Well thought I will do a weekly summary of what I have been playing this week. Maybe do a Sunday comment of the week gone past too, help give this blog some structure!

Playing through Megaman 2 on the Virtual Console and loving it. Good old fashioned platforming and a nice difficulty level, currently on the last level Wily's castle.

On PC playing the usual Team Fortress 2 and Warhammer Online.

On 360 few games of Geometry Wars 2 and Rainbow Six Vegas 2.

Lastly on my shiny new PS3 been playing Little Big Planet and Echochrome.

So this week saw the big redundancy push and takeover of 1up.com. Pretty much the climactic finale of the pretty shoddy state of affairs in gaming journalism over in the US. I am all for change and things, but getting rid of a talented group of people who could have made your company even better seems pretty silly to me. I guess this all started before Gertsmann-gate.

When i first got into gaming podcasts and watched Gamespot's on the spot the main presenter left to go into the gaming industry and thought nothing of it. Started listening to 1up and the odd person would leave for a games developer or publisher now and then, nothing weird there. Then Jeff Gerstmann got fired for essentially not giving Kane and Lynch a glowing review, in response to this Alex Navarro, Jason Ocampo, Ryan Davis, Brad Shoemaker, and Vinny Caravella left Gamespot in disgust at his treatment pretty much the entire core of people who made Gamespot worth watching. Navarro went to a game company, Ocampo to IGN (that correct?) and the rest went off and formed Giant Bomb on their own.

This action rippled through the scene and you started to hear rumblings about magazines getting canned for online content, PC Gamer for example. Then a major Playstation magazine got canned and this got the ball rolling. Ziff Davis (owners of GFW, EGM and 1up) were heard to be in financial trouble and to be crap employers essentially. And soon Games for Windows magazine was cancelled and Jeff Green, Shawn Elliot and Ryan Davis were left with doing online content having their main love taken away from them. This prompted Jeff and Shawn to seek employment elsewhere and subsequently they got snapped up by EA and 2k Boston. So two of my favourite podcasters left my favourite podcast. A bad sign indeed.

Then things came to a head with 1up being bought by UGO.com and EGM got cancelled, 40 employees made redundant, obviously the podcasts have stopped and we are left with 2 or 3 known names left at 1up. So most of my favourite podcasts have been stolen away from me :(

So we are left with Gamers with Jobs, Giant Bomb, Gamespot, PC Gamer and Maximum PC for gaming news and titbits podcastwise. I tried IGN, Gamespot UK and a few others but they were pretty awful. GWJ and GB are both independant so they are fine, but the others are all potentially in danger if some retarded exec decides to get rid of them.

2009 promises to be an interesting year for the gaming industry hopefully in a good way. . .