Gabriel and I are largely CoD adjacent. We purchase them, like them, and play them, but they rarely become a lifestyle. Black Ops II - "blops" - was the exception, at least for him, when he discovered that playing it via the Wii U's remote screen allowed him to play it more or less constantly. He plays the new one with Keek sometimes and experienced some of the classic concerns, but he's got a bad cold that has placed him betwixt life and death. I think he got it from Australia; it's essentially a bioweapon. He probably should have declared it on that sheet they give you at the airport. I haven't been able to play with them as much as I'd like. Barely at all.

Gabriel's Sonic Boom Verdict was similar to other Sonic Verdicts and ultimately resulted in us wondering to what extent we had manufactured the Sonic that we liked from whole cloth, and then just draped that engineered affection over new titles as they came out. I don't really believe it yet. I feel like I remember having fun. Maybe not everyone is. I feel like there's a gruesome career retrospective coming for this beleaguered hedgehog, one with heartfelt interviews interleaved with black and white reenactments. I think he's in a bad place.

Child’s Play has become a year round event but things definitely pick up around the holidays. One of the things I look forward to every year is the dinner auction that we put on here in Seattle. As of right now it’s about 80% sold out but you can still grab tickets if you act fast. Once a year it’s nice to ditch the black t-shirt for a black tux and get a little fancy. As usual we will have tons of incredible items from the videogame industry to bid on. It’s in amazing night and it’s all for a good cause so go grab your tickets today.

There are only a few series I "run a scam" to get advance copies of. Assassin's Creed is one of them. I'd beaten the game by the time it came out proper, through frenzied play, so I felt like I was missing something. Except I still am. I am either missing it, or it isn't there.

It's so lightly euphemized in the strip that it might as well be documentary footage: we are dealing with platform rancor the likes of which I haven't seen since junior high, only it's made a thousand times worse, because back then we could like whatever we liked in our own basements. Now, if you aren't wholly synchronized with this or that cult, the investment you have made in a piece of hardware is severely deprecated. With every friend who goes the other way, it becomes more lonely and strange.

The last console war I really participated in would have been the Sega Genesis vs. the Super Nintendo. I chose Sonic the Hedgehog as my lord and savior. I got a Genesis for Christmas and managed to convince myself that “Sega did what Ninten-don’t.” Eventually I got my first job though and purchased a Super Nintendo for myself. From that point on I made it my mission to try and own all the consoles. I never had great jobs but when you don’t prioritise things like food and clothing you can afford things like a Saturn and a Playstation. I’ve certainly had preferences over the years but I’ve never felt like that rabid console fanboy again. At least not until last night.

We had talked about the cost disparities for videogames during a Q&A at PAX - a subset of the larger phenomenon referred to as "The Australia Tax" - and Gabriel was legit scandalized by the revelation. I was aware of it because I am a well-rounded global citizen. But I wasn't aware of how screwed it is when you're talking about non-weirdo, non-indie games you would buy at a store - it's almost twice as much.

PAX South is coming up in January and we could use some Enforcers. If you would like to sign up you can get all the information you need right here. Just fill out the application at the bottom of the page. We could not dope the show without Enforcers so hit that page and join the ranks.

I mostly watch Twitch during the big tournaments; unlike my cohort, watching streams never became anything akin to a life practice. Then again, I wasn't aware anyone was doling out "content" with such a novel flesh quotient on a regular schedule. I have certainly found some of the manifestations of this principle in the streams I'm aware of… odd, they're better at LoL than I am, though, so I gotta give props. But there is a well-defined, reliably modeled relationship between the strategically deployed human teat and the pageview. Or is that one of those things you can't say anymore? I'm not always super up to date on my crimethink. In any event, I'mma get mine.

I don't feel like the parentheses ever really closed on this trip. Maybe the last one won't be placed until I step off the plane in Seattle. What it seems like happened - and I am open to alternate explanations in the vein of Grassy Knoll - is that we got off the plane, held a PAX that obliterated the first one here on every conceivable axis, made shedloads of friends, and now before I can even stack these memories appropriately in my brain I'm getting back into a plane.

I’ve had a lot of folks ask me for an update on my Surface 3 impressions. I said at the time it came out that I could not really recommend it for artists. The new placement of the Home button caused some problems but it was moving from the Wacom digitizer to N-Trig that really made the device very frustrating to try and draw on in my opinion. Microsoft has been working on various ways of fixing some of those issues and since I wrote that post they have managed to fix a lot of them.

They seem to corral their mean Australians at the border, just like they do in Canada, and everyone else is generally so nice here that my first inclination is that they are fucking with me. I'm heading over to PAX Aus in a second, after I link the comic and go HAM on this muesli. Oh! Actually, wait a second. There was something else.

We got to Australia about the time a PST person would normally wake up, but then we tried to do the sorta prescribed thing where you stay awake all day to get your head straight for the new place. I don't know if it worked all the way. Everything seems to be contained within a parenthetical which denotes its contents are not to be trusted.

Here in about seven hours or so we'll be on our way to the fabled burg of Mael-Byn, or at any rate we'll fly to the place we will fly to Melbourne from, that extra little kick this finite universe must always get in. It's the first time we won't be home for Halloween, but I know that some of our number fully intend to bring a measure of it there, at such volume and to such an extent that we may discover what laws prohibit wholesale lolly importation.

As is our way, we have delivered the most recently donated Child's Play Strip at or near the buzzer. I think the buzzer might already have gone off actually, but we ended up doing it for people who are as busy as we are, if not busier. It ended up being a crossover with a comic they also do in addition to everything else. Here's theirs, and here's ours. Many thanks to Steve and Ash for letting us play around with their toys.

I play Destiny every day. This past weekend I even started an Alt character. Now I have my level 27 Hunter as well as a level 5 Titan. Whenever I have a bit of free time I am in there playing. Kids taking a bath? I can do a story mission. 30 minutes until I have to leave for work? I can knock out a bounty or two. The Seahawks are playing? I’ll just play Destiny on my Vita all afternoon while we watch the game. Playing games is my job and so kara sees this a lot. I’m always playing something but even she commented the other day that I seem a little obsessed with Destiny. I can’t deny it either. This game has its hooks in me and I can’t stop.