The Burning Crusade expansion for WoW is coming, so named because of how the game devours human lives, leaving them a smoldering ruin. It offers up a new race for Horde players in the form of the Blood Elves, whose potent innate abilities and supernatural homestead almost - almost - make up for their unstoppable urge to feed on demonic energies.

They aren't a part of 1up's official, front-page content, but one "Joe Rybicki" has put up two complete songs  - "The Beast And The Harlot" and "Misirlou"  - on his personal blog, performed at the expert level.  I crave this kind of stuff, but then again:

<-- huge dork

(CW)TB

If you follow PA you know that Robert and I played a lot of Splinter Cell multiplayer. The demo dropped this weekend for the new multiplayer portion of Double Agent and for me at least it’s a huge disappointment.

When I titled "The Green Harvest, Part One," I did not append "Part One" for no reason! It was only a single facet of a painstakingly executed stratagem: one that would culminate in my uploading "The Green Harvest, Part Two."

Eurogamer has the most complete information I've seen yet regarding the PS3's online service - a rundown of the pertinent menus, item by item.  It's two long pages.  I still have questions about specific implementations, but I can sense now that obsession has taken the fore, sapping my brain health. 

I do wonder how long Live can remain a pay service, though. 

(CW)TB

We have a little poker tournament coming up, as Gabe mentioned. It was sort of a last minute thing, but playing games to raise money - for Child's Play, especially - just has a kind of symmetry to it that is hard to resist. I know Joel's Fünde Razor event in Brooklyn last year was well received, and he's got another one planned for this year. Fun scenarios where people get together and hang out, and then (by some not-wholly-understood process, amazing things happen for geographically distant children) could stand to be a much larger part of our annual effort.

On Saturday October 21st we will be taking part in a very special signing and charity poker tournament at the Comic Stop in Lynwood.

Tycho fucked up the text in today’s comic. He has the word “version” twice in the first panel. I suppose I should have caught it when I dropped the text in but honestly at that point I’m just thinking about making his disgusting words fit without obscuring too much of my beautiful artwork. It’s a delicate balancing act.

The post I made about it existed in some shadow realm, only visible depending on where exactly the moon was or through the use of primo psychotropics. We've identified ourselves as devotees of Access Software's Links series on PC and, ultimately, the Xbox. But with the sale and eventual collapse of the series' development home, it was starting to seem like the alternatives to Tiger's own extraneous crap were no closer to the actual game, as it is played: one could either select very large heads, or a round of golf where there was a very real chance your shot might bounce off of a mushroom and then land in a magic pipe.

The demo for this thing just hit Marketplace, so we grabbed it.  Weighing in at just under a gig - now the baseline for modern demos - it delivers a round of golf as classy as has ever been dropped.  I don't know what's in store for last-gen holdouts, I haven't played their versions.  But what's I've played of the next-gen product is challenging, no bullshit, simulation golf the likes of which we have consistently agitated for, and assumed EA would not or could not deliver.  We were wrong.

(CW)TB

Robert broke down what the next three months are going to cost us, and even the conservative version of the list - the one that includes only "must play" games, not statistical outliers like "Garfield: A Tale Of Two Kitties" - is something like fifteen hundred dollars.

You might notice that in Today’s comic Tycho is reading Bloodlines. We both just wrapped the book up and it’s incredible. I’ve always been a huge Boba Fett fan and now thanks to Karen Traviss I know why.

Gabriel apparently holds these... "films" to very high standards indeed.  I imagine he's routinely disappointed by the genre.

Welcome to the show notes for Downloadable Content 10/04/2006, "Zune And Very Zune." The episode is available for direct download at this link, or feel free to subscribe to our iTunes compatible feed here. This guide will help you navigate our frequently insane and often rambling conversation. Apologies for the cell phone noise that creeps in - we'll store them in a lead-lined crate during future podcasts.

Poking around at the 'Avatar yesterday, hungry for news, we came across a link to Engadget's verdict on the Zune. At least, the Zune as it is currently conceived - before the animal hunger and ingenuity of the open-source community penetrates it. I got the impression that Engadget was as surprised as we were to find a lot of the gadget's potential - things that seemed natural to expect, seeing as they are currently made manifest by competing devices - was sort of missing in action.