor, however, and it sounds as if I can just move on to another one and hope for better results.  Bombing my own business to complete a favor makes my organizational tendencies tingle in a sour way, but whatever the Family wants, the Family gets...

With all of the critical acclaim and high praise from audiences for last year's The Dark Knight, one would think that a video game adaptation of the film would be a foregone conclusion, and yet here we are in 2009 without a film-based Batman versus The Joker game in sight.  So what happened?  Who dropped the ball on a Dark Knight game?  As it turns out, it's a long, sad story from the worlds of publisher Electronic Arts and developer Pandemic Brisbane.  Kotaku has the tale of high expectations, rushed deadlines, and stretching a game engine until it snaps.

As for the quality of the design, our sources disagree. One says many of the game's mechanics were brilliant and potentially revolutionary, while the batmobile and batbike were loads of fun once you looked past the streaming problems. Another says the missions were mostly borrowed from other open world games and the core gameplay was dull and boring. The work on the sound design, however, was reportedly magnificent and beautifully responsive to the in-game action.

Either way, for the Dark Knight to become a title worthy of the Batman name, it needed more resources to sort out its host of design and technical problems. More and more people were brought onto the team, mostly as external contractors. At one point, our source says, there were 130 people working on the game. The human resources were there, but a more important resource was missing.

Time.

The real killer was having to hit the same release date as the movie. Eventually it became clear this would be impossible and the decision was made to focus on launching to coincide with the Dark Knight DVD release in December 2008. This would be the absolute deadline, as EA's rights to the Batman IP expired in December.

Maybe it's for the best that a game based on The Dark Knight just wasn't meant to be.  Lackluster games based on blockbuster movies are more the rule than the exception in the industry, and it would have been terrible for such a stellar film to associate with a dud of a game.  Nevertheless, I can't let go the idea of a Dark Knight game in which players are cast as The Joker instead of Batman.  Think about it for a moment.  Batman spends most of the film reacting to The Joker's madness.  It's The Joker who gets to have all the fun with his explosions and knives and rocket launchers and high speed chases.  Who do you think would be more fun to control, hmm?

After taking on time travel in Mario & Luigi: Partners In Time, it's time for everyone's favorite plumber duo to tackle Fantastic Voyage in the upcoming Mario & Luigi 3 for the Nintendo DS.  This time around our heroes are swallowed by Bowser and must make their way through his body before he can take over the Mushroom Kingdom in their absence.  Kombo has the whole story and some new screenshots.

[I]nstead of following the Partners in Time setup where sometimes the babies would appear on the top screen as the adults occupy the bottom, Bowser gets "top billing," and the Bros. can make him do their bidding by poking at various nerves and stuff. This leads to king-sized freak-outs by the turtle tyrant on the top screen, as he wonders if someone has made a voodoo doll out of him. Hopefully this is more easily manageable than controlling four characters at once in Partners in Time.

Mario and [Luigi] have pretty much the same kind of attack set-up as before, but Bowser gets to strut his stuff in flashier ways. One example is through the use of "vacuum blocks" you can collect through the game and use to suck in enemies, a la Kirby. The faster you mash the X button, the more this hurts anyone who dares stand against big bad Bowser.

I have high hopes for this sequel because it's not only coming from a series that has traditionally been full of self-referential humor and pure fun, but it's an actual first-party Nintendo core gamer title.  This desert is very dry and I am so very thirsty.  Nintendo, please fill my canteen.  And no babies in the gameplay this time!

We're just coming out of the time of year when all of the major game journalism publications choose a vaunted Game of the Year to hold up high for praise.  2008 was stellar year for gaming, so how is it possible to take a list of all of the games released last year and whittle it down to a single title that stands above all others?  The debate lasted quite a while behind the scenes at Kombo as all of us on staff stated our cases with lists of nominees followed by a vote.  The results were close.  Too close, in fact; three games wound up in a near-tie.  It was decided that there would be a run-off vote for those three games, and once again the staff stepped up to throw support behind the final nominees: Metal Gear Solid 4, Fallout 3, and LittleBigPlanet.  I thought that the ensuing debate was so interesting that I compiled it all into a massive staff roundtable discussion article, and you can read the result over at Kombo.

Choosing a single Game of the Year was not an easy task for 2008, and the first round of voting ended in a near three-way tie. Due to the close results, it was decided that a run-off vote would occur between the top three games from the initial voting results. The final round nominees were LittleBigPlanet, Metal Gear Solid 4, and Fallout 3. While Sackboy and friends eventually came away with the honor, the other two games did not go away quietly. we don't usually share our internal discussion with all of you out there, but there was some fantastic chatter about what makes (and does not make) a true game of the year that we believed you may have an interest in reading. Here is how the debate unfolded behind the scenes as the Kombo staff set about choosing 2008's Game of the Year.

Everybody made some great points and in the end it seems that most were satisfied with how the vote came out.  There were some especially fantastic arguments made in support of LittleBigPlanet (which eventually won the honor of Game of the Year), but what struck me is that those who voted for Sackboy all had a different reason as to why that game stood above the others.  It just goes to show once again that LittleBigPlanet is whatever the players make of it.

