In the manner of today's hottest reality programs, I need to inform you that the story you are about to read is entirely true. Historically in cases such as this the names have been changed to protect the innocent. In this case, the names have been retained specifically to amplify their shame.

We've got a new episode of Penny Arcade: The Series up today, about Dungeons & Dragons. It touches on a number of themes appropriate to that topic.

I'm fairly certain that playing videogames has given me unrealistic expectations when it comes to solving real problems. Independent of the scenario - a race of ravenous sentient robots, a wife lost in the folds of a parenthetical metanarrative, and so on - I can be expected to deliver a satisfactory resolution in twenty hours or less. More than satisfactory, in fact. I will recalibrate your entire concept of success as it relates to human endeavor.

**UPDATE**

I'll let him tell you:

I tend to like a little wiggle room in my narratives.

Split/Second - I will honor them by maintaining the slash - is an incredibly solid product. You can play the demo as many times as I did, which (between you and me) could well be described as a fuck-ton, and emerge from it with a sense that you have a firm handle on its bombast and can therefore skip the final release. It will be more of this, you might say to yourself. You'd be wrong; I certainly was.

Blur is marvelous, even though these might as well be real power-ups.

If you have not checked out the Penny Arcade store recently you should. I say that because, when you buy things from the store we get the money and we use it to buy stuff. Here are a few items of interest:

I played through Alan Wake prior to the actual release, before much was made of its fairly vigorous "promotional consideration." I've already said that as a writer in the Northwest, liking a game about a writer in the Northwest was probably a foregone conclusion. I never got tired of the way their technology manipulates light, and there are discussions to be had about the narrative itself that are worth having. I didn't notice the brands, or didn't care, because I was trying to keep my entire body contiguous, or I was busy looking at something else - but God damn, guys. God damn.

Gabriel thinks that he might be done with Red Dead Redemption already, and it won't be the first time I've taken a save we've created together and dragged it to completion. We pulled a very solid night of multi out of it, though; I should have recognized just how bright that candle was, and reverse-engineered the saying.

Here are some quick thoughts about the games I've been playing recently:

I just put Forgotten Sands to bed, last night around nine or so. It's strange, in a way, but maybe we shouldn't wonder when a series about time travel literally travels, itself, through time.

A PA reader and medic stationed just outside Baghdad sent me a mail this week asking about how I run my D&D games via Email. It just so happens that with the new baby I have not had time to run a proper game for my crew. What I decided to do instead is take them through a little adventure via Email until I'm able to get back to the table.

Red Dead Redemption sat next to my keyboard all day yesterday, face down, and I frequently stole glances at the screens printed on the back.  Soon, soon.

I am occasionally coaxed back into Azeroth, or into its battle-scarred adjunct The Outland, and each time I return to a bank full of mysterious garbage and elixir-maddened shrews. I don't know what half of that stuff is anymore, some of it is related to quests I've also forgotten, and some were almost certainly kept because they had "a cool icon." My bags are no better. They seem like someone else's bags, bulging with trinkets of questionable utility, baubles which steep in a puddle of alchemical reagents and alien produce.