Over twenty years after the last film installment, does the Ghostbusters franchise still have enough freshness to survive the transition into a videogame? Or is the franchise as stale as a musty old corpse?

E3 2009 marks a return to form for the show, and our podcast crew puts it through the paces. How do they think it went? Listen to find out!

The biggest, most on-topic and in-depth episode yet! This is also the last one before the E3 megatons start dropping, so listen in to hear everything from our predictions, to our lamenting of the G4 forums, and even our ideas to improve Project Gforum. Prepare for Trouble!

The GCast is invaded by pocket monsters! The myriad of topics includes Aka_Loki being old, G4 sucking hardcore, the best Pokemon games being remade, and the upcoming E3 2009.

The GCast returns with more new topics, more new hosts, and no more annoying feedback!

Due to the combination of me not having a job and me working on my Android game, I have been unable to complete it. But I want to push the whole series out by the end of this summer, so you should hear some things soon. Watch this space!

What is art…? Are games art? Can they become art? It’s a debate that seems endless with no signs of ever being settled. While I could easily go on with in-depth looks as to how games can be art, there is one possibility that seems to be over looked: gamers being the actors?

Well, here we are. Thirteen months after I first launched Project Gforum on March 1st, 2008, and almost eight months after conceiving the feature set and design of what would become Version 2, through countless delays and headaches, here we are; Project Gforum Version 2 is officially live.

I would like to apologize for the numerous delays leading up to this release, they’re entirely my fault and I am very sorry they happened.

Of course, I’d also like to rundown some of the bigger changes in Version 2 in order to help you get adjusted.

• Aggregated Main Page: The index or home page of the new Project Gforum is setup like a blog, as the last one was. However, the difference is that this time, each subsection of the site gets its own updates published to their main pages, and all that content is subsequently posted here. This allows me to tweak and add content to individual sections, so if you only come for one in particular, all the updates there will be easily available to you. In addition, by the power of Wordpress (more on that below), you can go back to older updates. I have migrated all of the Version 1 updates, and it is quite humorous to read some of the things I promised were coming.
• Articles: This section hosts mostly exclusive Gforum content, including reviews, editorials, and the recently launched podcast, which is discussed in detail below. I believe each of these is a vital component in creating a unique identity and sustaining a community for Project Gforum.
• Podcast: After many months of simply failing to get put together, The GCast launches with Version 2. The first episode is a little rough, but it provides an excellent proof-of-concept in my opinion. As we all get used to eachother and completely understand the software side of things, the podcast will greatly improve.
• Reviews: Reviews launch with Version 2 somewhat anemically as an aggregate of Kumiko’s previous reviews posted on the G4 forums, however as time goes on this section will become a major part of Project Gforum. Reviews are divided based on the type of platform, not necessarily the platform itself (although you can search for posts based on that as well), and authors have the freedom to choose whether or not to assign a score at the end of their review. If they do, the score will be an integer between 1 and 10 inclusive.
• Editorials: Once again, this section starts out as re-posts from Kumiko, however it is still off to a much better beginning than Reviews. As the name implies, this is used for articles examining various facets of the gaming industry, although in the future I also plan to place special pieces like interviews and such here.
• Forum (Non-Beta): This was very important and makes up a crucial part of Version 2. When I added the forum, it was the first time I had ever added such a large third-party component to my website. After modifying endlessly, I believe I finally have a piece of solid forum software that blends seamlessly into the rest of the site. Which is actually the next point…
• Integrated Accounts: I said way back in October that although you would be forced to create a second Project Gforum account in order to post in the forum, it would be worth it because this account would be the one carried over to Version 2. At the time, I didn’t even come close to comprehending how I would do this, but I stuck to my guns for it, and I believe it’s paid off. This bullet point was the single most massive mountain for me to climb during Version 2’s development, but now that I’ve done it, I can focus on keeping things seamless, instead of having you manage multiple accounts for everything.
• Dedicated Chat Page: This is small and not quite fully-featured yet, but I believe that having the link there to a large-size chat page makes it more accessible (and bookmark-able).
• All-New Backend: Version 2 has been made possible by the combining of Wordpress, vBulletin, and my custom code stitching them together with my new design. Dozens of headaches and teeth-gnashings made this a reality, and thanks to them, I can use vBulletin accounts in my own services in the future, and also make rapid updates to the individual sections and code. All you need to know is that these two softwares breath life into what was a mostly static and community-hostile website.

Also, unfortunately, some features had to be left out of this release, as always.

• Cliques 2.0: While vBulletin provides its own social group, I originally conceived Cliques 2.0 a while before even learning about them.
• Fictions 2.0: This section should come online within the next two weeks, and doesn’t really feature too many enhancements over the previous Fictions section.
• Start Page and Gmods: These two were to be the tentpole of Version 2; the “killer app” or features of it. Essentially, the shoutbox on the right would be swappable for several other widgets, or “GMods”, and you could have several “Installed” on your Start page, similar to iGoogle.

In addition, the Alerts link will only take you to your forum PM box, but will still show that you have a new message if someone leaves a message on your public profile. I will be enhancing this soon so that it uses vBulletin’s native drop-down boxes.

I hope you will continue to use Project Gforum if you’re already a fan, and I also hope this release attracts many new users. It was a very prolonged development time to be sure, but I have made sure that the design is rock solid (renders very well, even in Internet Explorer 6 at 800×600) and that the services are rock solid too (which is mostly due to the new Wordpress/vBulletin backend.) Please enjoy!

The GCast is birthed in this first official Gforum podcast for the ages.