I’ve been playing a lot of Call of Duty recently, which isn’t strange. What’s strange is that I’ve been playing it on the Wii U. It used to be that if a multiplatform game came out, there was no question what system I was going to buy it for. The Xbox 360 was the obvious choice for a number of reasons but the biggest one was Xbox Live. For a single player game I still wanted to be connected to my friends list and for a multiplayer game, well that’s where all my friends are. Getting an invite while I was watching a movie or playing some other game to join my buddies in some CoD was great. My PS3 is a good Blu-Ray player but I don’t really use it for games except the occasional first party title. In fact I think the last thing I played on the PS3 might have been Heavy Rain. The original Wii was the same way. I figured any multi platform game is gonna look like shit on the Wii and the online experience was a joke. I kept it plugged in for Zelda and Mario games but that’s about it. So the fact that I’m not only play CoD on my Wii U but fucking LOVING it is pretty bizzare.

I was telling my sister about how when Brenna and I first moved to Seattle, we inadvertently popped into a bar which was the kind of bar you pop into if you are a lady who likes ladies. I told her the name of the bar, and she laughed and laughed. This wasn't merely a gay bar; it was apparently a very gay bar, one you might not be gay enough to enter. She said it had a "bath house" downstairs, which I was surprised to learn, because I thought that was more or less an urban legend. It was a striking piece of imagery: the town I knew, undergirded by erotic warrens jam-packed with unregulated sex.

There is a tremendous volume of advice out there to keep the universally brutal and savage male from "creeping" at conventions, it may rightly be called a genre, but there is very little advice tailored to the skulking female predator. For such beasts, the following pamphlet may provide the education these reptiles so desperately need.

I like what Erika's done with the place. This sort of thing would have been my job, circa 2000, when I was so bad at HTML that I had to invent the idea of a Newspost just to fill my stretched-out tables. It kept me out of trouble, I guess. I'm glad there's somebody who can do that now, who actually likes doing that, would probably be doing that in her spare time and just dragging it to the trash if she wasn't here doing it for us.

You’ve probably already noticed some of the results of last year’s Penny Arcade Kickstarter. The biggest one is obviously the new ad free front page here. The comic strip itself actually got a bit of an upgrade as well. It’s displaying a full 150 pixels larger than it used to. Another of the big things to come out of our Kickstarter was Strip Search and I’m happy to finally be able to dish out a bit more information on that project.

Gabe's been exposing his heir to the Lord of the Rings movies, made timely by the release of The Hobbit, and we were able to snare a strip from the second film. That may end up being the only redeeming feature of their return, because Gabriel the Younger could not possibly be more bored.

It is December 31st and that means it’s time for a top ten list! I took a stroll back through 2012 and came up with my 10 favorite Penny Arcade strips from the last year.

I avoided Spaceteam originally because people said it was like Artemis, and Artemis is already like Artemis, so I felt like I had that base covered. There is a lot of shit going on over here, a lot of shit to do, and I don't really have the luxury of doing any of them twice just for kicks.

There have been a few takes on roleplaying in Star Wars setting, a few official ones anyway; you could always use any old system if you felt like handling the deviations wrought by its approach to stellar conflics, and I know people who do that. Knights of the Old Republic was essentially a re-skin of D&D, after all. I had the old West End version, of course, with its attendant brick of six siders. I've owned and played fully two different approaches from Wizards of the Coast, including the Saga edition, which some people considered a precursor to the much beloved/universally reviled Fourth Edition of Dungeons and Dragons.

The "metacritic" for Crimson Shroud is all over the place, which is about what you'd expect for such an idiosyncratic piece. It's like a game made on a dare, almost - in Japan, it was part of a compilation cartridge called Guild01, a "who's who" multi-designer release, like some kind of game-punk split LP. It's obtuse, to be sure, but I have to be happy that something like this exists at all.

I picked up the new Star Wars: Edge of the Empire beginner game box. This is an all in one product that contains everything you need to play a little adventure including character sheets, maps, rulebook and a handful of the special dice that are the core of the game.

It's rare, but not completely unheard of, for us to check in on some political thing. It's something we're reticent to do; it's easy to do wrong, and usually is, and so we avoid it the same way you might avoid any other treacherous pit.

We made Monday’s comic this morning and then decided that we should probably just put it up now.

The Vault Of Winter, Part Seven is now available - I pray it finds you well. We originally considered doing a story because we were working on something else, and that seemed like the best idea; I suggested AcqInc for a storyline next year and then it was all I could think of. It has been our great pleasure giving you something else to think about for the brief periods we were able to.

The Penny Arcade Game:Gamers vs. evil is now available on the iOS app store. Everything you loved about our deck building game has been lovingly transferred over to this robust little app.

The Vault Of Winter, Module 6: Behind The Curtain