So, today's comic strip is a big one I know. See I thought it would be cool to color the comic strip to make it look like and old comic book. Once I get one of these bright ideas in my head there is no getting it out. I spent the better part of the day trying to figure out how to do it. Now that I think back there is probably some built in "old comic book" filter if I had just looked in the fucking manual. Anyway, I devised a system of layers, selections and channels that seemed to do the trick. Take a look at this image and you will see what I mean. Needless to say I was feeling pretty fucking smart at that point and I continued to create the panels for the strip using my special technique. Then as I began to assemble the panels together into the page I noticed that I was going to have to shrink them down quite a bit. Once I had shrunk it and saved it out I realized that all my hours of work creating those tiny dots was now lost to the Gods of 256 color optimization. I still think it looks okay, just not like what I had originally intended. I'll always have this image though to look back on and remember what could have been.

After dabbling in a bit of Freedom Force - which I would follow up later with rather a lot of Freedom Force - we wanted to do something along these lines. The game has these great backstories for each character, like proper comics should - you can check out the one for the melancholy "Man-Bot" on the official FF downloads page. When I've played more of it, I'll have more to tell you - but at the moment, I'm completely infatuated with it. And hey, the EB website was wrong - the Bonus CD I got for pre-ordering came with three new models, not just skins. Max Sneddon (from Irrational Games Australia) intimated that new meshes and skins may be available soon, which is cause for celebration. I think of the models I have currently as a palette for inventing new personalities, so anything that broadens that gradient is welcome indeed.

I have a list of things I wanted to talk about in my little update here. I have some games on there and some Penny Arcade related stuff. I'll get to all that stuff in a minute though. Right now I have something more important to discuss.

There's a piece of "hatemail" over at Monkey's site, at least, that's what he calls it.

Today's strip features nearly a half-ton of prime bear. Speaking of which, I've always been a little disappointed that our plan to produce authentic Bear Steins never came to fruition - I can't shake the notion that there are those who want to drink bear, but settle for other liquids.

I know I said I would have something done for Club PA members today. Verizon decided to turn off my internet though on Wednesday and I just now got it back. I’ll get you guys your new gift over the weekend for sure. I may also write a little update about how much fun it is to destroy a droid ship with force lighting from the relative safety of your star fighters cockpit.

Blade II is out today. God willing and the creek don't rise, we'll be watching the Blade movies in order today.

We've switched this site's usual links with Folgers crystals. Let's see if anyone notices.

The last couple weeks on this site have been really screwed up on the network tip. I could talk about stupid router crap for the whole post, and wouldn't that be fun, but I'm afraid I'll jinx it if I go into it. I'm not even going to say it's fixed - I'm just going to go about my business, router, and if you want to service my packets, well, I think we're all very grateful.

Tycho and I hit our local EBX this morning over at the Redmond mall. I picked up Virtua Fighter 4 and he grabbed Gunvalkyrie. We spent all afternoon playing VF4 and my official opinion of it is "Shit Damn!" This game is about as close to perfect as a fighting game can get. Like Tycho said, we are normally Tekken fans. We have been since Tekken 1 on the PSX. While our opinions differ on Tekken 4 (I think it's great and he is an idiot) we still consider ourselves fans of the series. On the other hand we never really got into the VF games. I mean sure we played VF1 just like everyone else but when they dropped two on us Tycho and I where knee deep is Samurai Showdown two. We could look over and see the VF2 machine sitting there looking all cool but nothing was gonna pull us away from the glory that was SS2. Then three came out and our local arcade decided they should charge a $1.00 to play it. Needless to say it didn't get much play. Rather than drop the price they decided to sell it and that was the last we ever saw of VF3. So we loaded up VF4 not really knowing what to expect. What we got was a fighting experience that totally blows everything else out of the water. We picked up the strategy guide along with the game and I have to say I highly recommend it. This game is fucking deep. You could spend weeks just trying to get good at one or two characters.

I actually like Terminal Reality as a developer, so don't take today's strip to mean the opposite. When I told Gabe that this "BloodRayne" was from the (quote) Nocturne Guys, he made a scrunchy face which said "I am eating an entire lemon." He was coming from an angry place. Long ago, see, Gabe entered an art contest at a site - Kazi Wren's "Spookhouse," if memory serves - and won a copy of Nocturne for his trouble. In reality, it was me that won it, because after playing it for around ten minutes he uninstalled it and tried to lose the box underneath a pile of stuff. Developers, you will find that our Gabriel is not a patient man. He takes your poor control scheme and fun-house camera angles as calculated acts of personal aggression. Me, I'll let you get by on raw style just so long as this style of yours > some massive pain in my ass. Not so with my man Gabe. Even when he gets your game for free, it would appear that you still owe him.

First off I would like to thank everyone who showed up for our PA PSO weekend. I had a great time meeting everyone. We will certainly be organizing more of these weekends in the future.

The Penny Arcade PSO Weekend was a smashing success, insofar as an exotic menagerie of hostile organisms were successfully smashed. I don't know how many people actually showed up, but it seemed like a lot, or at least, a lot of people who dug out their DC's and went through the trouble of setting them up. There was much discussion of the upcoming beach zone in PSO for the 'Cube, a game whose release will likely kick off another weekend like this one. About a half-hour into it, it occurred to me: Why aren't we doing this all the time? PA, I mean? Why aren't we having extravaganzas of one sort or another with marked frequency? The next one will probably be a PC game, Medal or Wolf probably, and I'm willing to bet that HomeLAN might even handle the server side. Still thinking, still thinking, but it's like I said in the forum thread on this topic - it's like having a social event without all the weak knees and discomfort our kind often associates with all that realspace crap. I may not be making a lot of sense. I played PSO for around twenty-three hours of a forty-eight hour period, I can't really focus on shit, and when I look up and down this text I couldn't tell you if it was a phone book, or a cookie recipe, or what.

Really.

The Bnetd issue is the hot topic of discussion again in our forum. I've already said right here exactly how I feel about it so I don't see any reason to go into that again. However I would like to mention something about the EFF. In there press release they offer a link to our cartoon on the subject. I mailed Tim Jung and let him know that without our new posts on the topic the comic strip was out of context. He was very cool about it and removed the link right away. He sent me a couple e-mails asking why I don't agree with them but he wasn't really a dick about it. I felt like the problem had been resolved. Then I got a mail from Will Doherty. I'll just post it here so you can see it:

As a loose coalition of geeks, today's strip will make sense to most of the site's readership. It doesn't matter what we've heard about it, if anything. It doesn't matter if we've seen it or not, or what we'll think of it once we do. We see movies based on games so that somewhere, in the onyx tower where the cowled Accountant Lords ply their trade, in some small column and in some small way, a movie based on a gaming license registers a blip on Hollywood's sensitive equipment. I'm investing in the great movie that will be made when the people who create pop culture in this country decide we've been good enough - for long enough - to have it. The one true gaming movie. I think of it as a sort of Messiah Payment Plan.