Guest Lookouts Page Four is now available, peeled hot from the griddle by the perpetually fluxing Dreistadt/Grigsby meta-entity. Their chemically complex state is dangerously unstable - I hope we'll be able to secure the fifth and final page before heretofore uncataloged forces burn, crush, boil, and freeze them simultaneously.

Guest Lookouts continues, with Becky Dreistadt and Oliver Grigsby at the reins. Things are certainly looking bad for our heroes. I'm tense, even though I already know what happens! Apparently they're doing a good job.

And here you go: Page Two of Lookouts, hand-painted by Becky Dreistadt and penned by Oliver Grigsby.  Works of this power and sophistication will run Friday, Monday, and Wednesday, at which point you'll be forced to endure our work once again.

This is something we consider quite often: how massively multiplayer online role-playing games create a vortex of social musts whose wicked gravities are almost impossible to avoid.

Sometimes Robert will come in and ask us to name things, all kinds of things, I assume as a kind of test. Usually this is the kind of exercise that I can really get behind, but in general I would rather name a pair of ancient blades than a "retail outlet," or a "line of organic socks."

The trailer for The Last Airbender materialized yesterday, and there isn't much to see there, but the commentary that surrounds the production has been surging steadily for months.

One of the players in Gabriel's ongoing campaign made the mistake of suggesting they did not feel sufficiently threatened, and they did so in earshot of me, which his entire party will come to regret. They have a game tonight, their last game ever if I have anything to say about it. Disintegrations for everybody. Resurrections impossible, or at the very least undesirable, as these revivified unfortunates could do naught but wail for the remainder of their natural lives, cocooned in a perfect, impenetrable agony.

With a flourish of trumpets, we swing open the doors to the Inner Sanctum of PAX - the hall where the Enforcers dwell.  Would you like to help us keep this thing running?  We're going to need some help with this year's show here on the west coast, and if you're curious about the kind of hallucinations one might see after they've been awake for five days straight, here's a form you can fill out.

As a kind of psychic siesta, Gabriel has taken to curling up with [Prototype] some afternoons to harvest flesh with the terrible arc of his scythe arm. I'm not prepared to command you on this matter - I can't actually enunciate a clear onus that would culminate in your purchase, though I understand that Gabriel has prepared a statement. It's not a graphical powerhouse, and it feels like it's working its ass off most of the time. The array of powers and the perverse gesticulations required to manifest them approach parody. But - but! - as an unmitigated, morally compromised power fantasy, it is startlingly robust.

I don't know why I keep buying Tiger Woods games every year. I suppose because it's the only golf game available. I am always instantly frustrated by it and I end up putting it aside after just a couple days. The main problem I have with the game I think is the way your skills work. Tiger is essentially an RPG. That is to say as you play, your skills improve and you get better equipment. That's just not what I want from a golf game. Starting Tiger Woods is like walking on to the golf course wearing vendor trash and everyone else is in their tier 8 gear. You can not compete unless you put the time in. What I want is a golf game that's more like Halo or any other shooter. What I mean is that everyone has essentially the same character and what determins the winner is the players skill.

I want to see everyone start with a character that has the same basic skills. Then give everyone the same number of points that they can invest in their character to improve things like driving or putting. Then that's it, no more points no more stat upgrades. Now you're talking about creating a custom build for your character and then matching your skills with that build up against everyone else. Immagine if everytime you tackled a guy in Madden your players got stronger. Then immagine you could buy footballs that flew further or were easier to catch. Sure some people might like it but most fans would say "this isn't football". Well that is essentially how Tiger Woods works and I guess I'm just tired of it.

On the other hand I picked up Red Faction yesterday and ended up playing it until nearly 1:30 in the morning. Holy fuck this game is good. My favorite part of any open world game is always just tooling around and causing trouble. Well Red Faction is literally all about tooling around and causing trouble. In GTA if you drive out to a random warehouse and start some shit, you're not progressing the game. In Red Faction you are rewarded for pretty much anything you decide to do. Say you're driving around in your sapce truck and you see a big mining facility. You jack a giant tractor and then drive it straight into the main building. Then you jump out and start blowing shit up and killing guys. Congradulations you just earned a bunch of scrap that you can use to upgrade your gear and you helped liberate this section of the world.

I actually quit playing at about midnight and then made the mistake of deciding to check out the multi before I went to bed. An hour and half later I had to force myself to turn the box off and go to sleep. Even now writing this all I want to do is go home and boot it back up.

We have decided to hold one more vote, this time based on Automata vs. Lookouts. The complaint was that Jim Darkmagic was stealing votes that might have gone to Lookouts. I guess he was sort of the Ross Perot of the election. So here is a link to a new survey. We'll keep this one up through the weekend to give you guys plenty of time to vote.

-Gabe out

Gabriel was drawn in to the most recent Tiger Woods offering by (among other things) the promise of its asynchronous tournament structure, as well as its Play The Pros thingy. In an attempt to savor said tournaments, he played a full round - checking in a score he felt was a manifestation of excellence. He was surprised to learn that he had come in somewhere around eighteen-thousandth place.

Not much time left to vote. Here are the current results. Automata is still in the lead followed very closely by Lookouts. 

Here's a quick peak at how the votes are going so far.

Jim Darkmagic appears here, in his first comic at Penny Arcade - a comic we are prepared to expand upon substantially, if this is your collective desire. Of course, that mat not be your collective desire. It may be that you saw Lookouts last Wednesday, investigated the additional materials, and found something resonant there. It is also entirely possible that something in Automata appealed to you - perhaps you feel, as we do, that androids and prohibition are natural fellows. You have a choice to make.

Well Automata is done and now I'm on to Jim Darkmagic. Automata was an especially difficult piece for me as it's way outside my usual style. It might not look like it, but this page actually took me longer to complete than the Lookouts page. I'm really happy with the final product though.

Here's a closer look at the first panel for those of you who are interested.