This week Soren Johnson joins us to talk about the state of the strategy genre, working with gaming legends and what we should be looking out for in the future. Julian reveals his mail gaming roots and Shawn finds a way to compare Boom Blox and Sins of a Solar Empire. Check out the comments section for an easy link to Rat Boy's epic GTA IV audio email!

Michael Zenke joins us for our in-depth impressions of Grand Theft Auto IV. Does Sean still hate it? Will the vein on Rob's forehead burst? Can Michael inject some sanity into the conversation?!

The gang is all here as we discuss our gaming lifestyles and some of the latest games to hit the scene. We also revive the Thread of the Week, tackle your emails and listen to Rob's impotent rage.

We're taking a bit of a breather this week but you wouldn't know it listening to the show. Ken Levine on in-game ads, Matt Wilson on the upcoming MMO The Agency, a new audio bit from Rob and our big Risk: Black Ops contest winner!

After a long, arduous trek through the jungle we unearthed an ancient relic from the temple of glossy paper. Mr. Jeff Green joins us and he's so awesome, we lost an entire chunk of the show. Sorry about that ... but still awesome!

Thanks to GWJ contributer Michael Zenke you can win a limited edition of Risk: Black Ops (the upcoming Hasbro board game) in our glorious new contest! All you have to do is send in a funny picture that involves a board game of some kind to ! What could be easier!? Deadline is April 19th!

Rand Miller is the co-creator of one of the most successful video game titles of all time: the Myst series. Until Will Wright decided to own the space with endless SimVariants, the franchises 12 million copies sold proved that serious games could sell. Myst remains one of the seminal titles of video games on any platform. It taught a legion of game designers how to make photorealistic settings and CD-quality sound design matter at a time (1993) when the world was just discovering how to use 3d textures in Doom. It exposed millions of gamers to the joys of unashamed exploration at a time when blowing things up was what the cool kids were doing.

This morning at 12:01AM, the Myst saga came to an end, at least for the time being, when the Myst MMO URU Live was turned off but Turner's GameTap service. Unwilling to let sleeping dogs lie, I caught up with Rand Miller to ask him about the fate of URU, his hopes for MMOs, and what he's looking to do next.

We called and you answered! We got so many emails this week we're dedicating the whole show to them. Not only do we have new GWJ contributer Michael Zenke joining us, he was kind enough to offer a limited edition of Risk: Black Ops (the upcoming Hasbro board game) for a glorious new contest! All you have to do is send in a funny picture that involves a board game of some kind to ! What could be easier!?

This week we're joined by two very special guests. First up we have the Lord of Leisure, Mr. Paul Hughes, joining us from across the pond. Petroglyph's Chris Ainsworth also jumps in and discusses cross-platform play, the new Universe at War Xbox 360 release and Games For Windows Live among many other things.

This week we dig deep into what happens when we dig deep into our gaming and our groups. Elysium expresses his love for living under Shawn's iron rule, DoomMunky sponsors Games You Can Play Now and Rob ... says stuff. I think. So does Julian.

This week Blair Fraser joins us to talk all about Sins of a Solar Empire, the PC RTS that is taking the community by storm. We talk about the latest patch and what we can expect from future downloads. Oh, what's that you say? Exclusive news about a new expansion? Go oooooon. *steeples fingers* We also have a great new feature from momgamer!