In the same way that professional skateboarders can approach Tony Hawk Ride and extract something resembling a game, people who are Italian are in a position to discern the dialogue and plot of Assassin's Creed II without resorting to deep menus or taking copious notes. This is what something like ninety percent of the game sounds like to a non-speaker: an amalgamation of intercepted food court communiques.

The exact total is $542,107.01 - a jump of just over eighty-six thousand over last week's figure.  We'll take it, certainly.  But I warn you: my palm is poised over the knob labeled Stirring Rhetoric.  I can crank this mode like you would not believe.  Act Accordingly.        

New Super Mario Brothers Wii is marriage poison.

I was very excited about Gyromancer and I decided to grab it on the PC since I saw it right there in Steam when I went to play Torchlight. I remember now why I quit playing games on the PC.

I have to say that we found DJ Hero quite interesting, actually. I understand that it didn't sell particularly well, but that's never been an especially valid barometer of aesthetics.

We've waged an unrelenting crusade to have Gabe give Modern Warfare 2 a try, to see if he wasn't enthralled by it, or if the experience wasn't (at the very least) preferable to solitude. Our aggressive sales campaign has apparently gripped him because he's double my level, and plays it even in our absence. We haven't talked about it yet, what it is about the game that has him bound thus, but he's certainly not alone. So many people purchase the game just on the 360 that - even though I play it every night - my rank is worse by a hundred thousand or so per day.

Hello dear readers, I would like to tell you a story.

We launched Child's Play 2009 last week and as of today we've managed to raise $455,863.80. I'm going to give you all a little bit of time to let that number sink in.

Emotiv's Epoc mind controller device thing doesn't allow you to control other people's minds, which I think is a disappointment to everyone. You can watch a video of Indigo Montoya using it, but since the gameplay is occurring within the confines of his skull, it's difficult to assess. Controlling things with your mind isn't an especially demonstrative activity, almost by definition, which makes the product a difficult sell in a visual culture.  In today's strip, we postulate an encounter between our own Gabriel and the contraption.  I don't want to spoil it, but we use the device as a prop in order to generate a hilarious effect.

I get a lot of mail from new DM's asking for tips. Some of the stuff I post here will probably be old news to veteran DM's but I think it might be useful to others.

I've been jumping back and forth between a few different games recently. There's just so much good stuff to play right now.

I understand that Modern Warfare 2 is a big release - playing last night, the game informed me that my rank was over two million, and that's just on the Xbox. But the granularity of the coverage it's been receiving projects somewhat beyond the threshold of utility.

I once made it a point to attend midnight launches, if for no other reason than it offered an excuse to hit Dick's on the way back - around one o'clock or so - when that unassuming burger window becomes the capital of a spontaneous nation.

It's back! The ultimate in friction-free, ultra-lightweight charity engines is here, ready to transform the slightest movements of your finger into much-needed respite for young people. Here's what's up:

We spent quite a bit of time trying to determine how we felt about the Dragon Age situation described in today's comic - a character appears in your camp who offers a questline that is only available in downloadable content. The character is literally a salesman. Is this an act of abominable evil? Or is the mass of this evil sufficient to unfold itself - like a Popple - into a creature capable of love?

My D&D group is so hungry for content that we actually play via email between games. Sometimes it's just the characters talking amongst themselves, other times it's more of a structured skill challenge. I tweeted an example yesterday of one of our exchanges and I got a lot of feedback as well as questions. I thought I'd respond to some of it here rather than trying to tweet back to everyone individually.