No messing about, here’s the deal.

We’ve been champing at the bit to get ourselves back on the interwebs with our own brand of gaming related entertainment so we’re bringing The Games Cast back to life with a new direction and focus. If any of you remembered our experimentation with TGC Radio, you’re part way to knowing what we’re doing.

Gone is the monthly pre-recorded show because now we’re going to be hitting you with a weekly live show with a whole new format bringing you gaming chat and news, competitions but all utterly live!

Best of all, each and every show will be recorded and available to listen to at any time! So need to worry about missing an episode.

The best part of it is that we are teaming up with the awesome Stuart and Andy from The Monday Movie Show to make the beginnings of an awesome line up of shows for you all to enjoy. These guys are already broadcasting every week so make sure you check out their show; we are extremely proud that we can team up with them!

We’ll be announcing the dates of our first weekly shows very soon so make sure you keep an eye on our twitter feed as well as our home right here.

This is a massively exciting time and we’d love to have you along for the ride!

So lets start with something simple.

We’re sorry we disappeared without a trace; no podcasts, site posts, tweets, nada. All three of us realise that there are, or maybe now were, a lot of good people out there who have supported what we were doing and stuck with us and we kinda turned our backs on all of it.

Let me just be clear on behalf of Phil, Paul and I, this wasn’t intentional, we basically lost sight of how much we love the show and trying to produce something entertaining for you guys about a subject we all love; video games.

Suck-up apology done.

Why am I posting now on this site after so much time?

We’re coming back with a new show, a new direction, and overall a more live feel to our shows. Quite literally.

Right now we’re busy working on the specifics to get our new format working and will be announcing more details very soon both here and through twitter (http://twitter.com/thegamescast), but if any of you remember TGC Radio, keep thinking down those lines.

For now, thanks for reading and visiting, and we’ll keep you updated very soon!

In this months episode Paul, Duncan and Phil discuss the next-gen consoles, Team Bondi, Facebook Gaming, Portal 2, Duke Nukem Forever, Fear 3 and much much more. Paul manages to spend most of his time playing Tetris on Facebook but does make some very good points on the topic of the next PlayStation and the WiiU, before returning to Tetris.

Paul and Duncan catch up on Bioshock Infinite as they watch the recent gameplay trailer during the Retro Tunes competition, which is now on 4200 MS Points (or PS3/Wii equivalent).

And, just for the record, Duncan says Bioshock Crash mode first!

The awesome Shadow Complex is nearly two years old. Peggle, a game that continues to be enjoyed, is over two years old, released on XBLA in March 2009. Titles such as Uno, Zuma, Geometry Wars, Marble Blast Ultra, Trials HD and Castle Crashers are all great games delivered by an exciting service. It wasn’t just new games though, with classics such as Sonic, Doom, Street Fighter 2, TMNT, Worms and Outrun it enabled us to all relive our younger years, albeit through the rose tinted glasses of upscaling. By January 2007, just 14 months after it first came online the service had delivered over 20 million downloads.

It would be very difficult to try and summarise the service in just two paragraphs, especially as everyone will undoubtedly tell me I’ve forgotten their favourite game. A look through the most recent Top Arcade Chart from MajorNelson.com shows that a lot of the games we would call “classic” arcade titles are still there being purchased and played today. Which leads me onto the point of this post. What has Xbox Live Arcade done recently? Have we burnt out the new and exciting titles?

The most recent title, Trenched, isn’t even available in the UK. In fact the only place to have it is the US. I’ve not heard anything about it. It seems that these days Arcade titles just appear with little or no fanfare. Why? Has the Indie marketplace stolen all the good ideas – which is a shame because the Indie area of XBLA is so difficult to find many don’t bother.

So, really, my question to you all is two-fold. What was the last XBLA title you bought? And do you think the service is losing its edge?

Mine was Toy Soldiers – though I could have sworn I’d already bought it.

Personally I love the new look. It looks a lot easier to get to to games and content, but what are your thoughts?

Click on the thumbnails to view the full image.

For most gamers the E3 week is like a whole bunch of Christmas Days all rolled into one massive week of highs, lows and disappointments, with maybe a phew “whoops” and high-fives included for good measure. It’s also a week of face-palms, general embarrassments - like Zelda not working properly during last years Ninty presentation – and general awkwardness after the presenter builds up your hopes to almost breaking point, only to find some half-dressed clown in an ice-cream van.

Here’s a round up of all of the rumours currently circulating the interwebs.

Ninty

After last year’s big 3DS reveal (and I use the word “big” in a sarcastic tone) it’s down to Nintendo to do something massive this year. Sure, everyone loves Kirby, but it’s not the big crescendo of your E3 presentation normally is it. Only when the line up is weak do you leave it to a ball of string to round off the presentation. Anyhow, here’s what the rumour mill has on our plumbers parents.

