I know that utility software for the DS is a hit in Japan, and I know that people try to make these things go in the United States and elsewhere, but is quitting smoking something that people will actually do on the DS? I want to believe this is true, certainly. I want to believe that we are, in some ways, already toting around the ultimate, mutable living tool, a young lady's illustrated primer. It's a fantasy I can endorse. The challenge for them is going to be moving the product out of the core smoker demo into other markets, but that's not insurmountable.

During the writing of this strip, I was still in the grip of fever. I had spent the entire night consorting with entities of various kinds, slick with sweat, trying to figure out what to do with all the "excess nitrogen" (among other important tasks). After hours of recursive agony, I came to find myself in a canoe with a Native American. This seemed a little run of the mill as visions go, and I told him so. He seemed to find that amusing.

I had the mic for a little while in the video, and during that time I mention some fluff I wrote for the world. That stuff is now available over on the Greenhouse, right at the top.

So the chat about the game went really well. Thanks to everyone that showed up and participated. Tycho and I each took turns at the mic fielding questions about the game and PA. Here's the recording in case you could not make it to the live show.

As though fixed to some hissing mechanism, I receive a reliable drip of corporate PR every few seconds throughout the day. It's rare that I find this "content" worthy of you, and so I rarely present you with it. When Gabriel returned, knowing his abiding love for beautiful ponies and husbandry, I presented him with Ponystars - one of the bizarre gems I had sifted out of this endless accumulating ASCII. A product of the reconstituted Acclaim, I was confident the product would ensnare him, because in Ponystars one can:

Thanks to everyone that has taken the time to mail me their thoughts on the game. The response so far has been overwhelmingly positive. More and more reviews are coming out now and the numbers are falling right about where I expected. We got a 7.8 from IGN which I'm actually pretty happy with. I think Hilary had every reason to tear us a new one but in the end she actually said the game was good... yeah I know Hilary is a guy, old habits die hard. We got a 4 out 5 from X-Play which is another site I sort of expected to rip us a new one. One of our best reviews came from Destructoid. Rev gave us a 9.0 and said the game was fantastic which was really nice to hear.

I believed strongly in BioShock as an experience, and disagreed strongly with the idea that it should be corralled by a single console. It sold so well that Take Two apparently disagrees also, releasing the game a full year after sensible men and women had played it to completion. I don't remember if we're still angry at Bioshock for only being excellent, or for being too popular, or for breaking its ludic contract with the player, or something else - but at the very least, Playstation 3 stalwarts can stop hating it for no good Goddamned reason.

I just got back from Paris. I'll talk about the trip later after I've had some time to organize it all in my head. Right now it's still all sort of a blur. I have to talk about the game though.

For PC, Mac, and Linux, or on XBLA.

Being children of the eighties, of course we believe that every adventure should culminate as it has here. Not that this adventure has been entirely culminated, of course. We reserve the right to explore the Earth's hidden mysteries anytime Gabriel goes to France.

Here's Gabe's next communique... From Earth's ancient past!!!

Sometimes, the old magic is best.

Several people (3) asked about this set's whereabouts, and I am happy to announce that it just hit the store.

I guess Gabe wrote little intros for these pages. Hmm. Here's the second one:

We ended up taking a shine to that exterminator we made for some reason, but since we like to retain our conceptual agility we thought it was time to return to the news. With Gabriel leaving town, we saw an opportunity to indulge ourselves in questions like "what happened in there, exactly?" There are three such indulgences, so hopefully we weren't the only people curious about these events, which take place in the womb of the Ancient Earth.