On the last night of TGS, the official Destructoid Peace Summits between the Nick Chester Anger Society, its eponymous antagonist and the diplomat Dale North took place, and like many such summits, we all soon found peace by wildly gesticulating with our middle fingers in the direction of a common enemy... in this case, none other than that swarthy Cuban wearing nothing but a smile, a pimp suit and a gay robot for a hat. We refer, of course, to Mr. Destructoid himself.

Grievances were naturally aired.

"Get this," Eliza complained over her fifth mayonnaise margarita. "Did you know he actually told us we had to censor f*ck above the jump?"

As all of you know, I'm a huge fan of homoeroticism in gaming. No, really. I'm so supportive of gay gaming that I actually make a point of pronouncing "video games" as "video gaymes." Also, much like Nick Chester, I am gay myself, and as further evidence will even allude cryptically to my Tokyo clubbing adventures in Homoshinjuku the other night with several PROMINENT and SHOCKING gaming luminaries who MAY or MAY NOT be Tommy Tallerico and Adam Sessler, neither of whom are the heterosexual date rapists they might so eerily resemble, but both of whom still should be avoided in empty men's rooms.

Now, it's common knowledge that Eliza's my beard, so when Eliza and I first heard Flynn De Marco of Gay Gamer rave about Duel Love while fanning himself with a lotus-shaped Dragon Quest fan, we both knew we had to play it.

But whose hands-on impression would be more useful to you, our Deetoid droogies? Is it the opinion of Eliza — a morbidly obese straight woman who stains everything and likes to hang out with a constabulary of gay men as a laughable excuse for her feculent, cheese-scented virginity? The answer, of course, is no, but she just wouldn't shut up about it, so we decided to both do one.

Eliza played Duel Love first and I guess her preview is forthcoming: she's really burning Niero on this whole TGS deal we set up, so who knows. Here's mine.

I am standing on the platform of the Rapid Shogo line, stretching flat and straight from the heart of Tokyo to the remote district of Kahimakuhari. A throng of flesh compresses me from every side: one hundred million Japanese gamers who need to be squeezed onto this one train to go to TGS. Today is the first day the convention is open to the public.

Behind the crowd, a row of subway cops in meticulously fascist uniform shouts fierce instructions through a bull horn at the backs of the heads of the otaku before them: cosplayers and booth babes, Japanese and gaijin, fat and thin... it doesn't matter. All are dehumanized by the mere accident of their birth as gamers.

By now, all of you should be familiar with Hall 7. For Eliza, it is the most delicious smelling sphincter of TGS. For me? TGS' stenching taint dipped over and over again into my open, paralyzed mouth.

As a summary: Eliza and I have been exiled to Hall 7 through a strange conglomeration of our own arrogance and Nick Chester's casual homoerotic appeal. While Dale North and that bastard Chester flitter back and forth between Halo 3, Devil May Cry 4, Metal Gear Solid 4 and Dark Love, Eliza and I are wildly gesticulating our inept pidin interview questions at a bunch of mentally-handicapped game design majors fresh-out of Tokyo's local cut-rate technical schools.

But we're simply not going to take Chester's crap lying down. Our resolve? To review every last game in Hall 7. And in the cess pool of laziness and abject incompetence? We will find a sparkling diamond, crapped out by the sphincter of Japan.

Unfortunately, you will not find this rough, fibrous diamond in our first Hall 7 review, the mystically titled Road to Myself.

Yesterday at TGS, I met my ex-colleagues from Kotaku for the first time. Michael "Beardo" McWhertor! Brian "LOL" Ashcraft! Flynn "Fruit Brute" DeMarco! And some pallid kid with a gobbling thorax who looked exactly like a young Carrot Top. Collapsed in a heap in the corner of the press area at the Tokyo Game Show, rivulets of dirty sweat streaking down their brows as they feverishly pounded their words, impressions and LOLs into the keyboard. In their eyes danced that journalist's madness, the insane thirst for the scoop. The very archetypes of the game journalist professional.

I wandered up to them with a dixie cup full of beer in my hand. I introduced myself. "What's the rumpus?" I asked. Gandalf-like, Ashcraft arched his massive eyebrows. I translated it into his own patois. "What's the happy-haps?" I repeated. Ashcraft — god bless him — LOLed.

