Nearly every morning I'm treated to a kind of "after-action report" where the rigors of the evening prior are related. These tend to be action packed, and sometimes involve him acting out key portions in a meticulous fashion. One recalls the odd dance of the honeybee upon returning to the hive, instructing his fellows by virtue of these motions, and I have seen Gabriel's pantomime with such frequency that I think - think, now - that I could successfully defend a abandoned orphanage. Supposing such a thing were ever necessary.

Gabe's epic post yesterday concerning the nearly forgotten events at eFront has knotted my guts. We have always been over our heads with this, by which I mean Penny Arcade, but we have never been so overwhelmed as were were at that time - and I don't recall ever discussing the fullness of that period. I won't bore you with all of it, which is to say I won't bore myself relating it, but to the extent that I will discuss it at all let me express profound disappointment.

Certainly the scenario, people hijacking the comic via secret IM transmissions, defrauding people of money, all these things are bad. But as an adult who lives in the year two-thousand and five I would like to think that we've graduated somewhat from firing nasty little messages or coded slurs from our Goddamn vanity websites. I can hardly believe that schoolyard tussles like this define the contours of my actual life. It's often true that it is my task to polysyllabically "roll with" whatever new feud my friend and associate hauls to my porch. Let me officially register my exhaustion with this.

Also! There is some news about the Xbox!!!!!!

(CW)TB out.

floormats torn from matted hair

Let's talk about them vidyagames.

Rise of Nations was a great RTS, I thought - if you were to flip through a few screenshots you wouldn't be able to tell what distinguished it from its contemporaries. It's almost enough to say that its contemporaries weren't designed by Brian Reynolds, one of the men who devoured your youth with his insidious Civilization 2 and Alpha Centauri. But certainly diverse victory conditions and and almost tabletop sense of "territory" helped to separate it from the pack.

What they're doing with the "sequel," more of a spiritual successor I'd suppose, is ... Well, here's a long article on what. Honestly, the moment I began looking at screens for it I could no longer parse language. The one thing that penetrated my stupor was how dense and organic the cities look - that must be due to their "district" oriented city-building they refer to in the portion of the article I dimly remember.

Rise Of Legends (what they're calling the sequel, I forgot to mention that) and Age of Empires 3 both show what modern hardware is capable of when it is not immediately turned to the rendering of a dark hallway or dilapidated prison. It's kind of nice to see.

(CW)TB

It happens a lot, English-speakers get wind of the free beta period running on some odd, inventive MMO hauled from the Game Mines of Korea. There's a bloom of activity, and then I never hear about it again. It's possible that it already happened for Shot Online - if that's true, I apologize. If not, I mean... This is pretty wild. The game told me I could play until what they called "Level 10" for free, but as far as I know there's no charge at all currently.

It's a Golf MMO if you can imagine such a thing. I think it plays almost exactly like the Hot Shots series, which is a positive thing. But you create characters of various types that have stats and energy, and must practice... You get it. You know what Golf is. I also obtained some kind of elixir. Don't know what that is about yet.

I found links to a few other games from that site as well - Legend of Mir3, some kind of martial arts MMO called d.o, and a naval action game with customizable battleships (!!!) called Navy Field. These games tend to be pretty English friendly for the most part - and in the rare cases such things aren't true they tend to have enthusiastic communities that craft extremely detailed F.A.Qs in your native tongue.

(CW)TB

I just wanted to post all the information on or E3 appearance again.

E3 is fast approaching and we will of course be there. Last year Ubisoft was kind enough to offer us a portion of their booth for the purpose of meeting our fans. They’ve made us the same offer again this year and we’d be crazy not to take it. Those of you who have tried to see us at E3 will remember that before we had booth space security would just kick us all out onto the street. I have to admit that the line system we pioneered last year is far superior to the crushing mob seen in years past.

So if you’re going to E3 this year you can find us on Thursday and Friday at the Ubi Soft booth from 2 to 3. We have five hundred comic books to give away this year. Last year we had two hundred to give away and they were gone super quick. This time we will give away two hundred and fifty comic books each day. It’s a very nice full color book featuring our Brothers in Arms comic as well as our Spy Training Manual. I have a picture of the cover here:

Hope to see you there.

-Gabe out :o: