I played a bunch of Tera this weekend during their beta test. I was able to get an archer up to level 12 and I had a great time. I wanted to share some of my thoughts about the beta with you guys. I should mention that I did not try any of the PvP and I’ve heard that’s something Tera does very well. My take on the beta is based on a purely PVE experience. I’ll start with the stuff I liked.

Gabriel has told me that Little Deviants is very, very bad. He hasn't told me why, and only shivers at the mention of it, so I'm not saying you should invest this assessment with great import or something. He did, however, discover a novel input methodology. I have coined the term "Rear Stylus," and I am offering it for use royalty-free.

My hands quake as I type it!

My recommendation is that if you want to hate your son, please take him to Disneyland. If you want a preview of his coming dereliction, and if you want to see the extent you have failed at preparing a person for life in the world, by all means take him to this cacophonous hellzone. The only succor on offer is to see how miserably your generational cohort has failed their children, also.

I've been using my Nook color to tweet about the books I'm reading. I've had quite a few people tell me this was helpful. Choosing what book to read next is always an ordeal for me. I scour the web for best of lists and drill down through all of the "people who bought this book also bought this..." lists in my Nook. I ask all my friends what they are reading and if they think I'd like it. Maybe you are like me and maybe a quick list of what I've been reading will be useful. So here you go:

I've talked about David Sirlin a couple times before. I think that if you were to crack open his skull, his brain would look physically different from other brains; I play his games because they're good, but also in an attempt to figure him out. I felt confident that he'd have a useful perspective on the "clonin' fever" that swept the web recently, and I wasn't wrong. He makes a distinction I think is vital, and desperately missing from the utopian/free love model of creative work - what amounts to an Aesthetics Of Cloning. His games Puzzle Strike and Yomi are playable online at FantasyStrike.com.

About 14 years ago Tycho and I were roommates. We lived on Top Ramen and Kool-Aid. If we weren’t at our shitty jobs we were playing games. Then came Penny Arcade. We had some difficult years, made some pretty huge mistakes and very nearly gave up. It was at that point that you guys stepped up. We decided that before we threw in the towel we’d try one last thing. We asked you guys to support us with donations. We asked for a couple thousand dollars a month so we could pay rent, buy groceries and get games. You gave us ten thousand dollars in the first month. You supported us for a year through some very difficult times and I don’t think we can ever thank you all enough for that. What we can do is try and use the power you’ve given us to keep making things you’ll like and that make our community better.

Most enthusiast gamers "get" Angry Birds almost immediately, and move on. For those outside our order - that is to say, the vast majority of bipedal sentients - the ubiquitous Angry Birds is one of the first opportunities to understand what their children are always on about re: vijamagames. It's ridiculously easy to get and subsequently play, made so by the fact that even my grandparents carry around portable touchscreen computers with perpetual access to the dataverse. This is something even a life ass-deep in science fiction did not prepare me for.

Just like it says on the tin.

Our Boston Indie Showcase at PAX East will feature some of the best in mobile indie games. We got a lot of entries but we've picked the top six and you'll be able to play all of them at PAX. Check out this site to see the winners.

There's some kind of thing going on where EA is attaching things to things and then the things are whatever. It was one of many fanciful ideas, and was chosen ultimately because it had the lowest lethality index.

I I realized this morning as I twittered about the first season of our Trenches comic ending that I had forgotten something. What I had forgotten was to tell anyone that this is what we were going to do! You see it has always been out intention to run the strip for five or six months then take a one month break before starting the next season. We just didn’t tell anyone else about that plan.

It's true enough; we do have Vita software, but no Vita hardware, which is alternately worse and better. If I were creating a social media site about this phenomenon, I would call it "tantalizr." I would register it, but the device comes out next week. There isn't really enough time to do the IPO.

I debated talking about this but I think it's important. If you're playing SW:TOR this post will have some spoilers with regards to the end of the first story arc.

I had quite a few requests for a large version of today's strip minus the text. Kara and I have been watching two episodes of Downton Abbey every night since we discovered it. I am so in love with the look of the show that I just had to drop Tycho and Gabe into Downton.

Seriously, though. Are you up for it? Grab the application here, and mail it to Kristin Lindsay at klindsay@penny-arcade.com.