Jurassic Radio #42: On the Aisle

When I’m late with the podcast, as I am this week, I like to give you guys a peek at my excuse, if only so you can judge how inadequate it is.

This week, I blew our airtight Tuesday deadline because I was pissed at Steam. I had pre-ordered BATTLEFIELD BAD COMPANY 2 and SUPREME COMMANDER 2, pre-loaded the latter and got out of work as soon as possible Monday night so I could play ‘em the second they unlocked.

But Steam wasn’t able to negotiate a midnight unlock with EA on BATTLEFIELD (presumably so EA’s own online store could have a few hours of exclusivity), so that was pushed until 10 a.m. PDT Wednesday. And the SUPREME COMMANDER 2 unlock was a technical clusterfuck, failing to decrypt anyone’s .exe for almost nine hours and locking me out of my bought-and-paid-for game for most of the day.

Making matters worse, a Valve employee suggested on a Steam forum that the cause could be a glitch with Steam’s new beta UI. Getting impatient, I downloaded the install for the ugly, stable UI, but it couldn’t roll back the beta. So I uninstalled Steam — a process which, I realized too late, uninstalls every game you’ve downloaded through the service.

So I queued up 30 gigs of gaming, skulked off to work, came back on my lunch break and discovered that only two of my 11 games had downloaded and that neither of them were BATTLEFIELD or SUPCOM.

Fury. And all of this is to say nothing of Y2PS3, which, oh my God. The digital download train hit a cow or something Tuesday, and I got thrown the hell off. I want to take all my games and books and movies and go underground. Maybe store ‘em in a bomb shelter alongside all those beans and peaches Viggo Mortensen and his kid were eating in “The Road.”

I finally fixed everything by the time I went to bed, but of course — OF COURSE — EA’s BATTLEFIELD servers are utterly broken. That’s par for the course with DICE games, but for fuck’s sake, I’d like to play my game, please.

Anyway, this week’s show is awesome. It’s a disservice to all involved to bury the lede so low, but I had to get that stuff off my chest.

My college roommate Alan and I kick things off by dishing some completely unnecessary Oscar talk.

The regular crew follows that segment with the lowdown on the Gameodactyl’s testicles. Then, GRANDIA, CROSS EDGE, MARVEL ULTIMATE ALLIANCE 2 and SUPREME COMMANDER: FORGED ALLIANCE. Yeah, we’re partying like it’s 2007. Or 1997.

But I talk about HEAVY RAIN for, like two seconds, and we do a roundtable on the “Halo Legends” anime compilation DVD.

With music from Jimi Hendrix, Marty O’Donnell, Michael Salvatori, and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy.

PODCAST

(right-click to save, use player below, or get the show on iTunes here)

Jurassic Radio #42: On the Aisle

00:00 – 57:38 — Pete and Alan talk movies

ACT BREAK — Jimi Hendrix “Third Stone from the Sun”

58:01 – 1:25:43 — What we’ve been playing

ACT BREAK — Marty O’Donnell and Michael Salvatori, “Ghosts of Reach”

1:26:11 – 1:44:48 — WINNING TIME: “Halo Legends”

ACT BREAK — Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, “Jump with Me, Baby”

1:45:19 – 2:18:56  — The news, what’s coming out