• Project Cafe, aka Wii 2 (not really a rumour as it’s been confirmed)
• A new Mario 3D game for Project Cafe
• A new Mario 3D game for the 3DS

Sony

It’s been a very bad lead-up to E3 for Sony so they’ve got some ground to make up. The freebies have gone some way to make up for the lengthy PSN downtime but it’s hope Sony can revitalise their fans and reassure them enough to stop the loss of customers and give the brand some much needed optimism. I hope they can. I really do.

• Sony NGP titles to include Uncharted, Killzone and Wipeout
• Sony NGP price tag and release date to be announced
• PSP Go 2 (Cough)
• Metal Gear Solid 5
• Grand Theft Auto 5 Exclusive to PS3

Microsoft

The Redmond boys (and Seattle guys too, and gals – jeez, this is a PC nightmare this sentence) have a tough act to follow from last years E3 winning presentation. We’ve mostly all got Kinect and the 360 Slim has been sat here quietly for just under a year, so what are they going to pull out of the hat this year? I fear that this year’s presentation is all about the software, much like Sony’s last year. Don’t get me wrong, software is great but E3 wins only really come about with new hardware – it’s got to be a mighty fine presentation to win it based on release announcements.

• A new tier for Xbox Live
• Kinect games
• More kinect games
• Even more kinect games
• 360 Dashboard redesign using WinPhone 7 tile look
• Full on 3D firmware update
• Milo on Kinect

Game Developers

We all know the new Assassins Creed game will be revealed at E3 but what about these bad boys below (okay, on some of them, I’m taking the preverbial)

• New Splinter Cell title
• HALO: Combat Evolved HD
• Grand Theft Auto V
• Mass Effect 3
• A new Mirror’s Edge
• Bioshock Infinite (This has to be there)
• Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4
• Call of Duty: Covert-Ops
• Call of Duty Modern Warfare 5
• Call of Duty: Photo-Ops
• Call of Duty Modern Warfare 6
• Call of Duty: Co-Ops
• Call of Duty: Just give us your money.

If you have more rumours then add them to the comments below and we’ll post them here and keep the rumour mill flowing!

In the next few weeks we shall be recording Episode 14 with a new format, to take some of the weight of pre- and post-production off our hands. It was taking nearly two weeks from planning to publishing, which meant more than a four week gap between episodes.

The forum is offline for now whilst we sort out the mess the spammers left behind (stupid Christmas competitions!) so we’ll let you know when it’s back up.

In the meantime we hope you kept the place warm whilst we were gone. Anyone want to fill us in on what happened?

Did you know that Episode 13 of The Games Cast is now available for your audible pleasure?

No? Well you better get your iTunes account subscribed, or set up a link to our RSS feed (see below for that one). Of course you could just listen direct from our website.

Blatant reminder out of the way, those of you who have listened will already know about a rather neat way you can help shape one of our competitions, in the one-off Name The Competiton section of the show. The Caption Comp has gone for good and we want to replace it with something really fresh for the show. To find out more about it, go listen again (or for the first time) to Episode 13, or have a look at the special forum thread where you can also leave your entries (you’ll need to register for the forum first to leave a comment). You can also enter via Twitter, by adding the hashtag #tgccomp to your entry.

A number of good entries have already come in so get yours in now, and yes, you can enter more than one suggestion. You have until April 1st to enter at which time the three of us will sit down with all the entries and wittle down to the best one. Then all we need to do is actually make a competition around the name!

If you win, not only do you get name checked every episode we use the competition on (minimum of six episodes), but you also win yourself 2 months of free video game rentals from the awesome Boomerang Rentals. Notoriety and two months of free game rentals; not too shabby is it!

So get entering!!!

Despite the obvious connotations of the number, episode 13 is less about evil and bad luck (unless you count our tech fails, but they’ve happened since day one!) and more to do with us reaching the same ep number with our previous pod-casting incarnation.

The Vagusnet.com Podcast is where we all got bitten by this lark, yet after episode 13 of that show, the site imploded due to some daft argument, that we actually can’t remember the details of anymore, with the site owner. The show stopped, so did the site mostly, and we disappeared into the pod-casting ether. Five years on, all is good, the Vagusnet site owner of the time is still a very good friend of all of us, and we’re back in the groove with TGC.

Secretly we all wondered if we’d reach episode 14, and I have to say, there’s no reason to doubt we’ll go well beyond 14. We have to, there’s a whole bloody schedule of shows to work through over the next 12 months at least!

Enough of the past, what about the present. This months edition of The Games Cast sees all three of us discuss the Dead Island trailer, the PS3 ban/unban app and Sony’s iPad “killer”, along with all the usual features and competitions. Except for one main difference; the Caption Competition isn’t quite what it used to be. You’ll have to listen to find out why!

Episode 13 will be available within the next 48 hours if you’re reading this before 5th March, or is available now for those of you who only just realised we had a website too!

Happy gaming!