After Gabriel tried Arms during the Global Test Punch and bounced completely off the experience, I did my best to advocate for the game. There's something here, I said. Discrete, particular hands are an illusion, I said - the hand is a mutable concept. There's a way to mash buttons playing the game but that's not where it tops out. It looks goofy as hell, but don't be fooled.

I would have thought that Escape Rooms would be the kind of nerd shit that wouldn't catch.

I love Professor Layton and I love Ace Attorney. Gabriel does not. And it turns out that if you put both of those games together he likes them even less.

I'm not even interested in peeling the Exclusivity onion. The only medicine for these Goddamn maneuvers is to tend a fucking menagerie of consoles so that you can never be flanked by these beasts. Here is our exxxclusive guide to exclusivity - only at Pronny Urcrod Dort Crim.

Brenna went out and saw Wonder Woman last night, and was enraptured; I am given to understand that evil did not endure. Gabreel only had single problem with the film that I know about, and we had to make it up for the strip.

Battleborn just went free-to-play-but-not-really-it's-just-a-perpetual-free-trial-and-alternative-business-model-which-I-can't-meaningfully-distinguish-from-f2p, or something, and maybe that'll work for them. Games go free with varying levels of success; Star Wars: the Old Republic is often hailed as an optimal example, though it's starting to become clear to me that many of my friends are super into ESO. Retail launch for these service-product chimaerae looks more and more like the the disposable first stage of a rocket.

We started doing it for PAX Aus with some cool, unique stuff you can throw into your cart with your tickets, and we have some items we're trying out for PAX Prime I Mean West:

This didn't happen to us; it happened to one of our crew. Specifically, our Engineer.

Kiko asked me if Star Trek: Bridge Crew was VR's "Killer App." I could hear the quotation marks around Killer App; he was trying to create a kind of ironic gully around the term. But he also really wanted to know if it was the Killer App. I'll tell you what I told him.

One year at PAX Aus, Kristin (whose work you absolutely know from PAX and Child's Play) was splitting a room with Kiko. Whenever she was not ensuring the utmost experience for attendees, she was shotgunning episodes of Supernatural. The more I tugged on this thread, the more I discovered that… Supernaturality was everywhere. And its agents were implanted deep, deep in the office.

Morak was talking to me about a new documentary he had enjoyed on The Hulus called Batman And Bill. It's rare that a documentary gets made that is so applicable to what we specifically do, because what we do is so weird. We have a podcast about this strip, which talks around most of the specific topics, but I couldn't have him not talk about it because the core story was so heartbreaking.

I have used the dock for my Switch… twice, I think. I'm ready to play games there, I'm not opposed to it on moral grounds, but for the time being at least the Nintendo Switch is a machine whose purpose it is to ride through life with me, like a sidecar, while I busy myself making motorcycle metaphors.

Wizards of the Coast is doing an event called Stream of Annihilation to kick off the new stuff they've got going, some of which was teased in the Acquisitions Incorporated Live game from PAX East. They're essentially operating a kind of online convention you can attend June 2nd and 3rd, with twelve hours of programming per day. They've pulled out all the stops on the talent side, it's a little ridiculous: The HighRollers, Misscliks, and more.

You might like the podcast for this one when it comes out; the true origin of the strip is divergent from its terrifying new form.

People seem to like what we're doing with the PAX shows. We have a lot of very unique experience bottled up here at Penny Arcade, earned over almost twenty years of planning and executing cons, and as our partner ReedPOP founds or finds cool conventions around the globe they've asked us to share some of that hard-won knowledge with local teams. Wherever we can be a help to these shows, we will - and honestly, sometimes that's going to mean standing back and trusting that team's local approach. Check out the launch site for more info about the first Powered By PAX event!

Making a tabletop game is a lot of work you guys. Thankfully I am surrounded by some ridiculously talented folks at Lone Shark and Penny Arcade. Kiko has been working on finalizing the layout for our cards and they are looking really cool. For a long time our cards have gotten the job done, but now it's time to turn this stuff: