Tycho and I finished Dead Space 2 last week and I was really impressed with the game. Overall I didn’t feel like it was as scary as the first one but that changed this weekend. Our dryer stopped venting correctly and it fell on me to determine the problem. This meant exploring the crawl space below our house, something I had never had to do before. I removed the panel, slid into this dark space full of pipes and cables with my flashlight and immediately regretted the eight hours of survival horror I had just completed.

As one of Gabriel's fully actual dreams, this bizarre pastiche was weird enough to record. But now I want to use this character again, to re-enter the Time Files of Bono Trask, even though the workings of his device would almost certainly preclude it. Then I remembered that it was a strip about time travel, a genre where grievous narrative sins are expected and even encouraged. I've already generated no less than three distinct scenarios to shape the inevitable return. I've included exclamation points, to indicate my joy in their construction:

We are running a special sale on our heartris and life t-shirts for valentines day. They are now $14 each!

We've got the first episode of our Ping-Pong match against Screenlife, who you may know better as "The People Who Make Scene It."

Bulletstormin'.

One of the most important essays I’ve ever read is by Philip K Dick, entitled “How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later.” In it, he describes his idea that people can experience reality in such different ways that they lack a common language and therefore can’t relate to one another. He’s talking about schizophrenia, but he’s really talking (as is his way) about all people, everywhere.

I think this has really gone too far. We have people on both sides of this ridiculous argument making death threats and worse. Kara was certainly upset to see someone mention on Twitter last night that it would be funny to come to my house and murder my wife and children. I know there are people who see themselves as being on our side that have made equally disgusting comments in the other direction. I want to make it very clear that I do not approve of this kind of bullshit.

To this day, any conversational lull between Kiko and I invariably turns to Chromehounds.

We’re working on fleshing out PATV so it isn’t just shows about Penny Arcade. Ledo and Ix is one such show. The third episode went up on Monday and you can see it here.

We've got Dead Space 2 more or less in the bag, now, practically sewn up, and it's just... solid. It's more of a compliment than it sounds. They've created a very "firm" universe, studded with meaty bolts and secured by cascades of regularly spaced hermetic seals. It has intimacy and scale; along with breakneck pace, from which no neck is safe. Eventually we had to start running, altogether, just as we did years ago in games like Alone in the Dark or Resident Evil. Obviously, this would have been before the latter game became about mowing down fifty zombies at a time with a man-portable minigun.

With two analog sticks, two triggers, a d-pad, four face buttons, two cameras, and front and back trackpads, it's entirely possible that you will be speaking in ASL - inadvertently - every time you play a game. It might do to bone up on some of the basics, actually, maybe with a focus on what you don't want to sign. There are still vital questions to be asked of the device, in ASL or English, and there are answers nestled in today's installment.

It’s true that we have decided to remove the Dickwolves shirt from the store. Some people are happy about this but a lot more of you are upset. You think we’ve caved into to pressure from a vocal minority and you’re not entirely wrong. let me at least break down why we did it though.

For example, collating your feedback thus far, we have arrived at a low-cut, sleek skate-type shoe with a "cupsole" style "outsole." The side (or "quarter") as well as the "heel counter" are broad and available for whatever art or expression we collectively choose. I am suggesting a single, giant semicolon, but I'm open to suggestions. Materials for these portions can be combined (with suede, canvas, or leather being the most common). They're suggesting no more than three colors for the raw construction.

We've got a 4th Panel available for you today, which catalogs the process behind the strip "Teef."

I'm spending more time on the PC than I have in a very long time, and it's a policy I can't help but maintain - my Steam list is full of orders so pre they can't be loaded in advance, like The Witcher 2, or the second Dragon Age, or Dawn of War II: Retribution, all of which are little more than file paths which redirect to the untamed future.

If it is possible to be happier with the opening sequence of Dead Space 2, I'm not entirely sure how that would happen. Having returned from a jaunt to Dante's Inferno, EA's skunkworks imprint Visceral Games isn't fucking around in any way, shape, or form. Many reviews laud the audio specifically, and they should - I'm experiencing it in what must approach the optimal fashion, hearing every sound in absolute terms, seated in the unrelenting dark afraid for my life.