Happy birthday to us! The entire gang gather to celebrate the 50th episode and our almost-one-year anniversary. We mark the occasion by discussing some of our most beloved games: Tom S joins a Company of Heroes, Marsh posits a Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Graham measures his Half-Life, Chris lives a full life in Star Wars: Galaxies and Tom F goes on a Little Big Adventure.

Also discussed: the announcements of Blue Stream and Bloodborn and the re-reveal of Fortnite; the future of VR, journalism and crotch-gazing; how online gaming has broadened our and your horizons; the grossest nudity; our proudest videogame creations; and more.

Apologies for the various creaking noises at certain points throughout this week’s pod. Also introducing: the pod dog, the pod bird, and rain.

* Project Blue Streak, by Cliffy “Dude Huge” B’s new company Boss Key, doesn’t seem to have its own website yet. At least it’s not a MOBA.

* Unlike Battleborn, which is Gearbox’s hobby-grade co-op meta-growth competitive esport Battleborn Heroes. Here’s the tweet by Randy Pitchford‘s that we unpick, just to make clear that it’s real.

* Epic Games’ Fortnite is a cartoony, free-to-play Orcs Must Die-with-crafting game. It looks alright?

* The dumb Warface magazine Graham couldn’t remember the name of was Gameface.

* You can play Wings of Saint Nazaire, the purple, sprite-based, Wing Commander-inspired space shooter, right now.

* The VR Game Jam Tom F was talking about. Cockpits are our virtual reality future.

* The future of journalism includes virtual reality. This is the project Tom S mentioned, mention the beautiful, first-person, journalistic Somewhere.

* Here’s the clip of There Will Be Blood – from early in the film – with a gaze-tracking overlay showing where 11 viewers looked in any given moment.

* Page 257 of this eye-tracking study reveals that men are always looking at dongs.

* Chris tells the story of his life and final moments inside dearly departed MMO Star Wars: Galaxies. He wrote about the same, with screenshots of some of the final events he references, over at PCGamer.com.

* Little Big Adventure’s amazing soundtrack can be heard on YouTube. And yes, it’s on GOG.

* Former podcast guest Pip Warr asked on Twitter for people’s favourite videogame weather.

Here’s the forum thread to discuss or respond to anything in this episode.

Our intro music is by