It’s justice, and it wants to eat your brains.

Ah, so it’s “BRINK.” I’ve been saying it wrong. There’s a lot of technical language in this interview with Splash Damage’s Technical Director Arnout van Meer. In summary: BRINK is building upon the Quake Wars tech; these revisions should, among other things, allow BRINK to take advantage of multi-core processors on PC. Finally, there’s talk about things that Splash Damage isn’t doing, such as moving from OpenGL to DirectX 11.

“… it says on the box: ‘No Hispanics’.”

By now, especially if you’re a listener of such gaming podcasts as A Life Well Wasted, Out of The Game or the Bitmob Mobcast, you may have caught wind of the self-titled debut album from Robert Ashley and Sam Frigard’s genre-defying band I Come to Shanghai. Robert and Sam’s labor of love was three years in the making, having co-written and co-produced each of the album’s ten tracks themselves. “Another Sunday Morning,” the song I’ve selected to feature below was, as I understand it, written foremost by Robert Ashley, and is one that I like on a personal level very much.

I Come to Shanghai is being distributed under Creative Commons with a “name your price” model at the band’s official website.

By now you should be well aware of the podcast Rebel FM that is produced weekly by the people that brought us 1UP FM. What you may not know is that there are now two more all-new podcasts created by ex-1UP employees.

Ryan Scott (of GFW Radio and LAN Party podcast fame) has a new show called The Geekbox. Each week Ryan Scott, along with Karen Chu, Greg Ford, Andrew Fitch and Ryan “Master” Higgins gather at Comics Conspiracy in Sunnyvale California to record The Geekbox podcast. The Geekbox is something of a spiritual successor to GFW Radio and LAN Party by virtue that video games are not the main object of conversation. Rather, the crew discusses all things “geek” as they come up. World of Warcraft, Burn Notice and Lost are some recurring topics in the first three episodes. Other conversation concern things from comic books to Andrew Fitch’s dating life.

Not to be overlooked is Area 5, a new production company made up of former GameVideos employees. Their debut project, CO-OP, is a video podcast produced in the same general style of The 1UP Show; roundtable video game discussions with relevant gameplay footage displayed throughout. The first “arc” of CO-OP is a two-parter called “Reflection”. Therein, the Area 5 folks invite over their former co-workers to discuss their favorite games of 2008. Both videos together tally up to about 45 minutes. While CO-OP is free and hosted at YouTube for now, Area 5 may move to a subscription model in the future. There is no telling yet.

Finally, Rebel FM is trucking along. Audio quality has improved immensely thanks to the new equipment they were able to purchase with listener donations. As I said in my last 1UP-themed post, they plan to continue the popular Backlog segment from 1UP FM. Their first game was selected on-air this week, and it is Call of Cthulhu. Discussion about that game sounds like it will begin on next week’s episode. I have not played the game before and have meant to for years, so I think I will try to play along. It’s available for Xbox and PC and there is a Rebel FM post with information on where to acquire it.

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:

Okay, so it’s only TWO PAGES, but it’s a start. I was flipping through my copy of the October edition of EGM during some quiet time on the John and I would have crapped my pants were it not for my convenient situation. What do I see? A column by Jeff Green, former editor in chief of CGW and GFW magazines. Apparently it’s a new feature, and one that I think has been a long time coming. I believe that part of the perception problem of the state of PC gaming stems from the fact that so many publications (both online and in ye olde style print) are segregated. I’m so happy to see this happening and I hope CGW-branded columns show up more and more in EGM.

Here’s a photo; I blurred out the text as a precaution. Everybody should go buy this issue and send Jeff an e-mail thanking/congratulating him for having a presence in a previously console-only magazine!