We have been called upon to comment on that stupid Phantom console once already, but with a glitzy new video available at the machine's homepage readers let us know that our services were required. Still no actual pictures of the device, just that same case render which makes the Xbox look svelte by comparison. Then there's the matter of the specifications they claim, the best of everything basically, which makes it the Fable of the console world - just say with enthusiasm that it has whatever a person asks about.

Give it another shot. I was seriously considering returning it when I got it, but here I am talking to you now on 3 hours sleep because I stayed up until 6 this morning playing it. Threre are a variety of ways to play through it, so try to be an ordinary officer and try to climb the political and military ranks. That's what I'm having the most fun with.

Just one more thing about the Lanwerx event on the 23rd. Stormy will be showing up and he says he will be giving away a shit ton of Monster Cable goodies. So if you need the latest gold plated, twist-foil enhanced, mythril shielded S-video cable be sure and come down.

I just received a mail from a guy on the team for a Dungeon Siege mod called Elemental that is just... Well, you be the judge. They call their setting "Biblepunk," set as it is in a sort of mythological Judea. I absolutely applaud this.

As long as we are talking about import games I should mention the other one I just got. Dragon drive is the latest offering from Bandai and like most of their other games it goes along with a card game as well as an animated series. The game comes with two disks, the first one being an actual cartoon. At first I thought I was just watching a really fucking long intro. After about a half an hour I realized I was watching a goddamned movie. From what I gathered your main character plays a virtual reality card game called Dragon Drive. Players sit inside VR machines and do battle with their cards in a virtual world. Okay whatever.

It had originally been our intention to wait for the (almost terminally distant) US release of Crystal Chronicles to really dig into some of the features, but our curiosity got the better of us. We have resorted to a stopgap solution.

Okay kids, here is the lowdown on this month's Lanwerx gaming day

I just wanted to remind people that they were reading Penny Arcade.

The new Battlefield expansion Secret Weapons would be a lot more invigorating in a universe that had not already developed Desert Combat.

Just to clarify, Lanwerx is a gaming/lan center here in the Seattle area, where we are holding our next event. What we are in need of, is a few more 32" or larger TV's. If you or a friend own/work/manage/etc. a TV rental place or Electronics shop, and would like some good advertising for said place, then send Brad an email.

Before we were derailed by David Horsey, we had it as our intention to detail what a criminal act it is that Freaky Flyers lacks Internet play. Oh, I know what you're saying. "Freaky Flyers..." You knit your brow. You've heard that Midway was doing some sort of flying race game, and you have scrupulously avoided any contact with it for fear that its mediocrity might somehow be virulent. I bet Gabe that it would be terrible, and it wasn't, so now I have to fuck a dog. It was a stupid bet, and I should never have agreed to it. But I had no reason to believe that an off-brand flying racer would be enjoyable, or that the parts they meant to be funny actually would be.

problem solved

Obviously the fact that videogames are not seen as a legitimate form of entertainment along the lines of movies or television is astounding to me. David’s cartoon on the subject is of course ignorant but it’s simply a visual representation of what many of our nation’s elderly believe, and it’s par for the course as far as political cartoons go. While in journalism class in high school I once had the opportunity to speak with a political cartoonist from our local paper named Milt Priggy. He told me that his job was to create cartoons that piss people off. The majority of his cartoons that I saw in the paper though were surprisingly bland. Then he showed me all the cartoons that his editor wouldn’t allow him to run. One cartoon in particular showed the grim reaper slam dunking over Magic Johnson and was slated to run around the time we all found out he had the Aids. Talk about a cartoon that would piss people off. Of course his editors said no way and the cartoon got filed in a box in the corner of his office along with all the rest of his best work that no one would ever see. The job of political cartoons is no longer to piss people off or get them fired up. It is to say what the majority of the newspaper's readership is already thinking.

I love it when I go off half-cocked and talk about power or whatever, and then I find out that the guy I just smarted off about is practically the son of God.

More than a few humans sent in the following political cartoon, such as it is. It's entirely possible that we will receive a request to remove that cartoon from our site today, and if that should occur, just look down into the toilet when you finish for a reasonable facsimile of the work in question. We had another cartoon about Freaky Flyers all written up, but once we'd both seen this Dr. Frankenstein bullshit we had to do something in that vein. So, here's our take on the issue of videogame violence as we see it, and it comes with homework: submit the cartoon to the editorial section of your local paper. Go ahead, I can wait.

Don't forget - as I did - the Fileplanet release of the Secret Weapons Of World War II demo. My vigor for this title has waned somewhat, awash as I am in excellent titles available now - but I am not above being pleasantly surprised. Let's get our hands on it, all over it, and we'll discuss it Monday.