Still, with all I've seen, this excerpt from RPGVault, the sour smelling basement of our hated rivals, the IGN Network, shocked me.

Who would have thought that at this late date there was anything left to invent, but there it is, RPGVault's contribution to cut-and-paste journalism: the grudging link.   Here's some advice for TruthSword, and just so there's no confusion, I'm going to phrase it in the form of a reference to Star Wars: There is no try, either link or do not link.  Remember the agony of choosing your fantasy name?  Remember having to decide between TruthSword, OrcSlayer, BladeMaster, and Captain Kirk?  Linking to us shouldn't be that kind of trial.  Just don't do it.   Instead, link to your own doctoral thesis on Blaze and Blade, the only thing on the planet less enjoyable than Blaze and Blade itself.   Seriously, it's twenty-five hundred words, any of them potentially entertaining, just not in the order you put them in.

Next time you think about mentioning us, TruthSword, feel free to take the twelve hits it'll generate and shove 'em right up your fucking Monster Manual.  I'm your worst nightmare, a baby genius who isn't a baby.  Cross me again, and you're dead.   And if your primate cops think they can catch me, they better have a good map of Canada.  And a time machine

THQ might want to consider keeping its screenshot excreting orifice shut.  Dear VP of brand marketing, you're fired

The music does the job well in that it nicely sets the atmosphere that slightly gloomy and horrific feel that World War II is all famous about.

And I mean he could deal me the kind of ass-kicking that would kill my ass, and then my head. I'm a muscley guy myself - if I'm not stabbing a meaty finger at the blender's frappé button, frappé-ing up my next mega-muscle drink, I'm probably bench pressing 1000 (metric) - so it takes a lot of courage and a kind of admirable self-awareness for me to admit that Jason Hall could, to quote a statement I made recently to some children, punch me so hard my whole family would die.

This kind of painful insight does not come without consequences, however. I've been in a serious funk for the last two weeks and I've been emotionally incapable of updating the page. UGO, in fact, has fired me, while keeping Chet and Marvin. C'est la vie, you French fucks, I say.  It'll take more than you and Jason Hall to stop me from updating the page, unless Jason Hall actually karate kicks a hole through my neck. Getting canned was a real wake-up call for me. I realized that if I need a refrigerator moved, I'll phone Mr. Hall. If I want a game to play, give me the flabby, pale-yellow committee that designed Chu Chu Rocket. Monolith has proved that when a developer focuses exclusively on the heavy lifting component of game design, Blood 2 is the result.

I may be out of a job, but I'll be okay. As long as there's blood gushing through these old bones, I'll never go hungry, because you can sell blood and use the money to buy peach schnapps whose main ingredient, peach, is food. So don't send me any sympathy cards, especially with a lot of swearing. I don't know why everyone feels the need to curse so much when talking to me. I get emails that would make Jon Benet Ramsey's killers - Jon Benet Ramsey's parents - blush.  All of that allegedly.

So I'm back, but maybe a little rusty from all the depression. I'm going test the water by dipping my pinky toe into a John Romero joke.

John Romero... is gay!

I guess I still got it, and I'm just warming up. Here are some exclusive pictures of the John Romero doll that is rumored to be part of the line of products that Ion will soon release to support the awesome Daikatana strategy guide.  Other products, including a Daikatana video game and a mug, are also apparently in the works.

I've also been getting a lot of email lately asking essentially the same question, "Are you fucking cunts going to E3?" I figure I should probably answer the question publicly so that people can stop sending me mail calling me all the different words for vagina. We are absolutely going, and Seanbaby will also be attending as part of our entourage. You may have heard from some people that Chet and I are attending as part of Sean's entourage, but that's wrong. Unlike many of the other media outlets, we won't have our own booth or any pretty booth ladies. What we're hoping to have instead is the it-girl for the twenty-first century, Mike Schank.  Keep your fingers crossed.

