There is really the most incredible offering of Bungie treasure going on now on eBay, in a sequence of unstoppable charitable auctions.  Some fairly shocking things in there, including original concept art for what we now understand is Halo.  Just amazing.

I read on Krizz Kaliko that Microsoft was ”rumored” to be approaching developers about Free To Play games on their service. But they aren’t rumored to be, as the steel mask of Kakrotticus knows full well - they are, because Free to Play doesn’t represent some rapidly plumping metastasized future. It represents the flowing and present ultranow.

They're cranking away over there for Child's Play, beavering for real, and I got to show them some love.  "Love" (in this case) being a euphemism for money.  I also feel real love for them, of course.  Incandescent love!  But that is more difficult to enumerate, and it doesn't buy anybody any toys. 

We’ve got two items available for pre-order on our store right now and each one sports a a little bonus for purchasing early.

It is an episode about your hosts.

When something arrives at the office for Gabriel there is a sort of dance that accompanies it, a small one, a festival in miniature to which he is the sole attendee. I saw this ritual peel away yesterday, peel and flake, like old wallpaper.

Tycho and I will be the fame in tomorrow’s Game with Fame event on Xbox Live. We will be playing Magic The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalker 2012 Friday, June 24, from 1-2 PM PT (4-5 PM PT). If you would like to try and grab a game with us, send a friend request to Duels2Gabe or Duels2Tycho.

So I was actually able to get into the current friends and family beta for Star Wars: The Old Republic. It wasn’t too hard since technically I do have a friend over there. The tricky part is that Bioware, like a lot of places thinks of PA as “media” and they don’t want media playing it yet. I explained that we aren’t media, we prefer to think of ourselves as “enthusiasts”. They let me in but I had to pinkie swear that I wouldn’t talk about the game here on the site, or anywhere else for that matter. I’ve been playing it for a little over a month now and last week I asked if I could share some of my impressions with you all. It took some begging but finally they agreed and to their credit they didn’t ask to see what I was going to write first. Honestly they had no idea what I was going to say which must have been a little scary considering this is PA, but lucky for them I actually really like their game. So this isn’t a review or anything even close. What I’m playing is the beta and honestly changing all the time. I just wanted to share some of my impressions.

We grabbed the demo for Dungeon Siege III, because demo. Plus, we have the requisite neurotransmitters a game like this might stimulate. We long, for example, to wield the famed Barb of Yalf, and games where such barbs may be obtained are of interest. Also, co-op, and any game whose quality is at least partially determined by the friends I’ve made stands to gain several points.

People are constantly trying to figure out what kind of “hat” LulzSec is wearing, specifically the color of this hat, which is a waste of time. For one thing, LulzSec has no head. For another thing, thinking of it as a group or an individual with agency is a fool’s errand. It’s a natural “force,” like erosion. And I don’t want any Goddamn part of it. Plus, now they’re going to lap gently at the base of our government institutions until such time as our democracies are reduced to a granular, wholly uniform beach.  It's the sort of thing that makes one stockpile seeds.

I thought this trailer was pretty slick:

New PATV, just like it says on the tin.  It's a Fourth Panel, depicting the writing process for the strip entitled "Page 234, Table 29-A."

We spent some time in Child of Eden’s incredible fourth archive yesterday morning, Passion, and I don’t know if it’s a spoiler to say that you play the part of time in an interactive opera based on human technological achievement. If that happens in any other game, ever, I must have missed it. What we’ve got here is a shooter in reverse, one where you make every entity more beautiful with each shot. The raw clusters of instinct you encounter aren’t just corrupt: they’re so broken that they don’t want to be fixed, and they’ll kill you for trying.

Today is the cutoff date for panel submissions! PAX Dev submissions go here, and PAX Prime submissions go here.