The gyrations we might go through to make something ridiculous match established canon are well known, even if it's something like a bedsheet, or in this case, an advertising campaign. There's a Powerade commercial before X2 that is - I swear to God - over eighty minutes in length. It really is like a movie about Powerade that you have to watch before your own movie may begin. The fifteen minutes before your film are now a non-stop psychic barrage.

Evil Avatar just posted a little comment about PlanetSide that I thought was interesting.

Also from Namco

Get a load of this press release for Namco's new game I-Ninja.

When: Friday May 16th
Where: Kentia Hall, food court.
When: noon

Sony's mega-remote, mentioned earlier, is - I am told by many humans - an attempt to replicate the Philips Pronto. How could I have known?

Homelan has a little interview action with yours truly going on right here. Tycho is a huge star now and cannot be bothered with such trivial things, so he didn’t answer any of the questions. I tried calling him last night to play some Raven Shield but his personal assistant told me that “Mr. Brahe was in the middle of a very important meeting with Mr. Jacuzzifullofladies and was not available for comment.”

LoudMusic just sent me this link. It's some kind of Goddamned alien remote. Universal is one thing - it's nice to have a single device. But this thing can actually remember keyed sequences, which is nice, because it might mean that Gabe can stay married.

I know it's all very spooky, modern plague or whatnot, so perhaps it is not a viable target for humor. However! I would ask that you check out the second picture in this article on the grave threat. I doubt he is a PA reader or anything, I'll bet that in a scenario like that - where an invisible killer stalks men - you're just trying to make the best of a bad situation.

Gabe got his hands on a component switcher yesterday, no doubt prodded into it by Storm Shadow. He got it yesterday as we were writing the strip, and instead of setting up - or even opening it up and looking at it - he buried it under something in the closet and shut the door. Today's comic will take place probably when we get back from E3, provided she doesn't find it first.

We play Raven Shield every night. There’s usually three or four of us going up against the computer in co-op mode. When you are the last person left alive you are essentially incapable of completing the mission on your own so we came up with a new game for that last person to play before they die. It’s called Gunz Blazn’ mode. We all actually carry a secondary weapon designed especially for this mode. You switch your Uzi over to auto fire, you hold down shift and you run through the level with the trigger held down. This is Gunz Blazn’ mode. Now if you are able to actually kill a decent number of terrorists this way you are said to have gone out in a blaze of glory. It is very poor form to be the last man left on the team and then get killed without firing a shot or by blowing yourself up with a frag. If this happens, you are said to have pulled a Tycho. I don’t believe this term requires much explanation.

Jacob just told me about the Planetside Subscription Cards, they have these for Everquest as well - if you don't have a credit card for them to take their monthly fees off of, you can just grab one of these cards at EB and do it that way. In any case, the list price for these cards is forty bucks - same as the EQ cards, which would lead a reasonable person to believe that the fee was for one was commensurate with the fee for the other. That is to say, $12.95.

VideoGame Depot sent out a copy of Capcom's P.N.03, and Safety Monkey was ready. His impressions have been made available.

I just got home with RTCW for the Xbox and I played it for about an hour or so. I played a lot of RTCW on the PC so I wasn’t sure if it would still be fun. God was it ever. I jumped online and the first thing I noticed is how much faster the game is. I don’t just mean like the frame rate is faster or you run faster, both of which are true I mean the gameplay is much faster. It seems to me like the bar that allows you to perform class specific special abilities builds up much faster than it did on the PC. Lots more air strikes but also lots more health and ammo being dished out.

I have a ready response to people who say that Spokane, Washington has contributed nothing to humanity at large. Perhaps you've heard of "misery?" You know, the sort of unrelenting torment whose intensity approaches literary proportions. I have it on good authority that it was invented in Spokane, whose major export is human beings, fleeing that Godforsaken landfill of a town.

It's been radio silence on Headfirst's Dark Corners of The Earth for what seems like strange aeons. I can happily announce what I know to be true - that Bethesda is planning to publish it, it's not dead, and it's in good hands. I can't tell you what a relief this is.