November 18, 2025
It's incredibly silly to think that we have been at this - whatever this is - for twenty-seven years. That is a crazy thing to do for as long as we've been doing it. Any rational actor would have boarded the white ships aeons ago, as men reckon time. From this throne in the ATL, Ludacris calls upon all of us to - in his words - "Act A Fool." But he could never have imagined this kind of foolishness extended over such a substantial period of time.
Eurogamer's review is precisely the kind of activism they specialize in, but they're so earnest about it that I consider it an aesthetic. It only makes me mad when they pretend they aren't doing it - by and large they just have tender hearts and venerate the priors of their social class. I'm only mentioning them again because they gave the best shooter this year a two out of five because Embark used AI voices. Well, kinda. They might have, or they might do more in the future. I, uh… Goddammit. Far be it from me to venerate a prior, but I gotta give it to 'em.
Just another reminder that the 22nd annual Child’s Play Auction and dinner is coming up on December 5th. After a long break, Jerry and I are back as hosts. Come hang out with us and help us raise money for kids in Children’s hospitals all over the world! You can get your tickets right here.
Gabe has been pushing this new Frankenstein shit pretty hard, but I don't have to be nudged with any intensity into seeing a Guillermo Del Toro movie. I can close my eyes and see one, I love his shit. Apparently this new one balls out of control, and a wisp of a scene at the very end of the runtime hints at the kind of structures in play.
Because Mork is a literal Redditor, he let me know that the ARC Raiders community has split itself into two subreddits over some basic questions about the intention of the game. We're putting together a summit of course, on a summit, because it seems like that would be a cool place for one. We'll let you know how it goes.
I know that there are spelunkers reclaiming FMV, but the strip concept was too silly to resist.
Because we're still in the first flush of ARC Raiders, no equilibrium has been truly reached and thus raw potential permeates every interaction. This is the terrifying, middle-space ambiguity. You've heard - from us and others - that solo runs very nearly constitute a separate product from the first. You can and will get put under and robbed by rats and scoundrels, but the ratio is much different. I would say it's the inversion, almost to the number, of the group play dynamics. They are gonna try to kill and eat you the vast majority of the time, but every now and then they are just trying to check a box on the meta progression - a human universal, something anyone can understand. I have a button that shoots a gun and I have a button that talks to strangers. They're both modes of communication.
This is just a quick post to remind folks that the annual Child's Play charity dinner and auction is coming up on December 5th and you can get your tickets right here. The big news this year is that Jerry and I are returning to the stage to host the evening and serve as your terrible auctioneers!
"Always two there are" isn't an adage limited just to the traditional distribution of evil Jedi. There are also two reasons why a person might engage with Extraction as a genre. I indicated the first on Friday, but one more appropriate to Gabriel and others.
I am obsessed with ARC Raiders. This is my first time playing an extraction shooter and I am fascinated by the social experiment angle of it. I have had some absolutely unforgettable encounters with other people in the game and I’d say the overwhelming majority of those experiences have been positive.
The best possible advertisement for ARC Raiders is that Gabe likes it. Might actually be obsessed with it. Called me up to play! Played solo, late, and then woke up early. Sent me clips of his derring do late in the night, awoke to write the strip with his mind clouded by the peals and shrieks of the Earth's cybernetic inheritors. He has aspirations for his play experience that are situated perhaps a little above mine. But there is a point, somewhere between his best laid plans (men) and my best laid plans (mice) where it's essentially a co-op horror game and I almost always have the appetite for one round.
One presumes my final form is just me as I am now, a greasy and glistening sphere, within which plump veins can be seen writhing in their labors. There are disadvantages obviously but if we're both trying to get to the bottom of a hill, and we're putting money on it? Good luck, bro. Good fuckin' luck.
After experiencing the full arc of Gabriel's argumentation, robust in its profundity and vice versa, you may wonder why things have resolved as they did. That is because Smokey The Bear and Yogi The Bear are neither - they are simply Smokey Bear and Yogi Bear. So what he did was technically crimes. But I've never been effected by a Mandela so hard in my entire life.
At SDCC one year, some of the writers on The Simpsons came by to say hi. They told us something we thought was bizarre at the time, but they would know better than us: that it's okay to use the same joke again but it has to be at least ten years later. The parachute stuff was back in 2002; I think we're in the clear.
I didn't know! Back in the day, it literally used to be the 9 key, placed there as a kind of test by the developers. One of the more twisted executions of this concept must have been in America's Army, where if you didn't land correctly via a specific input you'd break your leg at the spawn point and just… crawl around. Is that meaner? I guess they're both pretty mean.
After finishing up the recent Lookouts storyline I still felt like drawing Eyrewood stuff so I did a new Hanna piece.
I don't think I've ever deployed the terminology here, but Gabriel and I will sometimes use the term "videogame" to describe a game that feels good to play. It's the result of many games being so bent toward epitomizing their genre conventions that they lose sight of the fact that they are something you have to play with in order to enjoy. There are a lot of Bethesda games that are very "open world," which is not without its virtues, but the actual experience of playing them is worthwhile because of those factors and not because someone thoughtfully modelled the experience of being there. As an example: Battlefield has always offered scale, but their gunplay and movement haven't always risen to the moment; I feel like BF6 is a videogame, even if my own sloth and ineptitude sometimes obscures it. At least they know what's going on.
