Credit exchanges for Massive games are inimitably useful mechanisms - the notion behind them seems counterintuitive, and we've certainly enjoyed some amusement at their expense. But - if you're a person that thinks of your own time as the prime currency and the various manifestations and products of that time as inherently fungible, it makes a lot of sense to resort to brokers of strange currencies. If somebody takes advantage of your exchange itself, though - if they purposefully manipulate the intangibility of the product you sell - it must be a pain explaining to normal people exactly what it is you do.

Lots of you asked for a larger picture of Nova after yesterday’s comic strip. I had some free time today so I went ahead and whipped this up. I hope you like it.

I'm still completely fixated on this thing. I saw on Gizmodo that someone managed to purchase an engineering sample of the device, and they proceeded to produce an erotic pictorial of the machine which you can see here. It's starting to look like the name of the device at retail will be MPX300, or something to that effect.

Our new posters are now available in our online store. We have a Gabe and Tycho poster as well as a CTS design. Our Twisp and Catsby shirt as well as our Aggro shirt should be popping up in the store very soon as well. Oh, and just to prove that we do listen when you guys ask for something here is a peek at one of the new shirts we will be bringing down to the San Diego comic con this year.

Did you see the new Star Chamber cards we designed? Tycho posted them late yesterday so if you missed them here they are. I think they turned out really cool.

The first time I saw Ghost - this would have been a couple years ago, now - it was one of the most impressive things available on the floor. They took a unit from Starcraft, made a character out of it, and let you experience the galactic conflict of that setting as an individual: dwarfed not only by hulking war technology, but also by the scope and scale of imperial political machinations. At that time, they were really playing up the stealth/platform angle - and that makes sense. Ghosts are, as one might infer, covert operatives.

Paul from Star Chamber asked us to do a couple cards for their upcoming Incursions expansion, and obviously we jumped at the chance to interject the malevolent Canid into his universe. Here's the cards, if you'd like to see them. Paul was even nice enough to entertain some card concepts.

Months and months ago I offered some advice to another web cartoonist who had put himself in sort of a tight spot. As someone who had been in his position before I tried to explain what I had learned. You can read the entire thing here if you like, it's pretty tame stuff. I ended the dialogue when I realized he was actually insane. I don't mean that to be funny or anything, the guy is crazy. I got strange letters from other people he had dealt with in the past and even ex-coworkers all suggesting I just give up trying to get through to him. After a few emails back and forth with the guy I understood what they were talking about. I decided to end our conversation. I was trying to be nice to the guy but there was no point in continuing that dialogue if he was determined to hate me.

We got nominated for lots of different awards in the Web Cartoonist Choice Awards this year. I think that’s really nice, although the nomination for best web site design seems a bit fishy.

I had some time on Saturday to play a bunch of Front Mission 4. If you take a look at IGN you will see their reviewer gave it a 6.8 while the reader review is a more respectable 8.6. You guys know that we are not in the business of assigning numbers to experiences here at Penny Arcade but if you held a gun to my head I'd have to side with the readers of IGN on this one. I think it's fair to say that Front Mission deserves about a B+.

One, I noticed over at Blue's that Warhammer Online> had been cancelled. Kind of a bummer actually, as I've growin into some enthusiasm regarding the title - it had some interesting Player Versus Player concepts in the form of opposed classes that I wanted to see play out.

You really should be reading Goats anyway, so what I'm about to tell you is something you should already know.

Another odd footnote in this Quality of Licensed Games thing, it would appear - even Transformers has been treated with affection!

Speaking of City of Heroes, the last time I exited the game it began downloading the first content update, called Through The Looking Glass. Don't know how much of this stuff is going to be available to a lowly level four Magic Defender, but it looks like I probably picked the right day to start playing.

This is the pilot for a new series on Penny Arcade, called True Tales Of The Industry. We've always wanted to run a rumor column that was sixty percent fabrications. Suffice it to say, if we are calling forty percent truth good enough, we know enough things already to crack these out until the heat death of the universe.

This was interesting, I thought. Sean Epperson writes: