I've discussed our friendly rivalry with Scott Kurtz before. We have genuine enough affection, but one of us still has to be the best - and if that means poking a ball-point pen through one side of his face and out the other, so be it. I do think, however, that he might have struck the final blow.

During Saturday's Mechassault indiscretions, a young man persisted in using the Robot voice mask. While I certainly prefer Robot to Child or Cartoon, no voice mask is always the appropriate choice, and we made ourselves clear on this point. It didn't help matters that he was continually singing robot sea shanties or whatever that shit was. I eventually just went and muted him permanently - instructing others in the exact procedure - and the entire server choosing to believe he did not exist prompted his early departure. It occurred to us that perhaps he actually was a robot, in which case it's not really his fault if he sounds like one.

Okay so today is the first day of our gaming weekend and we will be playing Neocron all day. I know that a lot of you are probably having a hard time actually getting your hands on a copy of the game. I'm sorry about that, I guess there were some issues with the CD keys and junk. If you do get a copy I have been told that changing all the plusses in the CD key to zeros will solve your problems. I am guessing that most of the people we are seeing in Neocron today are in the UK. Just so you know we will be playing until about 6:00 am UK time. That's 10:00 pacific and some other time for all the other time zones, you do the math.

The Penny Arcade corporation welcomes you to our fourth anniversary celebration. Any citizen who would like to join our corporation is welcome to message Tycho with the request, and I can enter you into our central computer. Penny Arcade's Headquarters is situated in beautiful downtown Neocron, in the Nexus Building. The elevator code is "penny4th."

Hey, check out what A.J. made.

On a more serious note, one of our own is in pretty bad shape. His buddy sent me a mail and asked if I could post a link to this website. Please take a minute and see if you can help him out. A few days ago I mentioned that you guys were like a powerful laser and that I needed to be careful where I aimed you. Many of you wrote in cautioning that I only use my powers for good. Well it’s not really my power, it’s you guys. I just sort of point you, and today I am pointing you right at this kid. Do your best.

It's like, why go to sleep at all?

So many games, so little time.

I have Gabe's post for tomorrow here with me, he mailed it to me early and I'll put it up right after mine. Suffice it to say he discusses Mechassault, and not just Mechassault but his preternatural abilities within that electronic realm. Indeed, that is also the subject of our comic. You can bet he'll find some way to fit that game in on Sunday, mark my words.

We made a new comic for you.

Four hours later and I am still playing it. It’s good…really fucking good. I still think the control and the targeting system could be tighter but it doesn’t matter. The game kicks ass and I can’t put it down.

I picked up Metroid Prime this morning at the Nintendo store and I've got about two or three hours into it. I know that's not much but I wanted to give you all some quick impressions so far. The game looks fantastic. Effects like rain and condensation on the visor are really well done and the levels themselves are beautiful. The scan feature is also pretty cool. If you are the kind of person who has to check every single barrel and box in an RPG then this game is gonna be a killer. You can spend a lot of time just scanning every computer terminal, strange bug or rock formation you see. The puzzles I've seen so far are decent but like I said I'm only a few hours in. I am not sure about the control yet. I am hesitant to say it's bad because there may just be a learning curve that I'm only at the beginning of. Right now it's pretty frustrating. The lock on mechanism is a nice idea but it's often hard to get it to lock onto the shit your interested in shooting. For some reason whenever there is a giant wasp stinging the fuck out of my asshole the lock on mechanism decides that the real threat is coming from the potato bug looking thing on the other side of the room. The game needs a quick turnaround button something fierce. Also when a group of enemies are attacking you at once the lock on system won't automatically target the next closest enemy after you destroy your current target. So you end up having to press the lock on button, kill the bug, press it again, and kill the next bug and so on. It seems to me like it should just switch to the next enemy and let you keep firing away. Also they don't make it very easy to look around. This wouldn't be such a big deal if the lock on system actually worked but there are lots of times were I had to manually look around all the while trying to get the lock on system to actually target the thing I wanted to shoot. If they are gonna make you look around they should have made looking around easier. Maybe that's some kind of upgrade you have to get later on in the game. The "fun" upgrade or something, I don't know. I'm determined to keep playing it though, at least until Wednesday when Resident Evil 0 and Mechassault come out. Perhaps with a few more hours under my belt I'll gain some new insight into the controls. Even with all that said I am still having a really good time with it. I just think there is some stuff that could have been done better.

There's people coaxing the PS2 version of Timesplitters 2 into playing online, via the same sorts of tunneling techniques that people have been using on the Xbox. Sometimes, even when you can get a game set up to work this way, they don't play all that well because they aren't optimized for this kind of connection. In the case of Timesplitters 2, it very nearly was online, the feature having been removed at the last second - perhaps as a result of that, I've heard nothing but good things about how it runs.

I received a mail once that asked in a very pointed way whether or not "Sprite" was paying us to include their product in our comic strip, the implication being - as it always is - that we had in fact sold out. Oh yeah, man. The truth is more ridiculous than sinister. Gabe doesn't drink anything else, ever.

I just got this error when I was trying to play your game Starfleet Command III.

So, I guess the MOH: Spearhead demo is coming out today?