colonelKWODIAN

It took five whole years? Well jeeze, they just don't make Japanese like they used to, do they?

I think something that needs to be said is that it doesn't matter if Nick/Jake leaves. In fact, I still can't tell the difference between them, and it's been what, 49 episodes? I'm not even sure which one is leaving. I don't mean to say that I want either of them to leave, but it doesn't really make a difference if it's just the one of them. I mean, if both left, it would be a big deal, but honestly, guys, they're the same person.

Portal is definitely a good go. I think the Halos are all pretty good for beginners, especially on the bottom two levels, though they aren't nearly as rad as Portal, of course. Much as this might seem like a dumb idea, I feel like the more retarded FPSs are going to be good bets, and are mostly great fun in coop: Halo, COD, MOH (does Medal of Honor even exist anymore?), or maybe even something like Battlefield Heroes (I believe it's largely oriented to beginners). L4D might be ok, but I've never played offline so I'm not sure. Online it's probably a bad idea. I mean, all of these are terrible for beginners online, apart from Heroes.

ThunderPeel2001's list is awesome. Read all of those. I don't think I'm going to do any of the books below justice, but they (particularly the first four, though the last ain't shabby) are truly fantastic, and, I think, some of the best examples of the art form. Black Hole is awesome. It's a beautifully drawn B&W comic by Charles Burns (whose art you may recognize from adverts and that sort of thing). It's a great book, to put it shortly: it's a horror/coming of age story. Black Hole is about a bunch of kids and how they deal with an STD that mutates people into freaky lookin' dudes. I'm a huge sucker for anything by Chris Ware. If you want a quick taste of his work, go for any of the Acme Novelty Libraries. He also has the long form graphical comical book Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Boy on Earth. Essentially, it's depressing stuff. The stories are all about sad people and sad shit that happens to them. But, I think, this isn't a reason to avoid it. His art is really beautiful, it's very clean (people, an art instructor of mine, for instance, sometimes say it's too clean) but it carries the emotional weight of his stories very well. Fun House by Alison Bechdel is a great book. One of the more cartoony looking books I've mentioned here, it's Bechdel's autobiography, her story of growing up as a gay kid in a funeral home and her relationship with her deceased father (odd parallels to Six Feet Under abound). Gipi's work is really great. I believe his only two books are Notes From A War Story and Garage Band. Both are really great stories of kids growing up in versions of Italy, each done in beautiful watercolors. Road To Perdition is an awesome book. Note: Do not read the sequels/spinoffs, read the original graphic novel. Sometimes you can find it with Tom Hanks on the cover. You may have seen the movie, which may or may not be a bad thing (I remember seeing it when it came out and being disappointed, but that was many years ago for me) but the book's loosely based on real life and Lone Wolf and Cub. An Irish mob hitman's family is killed, save his young son, and the two of them go out to seek their revenge.

I heard the Subject Zero audio on the podcast before I saw the trailer, and I'm still wondering whether or not what I initially imagined was worse than the reality of this trailer. I'm going to guess "no". About the whole tattoos for your favorite your kills dealy: in the world of Mass Effect, certainly in the first one and it looks like even more so in this one, does killing someone actually mean anything? There's no feeling to it in most games, and I think Bioware takes a more, to use a bit of a pejorative here, video gamey approach to violence. Anyway, I guess my point is that since violence means nothing in this and most games, why the hell does she care about her kills? It'd be like Mario having tattoos for every koopa he jumped on, or for the really good times he jumped on koopas. I'm sure in ME1 I killed at least two or three hundred people throughout; to call any one of them special would be quite a leap. There's such a disconnect there for me, and it's the type of artificial thing you see tried a lot in games; players don't really care about what happens in the game, so the devs have to tell you that you do, or that the characters do. It's not like Bioware has been creating metric assloads of original, non shitty characters in the past, but they had a few, y'know? We've gone a long way from HK-47.

Well, y'see, to me, "shan't" poses the same problem as "won't". I'd prefer "shalln't".

Hi everybody! So anyway, I was typing the word "won't" and that weird thing hit me where I started to analyze the word and I realized that "won't" is one of the most nonsensical words we have. So anyway, I shall, from now on, use the word (contraction?) willn't in its stead. I also like video games. I have a ps3 and a pc because I didn't want to pay for LIVE. My favorite game right now is driving around Liberty City while listening to podcasts. (On my Zune, not ingame podcasts. Though they really should have those. I mean the talk radio stations get boring really quickly once you hear the same thing a majillion times.) Also, yes, I have a Zune and a PS3. I like fighting losing battles in regards to my technology, evidently. Oh yeah, also I play a lot of CIV IV. EDIT: Dammit, its not it's.