Despite the best efforts of God, Murphy's Law and Comcast, GameHounds Episode 8: Hawkesless Tuesday is finally available for download.

As you may know, we had a rocky weekend, and thus we were unable to bring Hawkes along for the ride for this later-than-usual podcast.

Standing in for Hawkes at Edie's side this week is Thrillhouse17 of PSH Radio, another of the fine podcasts of Platform Nation.

Looks like we joined at the perfect time. Less than a week in the network and we were already whoring for fill-in hosts.

This week, Edie and Thrillhouse, who joined us from Italy discuss:

The San Jose Mercury News blog entry that questions why Super Smash Brothers Brawl merits a teen rating from the ESRB when its "crude humor" and "cartoon violence" is no worse than any Saturday morning kids' show. We have to agree.

Valve announces classic Atari games for Steam. We don't mean to sound like your bitchy ex-girlfriend, but what have you done for me lately?

Army of Two is region-locked. And not gay enough!

We'd believe China's claims they're trying to contain software piracy more if the Beijing Olympics website hadn't ripped off a bunch of flash games.

EB Games in Canada will let you return Haze after a week's play for a full refund. Who wants to run the border for cheap used copies? Anyone?

Minnesota cans mature video-game "tax" due to that pesky First Amendment. Stoopid amendment.

Europe gets a host of EU-exclusive Rock Band titles. Gratz... dammit.

ABBA drummer dies in weirdest way possible, but you cannot deny the power of the ABBA.

Win a copy of Turok for the XBox 360! How? Well just listen

Download at all the usual places.