When I first met them, those bronzed and beautiful olympiads of video game inquiry, they immediately rattled off a lexicon of journalistic accomplishment.Their headlines bubbled off their tongues like an RSS feed. TGS 2007: DOOM 4 TO USE UT3 ENGINE! RUMOR: MGS4 FACIAL HAIR INSPIRED BY HIDEO KOJIMA MOUSTACHE RIDE? BREAKING: PS3 RUMBLE EXACTLY LIKE PS2 RUMBLE! To be honest, they were bragging a little, but if anyone was deserving of promoting themselves as the Original Little Miss Jesuses, it was Kotaku.

Then they started asking me what I was doing. What scoops I'd got. What games I was looking forward to. To be honest, they looked a little bit smug and insinuating.

"Oh, you know me," I said casually. "Nothing. I'm the world's worst gaming journalist." And then, just to make sure they understood, I put sarcastic air quotes around "journalist" while jumping up and down, then loudly announced that I was going to go off and drink a few beers while they had to actually work.

But this was just a self-defense mechanism. I don't mean for it to be this way. From a pecuniary perspective, I am a highly paid professional. My name commands respect. Yet, paradoxically, this respect is based entirely upon a river bed of abject incompetence and apathy in our chosen career. Eliza's the same: it's why we get along so well. But we were sick of the smug patronization of our peers... all people who had been ostracized from all other forms of gainful employment. No, Eliza and I agreed: this was the conference that I decided to put things right, to finally command the respect we deserved... not fueled by my own practically infinite reservoir of idiocy, but by my incredible journalistic prowess. I would do things right. I would rule. And god help me, I'd drag that lazy slut Eliza Gauger down the road of journalistic super excellence with me.

And this is why I hate Nick Chester. From mother day f@cking one, he has been working against our best efforts to be real journalists.

To many of our more astute readers, well versed in the odd idiosyncrosies of foreign cultures, it will perhaps be surprising to see a beautiful, demure Japanese woman posing next to a giant tentacle. "Why isn't it crammed up her vagina?" you might well ask. I'm sorry. I just don't know. It's just one more mystery of TGS.

From Lonely Planet's City Guide to Tokyo, 2006 edition, page 241:

"Condoms are widely available in Tokyo, but generally only locally produced varieties, which tend to be on the small side."

When one reads something like this... when a travel writer states with limpid clarity that even the John Holmes of Japanese Salarymen makes the most micro-phallused American look as if he is packing several spools of glistening kielbasa between his legs... well, let's just say it's hard not to skip off the airplane at Tokyo Narita airport without a bowl-legged swagger, pockets stuffed with windsock-sized American prophylactics, winking at all of the almond-eyed Japanese girls one meets along the way.

And me? A man with genitalia so engorged, purple and profound that Mama Eckhardt's obstetrician mistook the first stages of his breech birth for the spontaneous evacuation of her own lower intestines? I'll admit it. I got a bit cocky.

What I mean to say is that it wasn't arrogance that made me first mistake Dangerous Meat — the newest game from superstar Japanese game developers Human Systems Ltd. — as a game about my penis. After all, I am a famous gaming celebrity... if Penny Arcade can have its own game, why can't my Gojira-scale phallus? Both are equally huge. No, it isn't mere arrogance. What else was I supposed to think?

Needless to say, Dangerous Meat was not about my monstrous, dew-tipped erection at all. But that's not to say it doesn't appear to be the game of the season.

With a roar of the engine... with flame belching from the exhaust pipe... with the grill work glinting like the blood hungry smile of some Great Red Shark, a crimson Cadillac will explode through the walls of the Tokyo Game Show next Thursday, scattering in its wake a broken chaos of scoop-hungry journalists and polite, nervous-looking Japanese businessmen.

As the rear axle collides with the show floor, the bulging trunk of the Great Red Shark will burst open, sending the contents of what can only be described as a mobile police narcotics lab flying through the air like the evisceration of a pinata at a Mexican junkie's birthday party. The contents? Two bags of grass, seventy five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of milti-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.

And there, on the floor of TGS, to be discharged amongst the confetti of drugs, the writhing wounded, the shrieking metal and the flames? Two strange creatures looking like fresh arrivals from the planet of David Bowie, their eyes dancing with delirium. The first: a tiny blue-haired Replicant with purse-shaped lips and black android eyes. The second: a gay black albino with hair brighter than the sun.

Yes, next week, Destructoid's TGS 2007 coverage will commence, and Eliza and I will be there as dedicated culture journalists. While the rest of the Dtoid team scramble for scoops, Eliza and I will be swooping through the conference like avatars of awesomeness, our sole concern to bring you the part of gaming conventions the other sites never bother with: the surrealist experience of actually being at TGS. We're calling it Fear and Lost in Translation. Eliza wants to make sure I point out that the name was her idea.

If Bioshock taught me anything, it's that Objectivist Free Capitalism is all about hitting as many people in the face with a wrench as possible, then stealing the money that spills out of their corpse.

So, ostensibly, you'd think I'd be interested in Kwari, the recently announced FPS from Australian developers Micro Forté. It's Objectivist Free Capitalism at its most pure: every time you frag someone, big clouds of cash explode into the air, bouncing across the floors and the walls along with their polygonal gibs. Likewise, every time you get shot or die? Your credit card gets dinged.

But here's where I reveal myself as a foppish pinko at heart: I like Objectivist Free Capitalism just fine as long as it's not my face someone is smashing open with a wrench. As long as it's not my money discharged with each meaty thwack. As long as its not my Liberty Dollars and teeth filling the air like confetti.

Foul-mouthed, chain-smoking, greasy-haired deviant author (and genius!) Warren Ellis has posted an excerpt from his first draft script to the new Castlevania: Dracula's Curse animated movie to the official production blog.

In a choice that will seem curious to some fans, the excerpt does not spend many words dealing with Trevor Belmont, the protagonist of the film, or his battle against Dracula. Instead, the excerpt — which seems to be the opening scene — concentrates almost entirely on a discussion between two Transylvanian peasants about the love triangles that can develop between two zoophiles and the goat they are mutually humping.

It's a really great read, and I could fill an entire post just blockquoting it, which I'd love to do, because as a professional blogger, I constantly oscillate between two existential states: lazy and drunk.

As a black gay Irish albino, I know the sting of prejudice, the invisible walls of racial stereotyping that isolate me from my fellow men. I hate it. I hate and I hate and I hate, even going so far as to declare myself Imperial Wizard of my own secret society for the Advancement in America of Black Gay Irish Albinos. I have not attracted any other members yet, but if you're white, and if you've ever woken up in the dead of night to find a stuffed Pillsbury Doughboy Doll, crucified upside down and burning on your front lawn, I'm sorry to say that was me.

But I think Robert E. Howard has gotten a bum rap as a racist for his Conan stories, and, by association, I think Funcom's latest MMO, Age of Conan, is being unfairly tarnished by the same brush.

As a gamer, I am a stinking, festering, pustulous thing. A translucent-skinned Gollum, slowly evolving like a deep-sea fish into a creature blind, boneless and explodable by the light. Contorted over the years into controller-shaped claws, my hands are useless for pleasuring a woman or even myself. My pheromone glands exude a rotting piscine musk; my genitals have long since shrivelled into vestigial sacks.

So it's no surprise that I've never had sex. My only knowledge of women comes from stripper-mongering and watching the impossibly inflated mammaries of Dead or Alive's school girls jiggle at a trillion calculations per second across my television screen.

As part of our rigorous contract negotiations, Eliza and I made an unorthodox proviso: on our first day at Destructoid HQ — a gigantic robot head perched atop a volcano — we expected to be introduced to our fellow editors with the scrotum-glowing glory of Electric Six. Seated upon burnished thrones in an opulent Edwardian parlor, the staff — one by one — would be ushered in, to quake in our bizarre and profane presence.

We were pretty excited about the idea. If you want to establish a cult of personality, it is best to go all out. Unfortunately, Eliza overslept this morning, and anyways, I had hurt myself the night before when I made the mistake of shoving a white-hot lightbulb underneath my taint as a way of rehearsing the routine. My back-up plan to achieve the effect — drinking several liters of radioactive isotopes, then holding my bladder until it was filled — only left me with several sentient cysts. Our props failing us, Eliza and I decided to make our first day at the office "no big deal."

But God bless Destructoid's editorial bullpen. As I shambled into the office this morning, they were all there. Aaron Linde! Dale North! Gameboi! Fronz! Colette! Jim Sterling! Tiffany Chow! And the rest! And when I walked through the robot's mouth and into the bright, light-filled atrium of Destructoid HQ, my new brothers and sisters let out a cheer and advanced upon me, their hands raised for a communal high-five, with Orcist at the head of the pack. My eyes swelled with grateful tears; I wished Eliza was there. Surely, this was heaven.