As you can see by the “part 1” in the title of today’s comic, we are kicking off a little storyline. It’s just three comics but it’s actually an idea we’ve been kicking around for a couple months. It touches on some pretty personal stuff for me and so I wanted to give you all a little setup if you’re interested.

We were going to tell you a story in the next few strips; as usual, it will be your half of the equation to determine what percentage of what we say at any given time is true. It's never been an especially hard game, because it always is. But that epistemic judder is what allows you to engage true topics. Sometimes you need a little space.

I think we can all agree that the previous episode of Strip Search was pretty intense. In today's episode we slow things down a bit with another social challenge and give you all some time to get to know the artists a bit better.

I have wanted to make a comic that used all these words in a single strip, that's the sort of thing I fantasize about, to the extent that I've had them all typed into the Cloud equivalent of strip.txt for coming up on a year and a half. Occasionally, one must do for oneself; occasionally, one must reclaim.

Strip Search episode 4 is up and we have our very first elimination.

We try to avoid all talk of politics here on PA. In general it's because neither of us is an especially political person, but also we want you to be able to come and laugh at our video game jokes regardless of who you voted for. The exception I guess is when video games end up mixing with politics and we feel like commenting.

The situation depicted in today's strip isn't confined to this Tomb Raider, or any previous Tomb Raiding excursion, which was one of the things that recommended it conceptually. That said, it's especially present here, with that combination of incredibly high graphical fidelity and physics puzzles that make the brain flip and roll inside the skull.

It took four years but Pinny Arcade is finally a reality! I came back from a trip to Disneyland totally hooked on Disney Pin Trading. I loved the experience of finding cool pins around the park and trading with cast members. I immediately started thinking about doing something similar with Penny Arcade. It’s taken a long time but Pinny Arcade is the result.

Deciding which Tomb Raider joke to do is actually very difficult. The game is such an exercise in extremity that it reads as parody very quickly, whenever it's not showing you something so incredibly gross you reach reflexively for your own throat while it says look what you just did.

With today’s episode of Strip Search we’re really getting into the competition proper.

When a retailer stops selling your game because your shit is so busted, and people try to get the money they spent on your nega-game back and you get mad, it seems like that would be pretty bad. Maybe it should be! Maybe it should matter. Does it? Well, seeing as they pull this shit more or less on the regular, we can say pretty clearly that it does not.

I have a bunch of PAX new to dish out so get ready.

Check out Episode 2 of Strip Search!

Gabriel wasn't able to get into SimCity last night to play, because the server wasn't working and single player games don't exist anymore, even if you are playing a private city and nobody can come in anyway. So I would remember it, because it was important, I said here in the post a long time ago that "EA games come with free misery." This is why I stopped being an annual purchaser of Tiger Woods games: because this company has a serious, serious problem with execution at launch. You would only fix it if it meant more sales. But it doesn't, because everybody already bought it. Well, except me.

We give the contestants a fun little game to warm up their drawing skills and get to know each other.

So, imagine that advertising and those who are made to look at advertising are locked in a constant struggle not unlike that between infectious organisms and organisms that don't want to get infected. They co-evolve in various ways; they circle each other in a tense orbit, until a development on either side alters the board. Susceptibility to traditional commercial messages has been almost completely bred out of the stock. You have to hide it now, like when you secret a massive pill in a glistening heap of Fancy Feast. It's entirely possible that when you think about our culture and all our entertainment as disease vectors you may become nauseous. Have you considered Pepto-Bismol, either as a chewable tablet, caplet, or classic liquid?