Once again I was able to beg an early copy of a game. This time I scored Kingdoms of Amalur. I’ve been playing it now for a few days and I am in love. I’m probably not supposed to talk about the game yet but I figured it would be much easier to ask for forgiveness rather than permission as the old saying goes.

There are many games where box breaking is core to the experience, a cultural practice, a folkway, and this happens in Kingdoms of Amalur as well. Games are developing more robust approaches to assessing your moral coordinate with precision, but they're still several long miles from basic etiquette.

After playing so much SW:TOR and really enjoying it I decided to try a Star Wars book. I had given up them a while back after a series of extremely bad books. I ended up grabbing Darth Plagueis. If it had just been incredibly boring I might have stuck it out but it was also stupid. I was listening to an especially lame chapter when the narrator started talking about ancient Sith lords and their lost techniques. One such lord was a sort of ancient necromancer and his name was Darth Andeddu. I don't care what stupid space way you spell it, the name is pronounced Undead-u. The immortal Sith dude is called Darth Undead. I said "fuck you" out loud in my car and turned the stupid thing off.

The dialogue in the second panel isn't true, not exactly, but it might as well have been. Gabriel told me not to discuss the strip in any detail, and so I wont. Apparently he wants it all to himself, and being almost paralyzed by this novelty I was in no position to refuse him.

I love it when Tycho asks me if I want to go learn a new card game with him and then I proceed to destroy him at it. I would not be surprised if he never plays it again. Which is too bad because it's a rad game.

The demo for Mass Effect 3 comes out next month, with both single and multiplayer attached, and it will apparently leverage all the Kinect "betterness" we have been promised. I have my, um... doubts.

Wise.

Harvesting dirt on tech via Techdirt, I saw a story entitled "The Internet Wins: PIPA and SOPA delayed." Author Mike Masnick delivers a precisely calibrated mixture of triumph and bleak prophecy in his write-up, which seems like the proper tone. If you go deeper, say, to Harry Reid's official statement, you won't see anything to celebrate. It's delayed, to be sure, although remission might be a better term. The will hasn't gone anywhere.

Hero Academy is from Robot Entertainment, which I always think of being entertainment for robots as opposed to by them, but that's not important right now. What's important is that you download this ridiculously free app for your iOS device immediately so that you can begin waiting for people to send you their turns.

I’m in love with Star Wars the Old Republic. I love the class quests and the flashpoints and the companions and the crafting and the space missions and all that shit! I could go on and on about how great I think the game is but that’s no fun. Here are the things I hate:

When I make a character in a massively multiplayer game, I tend to "go hard" on the embroidery aspect. That is to say, I like to tart shit up on the narrative front, imbuing landmarks and even world geometry with increasingly fruity elaborations.

We were recently asked by Cliff Bleszinski and his soon to be wife Lauren if we would create the save the date card for their wedding. The answer was “Of course!”

A Fourth Panel, detailing the origin of The Conflux D&D series which people seemed to enjoy. Or, at least, enjoy more than we expected. Which is at all, really. I'm always a little surprised.

When I saw the headline

Gabriel's D&D group has never endured a full Edition War. There was that Essentials thing, which didn't really touch them; even if one or two of their players might have preferred a "cleaner" system, nobody ever really knew what an Essential was. "Essentials" sounds suspiciously like less. And we are a people engineered to demand more.

First Place!