I've made a kind of bargain that you were party to, unawares, but I think you'll agree that it was for the best.

In exchange for being able to draw the strip this morning, better to enjoy his first Father's Day, I secured from him a handful of magic beans. When pressed, he would not divulge their specific powers or abilities, but I think it's fair to assume that we came out on top of this particular exchange. We will form regular raiding parties on giant strongholds eventually, but for now let's savor our simple victory. We hit the "range" (or the course, or whatever people hit when they go golfing) yesterday, which reminded us of a seldom used character - and in a few short hours this link will lead you directly to the new comic. Now might be a great time to experiment with the RSS feed, actually.

I've played a fair amount more Battlefield since last we talked, and as long as you can tolerate everything else corollary to the actual game it seems like snatching it up at retail is probably a lock. I'm seeing a lot of desert palettes in those map previews Gamespy did, but over the lifespan of the first game they did drop new content a few times - I'd like to hope that kind of thing is in the offing. Then again, they sold most of the content, so it's probably unwise to set a clock by their generosity.

I was really hoping that when I got to the next generation of this game I'd never have to see that squat, nasty little font again, or sit and wait while my machine struggles to pull up their menu, but those things have somehow slunk into the new product. If they're going to make me log in and track all the stuff I'm doing, it seems like the least they could do would be to let me find my friends via the same mechanism. I suppose it's possible that I missed it when I was going through absolutely every menu trying specifically to find this very thing. If this feature is there, I sincerely apologize to whichever wild-eyed protohuman made the rest of the primitive, hideous, bullshit UI.

So, talking about anything but the gameplay just makes me angry and doesn't go anywhere. On my pilot's recommendation, we did try something that was a lot of fun, though it seems like it might be counterintuitive: the sixteen player servers.

I know, right? Thirty-two is more than sixteen, and sixty-four, well, that's a big number. The kind of fun you can have on a sixteen player server is substantially different than the kind of fun present or perhaps even possible on a larger server. For one thing, and you're probably already aware, it isn't just half the number of players on the same map scrambling around - it's a much smaller map altogether, and neither side has an inviolate spawn point. There are also a couple vehicles per side at the maximum, so you end up in these squad level assaults where the new special abilities can really change the course of events. It was exactly the opposite of my expectation.

(CW)TB out.

there's always something there to remind me