Skins are back for the GBA SP, with a couple new designs. We're going through a new place now called GC Skins, which does covers for your other consoles as well.

Troy ain't that hot. That's not what we're here to talk about today, though.

People kept saying "why don't you talk about the new Zelda, why don't you talk about the new Zelda" and we have done so. There's also a lesson here, about being careful what you wish for, because we may append space dogs or the apocalypse to your initial request. I hope that everyone has learned their lesson.

Page 14 of our Splinter Cell comic book is online now (click on downloads). Only two pages left.

Of course I wouldn't read it, but if you don't mind ruining your dinner here's the last preview you'll ever need. There's probably no better source for this kind of info, come to think of it.

I posted it late yesterday so some of you might not have seen it. We have a working store again. We finally just decided to let the guys over at Thinkgeek handle it. Right now it’s got most of our current crop of shirts. In the next couple of weeks you’ll see our new Posters added to the list. A little after that you should start to see some of our new shirt designs like Baby vs. Rhino, Twisp & Catsby, “It’s not for you” and a new got wang shirt. So if you want to buy some Penny Arcade stuff check it out.

Ziggy writes in regarding Thief: Deadly Shadows.

Wow, that's not weird or anything.

Like Tycho, I have been avoiding a lot of game news lately. I don't know if it's just nostalgia or what but I've been thinking a lot about what it was like buying games when I was a kid. I remember getting games based on the screen shots and stories on the backs of their boxes. I've gotten kind of tired of knowing every detail about a game months before it comes out. KOTOR was really the first game that I purposefully avoided all news for and it was one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had. Obviously that has a lot to do with the fact that the game is awesome, but I think going into it with no knowledge of the story or mechanics really helped. Recently I picked up Onimusha 3 after a similar media black out. Since I haven't read any reviews or anything I don't know what other sites are saying, but I know I love it. I was disappointed by the lack of action in the second game. Onimusha 3 delivers enough action to more than make up for the slow plodding pace of the second game. I don't want to say much more about it because I don't want to ruin it for anyone. I highly recommend renting it at least if you're a fan of the series or action adventure games in general.

Writing about the Phantom is actually really complex, for reasons which are themselves complicated, but in the meantime I do reccomend you check out this image over at HardOCP. When we arrived for our meeting, the doors actually had signs on them that said Flim-Flam, Chicanery, and so forth - just like the strip. We found this odd.

I feel like I need to emphasize that the strip does not exaggerate the game in question or add things where things do not exist. You really do "possess" a bowl of dog food in an effort to terrify a dog, which can then be possessed itself in that state - indeed, there are more than four hundred breeds of dog, each with their own statistics, which makes Geist the Gran Turismo of dog scaring.

We have a store again. We finally just turned it over to the professionals over at thinkgeek.com and let them build us a store. You can go there now and purchase some Penny Arcade stuff if you want.

I've never announced it before, it's not something you should know about already.

I think the PSP is a beautiful piece of hardware and I want to own one so bad it hurts. Sony has a way of designing products that scream cool in a way no one else can, except for maybe Apple. My problem is that as Tycho said the PSP's various features move it into the "gadget" realm. However whereas he is resistant to the lure of gadgets I am quite the opposite. I am drawn to shiny overpriced electronics in the same way Yogi Bear is drawn to picnic baskets.

FF XII was actually one of the first games I checked out at E3 this year. I admit I am a recent convert to the series. I only got into Final Fantasy games with X, and even then I played it nearly a year after it actually came out. I loved X so much though that I went out and purchased the rest of the games in the series and have been slowly working my way backwards through them. Besides the great stories in each game the thing I really loved about them was the combat. I liked seeing all my characters lined up on one side of the screen with the crazy vegetable monster or whatever on the other side. Each game had its new features. Things like Materia or the Sphere Grid were super compelling additions to the game, but they simply complemented the already familiar style of combat.

It may seem strange, but the first thing I did when I got home was play Rallisport Challenge 2. You'd think that you spend three days at E3 playing games, and it just doesn't work that way. You spend three days sampling small amounts of a couple hundred games, and those samples are typically drawn from such a truncated set of the entire game experience that it rarely satisfies. Booting Rallisport was like finally enjoying an entire meal after some 72 hour hors d'oeuvre marathon.