So I was actually able to get into the current friends and family beta for Star Wars: The Old Republic. It wasn’t too hard since technically I do have a friend over there. The tricky part is that Bioware, like a lot of places thinks of PA as “media” and they don’t want media playing it yet. I explained that we aren’t media, we prefer to think of ourselves as “enthusiasts”. They let me in but I had to pinkie swear that I wouldn’t talk about the game here on the site, or anywhere else for that matter. I’ve been playing it for a little over a month now and last week I asked if I could share some of my impressions with you all. It took some begging but finally they agreed and to their credit they didn’t ask to see what I was going to write first. Honestly they had no idea what I was going to say which must have been a little scary considering this is PA, but lucky for them I actually really like their game. So this isn’t a review or anything even close. What I’m playing is the beta and honestly changing all the time. I just wanted to share some of my impressions.

We grabbed the demo for Dungeon Siege III, because demo. Plus, we have the requisite neurotransmitters a game like this might stimulate. We long, for example, to wield the famed Barb of Yalf, and games where such barbs may be obtained are of interest. Also, co-op, and any game whose quality is at least partially determined by the friends I’ve made stands to gain several points.

People are constantly trying to figure out what kind of “hat” LulzSec is wearing, specifically the color of this hat, which is a waste of time. For one thing, LulzSec has no head. For another thing, thinking of it as a group or an individual with agency is a fool’s errand. It’s a natural “force,” like erosion. And I don’t want any Goddamn part of it. Plus, now they’re going to lap gently at the base of our government institutions until such time as our democracies are reduced to a granular, wholly uniform beach.  It's the sort of thing that makes one stockpile seeds.

I thought this trailer was pretty slick:

New PATV, just like it says on the tin.  It's a Fourth Panel, depicting the writing process for the strip entitled "Page 234, Table 29-A."

We spent some time in Child of Eden’s incredible fourth archive yesterday morning, Passion, and I don’t know if it’s a spoiler to say that you play the part of time in an interactive opera based on human technological achievement. If that happens in any other game, ever, I must have missed it. What we’ve got here is a shooter in reverse, one where you make every entity more beautiful with each shot. The raw clusters of instinct you encounter aren’t just corrupt: they’re so broken that they don’t want to be fixed, and they’ll kill you for trying.

Today is the cutoff date for panel submissions! PAX Dev submissions go here, and PAX Prime submissions go here.

American McGee’s back, and Alice along with him; it seemed like an incredible opportunity to relive the days of yore.

Not really.

The cutoff date for panel submissions to either convention is the fifteenth of this month.  PAX Dev submissions go here, and PAX Prime submissions go here.  Plus, Early Bird registration for PAX Dev ends June 30th.  

Also a true story. Well, a true story about an imaginary thing perhaps. The hippo was small, lying on its side, and its long tongue wrapped around it in an apparently infinite sequence of concentric rings. The exertion it took to maintain this creature was immense, and very near the limits of my ability; if not for the richness and amiability of his company, I might have consigned him to oblivion.

The second episode of Feh's Bachelor Party Septathalon thingy is up.  

We’ve begun a League of Legends phase almost two years late.

Seeing first-run movies - without slurping them from the Web as a succession of isolated datoids - is something that doesn’t really happens.

Seizing on the incredible density of industry folk just before E3, Jamie constructed the First Annual Child’s Play Invitational Golf Tournament. Our policy is essentially to look real hard at the kind of thing an actual charity would do, and then do that, in the same way that wearing daddy's coat makes one indistinguishable from a grown-up.