I did refer to the Nintendo DS as a "useless novelty factory" at one point, which I will admit was impolite, but so many of the games that come out either don't make good use of the device or posit some novel idea and then don't follow through. Kirby's Canvas Curse has absolutely nothing to be ashamed of in this regard. It is beautiful to look at and plays with a sensibility that feels classic from the outset. Imagine that gaming history had followed a very different course - with pen interfaces de rigueur when the immovable tenets of platform gaming had been conceived - and you will be very near the thing.

I've said it before but I'll go ahead and say it again. I hope that if you read Penny Arcade you laugh, if you don't laugh then I hope it pisses you off. One of my favorite things is to see a forum thread about a PA comic strip with people arguing for pages about whatever topic we mentioned that day. Recently we did a strip about Will Wright that suggested that sandbox style games that required users to create their own narrative were inferior to story driven experiences. That comic spawned from a conversation Tycho and I had and it just so happened that my point of view was the one that got the comic. I saw tons of great threads about that comic with people intelligently debating both sides of the argument. That's when I feel like we really did a good job.

I'm certainly not suggesting you run out and buy one, for exactly the reasons Gabriel mentions - but once you get it up and going media altar is the only term that's apropos for the Momitsu. Robert and I decided to overdo it last Christmas and get him one, and he has complained about the device from that point all the way up until last Saturday, when he finally got it going and began lying prostrate before it in supplication.

I downloaded the Prey presentation after I got back from E3, having seen the screenshots of the big monster with the gun arms and determining that I was already up to here with ostentatious cyborgs.

This is actually a true story. The mints themselves came from Olive Garden, which I'm slowly realizing we have some kind of fascination with, and since I'm not partial to mints regardless of the mountain range he usually takes all of them. And he makes it clear during the check phase of the meal that a single mint will not be sufficient. Oh no. When they come back to grab the card and run it so that their lives may continue, he places a hand on it and in a low voice, so low they must bring their ear close to hear it, he establishes that it could be "worth their while" if they bury him in mints. I am certainly pro tip, I have a a bank of odd neuroses regarding it I will bore you with at some point, but if the idea is to secure as many mints as possible there are grocery outlets in operation which could no doubt improve the rate of exchange. He's not into it, there's something about that ritual that makes the mints more flavorful. At any rate, this is all meant to say that he probably had somewhere in the neighborhood of ten mints in there with his wallet and his Edge card. His pocket had become a kind of rich stew.

I’ve got some PAX news to share with you all. This year’s show is shaping up to be huge. We figured we’d get more people the second time around but this is insane. We’ve actually sold out all the rooms at the Double Tree hotel and so we’ve gone ahead and made accommodations at the Red Lion, which is right next door to the Double Tree. So the deal is $79 for Double Occupancy, say you’re part of the “Penny Arcade Group” to get the special rate. Here is a link to the PAX hotels page with more information.

Comixpedia had a link up to a documentary on webcomics called "Adventures Into Digital Comics," and the trailer for it is also an adventure, and informative as well, because now I know who keeps trying to buy weed from me at the San Diego Comic Con:

Killing certainly seems to do a lot of things for our hero. I wonder, does killing ever make her a sandwich when she is hungry? Does killing answer the telephone when she is in the bathroom? Has killing ever borrowed her car and then when killing brought it back there was a huge scratch on it and she tried to tell killing that it wasn't there before but killing says that it totally was?

It doesn't get any better.

Our own Gabriel tracked down some of my "writings" while he was rifling through the debris of his adolescence. Would that the bleak evidence of a mind in tumultuous development were cast outward from the Earth, there to careen or be annhilated.

The strips while we were gone originally dealt with the tribulations of young Ann at E3, but we'd done so many "stories" up to that point, and in some cases done them in such a way as to make their veracity ambiguous, that we decided it was best to return to the one-shots of our youth. I'm aware that the conventional wisdom states that doing storylines is somehow a more noble or difficult endeavor than making "gag-a-day" strips, "gag-a-day" more often than not employed as a kind of slur. I guess it depends on your process or something. It's always seemed to me that utilizing crass causation to determine the content of your next comic is essentially a form of cheating.

Now that I really look at it there is a burgeoning, understated power present in your earlier works.

Listen man, I’ve got a closet full of shit here and not all of it is mine if you get my drift. I seem to recall seeing an old piece of notebook paper with your hand written script for a comic book called “Scythe”. Wasn’t she a female assassin who carried a big, what was it now, oh that’s right a scythe! It wouldn’t be hard for that to get scanned and uploaded.

Do you know why I am here? To protect you from the kind of indiscretions you can see up there in panels three and four.

So over at the drawing forum I hang out in there’s kind of a cool thread going on. Artists are digging through their closets and pulling out old super heroes they created when they were kids and then redrawing them. I personally have a stack of characters I could go back and dust off but the one I had the most fun with was Sunburst. Jesus just saying his name is embarrassing.

There must be someone else who feels this way, but I've never met them - to the best of my knowledge Gabriel is the only person who doesn't find Will Wright's games enthralling. Or, in any case, he's the only person who doesn't mind saying so, willing to put his gamer card at risk by taunting Olympus.