Some vital information you need to know about Digital Cowboys and the changes that are coming.

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This week I was on The Married Gamers “Testrocast”. Kelly Brown gathered four male podcasters together and grilled them on some thorny issues surrounding women in gaming.

I hope I did 51% of the population proud.

My third article for The Game Reviews can be found…

Here.

Here by popular demand, is where you will find images of us the cosplay costumes mentioned in Episode 160.  It’s a thread on our forum, if you haven’t joined already then now is the time.

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.

Before you listen to tonight’s first installment of our epic two-part show on how to start your own podcast have a listen to both Gamers with Jobs and Sanctuary 4 Gamers. We actually helped Steve of S4G with a skit he did a few weeks ago on their Episode #78 (guest starring Justin McEleroy from Joystiq). It’s a cracking show with some mightily impressive editing and a huge community.

24 Hours, 24 games (total coincidence in the end). We hit 7500 gamerpoints, 2500 more than our initial aim of 5000. And massive, massive thanks to all of you who donated we’ve made over £1000 for Medecins Sans Frontieres so far. It was an amazing and exhausting experience and we had members of our community along for the ride every step of the way in a hastily organized video chat-room.

You can still donate here.  http://www.justgiving.com/Digital-Cowboys-Haiti-Relief-Challenge There will be no cut off date and considering the recent earthquake in Chile your donations will definitely be going to much-needed use. We’re unusually humbled by the fact that as foolish and punishing an undertaking as this was for the two of us, it will genuinely help people. It’s not often we can say that about the things we do.

Special thanks go out to Giles for helping us bring this to fruition and donating a massive chunk of the funds. True to his word he gave us £10 per 100 points. This week’s podcast will be edited highlights of our recordings so you can listen to us get more and more frazzled.

We’re moving this back a week to the 27th and 28th of February. The principle reason being that Tony is recovering from a nasty bout of flu and it would seem cruel and unusual punishment to deprive him of sleep and make him play CSI: Hard Evidence. We know that our community care about us being fighting fit and able to take on this challenge with gusto rather than actually being in pain.

The donations page is still here.

Thanks so much to everybody who has donated already. We’ve got over £200 so far and we’re 11% towards our goal already. It seems only Giles wants to sponsor us per gamer point so we’re going to pull out all the stops when it comes to getting them. Join us next weekend for the 24-Hour Marathon. Constant Twitter and forum updates. Estimated start time is 11am.

OK folks. This is a call out to all of you who would like to be on the show. This Thursday evening Tony and I will be on Skype. We want to do a Room 101 episode starring our community. If you want to be on the show, jump onto the thread on the community forums here, request a time slot and email me your Skype name if I don’t already have it.

Slots Available…

7.00pm
7.30pm
8.00pm
8.30pm
9.00pm
9.30pm

What you have to bring to the show is something that you’re sick of about games, the games industry or even gamers themselves. The aim is to make a convincing enough argument that the thing you hate gets cast into the fiery pit of Room 101. Conversely Tony and I have the task of playing devil’s advocates and trying to make a case for keeping your pet peeve out in the world. We’ve done three of these shows already and they’re always great fun and really entertaining.

Episode #114: http://thedigitalcowboys.com/2009/07/digital-cowboys-episode-114-room-101/

Episode #67: http://thedigitalcowboys.com/2008/08/digital-cowboys-episode-67/

Episode #11: http://thedigitalcowboys.com/2007/07/digital-cowboys-episode-11/

We’ll be updating throughout the night on Twitter. Let us know what you think.

Last Saturday we had the pleasure of attending the Eurogamer expo in London. We saw a lot of games we’d already seen at PAX but got hands-on on several we hadn’t yet witnessed. There was also a particularly fascinating keynotes address from David Cage; Director of Heavy Rain and Fahrenheit.

In the evening we finished off with a round table discussion podcast hosted by Kropotkin of Superhappyfuntimeshow, Elmo and Michael of Joypod were there to lend their particular expertise. You can find and listen to the whole show here on the SHFTS website.
Many thanks to Krop, Joypod and everyone we met and worked with, including old Cowboy Paul and DC listener Mr McFluffin who we played a little Beatles Rock Band with on stage.