Hope everyone is enjoying their holidays, to include Boxing Day for my British and Commonwealth subscribers, I know you pop in a couple times a month. I am currently on leave right now, seeing family in New York until January 2, so the first post for 2026 will be delayed most likely until later the next day. So this Boxing Day will be spent reflecting on pieces of entertainment that I consumed in 2025, even if it was older or not necessarily released this year.
I won’t be using any particular order or any kind of ranking system. This post is gonna be a free-for-all, so look forward to video games, TV series, movies, and animanga all in one post. For the video game front, the FPS genre suffered a devastating loss earlier this week with one of the founders of Call of Duty and Medal of Honor, Vince Zampella, losing his life in a car crash in Los Angeles. His work, along with that of Jason West, heavily influenced the trajectory of the FPS genre and the gaming landscape from spearheading the modern warfare concept up until he and West were unceremoniously booted on trumped up charges. Nevertheless, neither man was deterred and got back on their feet with the likes of Titanfall under EA.
I planned on making a post about this soon after the news came out, but I was waiting on more information relating to the news to come out. I was also busy with other real-world stuff, so if I’m able, this should be up either late Monday night or early Tuesday morning.
If you hadn’t heard yet, The Escapist’s video team resigned en masse following the firing of their editor-in-chief Nick Calandra. Nick’s firing was preceded by The Escapist’s parent company Gamurs placing impossible deadlines and goals for him and the team to meet and when he didn’t live up to those standards, he got the sack. Everyone, myself included, sees corporate avarice biting them in the ass with this since Nick oversaw a close-knit ship since most of his coworkers quit to join him for greener pastures. For more information on the situation from last week, see this video by YongYea:
Channel: YongYea
Gamurs bought the site in 2022 and seem to now be regretting their decision to axe Nick and by extension the entire video team. Some of The Escapist’s recent additions like Cold Take, Stuff of Legends, and other stuff is still available to view on the channel and seem to predate the The Escapist as told by some of the video team’s recently resigned members, but one of the major casualties out of this was the popular review series Zero Punctuation. Yahtzee explained in a stream last week that he was going to continue reviewing video games on his site, Fully Ramblomatic, which also predates ZP’s lineup in The Escapist, but whether The Escapist under Gamurs’ wing is gonna toss it for good or try something with the ZP license, I can’t say with certainty. All I know is what everyone knows about it in that Yahtzee couldn’t take ZP with him which is why he’s reviewing on Fully Ramblomatic. It might retain the Wednesday noon schedule as ZP but again it remains to be seen.
As for where it’s all going to go, the team relaunched and got back to business as usual by launching Second Wind.
This isn’t sponsored or anything. I’m making this to say that as a fan of ZP and of The Escapist’s other shows, like Jimquisition, the aforementioned, Stuff of Legends, Cold Take, 3 Minute Review, their livestreams, etc. that it’s terrible that the owners were so tunnel visioned that they’d axe a well-beloved member of the team, but looking at how well they bounced back into the fold on their own, I’m happy that they haven’t been too badly affected by the surprise changes.
Also, I’m putting this up as a YouTube recommendation. After the controversy earlier this year with Blair Zon of the iilluminaughtii, I expected another redacted recommendation to be controversy related or if the channel was mysteriously vanished. While I will keep my recommendation up for The Escapist until further notice, mainly as an archive, I’m also recommending Second Wind because the main video personalities have migrated their to continue their craft unimpeded.
As it stands, the channel has yet to set everything up, but by December or even January, it should start looking like a proper YouTube channel so get ready for that.
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