Rob's Back! Can't wait for some good old rage.

I totally had an Eagle Transporter, also had the die cast fighter from UFO. God, i loved those shows, so british and so not the mainstream, in those days. Except for Martin Landau, but whatever. I have such fond memories of Space 1999, I don't care if it doesn't hold up.

Oh Shawn, were you referring to this horrible earworm?

I can't speak for the guys, but as I recall what they were questioning in the previous show was the idea that one person's buying decision-- or even your typical Internet "boycott"-- will make any practical difference.

I don't have any illusions about whether my decision not to buy Assassin's Creed II on the PC will make the slightest bit of difference to Ubisoft's future plans or the future of DRM on the PC in general. I still won't buy it, however, simply because I don't want to support those types of practices. I don't want to be part of the problem. Will it make a difference? Maybe not, but it'll make me feel better.

This was a fun conference call this week. It was nice to have Rob back. I think time away may have helped his demeanor. There was no rage to be found anywhere.

On the subject of comfort food games, I confess that I still pop open my netbook and play Master of Orion 2 from time to time when the mood strikes me. I can sleepwalk through the experience at this point, but it's still very fun.

Also, thank you for reminding me that Age of Wonders exists. I bought this game years ago because I used to adore Master of Magic. However, MoM hasn't aged too well, so I could never get into it in recent years. I'll have to hunt another copy of AoW down and give that a shot.

Lastly, I want to thank you for planting such odd modern-game crossovers in my head. My vote is for Cooking with Kratos or perhaps League of Legends Dating Sim (come on, you know some lonely geeks would dig on that).

Fun as always.

Give Kinect time, I seriously think it has the potential to be pretty big. Between Dance Central, exercise games and some strategy titles (if you can sit down) there is a definite potential for good content.

I haven't listened yet, on my way home soon, but all I can say is

Good rule.

That practical line that Ubisoft crosses is an important one too. I have extremely crappy internet, not being able to play RUSE when I get home after a long day at work makes the game totally useless, even if it only happens once a week, and it won't happen that seldom.

I'm also finding that through Steam, and thanks to my internet, I am getting into small, easily downloaded indie games that I otherwise wouldn't have paid attention to. Triple A games are either too big to download, are too expensive, too demanding on my system or have too many restrictions to play.

We don't need to start a Kinect thread here, but honestly I had been having a hard time coming up with what games would work well on it and really anything that works well on an iPad/iPhone could potentially work well with Kinect ... until your arms get tired of pointing at things.

Great show this week. Lots of good laughs.

I think the health notifications are pretty good too. My problem was that some of the mobs seem a little unbalanced. You run into large groups of weak enemies who are hanging around with one really powerful enemy, so you get a little over-confident and suddenly you're dead.

I'm having trouble with the podcast. RSS URL and the 'save link as' give me an empty file. Others are clearly getting the podcast.

Suggestions?

Glad to hear talk about tropes. That word was sadly missing from the latest Three Moves Ahead 'cast with Levine.

I thought that was happening.

Oh Certis, in ten years you won't need special software to slow your computer down enough to play Counterstrike. You'll just need to convince that little paperclip to run software it thinks is old and boring.

Great show guys! I would like to say that I think a laptop or any electronic device only lasting 2 years is completely unacceptable. You guys kind of hit on this, but if you simply take care of the things you buy they will last longer. If something is designed to fail after a certain amount of time then the real reason behind this is the manufacturer simply wants to sell you another item later in time. I understand electronics fail, but five years is a more acceptable amount of time. One brand of laptop I would never recommend to anyone is Toshiba. I've had three now and they all have problems with the power supply connection. My last 2 were ones I rescued from being thrown out, and was able to repair. I am hoping to get a new laptop this Christmas and I am looking at the Macbooks. I have always owned Windows PCs and I really think there is a little more quality control at Apple versus the junk they sell at Best Buy.