In a rare moment of scheduling success, my co-hosts and I at the Played Podcast have lived up to our ostensible weekly format, releasing our latest episode in the week following the previous episode.  Anyone who follows the show will recognize this as something of an achievement for us.

This week’s episode is number 43, and includes Comic-Con talk as well as residual E3 affairs (The Conduit, Fallout 3, Fable 2), and discussion of currently-played games including Siren: Blood Curse, Space Invaders Extreme, Civilization Revolution, Ticket to Ride, Catan, and Everyday Shooter.  Go check it out.

[Update: For the full scoop on this story, including final price and specs, check out this update.]

At Electronic Arts’ Comic-Con booth today, an EA rep mentioned that the company plans to market pre-built PCs in conjunction with the release of Crytek’s upcoming PC-exclusive shooter Crysis Warhead.  The idea seems to be to try and circumvent some of the intimidation that exists for gamers who are either new to high-end PC gaming, or have been out of the scene for some time, and reassure them that it is not prohibitively expensive to acquire a machine that can tame something like Crysis and its followup.

Apparently, the rigs will come in various configurations, which will correspond to Crysis Warhead’s levels of graphical detail, with a likely price range being $600-$800 (I doubt EA will want to market a machine that meets only the game’s minimum spec), and they will probably be named accordingly–the Crysis Warhead Performance PC, and so on.

I like the idea of Electronic Arts looking for ways to make the PC platform more approachable, and this idea is sound–buy this PC that says Crysis on it; it’s designed to run Crysis, and you know that if it plays Crysis it’ll play anything else on the market.  I was also impressed that EA had no less than three PC exclusives–Crysis Warhead, BattleForge, and Warhammer Online, and other games on display like Mirror’s Edge and Dead Space are in development for PC as well–in its booth at Comic-Con, a mainstream show if there ever was one.

As the rep also mentioned to me, EA’s own internal analysis indicates the PC market is growing–publishers just have to learn how to capitalize on it.

On the train to downtown San Diego for Comic-Con, I snapped this portent of sights to come.

In the middle of writing this post, the guy picked up his cell phone (which rang with some crazy adventure music) and answered with “moshi moshi.”