Well I guess now we know what Microsoft employees do while they are at work. Apparently they surf the web for obscure Star Wars material. Monkey’s point here I think is that all this other weird shit is considered canon so I should accept JK2’s multiplayer. The problem is that, as usual Monkey has no fucking clue what he is talking about. I didn’t bring up canon because that is a slippery slope but since Monkey want's to talk about it lets do it right. There are many different levels of canon, from First level canon all the way down to what Monkey is speaking about here which would be considered apocrypha. First level canon would be items that fall directly under George’s vision for the Star Wars universe. This would include the movies and their respective special editions. Next you would have second, third and fourth levels. These include things like the original screen plays and the radio dramas of the films. After that you get into “official”. This is where the books, comics and some of the games come in. The original Dark Forces games and Jedi Knight when beaten with the light side of the force are considered “official”. After official we get all the shit licensed by Lucas Arts but not actually a part of official continuity. This is called apocrypha or just plain unofficial. It is easiest to think of this stuff as an alternate reality or existing in it’s own timeline. This is where you get crap like the cereal and the other junk Monkey brought up. Finally at the bottom of the list you have fan fiction. I am not certain but I assume the single player portion of the game is considered “official” canon. It would have been nice if the same care that was put into the SP game to make it fit in with the Star Wars universe had also been given to the MP. But instead we get a pretty standard multiplayer experience that only pays lip service to the license. I guess I was just hoping for more.

Here is a thought for you. I know Safety Monkey is a fan of Lord of the Rings as I’m sure many of you are. Here is another license with absolutely unlimited multiplayer possibilities. Let’s say though that a game comes out and all you get is DM and capture the flag. Not only that but you can play as any character you want and they all have rings of power. Just imagine an Elvin ranger named “LeGAYlos” firing arrows at a hobbit called “Frodo-Sexual” while an Orc uses his ring to turn invisible and sneak up behind both of them. Would you not feel just a tiny bit disappointed?

Thank you to everyone who mailed me in response to my little rant above. I was surprised at just how many of you agree with me. Of the hundred or so e-mails I got, only two of you felt like I was in the wrong. Since it seems like so many of us are in agreement on this subject I'll just do what we all do in real life. Ignore what Safety Monkey said and continue our conversation as if he'd never spoken at all.

And I contain hypertext references. What am I?

(Editor's Note: The new strip can be found here.)

So, today's comic strip is a big one I know. See I thought it would be cool to color the comic strip to make it look like and old comic book. Once I get one of these bright ideas in my head there is no getting it out. I spent the better part of the day trying to figure out how to do it. Now that I think back there is probably some built in "old comic book" filter if I had just looked in the fucking manual. Anyway, I devised a system of layers, selections and channels that seemed to do the trick. Take a look at this image and you will see what I mean. Needless to say I was feeling pretty fucking smart at that point and I continued to create the panels for the strip using my special technique. Then as I began to assemble the panels together into the page I noticed that I was going to have to shrink them down quite a bit. Once I had shrunk it and saved it out I realized that all my hours of work creating those tiny dots was now lost to the Gods of 256 color optimization. I still think it looks okay, just not like what I had originally intended. I'll always have this image though to look back on and remember what could have been.

After dabbling in a bit of Freedom Force - which I would follow up later with rather a lot of Freedom Force - we wanted to do something along these lines. The game has these great backstories for each character, like proper comics should - you can check out the one for the melancholy "Man-Bot" on the official FF downloads page. When I've played more of it, I'll have more to tell you - but at the moment, I'm completely infatuated with it. And hey, the EB website was wrong - the Bonus CD I got for pre-ordering came with three new models, not just skins. Max Sneddon (from Irrational Games Australia) intimated that new meshes and skins may be available soon, which is cause for celebration. I think of the models I have currently as a palette for inventing new personalities, so anything that broadens that gradient is welcome indeed.

I have a list of things I wanted to talk about in my little update here. I have some games on there and some Penny Arcade related stuff. I'll get to all that stuff in a minute though. Right now I have something more important to discuss.

There's a piece of "hatemail" over at Monkey's site, at least, that's what he calls it.

Today's strip features nearly a half-ton of prime bear. Speaking of which, I've always been a little disappointed that our plan to produce authentic Bear Steins never came to fruition - I can't shake the notion that there are those who want to drink bear, but settle for other liquids.

I know I said I would have something done for Club PA members today. Verizon decided to turn off my internet though on Wednesday and I just now got it back. I’ll get you guys your new gift over the weekend for sure. I may also write a little update about how much fun it is to destroy a droid ship with force lighting from the relative safety of your star fighters cockpit.

Blade II is out today. God willing and the creek don't rise, we'll be watching the Blade movies in order today.

We've switched this site's usual links with Folgers crystals. Let's see if anyone notices.

The last couple weeks on this site have been really screwed up on the network tip. I could talk about stupid router crap for the whole post, and wouldn't that be fun, but I'm afraid I'll jinx it if I go into it. I'm not even going to say it's fixed - I'm just going to go about my business, router, and if you want to service my packets, well, I think we're all very grateful.

Tycho and I hit our local EBX this morning over at the Redmond mall. I picked up Virtua Fighter 4 and he grabbed Gunvalkyrie. We spent all afternoon playing VF4 and my official opinion of it is "Shit Damn!" This game is about as close to perfect as a fighting game can get. Like Tycho said, we are normally Tekken fans. We have been since Tekken 1 on the PSX. While our opinions differ on Tekken 4 (I think it's great and he is an idiot) we still consider ourselves fans of the series. On the other hand we never really got into the VF games. I mean sure we played VF1 just like everyone else but when they dropped two on us Tycho and I where knee deep is Samurai Showdown two. We could look over and see the VF2 machine sitting there looking all cool but nothing was gonna pull us away from the glory that was SS2. Then three came out and our local arcade decided they should charge a $1.00 to play it. Needless to say it didn't get much play. Rather than drop the price they decided to sell it and that was the last we ever saw of VF3. So we loaded up VF4 not really knowing what to expect. What we got was a fighting experience that totally blows everything else out of the water. We picked up the strategy guide along with the game and I have to say I highly recommend it. This game is fucking deep. You could spend weeks just trying to get good at one or two characters.

I actually like Terminal Reality as a developer, so don't take today's strip to mean the opposite. When I told Gabe that this "BloodRayne" was from the (quote) Nocturne Guys, he made a scrunchy face which said "I am eating an entire lemon." He was coming from an angry place. Long ago, see, Gabe entered an art contest at a site - Kazi Wren's "Spookhouse," if memory serves - and won a copy of Nocturne for his trouble. In reality, it was me that won it, because after playing it for around ten minutes he uninstalled it and tried to lose the box underneath a pile of stuff. Developers, you will find that our Gabriel is not a patient man. He takes your poor control scheme and fun-house camera angles as calculated acts of personal aggression. Me, I'll let you get by on raw style just so long as this style of yours > some massive pain in my ass. Not so with my man Gabe. Even when he gets your game for free, it would appear that you still owe him.