One of the better Sony PlayStation Portable games that few people seem to have played is Capcom's Ultimate Ghosts 'n Goblins, another modern revamp of a classic video game from a publisher that knows how to treat their old properties with respect.  The PSP game maintains the crushingly unforgiving gameplay that makes the franchise a bizarre combination of total fun and controller-throwing frustration while adding lots to do and plenty of new items to collect.  Those of you out there who passed the game by when it was first released are getting a second chance to take up the role of Arthur the noble knight, as the game is coming to the PlayStation Network as a downloadable title for PSP.  The PlayStation Blog has the announcement.

To kick off 2009, I’m happy to announce that Ultimate Ghost ‘n Goblins will be available tomorrow in the PSP store for $19.99. For those of you not familiar with the game, UGG is a side-scrolling platform game featuring the heroic knight, Arthur, as he battles hordes of undead in his quest to save Princess Prin Prin. (total run on sentence) I think just having the name “Prin Prin” is reason enough for saving. UGG maintains the 2D gameplay mechanics of this classic franchise and is the only game in the series to employ 3D graphics. The graphics are beautiful and the gameplay is intuitive yet addicting, everything you want in a quality PSP game.

I rented the game last year and enjoyed it, but never actually got around to buying it.  I'm hoping that this downloadable version of the game can pick up on my old save data so I don't have to begin the game from scratch (it was frustrating enough making progress the first time around), but based on what Capcom's John Diamonon had to say when I asked the question, I'm not getting my hopes up.

I don't know how I forgot to mention this, but Kombo has published its list of the best and worst games of 2008.  All your favorites are there along with some hidden gems and even a few games that we love to loathe.  We also go beyond individual titles and pick memorable moments from the industry itself.

What follows is our Best & Worst of 2008 Awards. We've come up with 37 categories, mixing awards for the best and worst games and industry moments of 2008. Before we get into it, though, you're probably wondering, how did we select the winners and losers? (Great question, by the way.) Our editors came up with nominees for each category, and then we voted. The Kombo staff participated in a series of polls, one for each award. When it came to picking our Game of the Year, we came up with a ridiculously long list of nominees and voted. The top three games then went onto a final poll. Before the final vote, we debated (which involved an appropriate mix of yelling, crying, screaming and a few other emotions along the way) which game earned and deserves our Game of the Year award. Once the discussion was done, we voted, and the winner of the poll was named our Game of the Year 2008. It's hardly a scientific process, but in the end, our Game of the Year won by a fairly large margin. So, it's clear. Our staff have spoken.

I wrote some of the little explanatory blurbs that accompany each award, so be sure to read those even if you skim the rest.  No, I won't tell you which ones are mine.  You'll have to figure that out for yourself.  It's a game within a list.

Adult Swim's Robot Chicken skewered two more video games in this week's episode, although the twistings of Donkey Kong and Gauntlet are quick and to the point as opposed to the usual elaborate sketches we've seen in previous episodes.  Ever wonder what's inside those barrels that Donkey Kong lobs at Mario?  Does the "Warrior need food badly" quote ever become stale?  Watch this pair of clips (United States readers only, I'm afraid) and find out.

Personally I've found Robot Chicken not quite as funny this season as it used to be, but there's still flashes of greatness here and there. It's as if the show is leaning too heavily on excessive gore and toilet humor without including the clever satire and parody elements needed to really nail the punchlines..

I have been thoroughly sucked into the world of Burnout Paradise for the Sony PlayStation 3.  I'm not usually a fan of realistic-type racing games, but Electronic Arts and Criterion Games have created an amazingly enjoyable driving experience here.  Part of the fun about speeding through Paradise City is that I'm free to turn the game into whatever kind of racing experience that I want.  I spend most of the time in the city just exploring the streets while listening to music that I've imported into the game with the custom soundtrack option, meaning that we have another game here that allows for high-speed adventures set against the best of Billy Joel.  Burnout is headed to new heights next month as Criterion is currently putting the finishing touches on the Legendary Cars add-on pack which adds four famous fictional vehicles to the action (well, non-infringing alterations of four famous fictional vehicles, anyways).  Get ready to hit the road with cars based on the DeLorean from Back to the Future, Ecto-1 from Ghostbusters, KITT from Knight Rider (William Daniels not included, sadly), and the General Lee from The Dukes of Hazzard.  Where we're going, we don't need roads.

In 2009, we’re taking Burnout vehicles to the next level with some truly unbelievable new vehicles. First up – The Jansen 88 Special. This classic 1980’s styled silver sports car is based on the fan-favourite Jansen P12, but we’ve made a few interesting modifications. Fill the gauge and hit boost to trigger burning flame trails from your back wheels. The 88 Special’s fast, manoeuvrable and great in the air. In fact, if you want to take off, this is just the car for you. Hit L3 to switch to hover mode – the wheels retract and the car takes off and hovers through Paradise City at head height. Seriously. It hovers.

Do you realize what this means? Now I can buy the DeLoreanesque Jansen 88 Special add-on, load the Burnout soundtrack with Huey Lewis and the News, and make my own modern Back to the Future game!  Great Scott, this is heavy.