Quick hits: Jurassic Hour, review, news
Y'all.
Have you ever read a post written by a blogger who feels mildly contrite about ditching his readers? No? Weird, because people do this all the time. I'm about to do it!
(The apologizing bit. Not the ditching bit.)
Prickishness aside, sorry for the absence. It's not that I haven't been thinking about games or playing or writing about them -- I definitely have, I swear -- I've just been terribly busy preparing myself for a project I'm kicking off early next year. It's unusual of me to think more than a week in advance, especially where money is concerned, but I've finally got some incentive. And I'm not getting any younger.
I'd be more vague about all of this if I could. Wait, maybe I can. I'm getting ready for something you guys will find really exciting, and I absolutely intend to deliver on that promise. It's something I've tried before, and it involves doggie day-care and a bicycle. The entire endeavor will be chronicled exhaustively in this space.
There. Those are all the clues you monsters get.
Anyway, I have some stuff for you guys! One of them is a Gameosaurus first. It's a review I wrote two weeks ago for MONDAY NIGHT COMBAT, the great DOTA-inspired Xbox Live Arcade title released early this month. The review was published in the Dispatch, but our network deleted the file before I could archive it.
So I took a picture! And I'm too lazy to transcribe it. Click to embiggen.
My second item is the latest episode of the Jurassic Hour, which I recorded with Pat Gann a few weeks ago. Pete Rambo joins us one last time to hold forth on why moving is at once terrible and awesome. Plus, LIMBO, STARCRAFT II, NIER and other games we've been playing. It's a good episode and deserves more and fancier preamble than this, but I don't want you guys to have to wait any longer. With music from Anamanaguchi, the Mad Caddies, Phantom Planet and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy.
The episode has been in the show feed for a while. If you missed it there, get it here!
(right-click to save, use theplayer below, or get the show on iTunes here)
Jurassic Hour #8: Point A to Point B
I'm posting a column here Tuesday summing up Microsoft's Summer of Arcade (and the complete lethargy Sony showed in response), and you can expect another podcast shortly after that. And with the fall gaming season kicking into gear, you can expect our impressions of METROID: OTHER M, VALKYRIA CHRONICLES II, YS SEVEN, BLAZBLUE: CONTINUUM SHIFT and more -- not to mention the triple-A heavyweights that drop toward the end of September. For me, that's HALO: REACH and CIVILIZATION V.
For Patrick ... I don't know. It'll probably be a couple unjustly derided eastern RPGs published stateside by Aksys with an initial production run of 800 copies and a heap of Twitter buzz, amirite? I mean, there is an Atelier game slated for October or something, right?
Stay frosty in the interim, folks. LYLAS!
Jurassic Hour #7: So Intense!
My tech is limited (iPhone over 3G in Central Texas), but I want to get the word out somehow: We made a showz0r.
In this weekmonth's episode, BFF / RPCV (retired Peace Corps volunteers, duh) Pat Himes talks about his time in Kyrgyzstan, where he pooped for two years before returning a few weeks ago.
Then, Sabotage Yahoo! Answers and what we've been playin', all colored by Himes' time in Central Asia.
With music from The Gregory Brothers, Radiohead and Mel Gibson. Sweet, sweet music.
(right-click to save, use theplayer below, or get the show on iTunes here)
Jurassic Hour #6: Cohabitation
I got into a ferocious little disagreement today with a person around whom I've become increasingly uncomfortable.
I work with this woman. She's been waging a campaign of coercion against me for the better part of a year, convincing me that she and I, though without any sort of romantic future, are genetically obligated to reproduce.
It's like a lie you've told yourself so long that you end up believing it, or partially believing it. She's been declaring (publicly and indiscreetly) that I would donate my sperm to her so often that, at one point, I just kind of assumed I would.
But I came to my senses a couple weeks ago. There are the obvious reasons — I'm special; I'm not fathering a kid without giving him or her a shot at a two-parent home; I'm simply not ready for it psychologically — but there are factors I hadn't considered before.
And those I won't discuss here, though I had in an earlier draft of this nonsense. I don't want to get into the shitting-on-people-online business again!
So I've decided that, no, I won't be donating any sperm. But I haven't found the right occasion to tell her this, and it's been souring our otherwise stable friendship. (This all assumes she's still interested, which may not be the case. We haven't discussed it in weeks.)
