I thought I would chime in on the topic of PSO on the Xbox since I keep getting mail about it. I read the press release just like everyone else and I agree that eight bucks a month for your hunters license is way too much. However the game comes with two free months and I honestly can’t imagine it holding my attention any longer than that. That is about how long I played it when it came out on the DC. However, I think that it does set a bad precedent and this is something that Tycho actually brought up when we were invited out to that Xbox Live event at MS before the service launched. Mainly games charging fees on top of your Live fee is hard to swallow. The idea that I might have to pay for a hunter’s license in PSO and another fee for Star Wars Galaxies and another fee for some other game all in addition to what I already pay for Live is insane. There should be one fee for the Live service period. I think Tycho will agree with me on this one.

In his latest article Storm Shadow gave us the low down on his recent trip to CES. One of the items he mentioned in passing in that article was a possible new price and design for the Xbox. Here is the excerpt from his article:

I can't tell you how long I've been waiting to say "eschew."

I've been waiting to see first word on this one, and (at least in this case) the word isn't all that good. I'm kind of in the mood for a straight FPS at the moment, so I'm sure I won't be able to resist it on the shelf, but I wonder if an FPS can eschew a multiplayer mode these days and still survive.

The guns are actually called that. So is the song.

Thank you very much for all the great feedback on the Dante Pic. I got the same questions a lot so I am just gonna answer them here.

I've been playing a bunch of Devil May Cry 2 and I was inspired to do some new Gabeart. Click the thumbnail below to see my take on Dante.

You might remember that everyone came away impressed with Duality at E3, and it's hard not to like it on paper. I wholly expected it never to see the light of day, that's how beautiful it was, but I guess we're looking at first quarter 2003? Hey! We're in the first quarter now!

Yow, it's taking some sound beatings out there - check out GameRankings for a list of all the reviews. A couple gave it four out of fives, but there's a seven and a six out of ten as well. Take these under advisement, I suppose. That kind of depresses me, things started out well enough in the game. I guess we'll see.

Sometimes, when I fix one of my stupid typos in the strip under server load, it fucks up the image. I think I've got it going now.

I've spent some time reading the bios at the Soul Calibur 2 site this morning, and I thought you might also enjoy it. Some characters don't have their histories in yet, but there is still plenty available - it's interesting to see how characters have been changed or replaced.

I just jumped on Mechassault to see if they had made liars out of us, but no, it's still true: the promised content for January is still missing. This is an example of a topic I want to be wrong on, and the moment I become wrong I'll mention it here.

Check out this ReadMe for the 1.3 Battlefield patch. It's like a completely other game, look at some of this stuff.

I mentioned a little while ago that we were going to finally kick the Penny Arcade merchandising machine into high gear and I have a bit more information on that for you. One of the things we always felt bad about is that we never have shirts and stuff in stock. We just suck when it comes to doing that sort of thing. People always asked us to use Café Press but their products are cheap ass. When we decided to make shirts we wanted them to be really nice shirts. That is why we went with Gameskins. Same thing with the poster we sold at last years Comic-Con. It was the kind of large high quality poster that you just don't get when you go with Café Press. So what we did is get our shit together and with the help of someone who went to college (Unlike us) we put together a plan for a Penny Arcade e-store or i-store…it's like a store but it's on the web, it's a web store I guess, for the e-generation.

Very often, names or corruptions of names make it into the lexicon.

Since Tycho was talking about our gaming slang I thought I would mention another one. Thursday night Halo has become a ritual now. Safety Monkey is especially good with the Jeep and he makes it his job to always be in the driver’s seat of one. He is like a very fast very reckless taxi cab. He spends the majority of any game ferrying us between bases. There is no better feeling then popping out the back door of the enemy base in Blood Gulch and seeing Monkey waiting there in the Flag Express. Anyway he occasionally has problems navigating the rocks scattered around the map. That led Tycho and I to suggest that he not be fooled by the rocks that they got, he’s still Monkey from the block. This got shortened eventually to being fooled by the rocks which eventually ended up being used for any kind of screw up. Say you grab the flag but don’t make it out of the base. You were fooled by the rocks. I just thought I’d share that with you all.