I love the early days of a multiplayer game - before things are settled and optimized, in some cases before final decisions have even been made in the design. I sorta knew it was gonna get wild fast, I suggested as much on Monday, but the skill ceiling in Splitgate is… high. It's very high. A round of Splitgate makes me feel like my brain is being braided by hand, which is typically the feeling I get when I'm laying new psychological track. I'm not even sure all this is gonna stop me from playing! But it's definitely gonna stop me from winning.

I think that Gabe had just enough internet before The Plague Year, but when more of life moved online bits got pretty thin on the ground. What he has now, despite what might appear on the bill, is unlike traditional Internet access a substantial percentage of the time. But it's Comcast, and that's who sells Web over there! At least, currently. He just saw a Ziply truck, and I don't have a lot of experience with Ziply other than I guess I thought we were done naming companies like adverbs, but okay.

It seems reductive to say that Splitgate is "Halo Meets Portal," but if you do a search for Splitgate, when the website comes up the title is "Splitgate - 'Halo Meets Portal" so it seems like they're fine with it. And they should be. It's one thing to claim these inspirations, to suggest you are a divine child of eternal gods born at the crossroads of fate, but if you can kinda pull it off? That's wild fucking shit. That's also why you get queued whenever you try to play it, because tens of thousands of other people want to play it at the same time.

The main reason he can't get anyone to play Digimon with him isn't merely sloth and intransigence on the part of the young, although that's always a non-zero factor. In this case, it's simply because his previous entreaty - Pokemon TCG - simply caught on too well. I don't really know anything about Digimon outside of what the neologism would indicate; that these are Monsters which are somehow - inexplicably, unrelentingly - Digital. Essentially, he's trying to get them to play with GoBots when they're already playing with Transformers. That was always gonna be rough pitch. Cy-Kill? Woof.

I've been texting Kiko every time a new piece of information comes out about the revamped Kill Team, and thus emboldened I tried to engage in the same sort of rhetoric with Gabe which lasted about ten fuckin' seconds.

My obsession with Gunpla led me to explore the Premium Bandai website. This is essentially a store where Bandai sells special limited edition versions of all their goodies. I went there looking for special edition Gundam kits and ended up getting exposed to the full force of their brand firehose. I managed to stay focused for a while. I bought a couple of the Gundam Hathaway kits and I thought I was done but then I found myself exploring their various Digimon offerings. The virtual pet craze missed me in the 90’s mostly because I worked at Toys R Us back then. Having witnessed grown women fist fighting over the last Tamagotchi we had in the store, I decided to skip that particular craze. Almost 30 years later I thought maybe I was ready to see what the fuss was all about. 

We've been playing a lot of Unite, enough to have an opinion on it when motherfuckers skirt the social order. We made a joke in the lobby that it was gonna be us and everybody else in Bot Lane, but then it happened for really reals so I had to make note of it in the script doc.

I like Pokemon, but if it were to pass me a note in class with an option to indicate whether I like-liked it, I would have to think about it for a while. At the individual game level for new mainline releases, I rigorously follow the stories because… they're legitimately kinda cool? But the specific grind loop in the game is something my brain will only tolerate for around ten hours total, after which it's like asking me to put my hand on a hot stove.

Gabe has been getting into Cris Tales, and one of the main reasons for that is that his psychological reward structure has no defense against the onslaught of beautiful art in this game. Because our world is a fallen and decrepit place, we never had a collaboration between Square Enix and Mary Blair so it's nice to see these devs making up for some lost time.

Alright, so: let's go down the list of fascinations Gabriel has undertaken during The Plague Years.

This space shit is the most thoroughly dunked phenomenon; it comes pre-dunked, in the package. Dunk runs off it, down your arm, until it pools and drips from your elbow.

If you aren't sort of a dork, the fact that cheat prevention software and emulation is in a problematic state currently and the impact it might have on a device like the Steam Deck isn't broadly understood. Before we entered The Hell Dimension a year and a half ago, my main work machine was Linux Mint, and I really liked it. I had to stretch my mind taut over a hoop and embroider it meticulously to resolve a couple issues I had, and I got way smarter, but I'm by no means an expert. The official Known Issues section in the Proton documentation goes into what they consider best practices a bit, and these practices differ from the current state of the universe in some ways.

I think Loki is probably my favorite Marvel thing. I like the weirder parts of the whole enterprise, though; for mainline Marvel stuff my pick is probably Captain America: The Winter Soldier. You can sorta see why they gave the Russo Brothers the store after that. But even as a moist larva, I sought the weird shit. Guardians of the Galaxy - a movie where a spaceship goes into a large head - and it'is exactly the type of shit I'm still trying to get up to when I run a game. Doctor Strange, that's the other one I like, not least of which because it concerns a threat that can't be managed by repeatedly hitting it in the face.

Mr. Gribbz started with the demo of Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings Of Long Name, which seemed to run kinda raw on Switch, and swiftly moved up to the PC version where it essentially looks like an animated series running in 4k. There's a demo of it on Steam, too, if you want to see what we're talking about.

Honestly, I think The Witcher: Monster Slayer - their take on the "scour your neighborhood for beasts" genre - looks kinda cool. They're trying to approach it their way, which is sorta Questy. That's what they do best. That's why I thought Cyberpunk 2077 was gonna be cool, independent of any issues with basic functionality - because they knew how to tell inspiring little stories inside a relatively small amount of gameplay verbs. I played the whole thing on PC, where the worst of its technical behavior never expressed itself, so I think I understand what they intended, but… the problem is that it had no Andrzej Sapkowski and it very, very much needed a Sapkowski. The game is like a shopping list without a recipe. I recognize everything that was intended to invoke Bolognese but the ratio of every ingredient is fucked.

The Penny Arcade iRacing league will join the Draw4Charity stream at 2PT today for 2 fun races to help raise money for Child's Play! Join the Pit crew this afternoon for some wild racing all for a good cause.