There is a level in Mechassault called River City, a pretty cool urban environment which becomes a bouquet of twisted wreckage about five minutes into the match. Do otherwise rational beings actually live there? If not, what are the buildings for? And who builds them back up, thinking this, surely this will be the last time a parade of mechanical giants redecorates the place with futuristic weapons?

A reader was kind enough to point me towards Spike after reading my last update. It appears as though the dream of a single wireless controller for all your systems is not as far off as I thought. I read over their page and the technology sounds pretty fucking cool. I can’t wait till they deliver on it.

Q: Is that a big screen on the right? If so have you had any problems with games burning images on the screen?

I think it's great how you can look at a picture like his old entertainment center and date it - like some scientist - based solely on the consoles present. Also, you can see how the stuff looks now on his fancy new Bob Vila shit, but it was in a pretty sad state. I think the thing that finally pitched him over the edge into Home Depot territory was the Xbox, which he had to pile everything else on top of. Not only was it hard on the eye, it was like a treacherous, fabulously expensive variation on Jenga every time he added a new component.

I'll get something up here soon, I just thought that while I had his post here I might as well upload it. I still feel kind of whacked out from my trip. Strip's there, though.

Last week I got some new cables and I spent a large part of Thanksgiving Day wedged behind my television set stripping speaker wire and replacing cables. After I was done I sat back on my couch and took a look at my setup. While it's true that my wiring job was a work of art it was hidden behind the television set where no one could see it. What people could see was my ass ugly book shelf kind of thing holding all my equipment.

Well the Penny Arcade Internet Notification Tool or P.A.I.N.T is done. It's been tested and it appears to work great. For those of you who don't know about P.A.I.N.T, it is just a program that notifies you whenever PA gets updated. However due to it's size, 1.3 megs we aren't going to be able to host it on the PA server right away. The guys at Homelan anticipate a pretty big demand for the tool and I think they are probably right. Anyway, if you have the space and the bandwidth to host a file like this please contact Neil and let him know.

I come back to see if I've spelled things correctly, and he's found some way to turn a mea culpa regarding his own sloth into a personal insult against me. Yes, that's very convincing!

I think Alias Sketchbook is absolutely incredible. Feel free to take a look at the sketch below and decide for yourself.

Unless we hit our heads or something and completely lose it, this strip should represent the final chapter in our two-chapter, chapter thing.

Yes it's true I decided to get a credit card last week. Not just any credit card mind you. No, I have a lot of the same reservations about credit that Tycho does. So I got myself a comp USA card. I figured, how much trouble can I get myself into at one Goddamned store. The answer is quite a bit.

It's got nothing to do with Gabe, either - he got it to me yesterday well in advance of midnight. I was just watching that fabulous Buffy, then I finished Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, then I went out to get something to eat, then I leapt over a river of molten rock...

Though I am grieved to admit it, today's strip may mark a fumbling foray into perverse continuity. Brace yourselves.

I hope IGN won't be mad that I copied this bit from their Insider review, but Aaron Boulding said something very true and I want to recognize it.

Since posting the pictures of the GBA skins I have gotten over a dozen e-mails from people asking what the hell Over Easy is and why they have never heard of it. Sometimes I feel like I mention shit too much and that you guys are probably sick of hearing about it. It seems like no matter how often I talk about OE though there are still people who seem to miss it. So here is one more quick post about it.

There was this bowling alley on my way home from Salk middle school called Diamond Bowl, and they always had pretty good taste in games. over the years I played a lot of Xenophobe and Xybots there, as you can well imagine - the second Spy Hunter wasn't a bad way to spend an afternoon, either. But I always came back to their battered Black Tiger and Rygar machines, two action platformers with an insatiable thirst for my money.