Today, she came in to work with a pretty brutal head cold. A normal person would treat upper respiratory symptoms this serious with medication — Afrin, Sinex, some other nasal mist — or, barring that, by inconspicuously blowing his or her nose. This person chose to make the most offensive, ear-splitting honk I've ever heard. Repeatedly. Like, again and again and again, and just when you think you're in the clear, it happens again. AND AGAIN.
I registered my frustration earlier this morning — "CHRIST, [person]!" — and was basically told to fuck off. Then I started sighing, and just before my shift ended, she got in my face, announcing to the newsroom that I was bitching because things weren't going exactly my way.
I was livid. Finished my work and walked out.
Artist's rendering of what it's like to live with me. Left: me.
But was she right? Was I more irritable than I otherwise might have been because she and I have other unresolved issues? Am I irritable, period? I contend that I am not, though I'll allow the possibility that I'm kind of a grouch sometimes. In the interest of full disclosure, I ought to note that I've been on one end or the other of serious, bitchy fights every day for the last week, most of which I've instigated. But with cause!
With help from Pat Gann and his seriously lovely wife Jennie, I examine this question and others in the sixth episode of the Jurassic Hour. Listen in horror as I recite items from my irritation journal and catalogue the sins committed by each of my roommates over the last eight years. Pat and Jennie later list their complaints about each other, with generally hilarious and good-natured results. I love these people, and I hope I never blow up on them the way I do on everybody else (who fucking deserves it).
Then, of course, Pat and I talk games, spending most of our time on our reaction to this year's Electronics Entertainment Expo. Long story short, we're excited about the next 12 months.
With music from The Octopus Project, Tame Impala, The Cracow Klezmer Band and the Klezmatics.
(right-click to save, use theplayer below, or get the show on iTunes here)
Jurassic Hour #6: Cohabitation
INTRO -- The Octopus Project, "Truck"
00:15 - 48:53 -- Living with other people is hard
49:27 - 1:05:45 -- Flight of the Fuckface
1:05:45 - 1:51:45 -- What you been playin?
OUTRO -- Tame Impala, "Desire Be Desire Go"
Jurassic Hour #5: Pornography!
You know what's sad? When you start to stay away from your own website for fear that you might get a peek at it. Specifically, how nothing. Is. Happening. There.
Here's the skinny: the podcast as you two dozen people knew it got blowed up because we lost two people to perfectly defensible grown-up situations. For those keeping score at home, that's half of us.
And rather than pretend nothing had happened or would happen, Pat "Gameodactyl" Gann and I thought it might be time to change things up.
The result of all of that is in front of you. We're still Gameosaurus.com, and we still do the Jurassic Hour, but our bent is no longer strictly games. From now on, the show's focus is personalities and relationships, and the blog is a general-interest-whatever-the-hell sort of thing.
The first episode in the podcast's new format is wriggling around below these paragraphs. Our friend "Terra" joins the Gameodactyl and me for a sprawling discussion about our encounters with male and female strippers, how much porn is too much porn, when you should tell your boyfriend that you intentionally stopped using birth control to have his baby, and so much more!
Terra judged a "Male Entertainer of the Year" event in Baltimore last month, and we ask her plenty of questions about that. Listen in real-time as the Gameodactyl becomes completely scandalized.
And then Terra steps out, and Gann and I get down to the business of what we've been playing for the last month. Up for discussion: ALAN WAKE, BLUR, the sublime RED DEAD REDEMPTION, the not-s0-sublime RECORD OF AGAREST WAR and more.
The most important thing to note here, I think, is the fact that we're absolutely doing this for us and don't need validation from traffic stats and comments, though we certainly invite all of those things. We'll be trying another one of these in two weeks, and we may well solicit your participation. So if you get a plaintive e-mail or phone call from us begging for you to appear on the show, think seriously about it!
Okay, enough babbling. Let's overshare!
With music from Marilyn Manson, Sleigh Bells, Joe Budden and Chk! Chk! Chk!
(right-click to save, use theplayer below, or get the show on iTunes here)
Jurassic Hour #5: Pornography!
INTRO -- Marilyn Manson, "This is the New Shit"
01:16 - 33:42 -- Sabotage Yahoo! Answers
ACT BREAK -- Sleigh Bells, "Riot Rhythm"
36:00 - 52:15 -- Judging a male stripping contest in Baltimore
52:15 - 1:15:39 -- Pornography: great hobby or greatest hobby?
