Penny Arcade

I can remember when Gabe was telling me about Dauntless, a game we'd never heard of in a booth we'd never seen before at PAX South. Gabe spent most of his time there, and the promise seemed to be a free to play Monster Hunter. And that's more or less what they did. In terms of play arc, it's Monster Hunter in its basic shape. You fight rude behemoths of various elemental polarities in order to make clothes out of their guts. Outside of that, everything else is either streamlined…

Gabriel and I tend to approach things so differently that we can often accurately predict how the other will feel about something, simply by modeling our own position at a high level of detail and then inverting it. One thing we do agree on is that, if we are really enjoying a game, we will often stop somewhere near the end. It's not, like… a good plan on the surface. It's the opposite. Liking a game is one thing, but getting sucked into a game and living in there is something so rare…

I was all kindsa ready to get down on this Rage 2 stuff, the id Software/Avalanche combo has the texture of a summer mixtape, and every video up until now was deeply weird in a way that made me appreciate whoever had decided to pay for all this - a sequel to something that felt more like Engine than Game, for which I bear them no ill will. Why you would do it, and then how it could then manifest this kind of manic energy, is the kind of impossible horseshit that I naturally gravitate toward. …

I'm typing this on Thursday because I am getting up at eff o'clock on Friday to pick up Amy and go the Airport so I go down - literally down, on a map - to The Descent. Which is a D&D Event celebrating the new campaign stuff! Our own book comes out next month (!!!), June 18th, but the Multiverse has continued to spin in the meantime, and down seems like a scary direction. Let's see where they end up taking us. Elyssa and I will be down there with The "C" Team, and I'll be playing a solo…