Penny Arcade

We were watching some high level tournament play for Smash, as one does, and while I’ve played tons of it I got the sense like I did with its predecessor: there is a whole other game here that I didn’t know about, and may not even be able to see.

It exists in a visual band I need a fanciful visor to perceive.  I’ve played it the same way you would Theatre Sports or something - Whose Line Is It Anyway, let’s say, against a backdrop of brutal slapstick.  Literal props, many of them hilarious, fall from the sky to spice up each scene.  That’s “my” Smash, for lack of a better term: it’s a party game I play with three other people.  It’s nothing like what the true aficionado plays: my win condition is not getting Fourth Place.  I have fun every time I play it and I always see something new.  Occasionally, very occasionally, I get a sounding of its true depth.  I like knowing its there but I’m afraid to explore it.

Nintendo does this often - it might even be the core of what they do.  They make approachable games whose first impression rests atop a subterranean complex of frightful sophistication.  Except Mario Party.  I don’t think that one works in this metaphor.  Mario Party is all fondant and no cake.  Splatoon and Arms constitute the House of Mario wading into established genres and, in at least one case, figuratively vandalizing them.  Gabriel is much more adept at finding the other game than I am, and occasionally he takes me along for the ride.

You might recall Waffles, Inc. - a behind the screen collaboration between myself and Dungeon Master To The Stars, Chris Perkins.  With it, we combined our Acquisitions Incorporated: The “C” Team game with Chris’ Dice, Camera, Action croo for hijinks aplenty.  During that fateful weekend, we also recorded a top secret, Alpha level clearance, two-part podcast called the Waffles, Inc. K’thrissmas Special.  It’s fucking bonkers, and you can get tender links to parts One and Two at the links I just formulated earlier in this sentence.  It’s one of my favorite things we’ve ever done, and we came up with all of it completely live.

(CW)TB out.

It’s quite true, unfortunately.  I stuffed my Switch full of rad shit to play, but then I ended up reading the Kill Team manual the whole way, dreaming of ways in which I could better serve our twisted Patriarch as five long hours evaporated.  Shortly thereafter, I left the row and also left the Goddamn Switch in there, which burns us.

I have a lot of technology that can execute and subsequently display entertainment software, but there’s no device that has accomplished what the Switch has in my family.  My teenager sulks with it.  My daughter and I play cooperative games on it.  When her friends come over, they take turns playing while everyone else strategizes or they collectively try, without success, to operate a restaurant.  And it’s the normalizing anchor from home I take with me on the trips I take once a month in this season.  I miss it more than I would miss an object.  I just thought about it, and winced.

A lot of things happened at PAX Unplugged, and one of the things that happened was that it was Mike Fehlauer’s last official show with us.

Figuring out what this company wanted to be when it grew up was a monumental undertaking, and he was part of that.  I mean, he’s just turning toward Child’s Play now and rocking it Dad Style, I’m sure I’ll see him all the time, but it just won’t be back to back with our swords out taking on all comers and it’s worth taking a moment to mark it.

The term we use for this is Boarding the White Ships.  It’s a Tolkien thing; after the great tribulation of bearing the ring, and the accomplishment of great deeds, you leave on a ship to your earned rest.  Among other things, Boarding the White Ships means you get to actually attend a PAX, without any of the weight associated with its manufacture.  I asked him if he had a good time at PAX Unplugged, and he said yeah.  He understands why so many people want to go to them, now.

(CW)TB out.

I got the opportunity to help announce a new Overwatch skin over the weekend and I’m still giddy about it.

Put your enemies on ice.

Rise up the rinks as FIGURE SKATER SYMMETRA (Legendary)! ⛸️

Overwatch Winter Wonderland begins Dec 11. pic.twitter.com/fI3QQusPi9

— Overwatch (@PlayOverwatch) December 9, 2018

I drew some art inspired by Symmetra’s new figure skater skin and I’m super proud of how it came out.

It’s true that I had some issues when the Symmetra rework a while back but I stuck with her and eventually came to love the changes. In fact I managed to pull off my first team kill with her a little bit ago.

I just got my first teamkill! #Overwatch pic.twitter.com/KTwL7RVVMf

— Gabe (@cwgabriel) November 25, 2018

I still play Overwatch every day, although I have recently made the switch from PS4 to PC. After hundreds of hours on the console it’s been really fun starting over. So many of my favorite heroes like Pharah and Symmetra are so much more fun with a mouse and keyboard.

In addition to Overwatch, there are a couple other games I’ve been jumping into daily.

Hades

Like all games from Supergiant games, Hades is beautiful. I would give them $20 just so that more of this art could exist even if I never played the game. Thankfully the game is awesome too and I can’t stop playing it.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

I have not played a SSB seriously since the Gamecube but Ultimate has it’s claws in me. I’ve been playing a little bit every day with Noah and the slow drip of new characters is highly addictive.

-Gabe out

Our Merchandise Manager, the incomparable Lidija Piper, has given me a code for the store.  The code is KTHRISSMAS.  It will give you fifteen percent off.  That’s real good.  The only question is what you’re gonna do with it.

You could…  explore Gavin Greco’s WASD Collection:

You could… grab a copy of LEXCALIBUR, now blissfully in stock:

You could… take a chunk off more elaborate purchases, like Thornwatch or The Dark Of Wood.  Any Eyrewood stuff, really:

You could pragmatically celebrate Penny Arcade’s 20th Anniversary for less!  Indeed, in my Father’s house there are many collections - Stocking Stuffers or Sale Items might be appropriate - and any one of them might be of interest.

(CW)TB

When we wrote the strip, what I said wasn’t true - but when I went into the Epic Games Launcher just now to poke around for SuperGiant’s new roguelike Hades, it looks like it?

They’re not all tweens, of course.  But it’s non-zero, and if you haven’t been to a kid’s Birthday Party in the last few months you’d be forgiven for not knowing but Fortnite emotes are like a mind-virus with true dominion over the youth.  In a maverick fit of iconoclasm, Gabe’s son Noah performed these dances at PAX while dressed as Reaper.

I was deeply scandalized.

I think it really remains to be seen what type of vigor an Epic store would have; the “extinction level event” nomenclature is freighted with truculent ironicality.  I understand that the percentage it’s offering is better, 88 percent over Steam’s retaliatory, freshly goosed 75.  That’s a larger percentage of a smaller number, and it’ll be that way for a while.  More interesting at least to my mind is waiving the fees for games that use Unreal Engine 4, and bootstrapping a broader Support-A-Creator program.  I have a lot of questions, but it really looks like a good faith effort to me.  Greater revenue share for the developer as opposed to lower costs for the consumer is such an interesting narrative; “moral consumption” has been the overriding modus for a while now.  Steam’s 70/30 occupied the lofty same position, once.

What it really means, as a practical matter, is that now I have a fourth or fifth store client on this box.  The question at this point is really about which one is the first to be removed.

(CW)TB out.