Patential

It goes without saying that the Deadzone is dangerous. It's not a preferred zone. If it had any other redeeming characteristics, we would be calling it something else. Still, when you shoot an enemy's weakpoint, the game makes a sound like a river of coins flowing from a garish slot machine. Whoever made it sound this way should receive the bulk of the proceeds for this game.

I thought Hollow Knight looked cool when Gabe was playing it on the couch about a million years ago; I have a memory that I might have made up of him using some kind of bug-oriented fast travel mechanism inside a big tunnel. He bounced off it, ultimately, so hard that he didn't even remember playing it. Hollow Knight: Silksong passed into myth, and myth into legend, and then in a startling reversal of the usual order of things it became a literal.

I saw a video online of somebody missing a jump and then falling directly down through what seemed like five or six zones until they found solid ground. At this exact moment, I'm not sure my controller would survive a game like that. I can already feel it flexing in my palms, the preamble to a crack that can be heard both by the dead and those not yet born.

After Jasmine and Gabe both pushed Deadzone: Rogue on me in the same weekend, and because it's twenty five bucks, I crumbled quickly beneath this assault on heart and mind. There aren't surprises on the surface; it's gonna do exactly what it said it was gonna do. Then you fall into the loop. Part of that is getting a slightly better shoe, but… Here. Let me go into it.

The last time I tried to write about the censorship of content on Steam and elsewhere, I proved unsuited to the task. Well, that may be a matter for debate. Maybe you would have liked what I wrote. Gabe certainly would have liked it; that's part of why I didn't post it. Let me try this again, in the mode of the Elder Statesman that I am.

I am back home after another great PAX West. Thank you to everyone who came to our various Penny Arcade panels and events over the course of the weekend. I am confident that someday Jerry and I will walk on stage for a panel and find a completely empty room, but that day is not today! 

Here's the strip from the make a strip panel at PAX West 2025, to celebrate a new vendor I'm really excited about. In other news, Ronia wants to get Alien tattoos together when she turns 18; she wants me to get the xenomorph and her to get the facehugger, because "that's the baby." I'm weirdly touched by it. We must consider that she may be, in fact, my girl.

What we can say for certain is that the eighties were a very interesting time for cross-cultural product. Gabe's verdict on Shinobi: Art Of Vengeance is that it kicks ass, and he says the demo is super hefty.  Usually if he likes a demo, he'll just stop playing it - doesn't want to spoil the experience.  This time, he couldn't put it down.

The official show store for PAX West 2025 is live, and there are some hardcore bangers in there this time around. Dabe was able to get access to take pictures in real metro spots, and even just the store page for PAX has a ton of amazing photography:

I just got the pages, and the Design Team has of course killed it.  Keep an eye out for the Blue Circles - those are the ones that will be available at our relaunched store.penny-arcade.com very soon!  The incredible Metro Jackets are an online exclusive this year because of a shipping issue, but we'll have them to try on at the show and they will ship free!

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(CW)TB 

My criminality is well known, in lexical circles - my base contempt for the tyranny of accepted nomenclature always on display. I'm the joker/smoker/midnight toker of not spelling things correctly. But I have a very complex and yet absolutely wrong reason for why "phase" means "faze," just completely made up, and yet internally consistent enough to stay lodged there with primacy over the true word. Gabriel decided that I needed to be punished, which is true, but not for this! I need to be punished about another, different thing and I'm hoping this will apply.

A lot has to go right to get a new TCG going in your friend group. It's like founding a new religion, or maybe a terror cell - you need to make firm believers of them, and fast. They need to see the face of God instantly and hurl all doubts into a cleansing flame. You can always fall back on Magic the way you would D&D or, I don't know, Catholicism? These are proven brands that have stood the test of time and everybody has a few cards or dice or… beads, I guess. Wine might be better. Trying to get people to worship some off-brand deity like Baal takes a bit more doing. You gotta loosen that jar.

I made a joke that Gabir would be at the sing-along showings of KPop Demon Hunters, but when we were writing the strip he said that he had grabbed tickets with some difficulty for he and Kara. You know? For good or ill.

Pokemon GO has become a durable event at Chez Gabir, and with that comes engagement with the game beyond just putting a little English on a pokeball and bouncing it off a beast's head. I hope the suggestion in panel three is only a gentle jest, because the pocket monster he left there is essentially a bug made out of fire. Or vice versa. I guess. The forbidden hot pocket! Mayhap the hottest pocket known to man.

Gabriel's been tormented by Madden Ultimate Team long enough for us to have a chorus of strips about it, and we have penned a new entry in the canon.

Actually being old I can't speak to. But Getting old is really interesting. I mean, if you're me. If you aren't me, maybe the hellscape of degradation that our culture constantly heaps on you for having the temerity to not die can find purchase. There's a lot of people trying to make me ashamed of various things and then trying to sell me chemicals to manage them, and while I appreciate the hustle I'm simply too far along whatever kind of spectrum it is to yield to this kind of manipulation. It isn't possible to not age; I never thought I would remain the same. That's what would be weird, in fact: to endure raw time and the obvious, profound insincerities of existence and be recognizable at the end. It's psycho shit; I don't honor it.

You never know what you're gonna get from a Netflix Original. Or, maybe you know exactly, and it suppresses your expectations down to the level where it can be consumed without harm. Their Sony shit kinda pops, though. They delivered authentic quarantine thrills with The Mitchells vs. The Machines, and Sony Pictures Animation's KPop Demon Hunters(?!) made such an impact that it and its pretend bands are getting a theatrical release. I know about it from the girls on my block of course, but once Mork finally gave up on the Fandango at Home app they decided to watch the first thing that came up on Netflix. Then, when they woke up, they watched it again.

I ended up grabbing a plain white deck box for my Gundam deck because it felt appropriate for the RX-78, but once I got home it just started to look like a blank canvas.