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:

If you live on the west coast and you’re interested in coming to PAX you might want to think about the West Coast Supertrip! You can read all about here in the PAX forums. These are the basics:

Well, that's something we can work out. We can get you in. In fact, we can three of you in. And getting in is really easy.

I didn’t just stumble upon that skunk picture in my daily search for polecat porn. A kind reader sent me the link because apparently the creator dislikes Penny Arcade(as well as PvP and Sinfest among others). I checked the rest of his site trying to figure out what sort of person he was and found the weasel erotica. People always seem to think it is important that I know whenever they find some website that hates PA. I’m going to go on record right now and say it’s not that big a deal to us. If you don’t mail me every time someone calls me a dick, that’s probably okay.

If you are a fan of Songfight already, then you might already know this. They're doing another one of their live battles down in Tejas on the 18th and 19th of this month - this very weekend - and it seems like quite a treat. I wasn't able to attend the one in my own town, I was on the opposite side of the country, but if you're down near Austin you might want to take a look-see.

Had I just read the reviews of Front Mission 4 and not actually played the demo I might not go buy it today. Thankfully I did play the demo and I know that the reviewers are full of shit. I just want to make sure that others aren't steered away from the game by misleading reviews. If you're still hesitant at least rent it and check it out.