I mentioned Simon Parkin's "savage" and "carnivorous" Uncharted 3 review in my last post, and having several hours of the game now under my belt, I suspect it is only a kind of tactical diplomacy that kept it at eight of ten. This will be the installment where the shine comes off for many people, but for me, the inverse is true: I am wondering if the game is entirely comprised of shine.

Our newest limited edition Laser Cell is now available in the PA store. This particular one features the Lookouts and you might remember it as the cover to the PAX East guide last year. In fact is was requests at PAX that made us decide to turn it into a cell.

Any preorders received before 11/20/11 will be signed by everybody here, just like last time around. t Here's one of the bonus episodes, which is something like a Fourth Panel that didn't result in a strip. It's my associate and I trying to figure out how to be better at our other job, which is "attempting to producing psychologically whole beings."

The Child’s Play 2011 season officially started yesterday! We kicked things off this year with an incredible new website design that should make keeping up with all the different CP events much easier thanks to a new calendar. We’ve also got a brand new map that his been updated with more hospitals for 2011.

I think I was probably content to let another Sonic game pass over me and through me, until I saw a video review at GameTrailers that used words like "Best" and "Game" and "in Decades," all in rapid succession.

Having been harrowed by various modes of Halloween Party exposure, a strip like this was almost a certainty.

The brand new Penny Arcade card game is now available in our store. This is a deck building game along the lines of Dominion or Ascension that uses characters and art from all 12 years of Penny Arcade history. I’ve had a chance to play it quite a bit now and honestly I think it’s the best game of that genre that I have tried. It was created by Cryptozoic, the same guys behind the WoW TCG and the equally awesome card game Food Fight.

Everybody is screwing around with Fitocracy at the office it seems like, or the beta of it, which Gabriel managed to wheedle an invitation for. It's a social/gamification engine designed to incentivize physical activity. As I've suggested many times, I'm deeply invested in the idea that I exist discretely from "the husk." I am often deeply uncomfortable with the ineluctable fact of my body. That will either sound crazy to you, or it will sound like something you might think yourself in the secret vaults of your own mind. Making time to move this thing around and get to know it has made consciousness far more bearable.

We did it again! We made Dungeons and Dragons into a stage show at the last PAX, which you can see here. Many thanks to Wizards of the Coast, particularly our DM Chris Perkins, who is seen here in rare form. And also to Paul and Storm, who agreed to troubadour the event. Troubadour may not entirely be a verb. In any case, you can purchase the songs they troubadoured from the store.

What they're doing visually in the PC version of Battlefield 3 often, often borders on ridiculous. I will sometimes just shake my head the screen, the nearly silent "oh, fuck you" tucked below Ventrilo's voice threshold. My experience with the beta wasn't especially positive; this wasn't one of those "betas" which are sometimes released, with the quotation marks firmly affixed. Performance concerns and general anxiety about its stability made me wary, but I'd already preordered it. Indeed, it was my preorder that gave me access to a beta that made me uneasy about my purchase! I was caught in a chronoloop. And then, after I'd secured the real thing, it wouldn't let me join any games ever, which made me snarl and stamp my hoof.

Gabriel has continued his descent into Skylanders-inspired madness, and he would be farther down this particular hole if he could find a store that actually had product on hand. Apparently this "physical DLC" approach is working for them: whenever he goes somewhere to purchase additional toys, the place looks like it's been reclaimed by nature.

Just like last time, everybody here will sign all the Season 2 preorders. There are several ways to get it: you can preorder the set itself, which is fresh, and looks like this.

Batman: Arkham City exists, and roun' these parts it's getting play for real. We detail what I'm sure is a common problem in today's sequential offering, as there's like four hundred of these fucking things and they're every-Goddamn-where. I have to say, though, that I have a very hard time flying right over this game's plaintive cries; they're authentically chilling, in the vein of Red Faction: Guerilla's awful interrogation. I don't know how they got these sounds out of a person without applying a literal pipe to those areas of the body least able to withstand it.

The "rumor" is that the protagonist of the last three Assassin's Creed games - Ezio Auditore de Firenze - will be making an appearance in Soul Calibur V without a trip into the character creator. I only maintain this "rumor" narrative because I know all about them 'shops, but he's a perfect fit and it would be crazy not to have him in there. They did Link for Chrissakes, and he's not even from our planet.

I was interested in Skylanders as soon as I heard about it. I love toys and the whole concept just seemed cool to me. With that said I was still surprised by the marketing assault I found at our local Toys “R” Us or TRU as those of us who used to work there called it. I took Gabe down there who is seven now and smack dab in the middle of what I imagine their target demographic to be. When he saw the wall of Skylanders toys and accessories he actually started drooling. I took what might be the worst photo ever. Nice job auto focus.

It's been a while, but I have every faith that I'll be able to manage it. Don't call it a comeback! Call it a lethargic, days-long emergence from a waxen sac.