From accursedfarms.com (episode 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10)

We have two zero guest passes left for The Ship to give away. The game is unorthodox, but brilliant. It’s set during the early 1900s on various luxury cruise liners. Each passenger is given another passenger’s name. They are then supposed to seek out that person and murder them. Various murder weapons are given cash bonuses if you can find and use them. Meanwhile, you have to take care of your character while navigating the ship on the hunt. This mechanic is not too unlike The Sims (but with murder!). What keeps things interesting here is that you never know who your murderer is and because you have to take care of your character and find useful weapons, you may leave yourself vulnerable at times. It gives me a surprisingly strong sense of paranoia. (good paranoia!)

There’s various gameplay modes with support up to 32 players, with optional bots. That last part is important because there’s only roughly 50 players on at any given time. The bots are fun to play against in my opinion, but that may be a no-go for some. If that’s the case, you may want to wait for the possibly more popular The Ship 2. I love the game, personally. (we’re currently considering this game for a feature)

The game costs $10-20 (barring a sale), depending on what you want and where you get it.

For this weekend only, the DoSu-featured independent game Gish is on sale for $3.99 on Impulse, StarDock’s burgeoning competitor to Valve’s Steam service. Gish on Impulse usually costs $19.95 as opposed to Steam’s $9.99, which is why it isn’t linked in our database.

If you’ve never used the Impulse service before, it’s very similar to Steam. You can browse and purchase games as well as download demos either from their website or from within the Impulse client. Games you own show up within the client and can be downloaded there. One key difference from Steam is that the Impulse client does not need to be running in order to play your games; there isn’t even a background process for authentication. Pricing, game selection and community features leave a bit to be desired when compared to Steam, but it’s still a fine place to purchase games when the price is right.

To make some sense out of the second half of the title, I also wanted to bring up a relevant item from Edmund McMillen, creator of Gish. This is a Cry for Help is a CD collection of ten years worth of Edmund’s work as an independent artist. The CD includes 17 games (including Gish), 15 comics and a ton of extras including artwork and animations. While some games – such as Cunt – are flash games which can be played for free through a browser, I felt the collection was worth purchasing not only for the sake of convenience, but to support the creator as well. If you’re thinking of buying Gish anyway, I suggest getting this CD instead as Gish is included and it will only cost you $10 plus shipping.

This is anniversary month for us at DoSu. So, I thought I’d compile another episode of the award winning This Spartan Life, a series that first started my machinima posts with episode one on January 14th, 2008. Soon after my post, they stopped pushing out new parts, which is a shame. But who knows! Maybe they’ll launch a new episode featuring Halo 3! (edit: yep, episode six starts using Halo 3!)

So, for those new to the show, This Spartan Life is basically a talk show from within Halo 2. It features a show host, great 8-bit tunes, interesting guests, as well as things like players that uses game glitches and character movement to effect dancing. Typical topics range from virtual spaces to machinima to 8-bit music.

This third episode (34 min.) features guests Marty O’Donnell again (the first part of this interview can be seen on episode two), writer and producer of the musical scores for the Halo series; and Malcom McLaren, musician (currently playing with gameboy music), movie producer (Fast Food Nation), and founder of the punk rock band Sex Pistols.

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It has now been one year since the start of what might be called “DoSu 3.0″. The original, started in 2006, was mostly a forum with exported news. Version 2.0 was a video slideshow of sorts, again using forum software. For this version we ditched the forums for blogging on WordPress, with our first official post on January 13th, 2008.

Now that it’s been a year, and to celebrate the anniversary of our most successful version, we’re ready to launch a new forum. We weren’t satisfied with any old copy-and-paste forum with bloated features and hard to style tables, so we went with the sleek and customizable Vanilla boards. It helps focus conversation and community on a small site such as ours.

So, if you want to talk democratically about games, comics and various forms of digital art, we’d be delighted to participate. Just start a discussion over @ yonder forum:

DownloadableSuicide Forum

Furthermore, we’re currently re-evaluating what content and coverage we create and how we present it. (as if we don’t make constant changes all year long) If you want to offer some suggestions (or encouragement) now’s a good time to do that.

Though 1UP has now been gutted and sold to the highest bidder and EGM has been axed, several ex-Ziff Davis employees have already begun to rise above in the form of the Rebel FM podcast. In the spirit of 1UP FM, Nick Suttner, Matt Chandronait, Anthony Gallegos, Philip Kollar, Jade Kraus, and Ryan O’Donnell have brought us a brand new audio production. Though they experienced some technical issues which resulted in some sketchy audio quality, the Rebel FM crew gets right down to doing what they’ve always done: talk about video games. But not before they shared a bit about what went down at 1UP this past Tuesday. They’ve also said that the Backlog segment which 1UP FM listeners had come to love will find a new home in Rebel FM, albeit probably under a different name. I was very glad to hear this news.

Rebel FM is currently headquartered at Anthony Gallegos’ old blog Eat Sleep Game. If the site is still down when you’re reading this, you can grab Episode 1 of the podcast via Bittorrent.

I would also like to mention that torrents have been made for collections of several 1UP podcasts including 1UP FM, GFW Radio and 1UP Yours. Get your P2P on.

The news hit on 1/06/2009 that 1UP.com, MyCheats.com, GameTab.com and GameVideos.com would be sold to UGO.com. EGM has been closed. Many people on the 1UP staff lost their jobs. The 1UP Show is now canceled with the 1UP podcasts (including 1UP FM and the Backlog) likely to follow suit. This news immediately had a profound effect on gamers, not to mention the whole of games journalism. I turned to Twitter just after word of the acquisition hit my RSS feed and watched as the many reactions from both 1UP staffers and other games journalists poured in. I’ve compiled the reactions here in this video: