I admit I’ve been hard on 1UP in the past. And let’s face it – when your magazines are anemic to the risk of becoming pamphlets, your site loads ten percent of the time, your employees are foul-mouthed, attention-grabbing alcoholics, and you cheat legitimate prize winners out of their copy of Thrillville (really); well, you can’t help but earn those stripes.

So I took a break from visiting the cesspool of no-talent, and upon returning from my hiatus a funny thing happened: I started to actually enjoy 1UP.

Crazy, yes. Kinda like world peace happening, right? Well, there is a catch – in a word: moderation.

See, I stopped reading the staff blogs, limiting myself from prolonged exposure to James Mielke’s vacation photos and cries for attention. I didn’t have to worry about the poor site design because I let my podcatcher do the work for me, never having to venture to the land of the HTTP 404 errors again. I figure if there was something on the site worth reading, I’d catch up with one of the many aggregators out there like Joystiq, NeoGAF or CheapAssGamer.

And about those podcasts – a funny thing happened on the way to 1UP Yours: lukems was gone. Hopefully silenced forever, and bringing with him weeks (read: not months or years) of professionalism in the gaming press and years of perfecting adolescent humor (read: not humorous). With his absence, the 1UP Yours podcast became a happy place for witty, intelligent and insightful discussion on video games. Sure, Garnett still says things every week that make me wonder just how stupid do you have to be to get a job there, but at least Luke’s overt sexual references and subsequent giggle which would usually follow are a thing of the past. And Garnett seems to be sober more than not, probably a good idea since drinking on the job is generally not allowed; although the man clearly has an alcohol problem when left unchecked.

The GFW crew is better than ever, although I’m starting to grow tired of Shawn Elliot’s over-produced openings. In a weird balance of fate, I am now more interested in PC games more and more while they talk about them less and less, mixing their podcasts with one part PC games, four parts non-gaming randomness; yet I’m still oddly drawn in. The EGM podcast is hit-or-miss. One episode they’re making waves by giving a forum to Dennis Dyack’s mad ramblings; the next they regress into a sea of assorted disinterest, usually led by Crispin “I want to be like Seanbaby” Boyer’s annoying interjections. Yes, I know they have a magazine to run, but so does Jeff Green and the gang, and they still pull it off.

And about those magazines: one of the exciting things about PC game development is that it is uninhibited. There are thousands of tiny developers with great ideas and even equally great execution, but are lost in the PR avalanche from the majors. Yet coverage of these lesser-known games are relegated to a sidebar in GFW Magazine. I don’t know if this is a conscious effort to keep page count down, but I think it’s a disservice to the magazine’s audience, let alone to some of the guys on the staff who generally love PC gaming. Equally disconcerting is EGM, a shadow of its former self, with not a lot to say about an industry that increasingly has a lot to say about itself. I have a respect for guys like Dan Hsu, Brian Intihar, and even Shane Bettenhausen now that he’s come back to Earth since the PS3 has failed to capture anyone’s interest; and I know those guys could do a lot of good given the chance. Perhaps in both cases, the magazines are made to suffer while Ziff decides what to do with the business, stifling their staff in the process.

So there you have it – an apology of sorts, for being so critical of the 1UP crew during the past year. There have been some positive changes at site recently, and as long as I take it in small, digestible bits, I might be able to stomach them yet.