Quick Thoughts on Horizon 6 and 007!

We've been pretty hardcore Demeo fans from the jump; making a D&D experience inside VR where you reach down and move models around on luscious dioramas is the sort of thing plucked from my fantasies. The only thing missing was the actual license, really, which they got - and then delivered the much more story forward Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked. The first game got tons of neat, free chapters - and Battlemarked just dropped their first. Except I wrote it! And voiced Omni Dran in it! Because it's an Acquisitions Incorporated adventure!

Getting a chance to run a game for people asymmetrically was really exciting for me, and I wanted to tie it into their campaign's first chapter and move time forward a little bit - just make everything feel a little more real, like a campaign around the table would. Of course it is about a get rich quick scheme, but I'm always trying to put people onto the Elder Lore and I think I found a great way to do it. Please grab a copy, or load it back up, because I have a bunch of ideas for an incredibly stupid campaign set in their second chapter and I'm hoping might let me play around in there some more.

(CW)TB

At various times, I have known various people who have done various things at Bungie - going back to the Microsoft purchase. That is to say, I've had the opportunity to see their management stumble drunkenly from acquisition to more of a sugar daddy situation and then - rain-soaked, on the doorstep, in cinematic desperation - back into the arms of another suitor. I've seen the people they drag into these scenarios slowly ground into dust, all the while creating incredible worlds people live and believe in.

We'll get back to more reveries soon, when all these things stop happening! We gotta come in Monday with some stuff about them sunsetting Destiny 2. It's simply gotta be marked. Plus, there's some legitimately shady shit going on in this year's Horizon Festival it seems like - and now it's entered "the discourse stage." We were always gonna have to manage the advent of drivers with paracausal abilities, and maybe we should just count ourselves lucky that it didn't happen until the Year Of Our Lord 2026.

Forza Horizon 6 is doing numbers on Steam, and I'm glad - I think this series is the torchbearer for A Fun Racer That Is Just Technical Enough To Offer An Intriguing Skill Ceiling. That's a new subgenre I just made up. But apparently the game is fun, and works on computers - a powerful combo that's delivered real results in Q2. The only issue Morak has identified to me are the faces, which… well, I'll show you. They aren't faces in the classic sense, they're more like a fongoid "fruiting body":

I wanted this strip to erupt into a thousand strips - I wanted flowers to bloom the world over. My counterpart said no because for him, any effort to create beauty is regarded as a personal attack. That was just an opportunity to throw in a line from an Art of Noise song; in truth, beauty is the only thing he cares about. To an extent that it's been a problem!

It would never have occurred to me in a million years to unearth Cheeto of all things, it's completely nuts. My instinct was to say "cracked" but that means something different to the youth of today - something illicit, an etymological spur I've always feared was Fortnite-derived. But it was requested by the shivering mutants on Tumblr, and we are honor-bound to elevate these dreams, yea, unto the material world.

We will return to our regularly scheduled spelunking of our nearly thirty-year archive soon, but Playground Games banning Forza Horizon 6 pirates for thousands of years was too funny to leave alone. We had to strike - if for no other reason than I got to make up like four new terms. I got to bear fruit. That's what I'm trying to do every time! I'm tryna stay bulbous.

For the benefit of Arcadians new and old, gay and… I guess… not a hundred percent gay, somewhat less gay at any rate, our revels in Penny Arcade's ancient past continue apace. Time has passed everywhere, even inside Mork's purty pitchers he duz all them scratchin's on. I was startled by his suggestion for this strip and I suspect others may be also.

The incredibly funny resurgence of our humble Arcade continues to surge among the larval dorks known as Pennyarcadelings, a cadre referred to in more coarse environs as The Gay Teens. We find the whole thing very sweet, and feel very tenderly toward them; it must be very strange to not know about it and then know about it all at once - how the self-publishing wave of the early internet lead the same people to found a global convention, a charity that has raised and wisely invested tens of millions of dollars into the youth, the foundation of what is called Actual Play, self-inflicted wounds and grievous exile, but then also also cameo in a Poker Game and its Remaster that somehow exhumed them from the muck. Time is quite strange and we have been exposed to a lot of it. We are almost custom-made to wear the mantle of Goofy Uncle who went to jail once and won't talk about why.

I’ve posted another time lapse of the comic drawing process. This one is for Tattooine, the Maul comic strip we posted yesterday. If you like seeing how the sausage gets made, check it out below! 

If you are into Rhythm games or Beat em Ups I highly recommend checking out Dead as Disco. It is an arcade brawler with combat reminiscent of the Batman Arkham series except that all your punches and combos can sync to the beat. 

The best Star Wars since it was acquired by The Rodent is very easy to define. On the movie side, Rogue One. I thought Solo had some hot shit in it, but I can understand if you didn't want to pull the bar down for that particular ride. Beyond that, the first two seasons of The Mandalorian, Andor, and now - just finishing its run - is Maul. It's actually that good. Some people like it even more than me, and I like it a lot.

I can appreciate that this is probably some inside baseball, but our ancient alliance with Seattle Children's Hospital through Child's Play Charity compels us to offer aid.

The only time I feel bad for not having a newer console is when Housemarque drops something. With a pedigree that goes back to the Amiga, they have developed and honed their taste to Jamon Iberico levels - I wouldn't be surprised if they let their games feed on acorns, free-range. They've perfected arcade feel, itself a kind of artisanal, out-of-time style, and now with Returnal and (from Mork tells me) Saros, they've mastered progression as well.

I think Saros is a super fun game whenever it isn’t trying to tell me whatever this story is. The bullet hell gameplay is really well done and if that’s all the game was I would probably love it, but they have layered in this inscrutable story that I find completely uninteresting and unnecessary. Jerry and I often say that something is “too grand for chicken” when trying to explain that a thing can be simple and great without needing an extra layer of gravitas. I will keep playing it, but that is how I feel about Saros. 

I made a joke about the feeling of being observed somehow by the creators of The Killing Stone, a crack squad of Triple A escapees who keep making the weirdest fucking crap. Deep, deep down there is someone there who knew that they would sell at least one copy of the game - and not merely to their mom, like usual.