ACT BREAK -- Joe Budden, "Fire (Yes, Yes Y'all)"
1:19:55 - 1:56:45 -- What we've been playing
OUTRO -- Chk! Chk! Chk!, "King's Weed"
The Jurassic Hour #4: Team Jacob
The Gameodactyl sent around an e-mail after we finished this week's episode letting us know how much he enjoyed recording, and though our professionalism isn't especially evident here, I've got to agree. Doing this twice a month, even if it's just for ourselves, is a treat for yours truly, and I hope we keep it up for a while.
We hold forth on the new DLC for LEFT 4 DEAD 2, RECORD OF AGAREST WAR, NEPTUNE'S PRIDE, WORLD OF WARCRAFT (for like a year) and more! Plus, challenges!
- TRIVIA: In observance of the offshore oil rigocalypse, environmental disasters in gaming (five questions, one point each)
- GAME: SUPER STREET FIGHTER IV on PS3 (three points to the victor)
- PHYSICAL: Handstands (five points to the victor)
With music from Broken Bells, Caribou and Gogol Bordello.
(right-click to save, use player below, or get the show on iTunes here)
00:00 - 1:00:38 -- Trivia challenge, what we've been playing
ACT BREAK -- Broken Bells, "The Ghost Inside"
1:01:07 - 1:36:31 -- Media roundtable
ACT BREAK -- Caribou, "Sun"
1:37:08 - 1:51:26 -- The news, what's coming out
OUTRO -- Gogol Bordello, "Una Menina"
New home for The Jurassic Hour
Y'ALL.
One more technical update today, but first, check out this BRAIN-KICKING LOGO I MADE IN PAINT.
Done looking? Is that even possible? Okay, onward.
While I've developed some very modest Internet skills over the last few weeks, bad things still happen, and I will continue to ascribe them to circumstances beyond my control.
Case in point: a casualty.
The Jurassic Radio RSS feed didn't survive the server switch, and no amount of elementary hackery is going to bring it back. I tried .htaccess 301 fixes. I tried XML-level redirects. I brought the feed completely up to standards-compliance, which, given how sloppy I was with it over the last year, was no small feat.
But it was for naught. So I tried the nuclear option.
We have a new podcast feed for The Jurassic Hour! It's here. Spelled out, that's http://www.gameosaurus.com/hour/feed.xml. And we're up and running on iTunes already. You can check that out here.
If you click, you'll notice that the feed includes only the first three episodes of The Jurassic Hour. That's by design. The Jurassic Radio episodes will endure, but you'll have to click here to get to them. Spelled out, that's http://www.gameosaurus.com/podcasts/feed.xml.
I've got 150 GB of server space, and the 40-odd Jurassic Radio episodes we recorded comprise only about 4 GB, so they'll live on in perpetuity. If you ever want to leaf through them and can't find them, drop me a line. It's very basic, occasionally dull stuff, but it represents roughly a year of enthusiasm and fairly hard work. And there definitely were some good moments along the way — our New Year's show comes to mind, as does our October chip-sampling expo at Alex's house — so I'm preserving all of it.
Now get subscribed, and if you love me, go comment on iTunes!
The Jurassic Hour #3: No, really, let's talk about FFXIII
Okay, gotta be honest. I talk shit about MONSTER HUNTER TRI in this episode, and I'll be walking it back very shortly. Keep watching the site.
But more about the actual show. This week, we make noise about X-COM: UFO DEFENSE, Boss Baddie's WAKE, FINAL FANTASY XIII, SPLINTER CELL CONVICTION and CRYSIS.
Also, challenges! At stake was a kickass shirt emblazoned with Toon Link exclaiming "I'm on a boat!" Because he's on a boat. Shirt created by Dave Lister, the man behind Paradox Lost and some other cool stuff.
- TRIVIA: Rare's first-person shooters (three questions, one point each)
- GAME: PERFECT DARK on XBLA (three points to the victor)
- PHYSICAL: Swallowing a half-teaspoon of cinnamon. (four points to the victor)
Hint: I don't win.
With music from LCD Soundsystem, The Lion King and Okkervil River.
