Monster Train shares a lot of dynamics with Slay The Spire, a game I think it's fair to say will go down in, you know, the… game scrolls or whatever as a pinnacle achievement. God only knows how many hours have been eaten by this game? Before Coronaworld, Ryan and I would played STS (as it is known by rough and worldly youths) in beta and release for over a year and never got tired of it. And that was before I started spelunking its Steam Workshop, a septic fuckhouse where every twisted mechanical fantasy was made flesh.

I have coming up on fifty hours of Minion Masters, which may not seem like much - as I understand it, there are much larger numbers - but when you take into account the fact that a round of the game takes a few minutes at most, it's an incredible amount of play density. It's a deckbuilding strategy game similar to Clash Royale, except where Clash Royale maintains the MOBA concept of Towers, you're essentially going face with every unit you send over - hindered only by the units you've placed in their way. I'm back now after a long hiatus, and I expected to get fucking trashed, but (at least here in the genteel Platinum rank) it's still possible to play your way out of serious jams.

One of the best parts about PAX Aus for me is that there is a crazypants movie theater right next door to the venue where the show is held, a place with the deeply Aussie appellation Jeff's Shed. It exists in an array of theaters, actually, executed in a spectrum of fancitude. Some resembled the theaters you know. Some are the kind where you basically have fucking recliners and shit plus a button that will indicate to the proprietors that you are not drunk yet and it's a situation you'd like to resolve in the near term.

The Child's Play auction is this Thursday Dec. 10th! They've just added all of the silent auction items to the website so you can start browsing today. Keep in mind that if you want to bid come Thursday, you will need to purchase a ticket to the auction.  There will also be a live auction portion of the evening hosted by none other than Interweb celebs Kate Welch and Kris Straub! I've offered up a few items this year that will be a part of this section of the show. Three of my original acrylic paintings as well as an original color illustration by me of your D&D character. So head over to the site and check out the silent auction items and then buy yourself a ticket for the event this Thursday! 

When they want to craft another ambiguous Xbox platform, they should consider the nomenclature we deploy in today's strip - although from the sounds of it, there's just some performance weirdness generally on the new equipment. It's not a hundred percent clear depending on the game what's going on sometimes with the new hardware, and I have a ton of questions about it, because on paper these the new flagship systems are the sort of dragons you might find casually gnawing on the roots of Yggdrasil. I can't stress enough: I would have used that reference even if we weren't talking about the new AC. 

Join us tonight for the first race of the new season! After a week off, the Penny Arcade iRacing league is back at it. The Pit Crew will open at 7:30 PT

Among its other virtues, Leonard Cohen's famous song is a masterclass on how to rhyme things with hallelujah. You might not think you need to know that kind of stuff, but you never know. Could be a manticore type deal, spectral bride situation kinda thing. Knowledge is power.

I don't even get exposed to these powerful features, because as a rule I don't join open chats, and haven't since the first parties were introduced on 360. Arguably, we used GameVoice even longer ago to inoculate ourselves from that seeping realm. There was a very brief time at the outset of Xbox Live where people were sorta cool about shit. There was the sense that we had emerged from a darker place into a lighter one, and like so many crawdads stunned by a tween's flashlight, we were mostly just shocked that it worked and thus lacked the wherewithal to fully abuse one another. This idyllic state lasted - if I recall correctly - ten or so full minutes.

The "new console" I'm after is a 3080, but regardless of which one of these devices you want, you can't really buy it. The only way to get one of these things is to have one sent to you, or to hurl yourself upon the resale market to the tune of (last I checked) about eighteen hundred bucks. That appears to be something like a stable price for the device, having seen it many times, and it's a multiple of six which indicates - to me at least - the involvement of The Beast.

We talked about it a little bit when the movie for Ready Player One came out in the post and the strip. My policy on Nostalgia is the same as the laws sweeping the nation and perhaps the world - I think it should be legal for responsible, recreational use. If used in a work, optimally it's used in a way that interprets or transforms so that we get more work to interpret or transform. I adhere to the sourdough starter principle where such things are concerned.

Kind Words is not new by any means, I got it a super long time ago - I think even before it was on Steam, though I could be remembering that wrong? For some reason I remember - as one does - unzipping a file into a folder and clicking on something inside there.

This year’s Child’s Play auction has gone online and today is the last day to purchase one of the Mix and Mingle tickets. This ticket option includes a box with drink fixings and some other goodies that we want you to have on December 10th, the night of the auction. I’ve offered up a few of my original acrylic paintings this year. I did these back around 2008 along with a dozen more or so. This is the first time I’ve auctioned any of them off and I’m hoping they find good homes and help raise some money for a very good cause.

As with so many strips, this one is about a real happening that authentically occurred. Typically I can't prove it, though - not so this time. This link will deliver you unto the moment where we explored an anomalous Animus glitch in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, and the about twenty-five minute period after where we smashed our heads against a literally impossible puzzle and then ultimately succeeded, but not because we were possessed of any profound intellectual capacity but because we turned it off and then turned it back on again. I love that this answer holds true even when you're talking about a machine that dredges up holographic, livable representations of the past from DNA.

I was trying to get the gist of what the Ghost Rider movie was even about, and Gabriel was able to reconstruct these painful events with some difficulty. I watched a few clips online, and couldn't believe the levels of camp on display - I'm tempted to say it's just… bad, certainly that would save me a lot of cognitive resources, but it's so winky and plus Nic Cage is there that some weird, stark corner of my mind thinks you arrive at this kind of bad without a conscious effort.

Having been made to drink poison in hell with his wide eyed son, Gabriel had an opportunity to recall just how carelessly Marvel intellectual property had been scattered on the ground before it occurred to someone that they could fashion a nested modern mythology largely out of existing work and make billions. How stunted were the weird, dry fronds of the plants that once grew there. Bent shapes like symbols of agony! This is the vital portion:

With this year's Child's Play auction going online, I decided to offer up a few special pieces. Back in 2008 I decided to try my hand at acrylic painting and I made about a dozen paintings or so of varying sizes. Four of these hang in my house, two are at the PA office and the rest were in storage. During a recent cleaning of my garage I found some of these old pieces and I've decided to donate a few of them to Child's Play in the hopes that they will help raise some money and find good homes. Here's a quick look at the three pieces I'm handing over to Child's Play this afternoon.