I have been meaning to talk about Crystal Chronicles for a while now but I’ve just been playing it instead. I took a break to check out some forums and get some tips when I saw this post:

I think it’s fake. I’d say it’s a publicity stunt. The company that made all the videos and the website does some bad ass work. My guess is that this is their way of getting their name out. I mean come on, first they miss E3, then they miss GDC and the fucking thing is called the Phantom for Christ’s sake.

It really comes down to this: is it a hoax, or are the forces involved in making this system absolutely inept? I'd call that six of one or a half dozen of the other.

The whole thing we talked about with the Phantom and all that.

Can you be more specific?

Weren’t you gonna talk about that thing, you know with the guy?

LANWERX GAMING DAY

It's now 4:13 in the morning. I got home at about eleven o'clock and starting moving my mail over to Thunderbird, the Mozilla mail component that Scott said Gary said had nice spam filtering. I imported my old mail into it for some reason, to accelerate my hair loss I think, but I've trained it like a faithful pup to ferret out spam and viruses from of a sample of fourteen thousand hand-flagged mails. I am at the point where coffee just makes my teeth vibrate.

Whatever you're doing this Saturday isn't as important as our Halo Tournament. Just cancel it. We're digging out art from old strips to sweeten the deal for the winners, and, we'll also have a circus or a dolphin or whatever you like best.

I like it when I refresh my mail and get 1300 - thirteeen hundred - viruses.

I have a couple updates regarding this weekends Lanwerx Gaming Day.

We have been called upon to comment on that stupid Phantom console once already, but with a glitzy new video available at the machine's homepage readers let us know that our services were required. Still no actual pictures of the device, just that same case render which makes the Xbox look svelte by comparison. Then there's the matter of the specifications they claim, the best of everything basically, which makes it the Fable of the console world - just say with enthusiasm that it has whatever a person asks about.

Give it another shot. I was seriously considering returning it when I got it, but here I am talking to you now on 3 hours sleep because I stayed up until 6 this morning playing it. Threre are a variety of ways to play through it, so try to be an ordinary officer and try to climb the political and military ranks. That's what I'm having the most fun with.

Just one more thing about the Lanwerx event on the 23rd. Stormy will be showing up and he says he will be giving away a shit ton of Monster Cable goodies. So if you need the latest gold plated, twist-foil enhanced, mythril shielded S-video cable be sure and come down.

I just received a mail from a guy on the team for a Dungeon Siege mod called Elemental that is just... Well, you be the judge. They call their setting "Biblepunk," set as it is in a sort of mythological Judea. I absolutely applaud this.

As long as we are talking about import games I should mention the other one I just got. Dragon drive is the latest offering from Bandai and like most of their other games it goes along with a card game as well as an animated series. The game comes with two disks, the first one being an actual cartoon. At first I thought I was just watching a really fucking long intro. After about a half an hour I realized I was watching a goddamned movie. From what I gathered your main character plays a virtual reality card game called Dragon Drive. Players sit inside VR machines and do battle with their cards in a virtual world. Okay whatever.