Danny has put together a great site and it just went live a few minutes ago!

I'm back from a cruise of the Bahamas that we'd saved up for earlier this year and it was a blast, my favorite part of it all? Got to say the food.

Gourmet Salmon, on some kind of jello

Endless deserts

Lobster

Chee-eee-ee-zzzeee!

Oddly I didn't actually gain too much weight over the vacation, perhaps because I spent so much time running up and down between decks rather than use the always busy elevators, any other weight will probably be shed by the flu which I conveniently caught right after getting home.

Besides the glorious food time was spent at Freeport, Bahamas (An industrial dock with a couple of souvenir shops thrown in), Nassau, Bahamas (Felt like people actually lived there, but damn glad I don't) and checking out the entertainment they had on the ship. Despite the often dreary weather all eighteen of us had a lot of fun, I won't talk more, instead I'll let the pictures here talk for themselves.

I like to think the red tie makes me look like the spirit

James Bond bike chases

Sunset

Towel animals appeared in our rooms after dinner

Storms and lightning

Shenanigans

We also bought a couple of paintings as souvenirs, no factory garbage for us.

Finally here's a video I shotwith a tour of the ship, take your nausea pills, it's a little rocky: VIDEO

Get your towels ready, it's about to go down.

I'm just packing up thenecessaries (DS, PSP, ZUNE) and I'm heading out on a cruise but can you believe that they charge 75c a minute for wireless access? It'll be strange being totally disconnected for so long, but it seems most of the others I'm going with are taking it a lot harder, but I believe they'll just be missing the Facebook games.

I've been going around taking photos of the serial numbers of everything I'm leaving behind as I've become paranoid about a break in, I do hope that will help, I hear that insurance companies can be a total pain about claims, especially if we try to claim as much crazy stuff as we own. Despite the rush we won't be going on the ship until Sunday, I've had my Mum with me all week and she's going to be going with us, I'm also going to be meeting up with one of my best friends from the UK, so I'm pretty excited about that too.

Have a good week all of you and I'll be back soon with photos and perhaps a completed ChronoTrigger.

Hi guys 'n' gals, before I talk a little about web comics I just want to show this:

Forget your COD4 Night vision goggles and your batarangs, Kung-fu rooster is mean!

Now to the comics.

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! WARNING !
I've done my best to find episode from the following comics that are 'safe for work' however there are a couple of instances of bad language included.

The choice in web comics is huge and there's many great ones out there which just don't get the attention they deserve, so I wanted to highlight six of my favorites, perhaps you'll find something new.

Commissioned Comic

O from commisionedcomic.org is a good friend of myextralife.com and missiondeep.com he's also part of the great ELR podcast. The site has just celebrated five years of updates which is mostly made up of storylines that go nowhere and random musings, but O's great sense of humor is more than enough to make up for the dropped storylines.

O doesn't do a whole lot of videogame work, mostly because living in Columbia limits what games he can get a hold of.

Penny Arcade

Penny Arcade really needs no introduction, Gabriel and Tycho are the kings of the webcomic world with over ten years of updates, their own game and their own convention they are perhaps as mainstream as a web comic can get.

Least I could do

I've only recently discovered Least I could do but it's become perhaps my favorite web comic and something I look forward to every day. Ryan Sohmer is the current artist of the strip which is perhaps one of the more '"adult" of the ones I've listed here, in fact it was pretty hard to find a favorite strip that appeared to be at all suitable to put here, but perhaps that's one of the main reasons I love it. There are a couple of videogame references in the strip, but it mostly just focuses on what a womanizer Rayne (the lead) is.

Ctrl+Alt+Delete

Sometimes I feel bad for Tim Buckley, his CAD comic strip is so often compared directly to Penny Arcade and he seems to get a lot of hate, perhaps it's some politics with Tim's attitude, but as long as he makes good comics I'll keep reading. The comic used to be very game orientated but over the last year the stories have taken more of a front seat (perhaps to separate it from Penny Arcade), but despite some downer storylines (such as an abortion) there's still some good laughs to be had

XKCD

The Geeks' web comic. For most people the XKCD comics won't make much sence and I won't pretend that I undertand them all. The technical and geeky nature of XKCD is the entire charm of the comic, as it sure doesn't focus on art, although sometimes a charactor may wear a hat

VG Cats

All the other comics have pretty constant update schedules or people on standby for guest strips when the artists get the PAXflu, but Scott Ramsoomair from VG cats has one of the more sparatic update schedules. Scott's comics are generally videogame related and also pretty darn disturbing

That's my list for today, I know I'm missing some but these are the ones I visit the most and I think that anyone could get enjoyment from the wide range of humor across all these comics, but let me know if there's a favorite of yours I'm missing out here.

You stupid monkey!

Phew! Times get hard. My wife's still looking for work and now it looks like my job might be in trouble also. It's not a good time to be working for a bank that owns a lot of real estate and according to the papers my bank is on its last legs (note to those who know where I work: I do not have any internal info, just what the papers say). I guess on the bright side there's nothing tying us to Kansas since we rent our apartment and it might be a good opportunity to move to San Fran, if I can find work before I move.

I remember being told by Aaron Thomas:
"The biggest thing I did was move to the San Francisco area. Almost all of the websites/magazines are based out here (I think Game Informer is in Minnesota though), so since this is where the jobs are, it's important to live out here."

Either way, I'm trying to focus on the positive and looking at this as a potential opportunity,who knows, perhaps nothing will happen at all but none the less I've been working hard putting my work on http://www.madelk.co.ukto make sure I'm prepared should things go south.

-=-=-=-=-

Anyway, enough doom 'n' gloom, I figure I'll do something I haven't done in a while: Talk about what I've actually been up to.

Chrono Trigger is still a go-to game for me, I really can't stress how great of an RPG it is, it makes me really wonder why they never thought to release it in the UK.

I've had a very Batman weekend, I've played through Arkham Asylum and retrieved all items from the storyline, then I watched all six Batman movies. I forgot how good the early Batman movies were before they started to get goofy, heck they even have sound effects that sound like they came from a cartoon. As for the game, it's pretty rad, I stunned that I can't find much history about the developers except that one of them did work on Little Big Adventure - which is awesome.

I also played through both Wolfenstein and Shadow Complex during the week. It's quite bananas that Wolfenstein is a $60 game where as Shadow Complex is just $15. Now I'm not saying that Wolfenstein is a terrible game, I'd rate it about average, but an average generic FPS gets beaten down by a well executed Castlevania/Metroid type game any day.

Finally, I think my Wii drive is starting to give up the ghost. It seems that it'll only read disks about every other time, fortunately it only took a couple of minutes to hack the thing and softmod it. Perhaps this will keep the drive alive for longer if the only thing I use it for will be for copying my new games onto a USB hard drive.

Thanks for reading guys and gurls, I've kicked in and started back commenting again, so look for the Elk invading your GameSpot blog soon!