Medal of Honor fans! GameSpot will be teaming up with Slim Jim to host a gaming event at our downtown San Francisco offices on Thursday, October 4. Attendees will have the chance to play against game testers of Medal of Honor: Warfighter before its release. We’ll also be showing off an early look at GameSpot’s upcoming Xbox Live app. If you plan on making the trip to San Francisco please RSVP.

Can’t make it to San Francisco? Don’t fret! We’ll be live-streaming the event on GameSpot.com!

What’s Up?

GameSpot Wants You! Job Opportunity
Ever sit back and think to yourself, man I wish I could with that Kevin guy, he’s super keen. Well now’s your chance! Game spot is currently seeking “talented and motivated individuals" to come play with us in our San Francisco office. We are currently looking for a senior Operations Engineer, and if you think you might fit the perfect build than click away here!

Ranger Tryouts!
GameSpot is looking for a few more talented volunteers to join the Ranger team! Do you like helping on twitch? Are you a savvy forums fiend? Do you know your way around Fuse? Then it sounds like joining the GameSpot ranger team is the perfect thing for you! To apply simply PM Synthia with a brief explanation of how long you’ve been on the site and why you think you would make a good Ranger. Good luck!

Borderlands 2 contest! Win your very own CL4P-TP unit!
Calling all Vault Hunters! Is there something missing from your experiences on Pandora? Are Spider ants and Creepers not quite annoying enough for you? Perhaps you need something more as you pursue Handsome Jack, perhaps you need your very own Clap Trap! Click here for more details.

GameSpot’s XBL app due in October
It’s no trick but it is certainly a treat for XBL members! Coming October 9th GameSpot will finally have their app go live!

Live Stream Schedule

Rumor has it around the office is that there will be two awesome GameSpot developer round tables featuring Resident Evil 6 and Halo 4. On Wednesday at 11:00am PT Kevin will be sitting down with members of the Resident Evil 6 developers and will be taking your questions via the GameSpot comments page as well as on twitch. As for the Halo stream, things are still a bit top secret on the nitty gritty details but we do know that there might be some nifty swag involved.

User Reward Challenge

This weeks activities! As always, in addition to the automatic points you’ll get to your profile when you use the site you can earn some bonus points this week by participating in the following activities:
- 100 XP - Comment on Chalk Talk: Rated M for Murder
- 200 XP - Create an editorial blog for Chalk Talk: Big in Japan
- 300 XP - Submit a question for the Resident Evil 6 live stream
- 1000 XP - Join the GameSpot Players Network
- 3000 XP - Create your own custom Clap Trap!

Member Spotlights

Here’s your chance to be in the spotlight every week for everything from game reviews, forum contributions, player of the week, and even fuzing!

Forum Poster: Jonwh18
Started this interesting little topic in our Site Enhancements board about wanting to start up a new activity in System Wars, perhaps if he gets enough support we could hope to see something like this implemented.
User Review: PeterDuck
Stretches his literary technique in his PC review for Borderlands 2, well thought out points and a cleaver critique, you should give it a read.

Fuse Poster: Toplinkar
We picked this gamer for sharing this awesome little didyouknowgaming.com tip about Sonic and few creepy things that happen if you enter the right combo.
Comment Poster: Slinqy
We picked this user for his interesting points on Desmonds story line (or lack there of). "Yeah. Seems strange. We know virtually nothing about Desmond in ACIII. And this is supposed to be the conclusion of his story? They're either playing the cards very close to the chest or they're not telling us something."
Player of the Week: BloodMist
This GameSpotter is a shockingly good Borderlands player and has recently unlocked 1.21 Gigawatts, Pandora-dog Millionaire, and he Discovered Sledge’s Safe House.

This Week on Chalk Talk…

This weeks Chalk Talk in honor of the Tokyo Game Show we will be focusing on the contributions of Japanese developers. How have their works helped to mold the games we play. Perhaps you will want to write on how Japanese console game development has been slipping over the years? Be sure to mark your blog as editorial and to sound off in this roll call thread here with your awesome Chalk Talk entry! Deadline to post a link to your Chalk Talk Submission is FRIDAY September 28st at 10:00am PT

Tip of the Week: Contest Alert!

Did you know that you can receive a private message alert every time there is a contest or activity on GameSpot? Just head over to the “Spirit of Competition" announcement here and post a comment saying “Game On!" it’s that simple!

Competitions and Activities: Talk like a Pirate Day

It's talk like a pirate day and we're doing not one but three activities! By participating in one of the following activities you'll receive this Pirate Day 2012 emblem:
- What be your Pirate Name?
- Scribe a Blog
- Here there be Jokes
Finish all three activities by September 20th at 12:01am PT and you'll be entered in a drawing to receive a mystery box filled with t-shirt treasures, and if that doesn’t tickle your beard we’re also giving away an 8GB iPod Touch! Now, ye best start flabben yer gums like a scurvy pirate!

Gaming Bulletin

This weeks Gaming Bulletin seems to be filled with a fair amount of depressing news pieces.
Starting with the unfortunate news about the Bohemia Interactive developers who are currently jailed in Greece. Next there's the concerning arguments from the economic contribution study for Scotland's creative industries, claiming that the games industry adds no value. This is a concerning news is particularly alarming due to the fact that many policy decisions, and funding allocations are made based on this type of data. And finally, the news of NC Softs closure of City of Heros was also announced earlier this week. Though it would appear that the CoH community has banded together and started a petition in hopes of keeping the game alive. If you care about City of Heroes you should take a moment to go and make your voice heard. But amidst all this sadness there are still a few things to look forward to. For example Humble Indie Bundle 6 has been announced and will include Rochard, Shatter, S.P.A.Z., Torchlight, and Vessel.

Geeky Gimmies

It's been a while since we checked the internet for some amazing must have geek swag, so this week we're showing off a long list of some amazing new finds. Borderlands 2 ULTIMATE LOOT CHEST EDITION This bad boy includes a replica Marcus Bobble head figure, a poster of all the enemies you’ll find in Pandora, a copy of Sir Hammerlock’s Field Journal, art book, 4 BL2 Decals, 4 art postcards, exclusive DLC, a map of Pandora, and of course the game all can be yours for the low low cost of 300$, or 65 pieces of Iridium. Want a package with a little more punch? Then the Street Fighter 25th Anniversary Collectors Set might be just the thing for you! Included in this set you'll find an 8" Light-up Ryu Statue, 11 discs of Street Fighter music spanning the decades, a 64 page art book, Blu-Ray video set including a documentary which highlights from the past 25 years and of course Streetfighter 2, 3, and 4. Next up we have some amazing 8-bit customized Munny Dunnies from BluGhost featuring classics like Mario and Link, but also sporting hits from Ghosts N Goblins for the NES. And finally, we have some amazing wall art inspired by famous video games, currently they are not for sale but they do make for some amazing wall papers for your desktop. Are you able to name them the games in all the illustrations? Post your answers in the comments below for bonus 200 profile points.

Making Mischief

- Bark Ops - A Black Ops short film
- EA may be building Death Star
- 151 Penny-sized Pokemon
- You monster: A Portal 2 Movie
WARNING: Contains Spoilers
- Life is a Game and pandas ruin EVERYTHING! WARNING:Rated M for Mature

Free to Play: Super Happy Fun Time!

First up in our Free to Play portion of the Social Share, we have the Atari Arcade which has gaming classics such as Centipede, Combat, Lunar Lander, Super Breakout and of course PONG! Next we have a sneak peek at an early little Halloween goodie. The good folks at Popcap have teamed up with the American Dental Association and have decided to initiate the "Stop Zombie Mouth" campaign by giving out free copies of Plants vs Zombies for PC and Mac, the codes can't be activated until the 30th of October but it's still pretty nifty none the less! Last but not least we have this cute little top down dungeon crawler by the name of bit Dungeon the tale of a scorned night and his hopes to save his beloved from demons and monstrous creatures after a thousand years of imprisonment.

Link Lotto

Sometimes they're funny, some times cool, sometimes their just plain weird, its Link Lotto!
- Twitter’s new profile page look: Yay or Nay?
- Caines Arcade 2: If you thought the first story was inspiring have to check this out!
- Connecting to the World With Kinect: A charming story of helpful the Kinect can be.
- Project Holodeck: With support from Razer we could get a real-life "Holodeck".
- How artificial intelligence is changing our lives: The AI revolution is here, are the humble meatbags ready?

That's HOT!

That's Hot is a new feature to the Social Share where we'll be showcasing some popular cosplay from the corners of the internet. This weeks featured cosplay is the Lone Traveler of Journey ~ Photo by Natalia Farhadmotamed.

Bonus Item

A banging good time, Ocarina of Time medley.

← Click here for past Social Shares.

We’re lock and loaded with another edition of the Field Trip, where the gaming industry struts their stuff and gets heavily involved with their fans

Events & Attractions

First, we'll relive the past. PAX Prime and Dragoncon is pretty much the thing everyone has been talking about but not everyone could attend these events! For those who want to virtually go back in time, check out our coverage of PAX Prime. Epic Games also has some photos of Dragoncon.

Fast forward to the future, these days, getting to meet gamers in person happens much more frequently, and one of the upoming events open to the public is SOE Live, formerly known as SOE Fan Faire. If you plan to be in the Las Vegas area from October 18-2, Planetside 2 will be there! Speaking of Planetside 2, the game development team have a newer show called Command Center on SOE’s official Youtube channel

Moving on to online game events, the creators of Guns of Icarus are hosting an online beta tournament on Saturday, September 15, 2pm EST. The winners will receive a Collector’s Edition of the game and in-game costumes and accessories. But, if you’re not too competitive, how good are you at naming things? Auto Club Revolution Free to Play Online Racing game is asking their fans to name a race track.

FreePlay

Justin Calvert is at it again, handing out even more beta codes, games, and in-game gear in the latest Free Play Friday feature This week he mentioned a game that has portals, Tryst beta, and more.

If you’re looking for something else to play, how about checking out C&C Tiberium Alliance, a free to play RTS game. They recently released a new European World and unveiled unit upgrades.

And, while we all know that not everyone likes browser based games, maybe Gearbox’s recommendation, The Border Lands will be your one exception!

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Seeing is Believing

The third episode of Affinity third episode of Affinity, a Firefall comic was released this week, and we have to include a mention to Epic Games’ featured Onyx Guard cosplay.

To Loot or Not to Loot

We’ve scoured the game industry websites to find loot you can get for free or stuff you may want to splurge on. First, let’s remind everyone about the free gear that has GameSpot on it! Perfect World has given us some Blacklight Retribution in-game content so you’ll want to grab your GamesSpot themed gear before we run out

Keeping up with the freebies, Sega is giving away more free stuff this Friday, September 7th, and it looks like all you have to do to get a Ford Mistang RTR-X in Need for Speed World is Tweet!

Now on to some bargains. If you buy books, the Capcom store is offering 30% off books, and as always you can find the latest Steam sales by checking the ads on their page. At the moment Crysis 2 Maximum Edition is 75% off.

Now, we can’t leave without sharing something you may want to splurge on, but there is good news, you have a couple of months to save up for it! Capcom announced that the Street Fighter X Tekken Minimates coming in February.

The more you know…

The PlayStation Blog sure knows how to spotlight their fans! They’ve started to showcase Sound Shapes fanmade levels and this week’s featured user shares his history with Counter-strike, in light of Counter-strike: Global Offensive being released a couple of weeks ago.

Do you know what a Thousands Papercuts means? A forum user in the official Star Wars The Old Republic Forum shares background about this term. Speaking of Bioware games, they’ve jumped on the Pinterest bandwagon and appear to be having a good ole’ time showcasing cosplayers and other visual content.

That’s your look at the latest official game industry community news. If you have a tip, give us a holler by PM'nig JodyR or Synthia. Until next time!

We have been doing even further maintenance and issue investigations lately.

Resolved Technical Issues

To get you up to speed, the following issues are now resolved.

- Forum or union flooding errors
- User review not displaying immediately
- User images no longer displaying
- Harsh points loss when encountering a suspension.

Targeted Technical Issues

- Fuse taking a while to load. We're moving Fuse to another server. With the amount of data that needs to be moved over, we hope to see GameSpot Fuse back online Wednesday at 1 p.m. PT at the latest.

- Cannot change Password. While this issue is being worked on, check out gmax's automated solution in this topic.

- RSS Feed Repeating. We think we figured out the problem for this issue related to international feeds, but we will need a little more testing to make sure things are displaying as intended.

- Settings Issues. For the time being, please use your Fuse settings until we can resolve the old settings issue.

Further Investigation Required

- Server error messages. We have multiple technical staff members working on a solution to the server errors, but it's taking a little more time than we thought. If you encounter these problems, please refresh the page. If the problem persists, let us know in the technical support forum.

- PC game download data missing. Please report any files you notice missing on the site in this topic.

- Misleading Search Results. We're looking into a variety of search issues you've all reported, including a way to search blogs. More information to follow at a later time.

If you have a technical issue on the site, please post it in the technical support forum. Include as much information as you can, such as the error message, your browser information, the webpage where you found the content, and a screenshot if possible.

The GameSpot staff would like to thank everyone for their messages in a recent discussion involving our plans to rebuild the site. We're working to make the new GameSpot, and we cannot wait to share more news about the changes later this year.

Tomorrow, August 14 at 1PM Pacific Time we will be moving GameSpot Fuse to another server. During this time Fuse may not be available for up to 48 hours. If you'd like to continue socializing as normal drop by GameSpot or you can post a blog or two.

UPDATE 8/17: Fuse has been having some complications with the move and we expect to continue efforts to restore loading times on Monday. Thanks for your patience during this time.

