Gabe hadn't read Shogun, which ordinarily I would use as an opportunity to scourge him from a profound intellectual height. Something more like the opposite has happened - I envy this ignorance of the text. I wish to Gord I could read it anew.  Shogun is almost twelve hundred pages, and our affair was torrid. I couldn't leave it well enough alone. A visual note: it was a borrowed copy from Brenna's dad, before she and I agreed to be married, and because it was a paperback it could barely hold itself together. By the time it fell into my hands, it had essentially split itself into two books of a digestible six hundred pages apiece.

It’s been a minute since I did any iRacing but I was back in the rig yesterday preparing for the new rain update coming tomorrow. 

He's flipping out over those Unicorns and these Overlords and shit, so much so that he's had to turn to rationing. It comes out on the 8th, so he won't have to twist in the wind too long.

Garb is obsessed with Unicorn Overlord, which has a demo currently available on Switch, Playstation, and the Orxborx that you can use to get obsessed as well. It's the best kind of demo: it's the real game, just with a time limit, and your progress carries over. A blessing, in this dark age.

Need for Speed Unbound just got a new update and a roadmap for more content coming this year. This is one of my favorite arcade racing games and I’m happy to see it continue to get love. It’s also free with PS plus right now so if you are a subscriber I suggest checking it out!

I like it when co-op games aren't bullshit. You know? I like it when they don't manufacture little interpersonal caltrops like divvying up collected resources per player just to transform your leisure time into a twisted and darwinian Squid Game. Deep Rock Galactic is the best comparison, philosophically. Everybody wins. Oh, fuck - didn't make it to the ship on time because your cat was shitting in a houseplant in your actual room, IRL? We got you: we'll fire you down from the station in a custom bullet and you can join in progress because why shouldn't you be able to. Arrowhead Studios got the memo.

DRG: Survivor is a dangerously addictive mutation of the survivor genre, newly unleashed upon Early Access. It is a progression beyond the state of the art and is yet another necessary game here in the first few short months of the year.

I was poking around on Reddit this morning like I do and saw this Magic the Gathering card from their new Fallout expansion. It looks like the card Fraying Sanity is based on our old Fallout 3 comic about Vault 77. One man and a box of puppets!

I can’t believe how many great games there are to play right now! Here’s a list of where I’m spending my time these days.

I was excited to hear Gigantic was coming back. You can try to fit it into some recognized genre box, but as we suggested in our 2017 strip and newspost, it doesn't readily map. That's part of why it didn't connect when it was launched, I think - in concert with its freemium dynamics perhaps, they actually did something kinda new. I think about that tragedy all the time. They were from here; we even went to their office to see it. One of the artists on the project had been on Strip Search. And it was good. It was really good. One always hopes that being good will be a factor in the success of a thing somehow, but… yeah.

But!

We are approaching a time where my innermost dreams are no longer the stuff of fantasy - they can be plucked, ripe, from any tree. Crew-serving allied weapons feels just as incredible as I hoped, and you've got a couple options for it. When I play with the two other people I often play with, at our current level, we tend to have two autocannons and a recoilless, which is the one I have in the strip. I really, really like the autocannon because it's just sort of a Swiss Army Knife for problem solving, particularly if that problem is shaped like the enemies of the blue-green jewel we all serve.

I had basically accepted that cosmetics were a way to support games over the long-haul that essentially made sense. But Blizzard is absolutelydetermined to test the border of that.

Helldiving ain't easy, but it's necessary. There's a lot of bugs. And robots. I haven't seen any robot bugs yet, but I wouldn't put it past the enemies of managed democracy to stitch together hideous, chimaerical Terminid-Automaton hybrids born to hate our way of life.

The Metaverse isn't a thing companies can truly say aloud, where the marks can hear, for a variety of reasons. One of these reasons is that it's more or less synonymous with putting good money after bad at a scale that an arboreal monkey brain, regardless of its revision number, can't truly understand. This story from last July suggests that attempts by Facebook to become Meta instead through the creation of a wholly-owned prison universe had already lost forty billion dollars. Some small part of that goes to the people I know who work there, and I authorize those particular expenditures, but the rest is a boondoggle. Anyway, you can still make a Metaverse and you can still basically sell NFTs as long as you don't call them that.

I’ve been spending a lot of time pouring over pictures of stickers and albums from the 80’s and it’s bringing back lots of good memories. I can still recall walking into a sticker shop at the height of the collecting craze and being blown away by what I saw. It was like a candy store for art and I was ensorcelled. They had stickers on sheets, on rolls, in packs of cards, holographic, puffy, scratch and sniff, googly eyes, lenticular, I can still smell the shop when I think about it.

As our Design Director Kiko Villasenor and I are the only two people to have attended every PAX, and as Kiko doesn't especially delight in public speaking, it falls to me to be The Chronicler.  We'll have other ways for you to travel through all that history this year, I think you'll be impressed, but there are a couple real things that are worth setting down.