We played Kingdom Hearts 2 for a few hours yesterday, enough to know that they were pulling some odd narrative tricks that had us intrigued, but after a couple more hours today we were sort of wishing that they would begin the game proper. We're quite aware by this point that "shit is all crazy." We did hunt down the pop track which accompanies the introduction, though - at the most recent count, we have heard it twenty-three times. That would be twenty-three times today. And we are on the slick precipice of a twenty fourth.

New podcast is up - exclusively for members of our unique Penny Arcade Supreme service, a group that includes every human being on the Planet Earth. We have cons three weekends in a row, so I haven't been able to work out any RSS stuff. Hopefully direct download will at least provide some succor.

Don’t forget that the early bird pricing for PAX ends at the end of this month. So you only have a few more days to get in on it. I recommend signing up today!

I see that Gamespot is thinking the same thing: when you put the "absolutely unfounded" rumor that Lucasarts will strip Sony Online Entertainment of the Star Wars license, and the one hundred percent true fact that BioWare has created an MMO studio in the same Goddamn Town, it's hard not to fantasize that BioWare has been given the reins of a new Star Wars Massive.

If you follow Tycho’s link up there back to the cover for book 2 that we posted you’ll also see the artwork for our WOW binder from Brady Games. I’m happy to say that the binder is done now and it looks awesome. We just got ours in the mail last week and we took some pictures. Here is what the final binder looks like.

Continuing our tradition of ridiculous covers, I present the cover for Book 3. Behold!

You might recall that last year at Sakuracon, Gabriel was hauled by guile into the sensual world of Yaoi. We were not aware that Yaoi was but one deity in a greater pantheon of erotic gods, each with radically different domains. Looking back on two-thousand and six, it will forever be known as the year we broke The DouJinshi Code.

Don't pay attention to Gabe, I should have known intuitively that he wasn't ready for The Elder Scrolls. It turns out that I'm not quite ready for it either, for a different reason, but I'm not sure if mine is actually more noble or not.

We were able to secure twelve or so copies of Drakengard 2 to give away at the booth, seemed like a good tchotchke for an Anime convention. I don't know how long they'll be available, but our booth is typically a ghost town.

Just got a mail from Lik-Sang (import guys) saying my DS Lite was on the way, which is great - you might have been following the tribulations of people having a hard time getting them in Japan.

We will be at Sakuracon this weekend. If you are in the area and you wish you were Japanese, this is the con for you!

Pork came by on Monday to hang out, and being utterly without a DS he's never experienced the high points the system has on offer for wireless gamers. A number of these games only require a single cartridge to play, typically two or four player, but there are games that reach up to eight and, yea, even unto ten. Meteos has fallen out of favor with most people I know, because even though it's a great game you can be tremendously effective just scribbling on the screen. Like the "snaking" scourge of Mario Kart DS, it's the sort of thing that is best resolved by refusing to play with assholes.

Okay so we’ve had about 4,000 downloads of the podcast in just a few hours and I’ve gotten hundreds of mails. It seems like you all agree that we should do more but that they need to be recorded better and distributed like other podcasts through iTunes or released as a torrent. Well we can certainly do all that. Like I said this was really just a test to see if there was any interest.

Sometimes people ask us “how do you guys write the comic?” The answer is that we sit around and look at game news and we talk about it until we start laughing at something. It sounds boring and I think it probably is. That’s why we decided to record the process and let you download it.

And honestly, I can understand why that might be - this press release is a little on the long side.