PODCAST
(right-click to save, use player below, or get the show on iTunes here)
Jurassic Hour #3: No, really, let's talk about FFXIII
00:00 - 46:33 -- Trivia challenge, what we've been playing
ACT BREAK -- LCD Soundsystem, "Drunk Girls"
47:12 - 1:00:14 -- Watching other people play games
ACT BREAK -- The Lion King, "Be Prepared"
1:00:49 - 1:15:12 -- The news, what's coming out
OUTRO -- Okkervil River, "A Hand to Take Hold of the Scene"
The Jurassic Hour #2: What Enforcers Do
The Gameodactyl and Nobuo Uematsu are captured at a Boston Thai restaurant by the same picture box. FANBOYS ARE MEETING THEIR HEROES. WORLDS ARE COLLIDING.
The second episode of the Jurassic Hour is proof that God exists.
Okay, not exactly. But I do think we're carrying off the two-week format pretty well, as we're positively brimming with news and developed thoughts here.
First up, Benji and Rambo with their perspectives as enforcers at last month's PAX East in Boston. Then Pat, who traveled north a week later for Anime Boston, gushes about his hour of drinking and dining with the legend himself, Nobuo Uematsu.
We also squeeze in all manner of games we've been playing, including SAKURA WARS: SO LONG MY LOVE, JUST CAUSE 2, ACE ATTORNEY INVESTIGATIONS: MILES EDGEWORTH, DIVINITY II and my rekindled love for BORDERLANDS.
With music from She & Him, The Local Natives and Frightened Rabbit.
PODCAST
(right-click to save, use player below, or get the show on iTunes here)
Jurassic Hour #2: What Enforcers Do
00:00 - 22:50 -- PAX East Enforcers tell all
22:50 - 50:40 -- Anime Boston, trivia challenge
ACT BREAK -- She & Him, "This Is Not a Test"
59:48 - 1:45:46 -- What we've been playing
ACT BREAK -- Local Natives, "Sun Hands"
1:46:20 - 2:04:06 -- The news, what's coming out
OUTRO -- The Frightened Rabbits, "Swim Until You Can't See Land"
The Jurassic Hour #1: Bad for Ya
Keen observers will notice that this podcast post has NO LOGO. That's because I HAVEN'T MADE ONE YET. It's a brand new show!
Well, kind of. We moved up our timetable on the two-week thing. Long story short: the new stuff starts today, and you don't have to do anything. If you're subscribed to the Jurassic Radio in any podcast aggregator, including iTunes, you will get The Jurassic Hour.
Here's how this works. Or how it will work, once we get our shit together.
In a few ways, it's the same deal as always. We open with what we've been playing, we move on to some sort of special topic, and we finish with the news and what's coming out. But in between each segment, GAMES! To lead off the first segment, we'll stage a three-way trivia contest between Benji, Gamegnathus and the Gameodactyl. As host, I moderate.
Between the first and second segments, those same three dudes square off in a video game challenge a la Nick Arcade. As host, I referee.
In between the second and third segments, the guys do a physical challenge, a la all these shows. Since I'm vain and fit, I might jump in for one of these sometime. The winner of the evening, based on points accrued throughout the three events, gets ... something. The loser rips a shot of something, or, in Puritan Pat's case, must do jumping jacks for one minute.
We've videotaped the video game and physical challenges; scroll up for the grisly results.
Cool, right? No? Let us know in the comments. (The answer, of course, is yes; dissenters are advised to wash their eyes with fire.)
Apologies for the background squeal in the second and third segments. We changed venues for this introductory episode to Ben and Rambo's apartment, which has, well, background noises. Swingin' place, I might add.
Intro music lifted from "Price is Right" theme song composer Robert Cobert. Other music from Yello, Gorillaz and Blondie.
PODCAST
(right-click to save, use player below, or get the show on iTunes here)
00:00 - 59:48 -- What we've been playing (FINAL FANTASY XIII, GOD OF WAR III, SHIREN THE WANDERER, DAWN OF WAR II: CHAOS RISING, METRO 2033)
ACT BREAK -- Yello, "Oh Yeah"
1:00:08 - 1:39:37 -- WINNING TIME: "Everything Bad is Good for You"
ACT BREAK -- Gorillaz vs. Blondie, "Feel Good Inc. vs. Atomic" (from DJ HERO)
1:40:07 - 1:52:49 -- The news, what's coming out