Daiketanna Exclusive. 
Lead character, Hirro Miytoyoto, based on Saturday Night Live's Mango.

Computer Gaming World - Some Kind Of Imbeciles?

Ultima Ascension Enhanced Soundtrack
A masterpiece of dark dungeonous undercurrents and medievil triumpancy
fuse together to bring you quite possible one of the most exquisite of all
music cd's in our inventory. The act of floatation will be among the listener
upon first listen.

 

What kind of freaking Cylon do you have to be to understand this thing?  I know it's way beyond my ragtag fleet of misfiring synapses.  The GameDaily scheme breaks every rule of at-a-glance-ism and graph design.  Nox seems to have received a score of five unlabeled green bars, plus a three, a five, and a B.  I think one more symbol would really ratchet up the amount of confusion available in just one glance, maybe a fruit scale.  For instance, Soldier of Fortune could get four unlabeled green bars, a two, a seven, a yellow C, and a pineapple.  I think the list of numbers and phrases on the left, including the invisible X-Factor, may have some relevance to the "review at a glance panel", but it might not.  It appears that the "Overall" scale is not quite as strict as the "Final Grade" scale, but again I'm making an equivalency-educated guess

On Monday, the principal Mexican Roman Catholic Archdiocese, the only group of Catholics with cajones big enough to actually name their kids Jesus, made its position on Pokemon clear.  The game and its ancillary merchandise now join the ranks of birth control, Satan, gays, and Jews as ideas and activities best avoided by those Mexicans not wanting to spend eternity mouth deep in a sea of boiling shit.  In its weekly Catholic lifestyle and threatening to condemn you to an eternity spent bobbing in an endless ocean of scalding shit newsmagazine, Desde La Fe - a Spanish phrase that roughly translates to a bunch of bandellero strapped goons baring their black teeth and screeching "ayyieyieyieyieyieyie!" - the archdiocese stated that Pokemon incites violence and sexual perversity among children.

That previous paragraph is a fine example of the kind of response to this story you're likely to see all over my nigga the Internet today.  Catholics, like Nazis and belligerent aliens, are one of the few groups that can be publicly maligned with impunity.  If the Mexican Roman Catholic archdiocese came out against running your tongue across the floors of gas station restrooms, there'd still be some kind of bitchy outcry.  Sure, the Crusades were a big scandal, nine hundred years ago.   At least they tried to do something about Islam.  And abortion?   Well, what are you gonna do?  I'm the worst nightmare of both sides - I think fetuses are soul-equipped little people, but I just don't care.  The fact of the matter is that the direct quote from Desde La Fe is this:

Behind the huge merchandising phenomenon one finds, as in many Japanese cartoons, a combination of elements that incite violence and sexual perversion among children

Meaning someone at the Hall of Catholics did their homework, because truer words were never spoken.  Like everyone else, for me the phrase "Japanese Cartoon" conjures up images of adolescent girls being impaled vagina-first on a tentacle until it pops out their eye.  Whereas in America we at least put on a wholesome front and punctuate any public accomplishment with cries of "I'm going to Disneyworld!", the Japanese, after doing something noteworthy such as dropping bombs on Hawaii, will flash the double thumbs-up and announce thay they're going to "put on my rubber suit and masturbate to rape comics!"  Of course, these traits aren't exhibited by every Japanese person, just all the one's that I've heard about. 

If you want a real scandal for this week, here's a letter we received from reader Mike B.:

The biggest misuse of the Internet has been just beyond my reach, but now I understand who the real bad guys are. These stupid fucking snowglobe pages have all these pictures of snowglobes, BUT THE FUCKING SNOW ISN'T MOVING! Nobody even bothered to make a 2 frame fucking animated gif or something, and all of these fucking cool looking snowglobes ARE JUST SITTING THERE LOOKING FUCKING STUPID! Like this asshole- http://web.wt.net/~jsims/SnowDomes/snowdomes.htm He's got the cool MIDI and every thing, BUT THE DOLPHINS JUST FUCKING SIT THERE! I think the snow is just some painted on photoshop thing or something, but snow doesn't HOVER! Please let me know if you can do anything...

