The staff has been hard at work preparing to start recording what we like to call “The Mushroom Cloud,” MEGATONik’s new podcast dedicated to serious and not-so-serious discussion on facts that are important to gamers. We’re not talking about the latest sales figures or boring things that people in suits care about. The Mushroom Cloud will go that extra mile to give you the latest gaming news, thoughts, and enough not-safe-for-work jokes to land you in your office’s gender-sensitivity training for the rest of the week. We’re doing this for you, our readers, because we care.

We’re finishing up the details and preparing to record our first episode next week. Prepare yourself for a show that will take your questions and discuss with us live. Expect reviews, live games, and plenty of ridiculous humor that will leave you rofl-ing all over yourself. Nasty, huh?

We’ll be posting show notes and much more for the first episode in the middle of next week. Until then, let us know if you’ve got any ideas for topics, features, or live games. I promise that this podcast will be worth your time, or I’ll post embarrassing pictures of Cortez. You’ll be entertained either way.

Finally, after far too many delays and plenty of procrastination, we’re ready to announce the winners of our ThinkGeek Mario contest (where we asked you what your favorite game featuring Mario was). There were a lot great entries out of the 30-something that we received, and it certainly wasn’t easy to pick a winner. From the heartfelt nostalgic entries to the humorous ones to the lengthy essays, there was a lot of variety in not only the choices but the style.

Following are some of the best entries (in chronological order, and be warned, there is a lot of text), and if you can’t take the anticipation just scroll all the way down to the bottom of this post to see who won.

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As you probably know, Assault Heroes 2 is now out on Xbox Live Arcade. It’s got plenty of new features, and so I hope you’ve bought it already, because not only does it look fun but you’ll need it to enter this contest.

All you need to do is post something cool that happened to you in Assault Heroes 2 in the comments, and we’ll randomly select five winners.

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Have you ever gotten bored simply playing Mario, and wished it was a little more real? While unfortunately we can’t help with treating such delusions, we can help you make your make-believe Mario world seem just a little more real with the following contest.

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It’s been a week, which means Unlock the Achievement is over - and it was definitely a success. There were over 4,400 participants, and over 71,000 achievements were unlocked. Hopefully you enjoyed it as much as we did, but if there were any achievement on MEGATONik you just couldn’t find, continue reading because I’m about to tell you where they all were.

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For those of you who recall, you may remember a post back in October we did that covered Kotaku’s take on game reviews. It is a very good read and I highly recommend you run through it, beings that it’s one of the few places that have taken on the notion that gaming reviews nowadays frankly suck. But most importantly, if you look in the comments of our post, you will see that I mentioned I would touch on this subject myself once I got around to writing. And here we are.

Game reviews and ratings have always been a funny thing. At the individual level? Well if you give any one person internet access he/she will instantly spew pretentious as though they’re an editor for Pitchfork, with a handy bookmark to Dictionary.com and Microsoft Word open to check for synonyms. When the ability to publish some sort of art, whether it be writing, music, imagery, video, etc., becomes cheap and accessible enough for the masses to get a hold of, you can expect some low quality material. A case of “yeah, it’s great they can do it, but they shouldn’t.”

However, at the professional level, there isn’t any source out there that I can say I can trust with one grain of salt any more than the everyday blogger. The review and evaluation process from these sources, which are supposedly reputable, are typically inconsistent from title to title, lacking in a fair review based on full completion of the game, biased towards their advertiser’s preference, focused too much on technical individualities such as graphics/sound/online, or ‘aided’ by large yet completely meaningless scores.

Hit the jump for my take on these problems, and if I feel like posting them, solutions.

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That’s right, MEGATONik is currently looking for witty, creative and well-rounded intellectuals to join our elite team of writers. We’re all hardcore gamers, as you may know, and in order to get the job, you must have a solid background of gaming as well as a good knowledge of how to write. If you’re interested, send an email complete with a sample of your writing (preferably about games) or a link to previous work you’ve done to writing [at] megatonik [dot] com.

Well, you guys knew it was coming. After a couple of weeks of some light ARG “fun” and some immediate correct guesses, the new face of MEGATONik is up.

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To: Everybody (Yes, even you)
From: Bfeld

Hey guys! If you haven’t noticed, we’ve been a little lazy about updating the sight for a few days. This might have something to do with the fact that winter break started right around the time our lethargy set in. So this holiday season, we’ve decided to spend a little time doing other things besides refreshing our RSS reader every 30 seconds looking for news to give to you. Don’t worry, though. You can expect me to be back in full swing in ‘08.

So what should you do instead of reading the site? Try playing some games. Most of you probably got new systems for Christmas or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa. For those of you who didn’t get anything new, I’m going to suggest a giant online gaming marathon. Most of the new guys will be playing their first games of Halo 3, Call of Duty 4, and Team Fortress 2 today. If you want to boost your online rank, today is the day.

To recap: Sorry for the laziness. Go play something or spend time with your family. Maybe you can even get your family to join you in your gaming.

To: All writers, new and old
From: backflip
Subject: Moving home, Nor’easters and holiday shopping

As you may or may not know, my finals concluded this past week and, as a result, I’ve been moving home to live with the ‘rents for a few weeks. On the car ride home, I had daydreams consisting of hours upon hours of uninterrupted gaming both on my 360 and Wii. Unfortunately, over the past couple of days, this has not been the case.

The night that I returned home, a giant Nor’easter hit the Tri-State area, and subsequently continued to ruin my weekend. I spent hours outside with a shovel in my hand and frown on my face, shoveling the driveway free from the wintry mix. Then, I was decidely swept up in Christmas shopping for the rest of the weekend, leaving approximately oh, 3 hours for me to game. Thus far I’ve gotten around 6 or so stars in Super Mario Galaxy, played through Halo 3’s new downloadable maps a few times (expect an impressions post soon) and beaten a few worlds in New Super Mario Bros on my brother’s DS.

Hopefully your weekends have been better.

This was a bit of a slow week here at MEGATONik, since we were all too busy fattening up on turkey and being thankful to post a whole lot. If you were similarly busy and didn’t have a chance to check dailyhourly for new posts like you always do (…right?) or just want to look back on the week, hit the jump for the usual list of this past week’s posts.

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Plenty on Super Mario Galaxy, from incredibly high scores to incredibly low ones, some sweet deals, a couple of videos, and of course much more - hit the jump for links to everything we’ve brought you this past week.

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This week was one of the busiest ones yet here at MEGATONik, and one of the most crowded seven days for game releases since we started keeping track. There was some Guitar Hero III news following its release, and also some on Rock Band in anticipation of its fast approaching release date. There were also plenty of videos, headlined by the trifecta of sexy Mass Effect videos - from alien strip clubs to disappointing lesbian sex to slightly less disappointing lesbian sex. Point and click your way through the jump for all that alien ass and of course much more.

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That’s right, yours truly was recently interviewed by Collegehumor veteran and chieftain, Jeff Rubin. About what, you ask? Well, video games of course! Jeff and I had a really great conversation, and I definitely look forward to doing it again. We ruminated on a few diverse subjects, ranging from original songs in video games to the new Playstation 3 card-battling game, The Eye of Judgment. While there may not have been much substance in terms of information about what we were talking about, I do drop quite a few “zingers” throughout the interview. Unfortunately, they did have to censor some of what I had to say, but the real meat of what I said is still there. So, what do you think? How’d I do?

Another week has passed, and so it is that time again where I gather together everything from the last 7 days and present it to you in a conveniently linked list, for you to ignore (since you’ve read it already, because you check the site every day, right?) and possibly even comment on my hastily written intro. You should know the drill by now, so hit the jump and have at it.

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