I’m looking over at the pause screen for Days Gone right now and it says “758 DAYS GONE” which I think is very cool. It’s a running tally that tracks just how long you’ve spent in the zombie infested wilderness of Oregon. I’ve been playing it as much as I can every day since it came out and even now as I write this I am hungry to pick the controller back up. Open World game fatigue is certainly a real thing, and I don’t begrudge anyone who’s tired of running all over hell's half acre ticking of boxes. Days Gone has its hooks in me though and I wanted to share a few of the things I think make it stand out.

When Gabe came up with the name of the stupid show I shouted "Fuck you!" and left the office. Laura Stringer, affectionately known as Laura From Work, said in an email that "her hand slipped" and this was the result:

The type of D&D Gabriel runs is heavily salted with tropes tugged from videogames, and that ended up being a solution when the game he was running for his family left his youngest son, No-an The Usurper, cold and disengaged. If you're talking about Dragonlance, then you're talking about Raistlin, and I think Raistlin might connect better with an older kid whose very big feelings exist in the same fraught continuum.

My computer was, in fact, one hundred percent fucked. It was one of those things where you fix one obvious problem, a problem where when you see it you're like "How did this ever work at all," and then the entire fucking computer inexplicably falls to pieces. In this case, and I mean case in both senses, the CPU was trying to catch on fire because the impeller inside the liquid cooling solution had, through exhaustion or sheer laziness, either ceased to impel or whined throughout. The new Enermax cooler our engineer put on there is like a malevolent curl of alien impact shrapnel and is impervious to heat because it was born in a star.

I was over at Glorp's house last week, he wanted to show me HDR I assume because he owns stock in a company that produces high-end panels, and I had a chance to check out Darksiders 3 on PC.

The whole point of Game of Thrones is that you thought one thing was gonna happen but then another thing happens, and that works until it doesn't anymore.

Having come back from Spokane with more or less my full complement of hit points, it wasn't that bad really; Spokane was a kind of scorched lily pad that I made brief contact with on the way to Priest Lake. There's no reason you should know about Priest Lake! But that's where I went and I think I emerged with more sanity than I had when I went in.

We took our family Sea of Thieves game to Twitch this afternoon and although there were a few hiccups, overall it was pretty smooth! My home internet wasn't perfect and the stream ended up being cut into a few different parts. You can check out the start of our voyage here.

I had to repair this computer to even write this post - that's how fucked up shit is over in Spokane.

Gabe's been playing the original Darksiders on Switch and Darksiders 3 on PC, the PC of all things. I'm always going to be a partisan where gaming PCs are concerned, but even for me 3D action platformer type shit isn't something I prefer on there. The case he's made to me, and I think it is a good one, is that you have HDR and 4k on a console, which is being spread over a massive screen - all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread. Then you have the same thing on a monitor right in front of you, a density of content coupled with the fact that everything else being equal the PC simply endures more effects, more ground cover, so that I can be impressed with what's happening on a television but I can be transported by a smaller screen.

There are certainly complexities around the Yoshian mythos, but the aesthetics are impeccable. It's as though you've been given access to a range of light that exclusively communicates joy, and now you can see it.

While at PAX this weekend I was asked by a number of people about running D&D with kids. I’ve recently switched up my home D&D game and I thought I’d share some of my key learnings.

I am always surprised when I learn that somebody missed something of ours, but it's not actually a surprise to any conscious being - I don't promote the stuff we do as much as I could. Generally it's because I don't want to annoy you. But too many people worked too hard on it for too long for me to allow my usual horseshit.

We talked about it a little bit on stage at PAX East, and I don't have any idea how successful The Division 2 is or isn't, but whatever its coordinate in the Matrix of Market Justice I can't help but feel like another theme would have better projected and perhaps advocated for the frankly incredible game they made. Or, in any case, made them more resilient to having someone ridicule their tasteful shemagh.

One of the things I like about From Software's whole historical fantasy… thing is its inscrutability. At least, initially. It doesn't remain so, and it is this process of progressively enhancing one's knowledge that is the main draw. It rewards novel thinking; we've found gameplay in strange places we didn't truly understand were part of these games, and to be seen by it when we're working some intuitive narrative angle only to get paid handsomely in the mechanics is a level of unification most games don't even attempt. In Bloodborne, you might see a monster the size of a building that is just... I don't know what it's doing over there. Hanging out. Discussions of their difficulty pop up from time to time, but the difficulty is part of the story: you aren't supposed to win. Look at what's happened, what happening, look at the worlds they occur in. Look at the foes arrayed against you, their alien motives, their size, their ferocity. Read the inscriptions. Failure is the assumption. Narrative and Challenge aren't two independent phenomena in this construction. My own "story" invariably ends long before the game does - I can't even git the kind of gud they're looking for, and I'm not even mad. The game is like a cosmic Coinstar, and it sorts us all.

Every PAX we do I try to update the number of shows I've done in my head. Usually, anyway. At a certain point it's just kind of an N+1 thing. I think it might be more helpful to be granular about it: this is the tenth East, a show that rose from the haunted warren of the Heinz center which could barely contain it even in its first year, to the BCEC, a building so large that I felt touring it was a waste of time because we could never possibly need it.