This week defense minister for Britain Liam Fox called for a ban on the forthcoming Medal of Honour game because players get to play as the Taliban in the multiplayer mode.

This prompted quite a response.

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This is an interview I conducted at PAX nearly a year ago. The file was missing, presumed dead for the longest time but I have recovered it and can now bring you the twenty minutes I spent with Pete Hottelet; founder of Omni Consumer Products. OCP are a company that specialises in bringing fictional consumables into real life.

Go check out their website here.

Products include Brawndo; the energy drink from Idiocracy.

Sex-Panther the cologne from Anchorman.

And most recently Tru Blood, the substitute for the real stuff that the vampires drink in the HBO show.

It was truly a fascinating conversation. I voiced some of our communities suggestions to Pete and he actually genuinely inspired me.

Enjoy.

And you can buy Tru Blood within the UK at Play.com HERE.

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This is a transcript of a piece I wrote a year or so ago exploring how I and many other people felt around Nintendo’s E3 press conference in 2008 (You know, the one with Wii Music.). Considering their turnabout two years later at the most recent show I felt it deserved a different ending.

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My take on the movie industry as it stands today.

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The Game Reviews. An excellent site, filled with professional Edge-quality writing about video games. I’d like to thank Sinan and Joe of Big Red Potion who head up the article and review team for helping me get my work considered and the rest of the team for giving me the opportunity to write them a monthly article. I hope I can maintain their standards while honing my abilities.

My first article is on the finite life of Xbox Live and can be found here.

Here is an honest account of everything I have learned about the real world through playing video games.

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A look at the deeper issues behind why so many video games involve killing things.

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The second audio article in the Gonzo Gaming series.

I figured since our main show is intended not to be political in nature I would air my thoughts on the recently instated Digital Economy Act 2010.

This is basically a bill that allows license holders to disconnect the internet of anybody in the UK that they even suspect is downloading illegally.

You can get the basic idea of it here and there are plenty of other similarly dissenting voices out there that you can go deeper on this with. We may even discuss further developments on the main show, leaving politics out of it.

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This is the first of a series of weekly articles in audio format. Think of it as a mid-week bonus podcast; A fifteen minute rant to tide you over until Fridays when we roll out the main event. Since I’ve decided to get back into writing articles I figured a good way to showcase them and reach the largest audience would be to put them on our main podcast feed.

So we kick off with an axe I’ve been itching to grind about Heavy Rain. It’s absolutely packed with SPOILERS so steer clear if you want to finish it first. We will doubtless be resuming a debate in the main show but we’ll be keeping that one spoiler free so everyone can enjoy it.

If you enjoy this monologue, you might also want tocheck out this excellent article from Games Radar on fifteen of the biggest Heavy Rain plot-holes. It was scathingly inspirational to me.

As for where to put your furious rebuttal, check out the forums and join the debate.

More Gonzo Gaming next week, along with a couple of oldschool written articles.

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You can download this from wherever you get your regular Digital Cowboys episodes. Go to iTunes, Zune or wherever and click ‘Refresh’.

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This week’s Community Intelligence question is: -

What would you do if gaming wasn’t your hobby?

Next week’s show to be recorded on Thursday 15th April with Special Guest, James Batchelor, making a triumphant return from defending the Wii back in episode 130. James has just completed his games for Lent challenge whereby he game up gaming for 40 days and 40 nights. We are going to dig deep on whether or not it had any substantial change on his life.

So let’s take this one step further, if you were to give up gaming, what would you do to fill the void? Would you stay at home and watch Eastenders? Would you finally take a sport up with your free time? Or would you *shock horror* find more time to do more with that special someone?

Also, roughly how many hours do you spend a week gaming?