Penny Arcade

I keep meaning to check what the percentages are of people who played through the Call of Duty campaigns, but I don’t really have to, because I’ve bought a few of these and interacted with them in precisely the way Black Ops 4 suggests I did:
by going directly to the multiplayer mode.  Or pehaps more appropriately, “modes.”

I was hanging out with Acquisitions Intoxicated brewmaster Eric Benson over the weekend, and he hadn’t played a “cod” in a minute so I made sure to remedy this fact.  If you’ve been away, as he had been, this is a seismic event content-wise.  Any one of the three full games offered on this platter could sustain an obsession.  We just hopped back and forth, mode to mode, wondering how you could possibly exhaust it.

I wish there was something like a “battle pass” that could rest atop the entire offering, a reward schedule that encouraged me to flit between activities and might act as a force for unification.  I told my rich, supremely life-giving great idea to Gabe, and he said that he would mostly come to resent such a framework manipulating him into sinking time into modes he had no authentic interest in.  I’m open to the idea that my level of dilletantery is not the sort of thing a company should spend millions of dollars trying to court.

Join Josh, Ryan, and myself for Dadfuckerz, Inc: The Denoument today on the stream - I think we’re gonna crack through a few more of the endings to wring some more satisfaction out of the game.  Technically it starts at 2pm PT, but the truth is that you won’t need to make note of the time at all: when you look out your window see a stampede of hot-ass, tactically hairy dads, the hour has arrived.

(CW)TB out.

That’s what it looks like, anyway.  It’s really a lot for me to take in.  But, yeah: might be a good time to grab a copy, in the format of your choosing.

(CW)TB

Making parties seemed to be all kindsa fucked up for me last night, at least on Xbox, and I don’t know if it was some kinda NAT horseshit or launch day jitters or what, but I wasn’t able to party up with people I played the beta (“beeta”) with just fine.  We were eventually able to hack the planet, so to speak, by joining the game the other person was in and then beating the odds several times over as it kept us in the same party all night.

I have questions.  And theories.  But God damn it, once we were in the chute being hustled from map to map, gaining valuable imaginary points and growing in martial vigor, I forgot how mad I was because I had to educate the foe.  I’m gonna check this morning to see if that shit is still situated clearly within the ivory bounds of the Bone Zone.

The strip indicates that Gabriel was the “secret reader” at his son’s school, and while there he read Lexcalibur, which seized these youths with its vivid depictions of a world whose true nature was hidden, yet accessible.  Indeed, I wrote it with them in mind; large portions of the book were written with a child literally asleep on my lap.  It’s possible this inflected it somehow.  But I also used it as a way to teach young people what each part of a sword is called, and to give parents a book they wouldn’t mind reading overmuch, because I often had to read books to my children that were bad and I resented it.  The second printing is now available, in a variety of forms should you so desire.

The design team wanted to make something special for the launch, and they did, with a shirt for kids using the art from Sword of my Fathers - a personal favorite.  It looks like this:

It’s pretty important to me!  It took me twenty years to write, essentially.  And then a lot of people here took the thing I wrote and then made it better in every way.

Gabe and I are gonna be going hog-ass wild in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey this afternoon on Twitch from 2-4pm PT.  I had a really good time checking out the earlier levels with Josh yesterday, and I’m excited to check out where things are at around level 16.  Thus far, there’s been a lot of exceedingly dark physical comedy and I’m ready for more.

(CW)TB out.

So, my first volume of original poetry - full title, Lexcalibur: Useful Poetry For Adventurers Above And Below The World - sold out very quickly.  The elevator pitch is “What If Shel Silverstein were your Dungeon Master” and it has thus far been apt.  The reprint is in, hopefully enough to sate the apparently frenzied desire that accompanied the first one - there are a few ways to own it, so take a look at the official page. The designers really wanted to offer a kid’s shirt to go along with it, and the chose the art from the poem Sword of My Fathers which is a very curatorial selection.  Here are a few pictures that will inform and hopefully tantalize you:

Hey, so, writing Lexcalibur got me through a very tough time.  Maybe reading it will help you get through one?

(CW)TB

Probably the most relaxing night of gaming I’ve encountered in recent memory was forming a Convoy - anywhere else but Forza Horizon, it would be called a Squad/Group/Fireteam - and just… driving around.  Racing when we felt like it.  Doing a seasonal Barn Find when it came up.  As a template for winding down the day, it was almost flawless.

I did switch to the interior camera during a race though, completely on accident, which inspired the conversation in the strip.  Technically, I asked the question and Gabriel had the answer, but the assertions were the same.

I mean, I used that camera in Test Drive I guess, back on the C64, but that’s because it was the only camera.  And I will admit that I definitely sit in the cars in Forzvista, the fancy “car-looking-at” mode, because there’s no universe in which I’m really going to be seated on the driver’s side of an i8.  Generally, though, if I’m looking out the window of one of these cars it’s because I got too excited braking and pushed the wrong button.

One of the messages I received via my twitterer got way down into the practice in a way that revealed its totality: for him, racers constitute a kind of roleplaying.  In this context, they are taking on the role of an up and coming driver in an international automotive festival called Horizon.  The game is a tool, essentially, a kind of scaffold you drape the projected identity on.  And remotely driving a car from a nearby helicopter, as another interlocutor suggested, not only doesn’t satisfy the fantasy requirements it doesn’t really make sense.  It’s already one of my favorite games in recent memory - and the way they’re playing it sounds even more… whatever it already is.  Hm.

Hmm, I say.

(CW)TB out.