Penny Arcade

I haven't really played an Assassin's Creed game since Unity; I understand they've continued to make them. Syndicate predicated a pause in the franchise altogether, and when it returned, it was an RPG. More of one, anyway. It might be better to say that it returned as the kind of RPG where you want purple things more than you want blue things. Because we can never be into the same things at the same time apparently, he picked the series up when I put it down. The main change for him in…

There is a new Mario Party, and apparently it's "good," but Mario Party is almost a genre unto itself and as a thus may be considered an exemplar in a self-defined context. Rhetorically, it's a sundered condition. But! It's fast and crazy, and bright, and gravitational in a way, like a Welcome Sign. People who are actually good at games don't necessarily like operating in contexts that don't recognize their virtues. Or, as sometimes happens, games simply arrive at the wrong time. It might…

There is a lot about the Horizon Festival that probably seems very good at the time, but will eventually lead the kind of televised documentary with a lot of scary music that often flashes between full color and black and white very quickly. As a videogame, fully ensconced within a simulation that cannot spill into a world where mortals share the roads with it, it's… hm. I've only played it on an Xbox One X, on the kind of television that understands things like HDR and 4k, and it's…

I almost never play games on phones anymore, unless I'm on a plane and it's literally all I have with me. The last one I investigated deeply was Paladins Strike, which is not new by any means, and that was only because I happened to be into other Hi-Rez shit at the time and Michael can be very convincing. It was cool, but requires Internet, which makes the primary usage case questionable for me. A lot of phone games require Internet, even if you think they wouldn't, or shouldn't necessarily…