Bulletin

The GameSpot Community has been bounding with a plethora of activities, live events, contests, community gaming events and more! First up some of our crew headed out to Hawaii to get ready for Sunday's Pokemon World Championships 2012 live stream. Watch our live coverage on GameSpot or Twitch as we highlight the best players of both the video games and trading card game. Who knows maybe we;'ll have some schwag to give away from the event! The live stream starts Sunday August 12th, 10am - 5pm HST / 1pm - 8pm PST.

Next up, Chalk Talk, last week's assignment users wrote editorials about what developers and publishers they were willing to forgive and for the first time in a long time members were featured on the front page of GameSpot! And if that wasn’t cool enough, a new GameSpot User Rewards Challenge will be starting this week. In addition to the automatic profile points you get by simply being a user on the site you’ll also have the chance to earn bonus points by completing activities. We've also been cleaning up some nasty bugs around the site so you'll want to read the latest known bugs report for further details.

Making Mischief

Not everything on the internet needs to be serious about gaming, take some of these hilarious comics and videos for example. I mean who doesn’t want Bacon Wizard Time? We’re also sharing some amazing Dorkly comics, including Everything you ever wanted to know about "whoo-hoo" and The Great Deku Dad. But if silly cartoon humor isn’t quite your thing than this guy playing the Super Mario theme backwards might be impressive. Also, if you want to see the future by John Carmack, this video shows off his futurist VR Headset.

Free to Play

If you've been wanting to attend MLG for quite some time, pre-order Hitman: Absolution to gain free access to their Sniper Challenge game--now available on PC through Steam. Practice your sniping and win a chance to go to MLG's Dallas Tournament courtesy of GameSpot / In addition to our current beta key giveaway for Free Play Friday we thought we would take a moment to give a shout out to a little indie game called Freedom Planet they currently have a browser demo available on their site. For those of you who are Sonic fans you will likely be giddy at the clear homage to the spiky blue fellow. Also for this week only you can get Skylanders: Cloud Patrol free on iOS devices, One of Swords has the full details.

Geeky Gimmies

As always the internet is a cornucopia of gaming swag delights, this week in addition to all of the nifty Team Fortress stuff seen in Synthia’s blog, there were also Sriracha Rooster Sauce Lollipops to enjoy thanks to the good people at thinkgeek. But if you’re looking for something a little classier to add to your video game swag collection you could try this 300$ limited edition 25th anniversary Street Fighter chess set.

Will Play for Food

For many GameSpotters the idea of getting to work in an industry surrounded by the great minds that create something as powerful as games is a dream come true. Well for those of you who are interested we are here to inform you that both “Perfect World" and “Riot" are currently hiring for various positions, go make your dream a reality!

Bonus Item

For those of you who have not yet seen this fantastic Legend of Zelda parody and are in any way a "fan" of the games. Stop whatever you're doing and watch NOW!

We've in the middle of a transition with the server changes, so we apologize for the time-out errors and other related issues you may have been experiencing.

Due to the number of total users using the image upload tool we cannot warrant us spending resources on supporting it anymore We're determining a way to provide a better image upload system later this year, but starting tomorrow image uploads will be disabled. You can still view all of your image uploads of the years. Please use a 3rd party image upload service like imageshack or photobucke in the meantime.

As we continue to troubleshoot bugs, we appreciate your continued patience, and notifications about issues you've encountered. To keep everyone on the same page, here's the current known bugs we've been troubleshooting in the past week.

- Server error message - 504 Gateway Time-out. Technical staff have been working around the clock to resolve many of the server errors we've having on the site.

- Post flooding error preventing you to post in forums or unions.. Planned fix, we're in the process to exceed the amount of posts you can have per minute.

- User review not displaying immediately If you reviewed a game, please note that some users can see the link on their contributions page, but the review isn't accessible.

- Why won't my settings save? For the time being, please use your Fuse settings until we can resolve the old settings issue.

- PC game download data missing. Please report any files you notice missing on the site in this topic..

- Search problems. We're looking into issues involving forums and blog searches, but there's also reports about short game names not pulling up accurate results. This may require much more investigation across multiple bugs.

- UK users experiencing IE9 browser issues.GameSpot UK is checking into this technical issue.

- Harsh points loss when encountering a suspension. If you're a higher level account, you'll notice that when you get suspended, you will lose majority of your level.

We hope to have majority of these problems resolved this week. As always, we appreciate your continued patience and support. If you have a technical issue on the site, please post it in the technical support forum as soon as possible! Be sure to include as much information as you can, such as your browser information, webpage urls where you found the content, and screenshots if possible.

If you noticed something funky happening with the leveling system, it actually was for a good cause. We've done an investigation in the past week to find some interesting details about our profile leveling system. Check out our full report about what happened and how we fixed it.