Click here to read this week\'s twoplayer game comic.

There\'s no better atmosphere for writing the commentary of a comic strip than being in a hotel room in Hong Kong as someone in the room next door sings incredibly untalented karaoke. In Cantonese. Though annoying, the humor is still there, somewhere.

But speaking of funny things...

I\'m in Hong Kong for a game conference that preceded the Asia Game Show & Digital Entertainment Expo Asia 2005. I was invited a few months ago to be a keynote speaker at the conference, and I decided to stick around to see what I could see as the show moved on. I have no idea if the presentation I gave was what the people that invited me expected, but I think I was certainly one of the more... unexpected presentations. In a crowd where nearly every speaker was over 40 years old and wearing ties, I\'m pretty sure that I was not only the youngest, but probably the only speaker to throw out his notes on stage, and then literally strip off his suit jacket, roll up his sleeves, and proceed to give his presentation with complete indifference to his prepared materials.

It\'s possible it would have been better if I\'d stuck to my original plan of cowering behind the podium while I read from a piece of paper. Then, at least, I probably wouldn\'t have gotten nervous, spoken too fast, and left most of the audience behind in a pile of dust and debris.

Then again, it really wouldn\'t have been GF! style. If there is anything you quickly learn about the game industry it\'s that we are not suit and tie people, and the independents among us are hardly ever able to conform for long. It\'s possible that no one understood a word I said - I might have delivered 30 minutes of incomprehensible drivel - but I enjoyed doing it, at the very least.

Will I ever be invited back? Who knows, but they\'ll remember me, at least... probably as that dude who said stuff.

Honestly, I would have been happier if they\'d remembered me a bit more specifically than that, but beggars can\'t be choosers, as they say.

But moving on...

If you\'ve been following the comic, you might have noticed recently that the \"weekly\" publication has not been weekly, as of late. There are a variety of reasons for this, from the mundane explanation that everyone becomes busy during the holiday season, to the more out of the ordinary, like part of the comic\'s team is in Hong Kong at the moment for a game conference.

That would be me.

The advantage of working at an independent game magazine is that we\'re close to both the readers and the independent publishers, and you\'ll never have to worry about GamesFirst! having pop-up ads. Since we have no corporate structure insisting on making money, we\'re free to ignore profit in favor of things like integrity and better design.

The downside is that creative projects like TwoPlayer comics suffer at the hands of busy schedules and unexpected trips overseas more readily than if we were a larger, corporate entity. Not to worry, we\'ll quickly be back on track after the turn of the New Year. TwoPlayer comic has been published consistently now for over 8 months, and perhaps every once in a while a little breathing room is needed to keep things going. We\'ve implemented some different editorial controls recently as we move to integrate the comic more deeply into the GamesFirst! line-up, and we\'ll see how that works.

At the beginning of creative things, kinks get to be worked out. Fluctuations in production steals shouldn\'t be viewed as error of the comic as a refining of technique; we have to figure out how to deliver the best quality of comic over an extended time.

Good or bad, that\'s just the way it works, and I hope you\'ll be willing to work with us on this. In the end, we\'ll have a better comic for it, I think.