The FAQ was a nice start, but when you try to map Star Trek lore onto MMO tropes you run into trouble quick. BingeGamer collates information as it's discovered in a legible way here, which I found useful. I still feel like I'm starving. I'm not sure any volume of loose, approved factoids would be satisfactory at this point.

I didn't know that I was going to be excited for a Star Trek Online, but I am. For fluff addicts, being able to generate an entirely custom race (!!!) is an inspired maneuver. As established above, I don't know how you make an MMO out of some of these things. It's from Cryptic, so it's fair to expect heavily instanced content and incredible customization elements. When your "mount" is capable of orbital bombardments, I'm just wondering how it all fits together. Also, the, um... transporter. I suppose it is Star Trek, though. They'll chalk it all up to fields, or particles, or sentient liquids, etc.

I spend a lot of time wondering how exactly this new Fall Update for the 360 is going to come together. A video purporting to show the installation process for any game you own - one of the more twiddly features of the update - can be found here. I'm sure you've already seen it, but I don't really know what to make of it.

I don't know what level of "done-ness" this version of the dashboard represents, but what's shown there depicts a radically altered top level experience, but as soon as you start looking into the deeper levels a lot of it is pretty rough and uninspired. Or, it's simply the old UI with a different theme applied, which is... fine, I guess. Anyway, installs.

We have a 360 "dev kit" here at the office, and we've played game images directly from the drive, and the speed boost one derives is far less than you might assumed. People seem unhappy that you need to have the disc in the tray to play the game you've installed, but they're living in a dimension that doesn't resemble our own. The biggest concern for me is that I believe multidisc games are simply a reality for the system going forward, and my guess is their implementation of the feature will still require disc swaps for games you've copied to the hard drive. Asking for each disc in a set allows two people to play the same product, which goes against the kind of security they're trying to provide.

At first I was agitated, and then I was curious, and now I'm agitated again. I'll agree with them that this move is unprecedented. It's also sort of horrifying. They need to get out ahead of this and start selling the Goddamned thing.

(CW)TB out.

we only make do

In case you missed the earlier post about it, I wanted to mention the Fallout 3 project we did. This was a twelve comic project and they are currently posting a new one every Wednesday over at the official site. This was a really fun project because they gave us a lot of freedom to tell our own story in the Fallout world. We ended up creating our own vault and following the adventures of it's only occupant.

If you are familiar with the Fallout story you know that it was never really the intention of the vaults to rescue people from nuclear fallout. Rather they were designed to be massive social experiments. The conditions in each vault were different, some had plenty of food some had none, some had all men some had all women, some even had a door that wouldn't actually close. Our vault had plenty of food, water and everything else you might need to survive. The catch is that it only had one person...and a box of puppets.

You can start at the beginning by hitting up this link. Like I said, they'll be posting new comics every Wednesday. Check out the official site and let me know what you think as the story of vault 77 plays out.

Also, it's probably worth mentioning that we've updated the Penny Arcade presents page. We've done a number of these projects over the years and as the games get older the sites that host the comics tend to change or disappear entirely. We've gone ahead and collected them all on our site and linked them from the PA presents page.

-Gabe out