I sometimes ask friends who work at Microsoft why it is that they can't just be happy with absolute dominion over the realm of personal computing. Why they must prowl and scrape, why there is snarling, why there is lurking under bushes and (most importantly) why there is a subsequent leaping out to grip customers and then drag them with their powerful jaws.

A curious fact one can learn if you actually read the article you're sourcing:

Battlefield 1942 is almost seven years old, if you can believe it. Obviously, the events depicted are much older - but we've been playing the Conquest gametype now since 2002.

Internet just came back at the office, which allowed me to see a typographical error that has apparently been festering up there all day.  I am suffering retroactively.

There was a point at which Gabriel and I decided we would be Mixed Martial Arts enthusiasts for some reason, and I don't recall exactly why. Fascination with "combat systems" is not out of the ordinary for boys of any age; and speaking personally, any new conceptual space is loaded with jargon, sparkling in rich seams, and fighting is particularly dense in this regard. I have an urge to begin simply listing the radical, mind-expanding lexicon of this space, but I wont.  Krav Maga! Okay, that one just slipped out. Glaive-Guisarme! I'd better get a new paragraph going, for real. 

When you come across two Gods creating universes from scratch, it can be worthwhile to compare their approaches.

I jumped into a live game of 1 vs. 100 on Friday night and had a really great time. Originally I was just going to jump in and take a look. Then Kara ended up joining me on the couch and before we knew it, two hours had passed. We had a blast and we never even made it into the "mob" much less got chosen as the "one". Playing from the crowd as they call it is still incredibly entertaining. You're still competing for real prizes and watching the action between the one and the mob. Cheering when they choose to battle the mob and booing when they take their money and run. I'm hooked now and plan on catching as many of the live shows as I can. The announcer was great but in my fantasy Microsoft comes to Tycho and I, and asks us to host a version of the game filled with only video game trivia. 

When Gabe told me that he and Kara had taken 1 vs 100 for a spin, enjoying it thoroughly, I asked him if he'd tried Extended Play - the relatively no-frills trivia offering - or a Live Show, which features a more robust ruleset, prizes, and living host who comments directly on the proceedings. He didn't know that was even a thing. He made the time, and came away impressed.

Immediately upon returning to my gloom-wrought domain, I cranked up my 360 and downloaded Battlefield 1943. I'd seen it at New York Comic Con, pulsing in some cluster of kiosks, and its familiarity was a comfort to me. I didn't really understand what it was at first, but it quickly became apparent that they'd made a subset of Battlefield 1942 on Bad Company's Frostbite Engine. I'm fundamentally alright with that. We were in the beta for the inaugural Battlefield title, and enjoyed it thoroughly - what's more, I think that console gamers need Wake Island, even if they don't know what that is. They are missing a critical vitamin, and when exposed to it for the first time, I am certain their bodies will respond.

With this, the fifth and final page, Lookouts comes to a close. Unless it gets optioned or something (!!!), it might be a while until we come back to it. On the other hand, with any luck at all, Automata will drop before the month is out - covering our absence during San Diego Comic-Con. We'd like to thank Becky Dreistadt and Oliver Grigsby once more for their investigation of the nascent Lookouts setting. Getting another take on it has educated us immensely, and I feel like we could really kick the shit out of a Lookouts comic right now. Of course, this scenario assumes we could collaborate with parallel versions of ourselves to complete it - mad doppelgangers, blessedly sequestered in discrete "columns" of space-time.

Guest Lookouts Page Four is now available, peeled hot from the griddle by the perpetually fluxing Dreistadt/Grigsby meta-entity. Their chemically complex state is dangerously unstable - I hope we'll be able to secure the fifth and final page before heretofore uncataloged forces burn, crush, boil, and freeze them simultaneously.

Guest Lookouts continues, with Becky Dreistadt and Oliver Grigsby at the reins. Things are certainly looking bad for our heroes. I'm tense, even though I already know what happens! Apparently they're doing a good job.

And here you go: Page Two of Lookouts, hand-painted by Becky Dreistadt and penned by Oliver Grigsby.  Works of this power and sophistication will run Friday, Monday, and Wednesday, at which point you'll be forced to endure our work once again.

This is something we consider quite often: how massively multiplayer online role-playing games create a vortex of social musts whose wicked gravities are almost impossible to avoid.