I was curious enough about Immortals: Fenyx Rising to investigate the demo they released on Stadia last week. Logging in with my google account was simple and within seconds of clicking on the game in a Chrome window, I was loading into the demo. The game itself is beautiful and the combat is cool but poorly mapped to a controller. I probably could have played more of it if not for the obnoxious tone of the entire experience. Playing Immortals: Fynx Rising is like watching a low budget CG animated kids film. It feels like a straight to video sequel to a children's movie I hated. 

Hades is real good. This is a fact in evidence, and I'd talk about it way more if I didn't consider a couple of the people who made it not even friends but, like… allies. I would spend more time praising them if I didn't know them, which is its own counterproductive dynamic. I'm actually in a position to know how much they give a shit about what they make, products which strike almost unerringly, and that's what keeps me from doing it. You could certainly argue that I've spent this paragraph doing the opposite of what I've just said, but I'd prefer it if you considered the whole thing couched in a kind of ironic performance. It can only help my case that everything I've said is absolutely true.

I guess I sorta figured they'd haul a bunch of these fucking warlocks onto Zoom and yell at them for a while, and that was gonna be it. It wasn't. And then, when we started talking about writing a strip about it, we laughed ourselves hoarse because it turns out our entire workflow winds through Google's intestinal tract.

And their names are, respectively, Gary Whitta and Will Smith.  These greasy, inhuman leavings only materialize when, as now, the veil between this world and the next grows thin - and only in places where a great wrong has been done.  In the ongoing mythology of the tournament, the "great wrong" is when they beat us really badly all those other times and I got sad.  Join us on streem at 4pm PDT when we will set these events right and exile them into the Shadowdeep once and for all.  

We wrote the strip after Gabe told me about the plan they had going at their house, which was to have their youngest Noah get nestled in his Drift getup and Trick-Or-Treat from room to room in the house, which is genuinely sweet. It's certainly more than we've put forward. It may have changed recently, but last time I checked the plan was just to eat a lot of candy.  More than usual.  

My oldest son Gabe is sixteen now and he hasn’t really been interested in Halloween for a few years.Noah is ten though and he is what I would call the target demographic for this holiday. Not being able to wander the neighborhood collecting candy is a huge disappointment but we’re doing what we can to make it a fun night. He’s still dressing up in a costume and we’ll get some good candy but the festivities will be limited to our own house this year. 

I did get incredibly lucky apparently, with Venti, Fischl, Barbara and Jean, but because you spend most of your time in Genshin Impact essentially playing what seems like a new RPG import I'd never been chastised for not using them as I was on stream. I still like Amber, the fire archer you get like ten minutes into the game, just because we're friends but if you look at the tier list she's literally down at the bottom in a category they might as well call Shitty because she's the only one in it.

Our 100th iRacing stream is tonight and it's going to be a fun one. To celebrate the monumental achievement of pretending to drive a car a lot I will be giving away all sorts of goodies. The Pit Crew will open at 7:30PM this evening and we will be giving away a 1 year subscription to iRacing every 15 minutes during the stream! This is for new members only so if you've been thinking about joining the club, this might be your chance. There will be about 45 minutes of practice tonight and then right before the 30 minute race at Daytona starts, I'll show off a couple of the pieces in our new Gabir Motors line of merchandise. Then, after the race we will do CSiRacing where we go back to the replay and examine all the murders on track. Once that's done we will wrap up the show by giving away a set of Logitech G733 headphones as well as a Buttkicker! I will also eat some cake. See you tonight at 7:30PT Pit Crew! 

I mean, my presumption is that he'll actually just be playing the new Dirt on the Xbox Series X. Unless he bought it for PC a few days before, because that's when it's supposed to come out on PC, where he can play it on ultrawide with a wheel…? I mean, I do know him. I guess I know him well enough to know that he'd be compelled to try it on both.

I waited for the third Hotfix, and then I tried a bit of the co-op on Baldur's Gate 3 with Eric Benson, who you may know better as The Notorious EJB or Edge. I can't speak for the previous builds, but the two hours we spent in there were informative. Here is the information:

Of course, I sent this strip to Will before we posted it. He liked it and may even have been touched, independent of its horrors.

Thursday night is race night. The Penny Arcade league will hit the track tonight and the Pit Crew will open at 7:30PT. Tonight we're racing Road America for a multi class event. That means there will essentially be two races happening at once on the same track. Drivers have a choice between the Cadillac CTS and the Kia Otima with the Cadillac being quite a bit faster and harder to control. You're only racing the other cars in your class but both races are happening at the same time so you have a chaotic track. Tonight will be our 98th iRacing stream and I've got big plans for episode 100 which we should hit next week. I'll be giving away a set of Logitech G733 headphones as well as a Buttkicker and hopefully showing off some of the Gabir Motors merch we have on the way. I may also get a cake to eat on stream, we'll see.

Our experience with the Co-Op in Genshin Impact - something you don't unlock until Adventure Rank 16, a kind of "meta-level" independent of characters - is that it is very, very much unlike the game proper. Not necessarily in a bad way, but because you've played so much of the game solo at that point not being able to do the things you've done for the last twenty or so hours is quite a surprise.

About a week ago Gabriel sent me the cover of a book that attempted to snare the reader with its romantic tales of brothers who were dragons but also, somehow, Irish. I was going to use the term Inexplicable to describe it, but it's super, super explicable. It is deeply, profoundly explicable: it's a sex thing. The same author offers tales of Bears - a term I was already familiar with, but these are heterosexual bears, and also actual bear bears in some way. Like, the animal. You don't meet these bears through an app, like you typically would. You meet a bear like this because you are a cougar - literally and figuratively - and you're trying to find your parent's killers.

I'm playing it now too, trying to put in enough time to access the multiplayer, where I can only assume the trap is truly set. Because this whole first part is basically like somebody forgot to tell them they were making a freemium game - you see the lure so often you become inured to it. The elemental systems are old school JRPG brain snacks. He's played it for God knows how long at this point, not spending a dime, and Not Spending A Dime while Getting Maximum Time out of it seems to be the game for him.

It's sometimes the case that Jerry and I create jokes and then you guys help us embellish them. The greatest example of this I believe is the Epic Legends of the Hierarchs: The Elemenstor Saga. Jerry and I cooked up the name of this setting and gave a few examples such as Grimm Shado. We also claimed that this made up fantasy BS was a rich IP that spanned decades and included books, cartoons and all sorts of amazing stuff. The Penny Arcade audience then went completely bat shit and created a massive wiki that attempted to collect all the information there was about this non existent franchise. Jerry and I just watched as this thing grew by the hour and soon I was drawing fan art of my favorite Wizbit. I understand if you don’t remember Wizbits, it was a “re-imagining” of the Japanese anime ElamenSTAR which originally aired in Japan in 1996, as a cross promotion with the collectible card game ElemenSTAR Card Battle renamed Wizbits Elemenstor Battle for the US.