...before me was a throne...and the One who sat there had the appearance of jasper...From the throne came flashes of lightning, rumblings, and peals of thunder...Around the throne were four living creatures, and they were covered with eyes, in front and in back...Day and night they never stopped saying: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come."

Terrifying excerpt from the Cthulhu Mythos describing a sunken or outer-space city whose name is a chilling, vowelless string of consonants and apostrophes?   Close.  It's the apostle John's account of Heaven from Revelation 4:2-8.   As far as I can tell - after a month spent in quiet Bible study and silent admiration of my own reflection - it's the only actual description of Heaven in the entire book.  Now there's no cynical prick on the planet or in near orbit who's more pro-Christian than me.  Or at least more anti-anti-Christian.  But I just gotta state for the collapsing electronic permanent record here that the final reward sounds like some spooky American McGee shit I'd rather avoid. 

Other than the fact that my abrupt religious conversion and subsequent John-fueled apostasy explains my month long absence, the only reason I bring it up is because of games about Nazis.  I love them.  I look forward to them with the same stubborn optimism that Christians apply to Heaven and John Carmack and Anna Kang apply to the time when Ayn Rand wills herself back from the dead to cleanse the Earth of crippleds and retardeds.  And like all the bewildered dead Christians who are now trapped for eternity with the four insane eyeball creatures, I always end up getting burned.   

The most recent example of this trend is Valuesoft's WW2: Normandy.   True to form, I though it'd be great, I told people it'd be great, and it turns out it's terrible.  I'm still getting my sea legs back after my long hiatus, so I'm not going to attempt a strenuous deconstruction of it.  One point of interest, however, is that it was developed by Third Law, the people who brought you the "KISS" game.  I put KISS in quotes in much the same way that angry people will write things like 'The American "Justice" System' - I'm trying to bring to life for you the bitter irony of it all.  WW2: Normandy is a direct sequel to KISS Psycho Circus in the sense that they both share a common theme: no KISS.  On the other hand, Third Law has sort of betrayed the central tenet of their bait-and-switch design philosophy by not, as expected, setting WW2: Normandy in Austria during World War One.   But the major thing I don't like about WW2: Normandy is all of it.  And that's what I did on my spring vacation, and Chet was there too.  The end.

In other news, E3 is next week.  We're going again this year.   Since the only original-content game sites left on the Internet are us, IGN, and Gamespot - and IGN may be out of business before E3 finishes and Gamespot is switching to both a subscriber-model and an all-Spanish format - we're planning to cover the event in much greater detail than we did last year.  This year, our expanded coverage will include commentary on games.  We're even going to finally wrap-up our E3 2000 report with an article called "E3 2000 part 2: E3 2001".

During my mysterious absence, I received a lot of mail from concerned readers whose main concern was that they hadn't called me a cunt much recently.  The other major topic was when were we going to review Black and White.  Chet and I each bought Black and White with every intention of playing it all the way through.   To quote the famous closing line from John Steinbeck's Orwellian nightmare novel, Of Mice and Men: The best laid plans of mice and men...  I didn't even install Black and White.  Neither did Chet.  Instead, we played Tribes 2.  I think I speak for Chet and, as always, id Software and the U.S Government, when I say that Tribes 2 is the greatest game ever.  Unfortunately, there's roughly a one in two chance that it won't run on your computer.  Reverse-unfortunately, that's better odds than you get playing forty bucks worth of scratch-offs.