Happy Anniversary to Penny Arcade. We turned five today.

I won't be satisfied until we graduate to "Shady Dealings."

Here is a quote from Matt Smith, the Microsoft Game Studio developer responsible for the ball physics in Links 2004. This is from the Xbox forums:

I beat Prince of Persia this morning. My total time ended up being right around 10 hours even. I was trying to figure out how to describe how amazing the ending is. Tycho called me after he beat it and told me it was “masterful”. I think that’s probably the best word for it.

Links 2004 is much, much better than I expected - and I expected it to drift lightly into my apartment, placed in the CD tray by a glowing angel. Really, the only things we would add are:

Tycho is right, I have been super busy lately. Any free time I’ve had has been spent on games though and I wanted to share my thoughts on a few of them.

As the title makes clear, these words are not for saying. We don't all have time daggers, let alone magic sand, in fact neither of those things are real.

Like a prophet, I foretold the arrival of the Omega Hare - literally, "The Hare Who Ends." But when you get on a roll out there in East Ronfaure, and you're about twenty times larger than the beast in question, you might neglect to examine your foe. That is when he will strike.

People keep mailing me about this Halo 2 rumor that is making the rounds. Since we happen to live so close to Microsoft Tycho and I have had the opportunity to go over there quite a few times. We’ve made some great contacts there and I decided I’d just go right to the people who would know. One of our contacts at MS told us it’s unfortunately not true. Halo 2 is 2004 he says.

Karaoke Revolution is pretty good. When you play it by yourself, it's better than doing than dishes. Get a couple people over, and - like Mario Party or Super Smash - something alchemical occurs. Even singing "Wind Beneath My Wings" becomes a carnival of self-aware amusement.

Someone please remind me why I play online games.

Just a reminder that the fourth and final page of our Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon comic is now available. You can read the entire thing right here if you’re interested. The response to CTHD has been awesome. Thank you to everyone who wrote in and complimented ourstuff so it was really nice to see that you all liked it as much as you did.

Just in case I'm wrong and there are others that want to get down in this in way, here is the Song List for Karaoke Revolution. It's a pretty wide mix of pop songs, with some eclectic picks. You'll note that Freezepop managed to tuck another of their songs into a game, in this case Science Genius Girl. It begs the question: Why SGG? Why not Bike Thief, or Plastic Stars, or Harebrained Scheme?

Short an issue I'll go into in a moment, which isn't even really an issue but more of a semantic distinction, Call Of Duty Multiplayer takes us straight back to the fun we had playing Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault. We jumped from Wolf to MOHAA not because Medal was better as a game necessarily, and it ran pretty rough sometimes. We made the switch because it evoked its cinematic heritage with such precision. Call of Duty does it too, and it's no wonder, seeing as it's virtually the same team that made it. With four nationalities and their respective armaments lovingly realized, not to mention a suite of fully twelve maps to play the team-based modes, it occupies my thoughts constantly. I had the opportunity to speak with a couple guys from the team during production, and the enthusiasm for their project was obvious. If I were Activision, I'd have bought them too. I would also say things like "Look at my new developer" or "Isn't my new developer nice."

Our crew is playing Call of Duty now at night and I just had a quick comment about how the search and destroy mode works. It’s fucking lame. So the objective is to go and blow up the German shit, which is cool. The problem is that if the Germans defuse the bomb the game ends and the Germans win. Even if there are allies still alive and time on the clock the game is over and you lose. This is really stupid. If the Germans defuse the charge and I am still alive and kicking I should have the opportunity to plant again or keep kicking ass. I can understand if only one soldier had the ability to plant and he was killed, but everyone on the team can plant explosives. Either way it’s really frustrating and doesn’t make any sense. Our entire crew agrees that they need to at least make it a setting you can turn on or off.

Playing the excellent SSX3 just made me angrier. This feud between EA and Microsoft has got to stop. It's hurting the kids.