Ziggy writes in regarding Thief: Deadly Shadows.

Wow, that's not weird or anything.

Like Tycho, I have been avoiding a lot of game news lately. I don't know if it's just nostalgia or what but I've been thinking a lot about what it was like buying games when I was a kid. I remember getting games based on the screen shots and stories on the backs of their boxes. I've gotten kind of tired of knowing every detail about a game months before it comes out. KOTOR was really the first game that I purposefully avoided all news for and it was one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had. Obviously that has a lot to do with the fact that the game is awesome, but I think going into it with no knowledge of the story or mechanics really helped. Recently I picked up Onimusha 3 after a similar media black out. Since I haven't read any reviews or anything I don't know what other sites are saying, but I know I love it. I was disappointed by the lack of action in the second game. Onimusha 3 delivers enough action to more than make up for the slow plodding pace of the second game. I don't want to say much more about it because I don't want to ruin it for anyone. I highly recommend renting it at least if you're a fan of the series or action adventure games in general.

Writing about the Phantom is actually really complex, for reasons which are themselves complicated, but in the meantime I do reccomend you check out this image over at HardOCP. When we arrived for our meeting, the doors actually had signs on them that said Flim-Flam, Chicanery, and so forth - just like the strip. We found this odd.

I feel like I need to emphasize that the strip does not exaggerate the game in question or add things where things do not exist. You really do "possess" a bowl of dog food in an effort to terrify a dog, which can then be possessed itself in that state - indeed, there are more than four hundred breeds of dog, each with their own statistics, which makes Geist the Gran Turismo of dog scaring.

We have a store again. We finally just turned it over to the professionals over at thinkgeek.com and let them build us a store. You can go there now and purchase some Penny Arcade stuff if you want.

I've never announced it before, it's not something you should know about already.

I think the PSP is a beautiful piece of hardware and I want to own one so bad it hurts. Sony has a way of designing products that scream cool in a way no one else can, except for maybe Apple. My problem is that as Tycho said the PSP's various features move it into the "gadget" realm. However whereas he is resistant to the lure of gadgets I am quite the opposite. I am drawn to shiny overpriced electronics in the same way Yogi Bear is drawn to picnic baskets.

FF XII was actually one of the first games I checked out at E3 this year. I admit I am a recent convert to the series. I only got into Final Fantasy games with X, and even then I played it nearly a year after it actually came out. I loved X so much though that I went out and purchased the rest of the games in the series and have been slowly working my way backwards through them. Besides the great stories in each game the thing I really loved about them was the combat. I liked seeing all my characters lined up on one side of the screen with the crazy vegetable monster or whatever on the other side. Each game had its new features. Things like Materia or the Sphere Grid were super compelling additions to the game, but they simply complemented the already familiar style of combat.

It may seem strange, but the first thing I did when I got home was play Rallisport Challenge 2. You'd think that you spend three days at E3 playing games, and it just doesn't work that way. You spend three days sampling small amounts of a couple hundred games, and those samples are typically drawn from such a truncated set of the entire game experience that it rarely satisfies. Booting Rallisport was like finally enjoying an entire meal after some 72 hour hors d'oeuvre marathon.

And it won't let me upload comics. Things might be goofy in the morning, I'm just warning you ahead of time.

When he came back into the room, the whole thing had a very "five more minutes, mom" kind of motif. I decided to wait until everybody was done using the computer before I woke up for real, which took a really long time because Gabriel was apparently writing his first novel. I could have gotten up and interrupted him, but I kept weaving into and out of a dream in which I had a lactating nipple on my wrist, like a watch that milk came out of. I kind of wanted to see where that one went.

I got the comic strip drawn fairly early and I told Tycho I was gonna hit the hot tub with some friends. He told me he was gonna stay in the room and write his news post. He made it very clear that if I came back and found him asleep that I should wake him up. Well the hot tub ended up being a warm tub and when I got back to the room Tycho was of course passed out in bed. I gave him a little nudge and said "hey buddy, you told me to wake you up." to which he replied "go fuck yourself."

Please come see us at the Ubisoft booth this Thursday and Friday, if you would be so kind. We'll be there from 1:00 to 2:00 both days, and we also have one-hundred printed versions of the PA Presents comics to hand out per day. I have a few copies here, and they look startlingly legitimate.

There are hiking trails near Mount Rainer, and if you want to brave such things that's fine, but the forest service does ask that you bring a few emergency supplies. This is probably to delay the onset of cannibal acts a few hours while rangers attempt to track down the next batch of city folk. It was these terrifically useful items I removed by the handful from the pack Brenna had been using up there, and I was relatively certain that I had gotten it all by the time I began replacing that stuff with the things I'd want to die in a forest with, like ironic game shirts and a phone charger that fits any outlet.

I was thinking it would be sort of an amusing, odd thing to have you color the picture. Then, I would look at the finished product, selecting from among their number as one would select an avocado.