These things come in seasons, I guess; they've been through a couple rounds of intense Warhammer 40k interest at Chez Gabriel. This most recent fever is almost certainly the result of Space Marine II, and as I said before, the game is so ardent in its manifestation of the brand and its lore that I think it could mint new fans just as well as repel them. But the borderline? The person who owns models, many of whom are gray, or still lie flensed on their sprues? Those who are down to clown, but haven't prioritized the hobby recently? Their minds will be terraformed by this game. Those people are well and truly fucked.

The boys and I decided to try and learn how to play 40K 10th edition. There’s a lot to learn and I figured we’d start with the basics. In order to learn the core rules we avoided playing with objective markers we decided to keep it simple and just try to kill each other's army in a straight up fight. Jerry, Kiko and Eric came over yesterday to play some 40k and teach us the rules. What they told us is that the game is not really balanced for the way we were playing and actually needed the objectives to work. This made sense because I have to say it was damn near impossible to beat Noah’s Death Guard army in a fist fight. 

Right here!

Mormons used to call the house all the time, because my dad - and his nine brothers and sisters - grew up Mormon. Mormonism has always been very normalized for me, very ordinary stuff, but I just happened to come up in a place that has a unique relationship with the faith. Until you really get into the lore, it's essentially a Christian sect that shares a lot of what you might call "class features" with Bible Classic. But in one of the most incredible flexes of all time, their founder Joseph Smith literally wrote what is essentially a sequel to The Bible. And, well, yeah. You know what they say about sequels.

I don't really go in for Remasters generally, there's always somebody doing something new and incredible and I never want to miss it - I always want to get in just as it's being removed from the oven, where consensus has yet to transform a dynamic, hand-made experience into a number. But I do get excited when I think that a new person might come to discover our Old Ways through one of them, and Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver is very particular vertical slice of an era. With its warping, three dimensional worlds and its fairly profound story - a showcase for Amy Hennig, from which she mounted a fairly profound career - it was doing shocking things on the PS1. It has some incredibly hard lines - bars, in the modern parlance. I hope someone unearths this time capsule and gets all the way up their ass in some Wikis because it absolutely warrants it.

Having crushed Space Marine 2 beneath my ceramite heel, I'm now in a position to observe Gabe rolling hard on his own playthrough. It's just very, very good. Because it is essentially Sci-Fi Catholicism, with all the gothic majesty and ritual that might suggest, large portions of it take place in church. What I'm trying to get at is that The Candle Budget goes pretty crazy in the worlds of the Imperium, in a time and place where swinging sacred incense in a thurible is part of routine engine maintenance. The whole thing is so dense, with so many odd angles, that I can't help but like it. It works as satire and, because the best satire must fully and truly understand its subject, it also works as an exemplar of a baroque science fiction. You can tell it wry or tell it straight and it works either way.

I was seventeen when the first Crow movie hit theaters. It’s hard to imagine a better movie for an angsty teen in 1994. I was already a fan of the comic book and absolutely loved the movie. There are lines from the Crow that I still quote to this day! Obviously a lot has changed in the past 30 years. Art that I might have called “sincere” is now considered “cringe”. Everything today needs to be viewed through a protective layer of irony. You need to deliver a wink to the audience every once in a while to let them know you’re not actually taking this shit too seriously. Maybe it’s the Gen X in me, but sometimes I want to take this shit too seriously.

You know what? Gabe actually really liked the new Crow, or as it is being called in higher-end circles, Le Crow Nouveaux. He says it feels like a throwback in the fun way. I'm curious, but not so curious yet that I would prioritize it over any other activity. I wonder if it's the same thing with a hard seven in game reviews - occasionally sevens are, in actuality, sevens. But there's also a handful of cases where the game is a nine for some and a five for others and the mechanism doesn't know what else to do with it. Also, hell is bad! It's not a first-choice destination.

The potential of a third D is immense - however you might parse the phrase. It seems like there's a lot of cool stuff that could happen out there; it's a lot of room. Are we doing the best we could with it? Maybe not. It would be nice to have a point of comparison, like an alien world. I saw a TikTok that said that the James Webb Telescope had found city lights on a planet several trillion miles away, but then another TikTok a few seconds later said that the James Webb Telescope can't even see things like that. It was a heady couple minutes or so and I'm still whirling psychologically. In any event, we'll have to wait to see what others are managing to accomplish with their D.

True to the strange force that keeps us in perpetual opposition, any video of Gabriel must also be a video of me eating shit:

I think that Space Marine 2 is very good, in an obvious way that should be apparent to all! But it might just be that everybody has "their Space Marine" or Space Marine Equivalent Product (SMEP). Ryan has a soft spot for Marvel, and even after The Book of Boba Fett Gabe simply has no natural defense against Star Wars! He has repeatedly taken to the site to defend the virtue of Star Wars Outlaws, but my immortal warrior eunuch dolls are a step too far?! Come now.

Eleven years ago today we posted page four of the Tithe storyline! We were asked at PAX about our favorite creations over the years and I said that I think the Eyrewood is probably the coolest thing we’ve made in our nearly thirty years of work. It’s possible you missed the Tithe when it first came out. If that’s the case or if you just want to revisit it, you can start our investigation of the Daughters of the Eyrewood right here. 

-Gabe Out

My boys got me into Raingbow Six Siege a couple months ago and I have since gotten Jerry and Kara into it as well. It’s an incredibly difficult game but I am starting to get the hang of it. The other night I got my first “ACE” which is when you as a single player kill all five of the opposing team members. As an old man who just started playing I was very proud and had to share it here.

Thank you to the folks at Bandai Namco who hooked me up with some awesome Gundam Breaker 4 goodies. This package arrived for me just the other day and contains the game for PS5, a beautiful steel collectors case and a brand new Gunpla kit that I have already started building. Don’t forget the Gundam Base mobile tour is traveling around the country and will be landing in Redmond Wa, on October 12 and 13th. I plan on heading over there myself with the kids and checking out the festivities so say hi if you see me. I’ve also heard that Michaels craft stores have started selling Gunpla if you are looking to pick up kits locally. 

-Gabe Out

Morakh and Kara have been playing Ale & Tale Tavern for a minute now, I think it got surfaced in one of these incredibly frequent, increasingly niche showcases on Steam. They ended up getting hooked on the free demo "First Pints" which limits the full extent of the play area by situating you under a dome, reminiscent of the Stephen King thriller "Under The Dome." But that's the kind of thrilling intensity Gabe brings that kind of intensity to the dining room.

A wooly mix of Dune, Foundation, Catholicism somehow, and a uniquely British voice, the universe that underpins Warhammer 40k is something I can't really pretend to be a neutral observer on. My arc in the space is the same as a cautionary after-school special; I tried some at a party in 1993 and I have had a fever for the flavor ever since. Licensed excursions into the setting have a dodgy reputation; there's a lot of big ideas here and a unique voice that requires sort of a deft hand to execute. Games like Gladius, Mechanicus, and surprisingly the mobile game Tacticus all prove it can be done - basically, if it ends with -us it seems like we're in the clear. Shockingly, I never played the original Space Marine; I was nervous. I get this way sometimes about things I like. Space Marine 2, though? This is legit. I can understand why you might not want to take my word for it. But there's an inverse here, too - if it passes my test? Frankly, the game goes so fucking hard, so dense with real lore and crazy words, I don't know if it will mint new fans or repel them! That's how true it is.