Tycho and I hit our local EBX this morning over at the Redmond mall. I picked up Virtua Fighter 4 and he grabbed Gunvalkyrie. We spent all afternoon playing VF4 and my official opinion of it is "Shit Damn!" This game is about as close to perfect as a fighting game can get. Like Tycho said, we are normally Tekken fans. We have been since Tekken 1 on the PSX. While our opinions differ on Tekken 4 (I think it's great and he is an idiot) we still consider ourselves fans of the series. On the other hand we never really got into the VF games. I mean sure we played VF1 just like everyone else but when they dropped two on us Tycho and I where knee deep is Samurai Showdown two. We could look over and see the VF2 machine sitting there looking all cool but nothing was gonna pull us away from the glory that was SS2. Then three came out and our local arcade decided they should charge a $1.00 to play it. Needless to say it didn't get much play. Rather than drop the price they decided to sell it and that was the last we ever saw of VF3. So we loaded up VF4 not really knowing what to expect. What we got was a fighting experience that totally blows everything else out of the water. We picked up the strategy guide along with the game and I have to say I highly recommend it. This game is fucking deep. You could spend weeks just trying to get good at one or two characters.

I actually like Terminal Reality as a developer, so don't take today's strip to mean the opposite. When I told Gabe that this "BloodRayne" was from the (quote) Nocturne Guys, he made a scrunchy face which said "I am eating an entire lemon." He was coming from an angry place. Long ago, see, Gabe entered an art contest at a site - Kazi Wren's "Spookhouse," if memory serves - and won a copy of Nocturne for his trouble. In reality, it was me that won it, because after playing it for around ten minutes he uninstalled it and tried to lose the box underneath a pile of stuff. Developers, you will find that our Gabriel is not a patient man. He takes your poor control scheme and fun-house camera angles as calculated acts of personal aggression. Me, I'll let you get by on raw style just so long as this style of yours > some massive pain in my ass. Not so with my man Gabe. Even when he gets your game for free, it would appear that you still owe him.

First off I would like to thank everyone who showed up for our PA PSO weekend. I had a great time meeting everyone. We will certainly be organizing more of these weekends in the future.

The Penny Arcade PSO Weekend was a smashing success, insofar as an exotic menagerie of hostile organisms were successfully smashed. I don't know how many people actually showed up, but it seemed like a lot, or at least, a lot of people who dug out their DC's and went through the trouble of setting them up. There was much discussion of the upcoming beach zone in PSO for the 'Cube, a game whose release will likely kick off another weekend like this one. About a half-hour into it, it occurred to me: Why aren't we doing this all the time? PA, I mean? Why aren't we having extravaganzas of one sort or another with marked frequency? The next one will probably be a PC game, Medal or Wolf probably, and I'm willing to bet that HomeLAN might even handle the server side. Still thinking, still thinking, but it's like I said in the forum thread on this topic - it's like having a social event without all the weak knees and discomfort our kind often associates with all that realspace crap. I may not be making a lot of sense. I played PSO for around twenty-three hours of a forty-eight hour period, I can't really focus on shit, and when I look up and down this text I couldn't tell you if it was a phone book, or a cookie recipe, or what.

Really.

The Bnetd issue is the hot topic of discussion again in our forum. I've already said right here exactly how I feel about it so I don't see any reason to go into that again. However I would like to mention something about the EFF. In there press release they offer a link to our cartoon on the subject. I mailed Tim Jung and let him know that without our new posts on the topic the comic strip was out of context. He was very cool about it and removed the link right away. He sent me a couple e-mails asking why I don't agree with them but he wasn't really a dick about it. I felt like the problem had been resolved. Then I got a mail from Will Doherty. I'll just post it here so you can see it:

As a loose coalition of geeks, today's strip will make sense to most of the site's readership. It doesn't matter what we've heard about it, if anything. It doesn't matter if we've seen it or not, or what we'll think of it once we do. We see movies based on games so that somewhere, in the onyx tower where the cowled Accountant Lords ply their trade, in some small column and in some small way, a movie based on a gaming license registers a blip on Hollywood's sensitive equipment. I'm investing in the great movie that will be made when the people who create pop culture in this country decide we've been good enough - for long enough - to have it. The one true gaming movie. I think of it as a sort of Messiah Payment Plan.

