I love UT2K4 but chances are you will never see me online. I play pretty much every day but I play with myself…erm that is to say by myself. I play with bots is what I’m trying to say. There is just no good reason to play with humans. I tried it last night with Tycho and it was alright but I think we spent more time trying to find a server with a decent ping than we did playing. Then during the game I had to put up with people telling me I "suck penis good". No thanks. When it comes to humans versus robots I’ll take robots every damn day.

Despite anything we might have said in the strip, Unreal Tournament 2004 is pretty good even if you decide to settle for human company. I don't retreat from any of the things I said regarding the balkanized community their many gametypes and options automatically creates. However, I firmly believe that the path en route to that inevitable implosion will be fantastic!

Here’s a funny story about our good friends over at American Greetings.

You play a game like Champions of Norrath - any multiplayer roleplaying game, really - and pragmatism must sometimes trump fashion. Of course, that rarely keeps your fancy elf friends from flipping you shit about it, as though their pretty circlets were somehow the emblem of masculinity.

In Germany a recent issue of GamePro came with a kick ass little Penny Arcade mini comic book. Unlike the US version, the German GamePro is actually a cool magazine and we’re very proud to have them translating and distributing PA in Deutschland.

Indeed, it is the absence of a preference. Each discrete sensual act conforms to one of the two primary orientations, we don't need a whole new "catch-all" term to collect all the people who simply have a hard time making decisions. If you like pepperoni but you're also fine with Hawaiian, we don't have a word to describe people in their moment of indecision while talking to the pizza guy.

Did anybody else catch the first episode of Real World: Zebes? With fully seven distinct species and four different sexual orientations, it's the most diverse Real World yet. It makes the bridge of the Enterprise look like a KKK rally.

I won't even waste time trying to appear neutral about Star Chamber. It's an interesting, original game that I was proud to have sponsor the site. I talked about it a bit during the holidays, when its ability to run on virtually anything served me in good stead. It has a lot more going for it than just its egalitarian position on hardware.

The entire Marvel/EA thing seems sort of vile and incestuous and nonsensical. I guess I don't really think of EA as some kind of Big Ideas company, the ones I would shuffle up to for concepts that would resonate like Marvel's own icons. That might be unfair, but I'm basing the assertion on their library itself. It's not to say that they don't publish some good games, everybody owns a game from EA. They did acquire Big Ideas companies like Westwood, Origin, and Maxis, though they did eventually lobotomize the first two. But they didn't invent football, snowboarding, or modern war because they manifested those concepts in compelling ways. They didn't write the Lord of the Rings, for example, but their game metaphor of the events was almost completely inoffensive.

I said something that wasn't actually true in first post today, I just corrected it and I apologize. I knew that Starsiege: 2845 was a highly anticipated mod for both Tribes fans and enthusiasts of the classic franchise - but I didn't know it was actually Sierra sanctioned, that it was a mod for Tribes: Vengeance itself, or that they meant to include it with the actual game. Sorry about that, the whole thing is a good deal more awesome than I was aware of.

The Emerald City and Uber cons occur simultaneously, but since Ubercon is in New York and Emerald City con is down the street from me, we're going to New York. We'll still have a booth at Emerald City though, staffed by the incomparable Porkfry, and he'll have the shirts you could buy online if our store wasn't always broken. Sorry about all this, but we feel like we sort of let the eastern part of the nation down when we had to bow out of Otakon before.

Many people wrote into tell us about the Playstation 3 that recently appeared (and then disappeared) from eBay. We were like, Playstation 3? That old thing? Man, we're past that shit.

They're saying that there really wasn't the subscriber interest to support it, and while I find that sort of depressing it wouldn't surprise me in the least. The whole thing was really high concept, placed high demands on their technology, and had somewhat ethereal elements to it. I've heard Uru Live's functionality referred to as a sort of "chat room," which is a claim so ridiculous that I hardly know how to characterize it. My vocabulary is an arsenal, and I can't produce a comparable understatement.

I've been wondering when it would happen, and it looks like it just did. Trauma Studios - the guys behind the extraordinary Desert Combat mod for Battlefield 1942 - just got tapped to work on an official project. They deserve it.

And are, therefore, unable to see the reviewer's response to the thread created by the above post. Hopefully it won't displease anyone if I simply re-post it here, for the sake of balance.

There's a wonderful snack that's easy to make, the portable party they call the "cup-cake." But who knew that we lived in the long shadow cast by these treats?