First of all, Mike, nice mouth.  I've always tried to make this page an open forum for the discussion of what assholes these snowglobe people are.  Secondly, I'll do what I can.  It will involve making fun of Daikatana over the next several weeks, months, and years.  I hope that helps

Many readers have written to ask us where we stand on gaming's biggest issues - Quake 3 vs. Unreal Tournament and Mark Rein and The World vs. Jason Hall.  Other readers have written soliciting our opinion on naming an afro-centric all anal porn production company whose name must be the rearrangement of an AC/DC song title.  To this latter group, we can unequivocally state that "Black in Back" is your best choice.   Things get a little stickier when answering the first question. 

We tried to dodge the UT vs. Q3A issue by backing the less politically charged Dukes of Hazzard game.  And here I'm talking about industry-political, because supporting a game in which a pair of white moonshiners terrorize the rural south by shooting flaming arrows from the window of a muscle car whose roof is decorated with the confederate flag would obviously raise some eyebrows in any other context.   Southpeak Interactive allayed our fears of aligning ourselves with the white supremacist and separatist back-to-Europe movements by sending us a box of Dukes of Hazzard merchandise, and we were content to sit this one out secure in the knowledge that, for once, we were doing the right thing.  But we've received enough mail to make us rethink our position on making a public statement.

Unreal Tournament is the better game, but Quake 3: Arena includes our logo.  So we're calling that one a tie.  However, since office rules don't permit our opinion derbies to end in deadlock, we put the competition into overtime and pitted the offensiveness of Cliff Bleszinski's wardrobe against the idiocy of everything that comes out of Paul Steed's mouth.  It was really no contest: Cliff's medallions and shiny suits are an affront only to good taste while Steed's nuttiness seems directed squarely at us and other people we respect, such as holder-of-subjective-opinions- regarding-items-he's-purchased / astronaut John Glenn.  Unreal Tournament was the clear winner.  Congratulations to everyone at Epic.  We'd like to save them the trouble of sending us an apology for forcing us to pay for their failed first attempt, Unreal, by informing them that we pirated our copies of Unreal Tournament, making us even.

A much less contentious issue is Mark Rein vs. Jason Hall.  Much like the Atari 2600 cartridge Snail vs. Squirrel, or us vs. the mushroom, or us vs. Salman Rushdie, or us vs. Daikatana, or us vs. Drakan, or us vs. Jason Hall, or Taiwan vs. China, unless you're Kevin Murphy, Jason Hall, a squirrel, or China, it's pretty obvious which side to take.  In Christian mythology, Lilith was the precursor of Eve and the Devil's grandmother.  Satan, the trickster, goes by many names including the father of lies.  Lilith, then, can be considered the great-grandmother of lies.  With this in mind, Lith, being short for Lilith, and tech, being short for technology, is Lou Cypher-esque wordplay meaning "the grandmother of lies about technology."  So there's that.  Plus, in Semitic legend, Lilith is a female spirit who haunts deserted places, like the area of Best Buy where Blood 2 and Shogo are kept, and attacks children.  If I was marketing a tool to design interactive toys for children, I would make sure the name didn't evoke bleak images of eating children.  Unless I was Satan.  Obviously, I'm not insinuating that Jason Hall is Satan.  Roberta Williams is Satan.  I'm not even saying that Jason Hall thinks he's Satan or that he worships Satan, I'm just saying that there's no compelling reason to rule those possibilities out if you're shopping around for a 3D game engine and are concerned about the continuing intactness of your soul.   Note that the ƈ' in LithTech 2 can be considered short for "number 2" which is poop, as in Hell's sea of boiling poop, or just regular poop which is also pretty bad.  I'll end on that note.  Thank you