Ravenous for news, I hit VGNation - and saw something I hadn't seen yet. Check it out - in all my imagining about what form a game that utilized the GC and the GBA might take, I guess I never expected this.

It's a good time to be a star wars fan. Far be it from me to complain about a how many star wars games there are. I have already told you how excited I am about Knights of the Old Republic and Star Wars Galaxies. However Lucas Arts refuses to make the one game that I really want to play. I understand that they are making these episode one games to tie in with the movies. However they are overlooking the books which could provide them with games that are about a hundred times cooler. Anyone who has been following the star wars story line into the New Jedi Order books will tell you that the galaxy is in the middle of a shit storm the likes of which it has never seen. Seriously would you rather play a game set against the backdrop of political intrigue that is the episode one/two universe or the galaxy wide war against an unstoppable foe that has already brought the republic to it's knees as in the New Jedi Order? For me the choice is a simple one. Drop me into an x-wing cockpit and send my ass out against the Vong. That is where I want to play. Put me in the fucking trenches of a war that has already cost the lives of some of the most cherished characters in star wars history. Not killing wave after wave of mindless droids from the safety of some spotless chrome starfighter. Someone at Lucas Arts needs to grow a fucking brain and realize that they are missing out on what could be some of the best games to ever use the goddamned license. I know you don't accept un-solicited creative ideas from out side the company but maybe you should. I mean come on, Obi-Wan, Battlegrounds, Power Battles or Star Wars fucking Demolition? You guys obviously aren't coming up with winners on your own. Why not look to the fans for some inspiration. We know what kind of games we want to play. One survey would have told you that no one wants to play a demolition derby set in the star wars universe. A DEMOLITION DERBY SET IN THE STAR WARS UNIVERSE! This is the kind of shit we get but you won't let us play a game set in what is arguably the most dramatic period of strife the star wars universe has ever seen? Please Lucas Arts, I am begging you. Pick up a copy of one of the New Jedi Order books. Give it a read and see if it isn't screaming to have a game made out of it.

Gabe (and )told me about this Flippin' Kirby thing, where Kirby falls down from your TV, into your GameBoy Advance, and you play him in there. That seems to cry out "using it as a controller" to me, so maybe this was an Xbox rep wearing a Mario pin or something. Need more info? The hand_of_g0d writes:

I just had too many of these, had to do something with 'em.

It takes two HTTP servers to keep the site running smoothly, and the main one - the one I publish updates to - is housed at a co-lo facility that was having some kind of router problem. Many of you were getting in just fine, hooking up to the other of the two servers, and many of you were (more than likely) just timing out. Sorry about the trouble, it's nice to have you with us and that behind us.

I have gotten a lot of mail about our PSO weekend. I want to make sure everyone knows not to purchase a used copy of PSO version 1. This game will only work on the first Dreamcast it is played in. You need to buy a new copy if you do not already have one. You can get it on the cheap right here if you are interested. Also make sure you get version one not version two.

I was extremely pleased with Red Alert 2, as well as the Yuri expansion - they married creative, sometimes bizarre units with a frantic pace that approached arcade intensity.

Well I said that Batjew and I would deliver a full review of Herdy Gerdy today. It turns out that was a big fucking lie. What we did deliver though is something I think is even better. Really I do. We got together the other night to discuss our feelings about the game over messenger and then figured, why should we do any extra work? Let's just post the chat log. So that is exactly what we have done. It's a candid, behind the scenes look at something or other. Be sure and check it out.

Scouring Evil Avatar for tender news, they had a couple links from Planet GameCube that I found highly relevant. There's an article up that explains some of the history behind the recent Square developments, and another item that claims a port of Final Fantasy Tactics may be on the way for the GBA. Of course, the The Madman has all this and more.