New intro! Right then. July, eh? Bit mad.

As we watched the world roll by through the starboard windows of our stately social media airship, we witnessed such events as Kinect Sports: Season Two dropping neatly into the framework of Kinect PlayFit even as its DLC conveniently went half-price, while both Sports and its sequel were spotted in a variety of social scenarios across the world – by mechanics, with dads and like a boss for starters. We also kitted out some intrepid reps, lowered the rope ladder and sent them down south for the Develop conference and up north for Dare to be Digital, all the while advertising for a regiment of new positions to strengthen the Rare fleet even further.

Meanwhile, to mark the emergence of a Honey Bear and esteemed colleagues in Minecraft for Xbox 360 via the release of Skin Pack 1, codes for the pack were given away more than once despite some terrible setbacks. The unveiling of Rare’s first Minecraft presence took place in three stages over a couple of weeks: first MS blog PlayXBLA revealed the bear himself, then we spilled the beans on all his mates/non-mates, and only a few days later came the timely launch of the pack itself. But is it actually Banjo & co. mucking about in the Minecraft world, or just a collection of skins for ‘Steve’? DK Vine battled manfully with this conundrum.

July was a fine vintage for third-party listage: IGN’s Top 50 Video Game Makers had a slot for Rare, Diddy Kong cartwheeled into Virgin Media Games’ pick of videogaming child heroes, Digital Spy backed Perfect Dark for a movie interpretation and Games Radar labelled ’90s Rare brawler Battletoads Double Dragon a “bizarre crossover”. As if. Prolific fansites Rare Gamer and RFDB also buzzed with activity – the former grappling with the triple horrors of the Top 5 Rare Zombies, Fiendish Faces and Evil Veg then taking on a double bill of Most Difficult and Most Useless achievements, while the latter escorted their Rare commercial compilations into the ages of Game Boy, Xbox and Xbox 360.

To give a broad cross-section of events back at the Rare HQ airship dock, it rained a bit, rained a bit more, we watched the Olympics opening ceremony, got some strange email, did performance reviews, kept an eye on the fizzy drink situation, inserted cheese into game titles, lamented the fading influence of ’80s arcade games and pestered Viva Piñata artist Ryan to draw us a Bunnycomb on his lunch break.

One final office move marked the passing of July and the recalibration of our social media steampunk astrolabe for another month. Drift with us on the thermals of August via Twitter and/or Facebook, where we do double time as Rare and Kinect Sports. For those who have no patience with the quickfire cadence of the modern world, this summary will reoccur in a month’s time. There will be whimsicality and flippancy and baseless analogies and you are most welcome to join in.