Whew! Many hecticness over the last few weeks. The podcast is not dead, and we're recording this Saturday, which means throw your questions and comments over to mailbag AT trigames DOT net. Even though we haven't recorded a traditional episode in a while, we've christened Pete's hour-plus-long trilobyte as Episode 141 because there's enough in there to qualify as a full episode. The RSS is updated all nice and smooooove, but if there are any issues, please let me know. (Pete says he was having trouble with it before.)

Al's wedding was a very nice gathering on the side of the beach at the Rio Montego Bay. The rest of the trip was quite a lot of fun, as well. We all went on a zip-line tour but spent most of the time relaxing on the beach and enjoying free beverages of the "hard" kind. Never before have I spent that much time just lying down on a beach chair and getting some color to even out my horrendous t-shirt and sock tans. There were also some random late-night hijinx after those beverages started to take effect. I'll sum it all up with these pictures (our condition worsened from the first picture to the second picture in, I think, the span of an hour):

Don't ask me what we were doing in the second picture. Maybe he thought I had some electric charge to my skin, a la Blanka, and wanted to try it out. I don't know, I'm not a doctor.

But before we went to Jamaica, we caught up with Alex Navarro at the Village Pourhouse in New York City, where he and other Harmonix and MTV heads (with a cameo from Alex Rigopulos!) were showing off a preview build of The Beatles: Rock Band. Plenty of off-pitch harmonizing, Beatle-lovin' and open-bar drinking to be had, and Al finally met the voice behind the special guest of Trigames.NET Podcast Episode 47:

I hadn't shaved in a week. Still can't match the Navarro beard.

In the meantime I picked up Street Fighter IV for Windows via STEAM, and boy am I enjoying it. I suck at it completely but I'm definitely getting a kick out of learning the ins and outs of the Focus attack system, with the three levels of Focus, EX canceling, and the nasty stuff you can use to punish fools when you hit them with a fully charged attack (Zangief says hi). You're probably laughing at the fact that I got it for Windows, but it was cheaper than the console versions, I don't go online with my PS3 due to its physical location in the house, and the gamepad I have for my PC has a better d-pad than both the 360 and PS3 controllers. I also plan on trying out my X-Arcade joystick on it, something I *can't* do on those consoles (yet).

I also started a bit of Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, and I'm really sick of all the dialog that it throws at me. I would just skip it but sometimes I feel guilty for doing so. I don't know why. Thus far, I'm about 8 missions in and there are very few, minor differences between this game and those of old. I didn't bother reading the instruction manual; I figure I'll run into gameplay enhancements as I see them. But thus far, it really just seems like more of the same old same old. A new unit here, new zoning and building capabilities there. That means it's still a lot of fun, but it also means that Advance Wars: Dual Strike has been the only one out of the series to show any huge differences in gameplay thus far. Of course, I'll wait until I play a lot more to actually make a judgment.

Remember to send your mailbag questions in. We'll be recording on Saturday, August 8th, at noon EST.