Late last year, as you might recall, Gabe had been sufficiently tantalized by Battlefield 2042 to pre-order for beta access. The practical outcome was that this beta convinced him that he shouldn't have bought it, but it was too late. There's an Alanis Morissette song about this I think. It's like one of those sci-fi novellas where the protagonist is assigned to kill themselves or some shit. There's a cosmic payload there and we're still unraveling it.

Obviously, one hesitates to engage in armchair psychology. That's sort of a joke: this is something literally everyone does all the time. For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn? And also to ascribe troubling psychoses to people we've never met? I'm not sure if you've heard of Twitter. It happens on there sometimes.

The news that Nintendo is shutting down the 3DS and WiiU eShops comes at an interesting time because I’ve been thinking a lot about the games I own recently. For the last few weeks I’ve been going through old boxes in my garage and trying to sort out what games and consoles I actually own physical versions of. As it turns out I own more 3DS and DS games than anything else when it comes to real physical media. 

I haven't played Lost Ark. I bounced off Diablo III, for fuck's sake; it may be that the genre has simply lost its grip on me. Or I can't grip it, or something. It's a grip issue of some kind. Gabriel was able to determine that he wasn't interested anymore very quickly and told me so.

I was hoping this Nintendo Direct would have some Breath Of The Wild II shit, which in my house is known colloquially as "botwatu." But they've suggested that they can't even say the subtitle without spoilers, and since it sorta seems like it might be the closing parenthesis on the whole story… maybe they don't put it on the mantle unless they intend to fire it.

"Playstation Exclusive" often means "Available On Epic Game Store," which I appreciate. I grabbed Sifu because Gabe advocated for it at full volume, but also because I'd seen some streams of it, and in the hands of some of these dorks it streams better than any game I've ever seen.

The best, most entertaining, more productive way for Gabriel and I to "play" a game together is for me to just sit next to him on the couch. That's more or less the ethos of the site anyway, it's represented by an incalculable (that is to say, deeply and profoundly calculable) number of strips where we do just that. I have a lot of valuable opinions on when he should jump and he shouldn't be deprived of that. A lot of it depends on the game. I feel like this is basically how it would go.

(This is the last day I'm pushing this - consider supporting the vast network of people who make a living connected to events.  There are a lot of them.)

I don't actually consider it a big deal if you change your difficulty, though the outcome in this case is legitimately funny. I've done it a couple times myself, but I have to be pretty mad at a game in order to do it. If Metroid Dread had given me the option to, I might have given in on one or two of those encounters, but in that case I'm glad it didn't. Outside of sequence breaks, I like that anyone who beat that game has a shared experience. I feel the same way about Soulsbourne games. It makes them a little less lonely.

Techno-feudalism - catch the wave! I can't even maintain this posture as a joke. Obviously, happy to license or even sell IP to somebody who we think could do more with some of our settings and stories, but probably not the whole thing.

Well, so, it sounds like Pokemon Legends: Arceus is both a cool, new direction for Pocket Monsters and the environments are… you know, they're environments. Right? That ain't nothin'!

Something I've always held as an article of faith is that life is not a purely local phenomenon. Its origins in my mind are strange, but the fundamentals have been retained: the church I went to as a young person told me that telescopes had recently identified the Gates of Heaven approaching the Earth.

2020 has progressed unabated. The treacherous Gary Whitta - merely this era's wet vessel for the perfidious and eternal sorcerer Gar'Whita - has unleashed his naughty Wordle clone, Lewdle, where morally wrong answers are always right. Will this lead to an age of license and perversity in the young? Undoubtedly, yes. This was almost certainly its purpose. Such are his workings that they may take centuries to come to fruition - his was the bony hand behind "Fruit By The Foot," too long the fuel for rough teen behavior, a crimson snack that is somehow also, improbably, a whip. It is the very icon of his wickedness.

I still haven't had a chance to get into this fuckin' Valheim server - maybe I'll do it today. It will definitely require that I scroll up my text history with Gabe until it reaches the cached portion. That's the kind of sacrifice I'm willing to make, and I think it's an indication of my vigor and resolve.

I'd actually decided not to read this Joss Whedon article; I'm not super interested in a piece that layers bullshit retcons of his behavior with flaky pastry and tender rabbit. I'm not in the market for some kind of artisinal rehabilitation. But… it's not that. It's something that is, in fact, truly revelatory. It's a confession, lurid and ornate; it's the last ten minutes of a procedural where the villain can't help himself anymore. He has to make absolutely certain that you know just how smart he is.

Sometimes on the Internet sometimes "thing happens" and all you can see are the ripples out, not the inciting event. Microsoft's move to purchase Activision Blizzard was in that category. There were a lot of one and two word tweets; I couldn't help but get in on it myself. The headlines all seem to say slightly different things - Microsoft bought them, they intend to buy them, those are pretty different. It's possible that those who say it's already done are simply saying the FTC isn't even gonna look at it. That's a charitable interpretation.