Gabe got his hands on a component switcher yesterday, no doubt prodded into it by Storm Shadow. He got it yesterday as we were writing the strip, and instead of setting up - or even opening it up and looking at it - he buried it under something in the closet and shut the door. Today's comic will take place probably when we get back from E3, provided she doesn't find it first.

We play Raven Shield every night. There’s usually three or four of us going up against the computer in co-op mode. When you are the last person left alive you are essentially incapable of completing the mission on your own so we came up with a new game for that last person to play before they die. It’s called Gunz Blazn’ mode. We all actually carry a secondary weapon designed especially for this mode. You switch your Uzi over to auto fire, you hold down shift and you run through the level with the trigger held down. This is Gunz Blazn’ mode. Now if you are able to actually kill a decent number of terrorists this way you are said to have gone out in a blaze of glory. It is very poor form to be the last man left on the team and then get killed without firing a shot or by blowing yourself up with a frag. If this happens, you are said to have pulled a Tycho. I don’t believe this term requires much explanation.

Jacob just told me about the Planetside Subscription Cards, they have these for Everquest as well - if you don't have a credit card for them to take their monthly fees off of, you can just grab one of these cards at EB and do it that way. In any case, the list price for these cards is forty bucks - same as the EQ cards, which would lead a reasonable person to believe that the fee was for one was commensurate with the fee for the other. That is to say, $12.95.

VideoGame Depot sent out a copy of Capcom's P.N.03, and Safety Monkey was ready. His impressions have been made available.

I just got home with RTCW for the Xbox and I played it for about an hour or so. I played a lot of RTCW on the PC so I wasn’t sure if it would still be fun. God was it ever. I jumped online and the first thing I noticed is how much faster the game is. I don’t just mean like the frame rate is faster or you run faster, both of which are true I mean the gameplay is much faster. It seems to me like the bar that allows you to perform class specific special abilities builds up much faster than it did on the PC. Lots more air strikes but also lots more health and ammo being dished out.

I have a ready response to people who say that Spokane, Washington has contributed nothing to humanity at large. Perhaps you've heard of "misery?" You know, the sort of unrelenting torment whose intensity approaches literary proportions. I have it on good authority that it was invented in Spokane, whose major export is human beings, fleeing that Godforsaken landfill of a town.

It's been radio silence on Headfirst's Dark Corners of The Earth for what seems like strange aeons. I can happily announce what I know to be true - that Bethesda is planning to publish it, it's not dead, and it's in good hands. I can't tell you what a relief this is.

Most of you have probably already seen it, but this message is for those who - like myself - had held off for whatever reason. Please watch the fourth installment of the Animatrix. I found it horrifying.

Continuity Schmontinuity, that's my motto - we're switching it up. What are we doing these days to dull the horror of sentience? I'll tell you this much: there's a very special game we aren't playing. As I'm sure you can imagine, Gabe doesn't play it more than I do.

On the PC, I seek out cool utilities that provide rich functions all the time, but apparently I need to widen my view a bit and examine what is available homebrewed on Consoles as well.

This site is about games right?

I've been hearing about "Xbox Live 2.0" for quite a while, now - some of the ideas they've implemented might even have come from that "Xbox Live Boot Camp" event we went to a while back, where they seemed fairly genuine in their interest as they asked our opinions. So, lobbies separate from any game with voice support to get games started up. A very cool feature, but check this shit out.

Well I can’t play it yet so I can’t really talk about it.

Are you going to talk about that "doodling" game? Or what?

Phone no worky so I call the phone company:

Dammit, I thought I had time.