Don’t forget that the early bird pricing for PAX ends at the end of this month. So you only have a few more days to get in on it. I recommend signing up today!

I see that Gamespot is thinking the same thing: when you put the "absolutely unfounded" rumor that Lucasarts will strip Sony Online Entertainment of the Star Wars license, and the one hundred percent true fact that BioWare has created an MMO studio in the same Goddamn Town, it's hard not to fantasize that BioWare has been given the reins of a new Star Wars Massive.

If you follow Tycho’s link up there back to the cover for book 2 that we posted you’ll also see the artwork for our WOW binder from Brady Games. I’m happy to say that the binder is done now and it looks awesome. We just got ours in the mail last week and we took some pictures. Here is what the final binder looks like.

Continuing our tradition of ridiculous covers, I present the cover for Book 3. Behold!

You might recall that last year at Sakuracon, Gabriel was hauled by guile into the sensual world of Yaoi. We were not aware that Yaoi was but one deity in a greater pantheon of erotic gods, each with radically different domains. Looking back on two-thousand and six, it will forever be known as the year we broke The DouJinshi Code.

Don't pay attention to Gabe, I should have known intuitively that he wasn't ready for The Elder Scrolls. It turns out that I'm not quite ready for it either, for a different reason, but I'm not sure if mine is actually more noble or not.

We were able to secure twelve or so copies of Drakengard 2 to give away at the booth, seemed like a good tchotchke for an Anime convention. I don't know how long they'll be available, but our booth is typically a ghost town.

Just got a mail from Lik-Sang (import guys) saying my DS Lite was on the way, which is great - you might have been following the tribulations of people having a hard time getting them in Japan.

We will be at Sakuracon this weekend. If you are in the area and you wish you were Japanese, this is the con for you!

Pork came by on Monday to hang out, and being utterly without a DS he's never experienced the high points the system has on offer for wireless gamers. A number of these games only require a single cartridge to play, typically two or four player, but there are games that reach up to eight and, yea, even unto ten. Meteos has fallen out of favor with most people I know, because even though it's a great game you can be tremendously effective just scribbling on the screen. Like the "snaking" scourge of Mario Kart DS, it's the sort of thing that is best resolved by refusing to play with assholes.

Okay so we’ve had about 4,000 downloads of the podcast in just a few hours and I’ve gotten hundreds of mails. It seems like you all agree that we should do more but that they need to be recorded better and distributed like other podcasts through iTunes or released as a torrent. Well we can certainly do all that. Like I said this was really just a test to see if there was any interest.

Sometimes people ask us “how do you guys write the comic?” The answer is that we sit around and look at game news and we talk about it until we start laughing at something. It sounds boring and I think it probably is. That’s why we decided to record the process and let you download it.

And honestly, I can understand why that might be - this press release is a little on the long side.

Have you heard about the Video Game Voters Network?  It is a thing.  We made a comic strip about it. 

Well, loosely about it.  It's mostly about Gabe.

I understand the idea behind it - the network, I mean.  But I don't think there's actually a monolithic "gamer" voting block  that receives their signal from the mothership and then behaves according to some agreed upon protocol.  Even assuming there were, the people who would be most grievously affected by gaming legislation aren't of voting age.  They cannot vote, they are not allowed to, even if you put an adorable stepstool in the booth so they can weach the bawwot.   

I actually believe the site when it says that "fifty percent of Americans play games", or that "seventy four percent of gamers vote."  That is to say, I don't think the use of entertainment software is restricted solely to lunatics - authentic American citizens are daily being engaged by this medium.  And as compelling gaming becomes more portable, more distributed, less onerous, more people will identify themselves with the term.  That's more people, with their own goals, and lives that incorporate the matching of gems or the desecration of tombs, but are not dominated thereby.  

You can't get eight fucking nerds to agree on what kind of pizza will accompany Saturday's dungeon crawl.  And I think it's a fair bet to say that you'll have a hard time marshalling the troops on gaming legislation when your "troops" are this disparate.  Will I have the same ideas about the tongue-in-cheek sexual content of God of War as, say, one of the squad leaders of Christian Gamers Online?  Will I arrive at the same conclusions regarding fines when a store doesn't follow the ESRB guidelines?  Should I?  That seems to be the assertion. 

I think the threat to adult gamers is usually described as a "chilling effect" that will constrict the themes of even mature entertainment,  the self-censorship of games to secure a more desirable (i.e., marketable) rating.  The First Amendment is often hauled out in these instances, as though concessions to the marketplace amount to the tromp of the jackboot, but to the best of my knowledge the "Right To Be Sold In Wal-Mart" is not enumerated in the constitution.

(CW)TB out.

 senators, congressmen: please heed the call

Is available, if you want it.  It's at 1280 wide, but the image is there, against a black background.  I don't doubt that you could shape it to your purpose. 

(CW)TB