Orcs and Elves for the DS has a fairly strong mobile heritage, which is to say that some of its presentation is a little two-frame and raw. If you crave gold and adventure - a common affliction among our people - I think you'll slip past it, and into the retro dungeon crawler at its heart. It's been reviewed much better on the mobiles than it has been on the portable, but I imagine that people who review games that you play on a phone have a more forgiving palette.

We received the game in a large box that included several tiny wands perfectly sized for squirrel wizards, a black Nintendo DS, and a letter. These boxes are often accompanied by "letters," but these letters are not actually correspondence. We've been trained by years of these packages to roundfile the entire toxic husk, everything but the nut. Atlus sends nothing but the disc, and only the most rudimentary kind of extra information in a nondescript mailer, whose lean efficacy always lead me to believe their PR people were once forced to write reviews themselves.

We didn't even open the DS that Electronic Arts sent. If we had, we would have seen that it was being offered up as an auction for Child's Play. It was, in fact, a Nintendo DS signed by John Carmack. As I said, we didn't even open the thing. If you have been doing this for almost a decade, as we have, you develop a very comprehensive and far reaching cynicism that applies to anything that a company sends you. We arm ourselves in this way because we think it will make us deliver you a more robust assessment of the medium. Also, we are assholes. Professionally.

What I am trying to say is that we fucked up bad. Bad. We actually sent that DS away as a prize in Gabriel's revolting cookie contest this morning, and pawing through the entrails of the box we found an absolutely genuine letter of support for both the site and for the mission of the charity. There is a portion of the letter dedicated to his pride in the game's custom wand-shaped stylus, and if you take pride in custom wand-styluses what that says to me is that you are a huge nerd. This was not some vile and crass manipulator. He wasn't trying to fly me out to gay Paris. He used his position to secure something incredible for the charity, and believed that I would be literate enough to read the enclosed letter. He was wrong.

(CW)TB out.

i didn't mean to tell you lies

The Penny Arcade Battle Academy Will be meeting next Tuesday the 8th at the Comic Stop. We're an official Pokemon TCG league now. Those of you in the Academy who haven't done so already, should register with Go Pokemon.com. Once you have a POP ID you can post it in this thread and Joe will get you added to the roster. As always, new players are welcome. Just grab a starter deck and be at the Comic Stop around 6.PM. There will be plenty of people willing to walk you through the game if it's your first time. For our regulars, if you're looking for a place up north to get cards and boosters I highly recommend the Cardhaus in Lynnwood. He's got some singles in stock but he also has the best price on boosters I've been able to find. Also, Kiko and I picked up some great tips and a few interesting rules that we did not know about while at the tournament. We'll share our "key learnings" with you all on Tuesday. It should be a fun night, hope to see some new faces.

-Gabe out

Some of you have probably already heard it, since I put it up yesterday - but we're trying new hosting for the podcast, and I wanted to make sure everything made sense before I dropped it on the front page.  The podcast is for Wednesday's strip, "The Ungift, Part Two."  You can download it here, or subscribe to the feed here.  The levels are a little crazy in a couple spots, for which I apologize.  I think we've got those ironed out, now. 

(CW)TB