Scarathon

I think we have to just establish - verbally, conceptually - that we have entered into a kind of vortex where traditional assumptions about the industry have been annihilated. Megafauna are collapsing under their own weight; they're loaning their treasured IP to tiny, scampering creatures so that something useful might be done with it at all. They're slicing and sectioning themselves into charcuterie boards, or tarting themselves up for handsome saviors. The return of the demo, an attempt to thumb the scale in a world where making a good game appears to be a solved problem but people knowing you exist is increasingly impossible, means I've bought more games in the last two weeks than I have in the last two years. Escapees from "triple a" have gnawed at its root, drawing from it a dark strength. Or, you know, gotten utterly annihilated. Like I said: Vortex.

Time was, people would say that you had to read the newspost to know what the comic was about - like that was a bad thing! As the author of the newspost, I have a natural impetus to craft the kind of strip which requires an independent Stone of Hammurabi to help interpret it; a conceptual side order. The thing about today's strip is that you will find absolutely no succor in these words - no nourishment. It's inspiration is almost impossible to explain, it must be experienced viscerally. Brenna was only able to watch it for ten seconds. How far will you get?

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Chris Kempczinski (@chrisk_mcd)

In the Time Before - no relation to The Land Before Time - it was very important to have a "Halo Killer." There were many attempts, wrought at a profundity of expense and labor. They would have been very surprised to learn, years after this conflict had passed into history, that the storied franchise and its laconic green action figure would die to suicide.

Capcom just released a demo for Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection and I love it. The demo seems to have come out for pretty much everything but I grabbed it for the PS5 Pro and it’s gorgeous. Plenty of people love the Monster Hunter series but I feel like the “Stories” side games get overlooked. That sort of makes sense as the Stories games are very different. These are turn-based RPG’s with an anime art style and a focus on younger characters with monster collecting/ battling. Think of them like Pokemon + Monster Hunter and it’s just as cool as it sounds. 

I haven't played Overwatch since… I mean, a long time ago. I don't even remember why. Oh, wait! I do remember why, and no doubt others remember also. In something like COD, bare minimum, I can run around and pick up your tags or whatever. The only shooter I ever got truly competitive in was probably Gears 2, and then, only for two reasons. One, because your whole team is two people. And two, because if you don't get good at the a complete stranger will chainsaw you from your asshole up to your collarbone. It's the worst feeling I've ever experienced in a video game and I'd do anything - even git gud - to avoid it.

I mean, where to start.

Kara and I are having so much fun with Hytale and all the mods. They do a cool thing where you only need to instal the mod on the server and then everyone who plays on the server just gets the benefit. It works great and we have added a bunch of cool mods for furniture and other decorations. 

I gravitate toward support roles in virtually every game we play. Outside of a couple odd instances I could go into, I usually just want to help somebody else do whatever they want to do. In the first Minecraft server we ever had, the "job" I invented for myself was to harvest just enough wood to make signs and use those signs to name landforms. In my role as a natural loremaster, I took this incredibly seriously and did not make jokes on the signs. The only time I really made something substantial in one of these was the Krahulik Valheim server was a fancypants bar the children were too young to enter, substantially limiting its utility. My newest role is Effervescent, Erotic Cyber Jester, making keen observations and returning an engorged whimsy to the frontier - a whimsy that's been gone for far too long. Is that welcome? No! No, it turns out. Garb essentially had the talk with me that exists in the second panel. It was surprising, but weirdly tender - obviously, I knuckled under. Even though I have a lot more to say about dicks.

Games where you build stuff fire a broad-spectrum ray at the Krahulik House, with a wavelength proper to each member of that storied clan. Gabe wants to "erect" huge buildings but not decorate them, in the same way he likes to draw comic strips but not write them. Kara - who once wore the handles "Orbital Strike" and "Yuna" - doesn't have a lot of affection for building big structures but has an infinite affection for greebling the interiors with immaculate decor. The boys want to kill shit and then they need a place to keep all the shit they found on the bodies, some of which are just parts of the bodies. I like… well, that's Monday's strip.

Having been bold enough to buck the trend of community mandated hatred, now we have to enact the odious task of reeling all that goodwill back in. Well, not really. Grub has merely determined that he doesn't need something like Highguard in his life, though he has certainly enjoyed the game in its many primordial configurations. I think it looks very cool, but I'm intimidated as fuck to go in there as thirty-three percent of a three person team, brow damp, logging into sweaty hyphen lobbies dot com.

Played some Highguard

Reading the strip reminded me I needed to use the credentials I had been given in order to enter the consensual hallucination of the Krahulik Hytale Server. The comparisons to Minecraft are very frequent, but Minecraft came out in 2009. In truth, the most Minecraft thing about it is that they did what Notch did: own every cent the game produces per sale by having you buy directly from them. Anyway, it's obviously a clone of Infiniminer. Kids these days!

Snorks, like many of our most treasured institutions, are real but not in any way that matters. Such are the wages of decrepitude and the fundamentally human centipede of cultural grist.

Mark has covered a lot of it, he and I had discussed it at length, and so will probably go over a lot of the same ground. But did he have any Aliens references? No. Would such a reference even be welcome in a Star Trek: Starfleet Academy context? I guess we'll find out!

I have watched only the first episode of the new Starfleet Academy show and as the comic suggests, I like the hook, the characters and the actors. What I don’t like is pretty much every word of dialog written for them to say. When the incredible Paul Giamatti launched into a wild speech comparing time to an origami chicken I nearly shut the show off. I finished the episode though and while I intend to continue watching for at least a few more episodes I have to say I am dissapointed by the desicion to use so much modern language and current idioms.

I have way, way more than this done, but it seemed like a super funny situation and who knows; I'd love to see him go for it. Let's see him put his best foot forward on such a rich narrativo. I would definitely like to read a couple strips about that, maybe on some Cave of Tits type action, but then I would have to write it. Inconvenient!