Retroactive

I’ve posted another time lapse of the comic drawing process. This one is for Tattooine, the Maul comic strip we posted yesterday. If you like seeing how the sausage gets made, check it out below! 

If you are into Rhythm games or Beat em Ups I highly recommend checking out Dead as Disco. It is an arcade brawler with combat reminiscent of the Batman Arkham series except that all your punches and combos can sync to the beat. 

The best Star Wars since it was acquired by The Rodent is very easy to define. On the movie side, Rogue One. I thought Solo had some hot shit in it, but I can understand if you didn't want to pull the bar down for that particular ride. Beyond that, the first two seasons of The Mandalorian, Andor, and now - just finishing its run - is Maul. It's actually that good. Some people like it even more than me, and I like it a lot.

I can appreciate that this is probably some inside baseball, but our ancient alliance with Seattle Children's Hospital through Child's Play Charity compels us to offer aid.

The only time I feel bad for not having a newer console is when Housemarque drops something. With a pedigree that goes back to the Amiga, they have developed and honed their taste to Jamon Iberico levels - I wouldn't be surprised if they let their games feed on acorns, free-range. They've perfected arcade feel, itself a kind of artisanal, out-of-time style, and now with Returnal and (from Mork tells me) Saros, they've mastered progression as well.

I think Saros is a super fun game whenever it isn’t trying to tell me whatever this story is. The bullet hell gameplay is really well done and if that’s all the game was I would probably love it, but they have layered in this inscrutable story that I find completely uninteresting and unnecessary. Jerry and I often say that something is “too grand for chicken” when trying to explain that a thing can be simple and great without needing an extra layer of gravitas. I will keep playing it, but that is how I feel about Saros. 

I made a joke about the feeling of being observed somehow by the creators of The Killing Stone, a crack squad of Triple A escapees who keep making the weirdest fucking crap. Deep, deep down there is someone there who knew that they would sell at least one copy of the game - and not merely to their mom, like usual.

Discord used to be a tool that I leveraged to communicate with friends and erstwhile allies, but over the years it's increasingly become something like a car up on blocks in my front yard - something to tinker with, absent any prospect or expectation of continuous functionality. I have to constantly remind it that I don't want to use the speaker in my monitor. And mics? "Forget about it." I would say that this is an unforgivable sin but I know at least one other person who might actually prefer this state of affairs. Also, this really happened. So.

I could link you to a trailer for Assassin's Creed:Black Flag Resynched, but there's a ton of them, and it's safest to just drop you at their YouTube where you can choose from a World Premiere Trailer, an Official Game Overview Trailer, or even the Worldwide Reveal Showcase that clocks in at life a half an hour. It looks fucking amazing. This used to be My Series, I even liked the ones you aren't supposed to, but after they released two of them simultaneously and I finished Unity I kinda bounced off it - the RPG era and even to a certain extent dual protagonists felt really OOC. Just pick! Just pick the one whose blood I'm living in. This runs back before all that - probably the last of the truly blown out, old-style AC games. I really thought Edward Kenway was going to have a go of it, on some Ezio shit, get a trilogy by himself. That's how much people liked IV. I'd love it if that's what they're setting up. The multiplayer was some of the best times we've ever had online, it used to be kind of a full office affair watching those murderous Hide and Seek matches play out, but those were all additions after the series had hit its stride with mature technology and a massive global network of development teams. I can wait. It seems like they've really been going through it.

I've finally started checking out Pragmata, and it's like the demo, but with a ton more stuff - exactly what you want from "product." It looks sick and for a game asking you to do some Cirque du Soleil shit with your hands it maps to a controller in a way that feels solid. Gabe is playing it on PS5 Pro, the secondary Hacking inputs just map to the face buttons - I figured it would just be an easy remap on PC, that would certainly help Walter, but the way these perverts are navigating the hacking board on PC is with the Goddamn mouse. Just imagine it - picture that shit. These fiends hold down a key or "the back button on your mouse," and then scoot a cursor thingy through the grid. I want to try it just because it seems naughty. Dodgy, like. Type of shit that gets you put on a list.

When I named the strip, I was thinking about how Athena burst from her father's head - considering the bedevilments we had proposed in the strip. As I woke, I feared that there was a vibrator company called Athena and I was Goddamn right. You know how you can have a party where you sell candles or something to your friends? Right. This is like that, except it's for things you… things you put. Things that are and can be put in, like… Anyway, they have different things. For a place.

I've taught him everything I know about Once Upon A Galaxy, and now it's time for Dabe to travel into that wilderness alone.  Well, not entirely alone.  You should go hang out!  Day One of this month's tournament just opened up.  I don't compete in tournaments generally, I find them scary, but I'm excited to explore this new part of myself. 

(CW)TB 

It sounds like there was some networking shit early on that plagued early adopters, but Windrose - part of a genre we attempt to name in the strip - is something I'd already played a bit during one of Steam's various "Fests." These fests are getting more and more baroque, more obscure, and a fest for fests ("Fest Fest") cannot be far behind.

I recently finished my side of a “sketch swap” with the incredible Bob Q after he had already completed his end. Bob and I have very different styles and I think he would agree that it was a difficult task trying to ink and color over the other person’s sketch. From his report, it sounds like he was probably more outside his comfort zone than I was. I grew up wanting to be a comic book artist like Bob is, but I was only good enough to be a cartoonist. So here are the results of our Acquisitions Inc. sketch swap!

I have now gotten him to talk about it twice when he wanted to talk about his colon zero or even fewer times. This accrues not to my capacity for manipulation, but rather to the fact that he has been so harrowed body and mind by the experience he is now essentially just a sausage casing with a t-shirt draped over it. I was able to extract more data in my most recent interrogation and what I learned will shock you.

I always preferred Forza Horizon to the traditional Forza, but I never thought that was a compliment to me.  I would love to say that I stopped going to church because I had unspun the fundamental philosophies inherent to it, and stood astride it, gleaming like a newly minted God.  It's a fiction I'd love to maintain.  In the end, I simply couldn't hack it - I was willing to engage in a multi-year campaign of gruesome self-recrimination, obviously. But once it became clear that it was utterly open-ended, a blank check I would perpetually cash against my own identity, I could burn myself alive or try to go on as a maimed and useless creature.  That's basically me and Forza Horizon.  I wish that I were hardcore enough for the progenitor - of the universe, or the racing franchise.  Take your pick.