We have a lot we want to accomplish in the next few years, and we need somebody to help us do that - the help we're looking for right now is in the "Graphic Design" realm, and it's somebody we'd like to have in-house. From Acquisitions Incorporated to the Eyrewood to Automata, I feel like it's time to really investigate what these things mean. I had Kiko put together a slab of text to explain the skills they're looking for in Design. Here he is:

Gabriel has failed again, and it's my duty to catalogue it.

Are we running up against the namespace limitations on game titles? "Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3" is practically fridge poetry. So, I lashed out. And I'm sorry.

Puyo Puyo Tetris dropped for the Switch this week and it's fantastic. I've been playing it on my own, with my family, online with strangers and just today I brought it in to play with Jerry. The amount of "game" here is just bonkers. Obviously you have both Puyo Puyo and Tetris but then you've got a bunch of different variations on those games as well. You can also play Swap mode which has you switching back and forth between both games during a round. There's even a mode called Fusion where you play both games at the same damn time! I ended up poking around online looking for some tips and found this incredible series of videos over on the Sega YouTube channel.

Even the demo of Puyo Puyo Tetris hit hard around here. Gavin had a literal Millennial Rooftop Party with this shit; it's nuts. When Mario Kart 8 Deluxe hits on Friday it's all gonna happen again. A portable with a little kickstand you always have two controllers for is… look. I've said it before. But when something actually works like it does in a commercial, a technology that projects into social space, I have to make a note.

Gabe was telling me about a terrifying event that he had witnessed on television, via a show which is ostensibly about children's toys but is also about adult ambitions. It was very difficult to watch. I felt like my teeth were trying to escape my gums and crawl to safety. We started to discuss the sorts of products we might offer in this context, which ultimately lead to the scoping, scripting, and ultimately the manufacture of this comical strip.

Thornwatch is in the home stretch now and the pace is picking up for me. This game needs a lot of artwork and I can’t do it all on my own. I wanted to introduce you to the other artists helping me out on this project and share some of their work with you.

I'm still on the prowl for a Switch, so I can't speak to it personally, but Grabe is having a premium experience with the new Wonder Boy. That just which just reinforces two things I thought already: one, I need to steal a Switch from one of the other people here, and two, that a lot of the stuff I'm going to like best for it isn't going to be on a cartridge. I guess this all leads into a corollary, or maybe even a Point Three, where if you don't have a plump SD card slotted in that thing it's entirely possible that ur doin it rong.

Grab has already waxed poetical about Overwatch: Uprising, and in private I have seen him wipe away those tears which demand release. When I look at the official page, that language doesn't strike me as being in the service of a one-off initiative. They can play with this forever, each time with a delectable new mess of crates, just continue driving in this potent spike of ambient narrative expression. I want to emphasize that Overwatch is what it looks like when Blizzard fails to release a product. Failing is a skill. Can you imagine how it must have felt to be waist deep in the ashes of Titan, and still find Overwatch in you? Would that we could all fail so well.

I mean, this is what happened. This is just a few frames of a documentary about Gabriel bleeding out in the desert. To be honest, I don't know if what came back from there is Gabriel at all: it could be one of those "cactus men" you hear about. The Walking Cactus, that gets a taste of blood from a dying man, and looks to takin' on his shape, just to drink more.

I like games in general, games of all kinds; that's sort of my thing. In the manner of a giant enemy crab, though, I do have a weak point that can be struck for massive damage.

We have another strip on the topic of Gabriel's desertification, I think that's on Monday. His first day back in the office was yesterday, and his posture seemed to have been altered drastically. He was taller than usual and… I don't know how else to put this. He appeared to have a spine? I don't know what Arizona mineral he absorbed but whatever it was it seems to foster the wearing of hats.

I have to say that the new Overwatch mode Uprising is the most fun I have ever had with the game. Kara called it last night when she said is was basically a Destiny Strike but in Overwatch (and with 4 players yay!) . She is absolutely right and the reality is that I wish I could throw myself into a playlist of Uprising style encounters in OW just like I can enter the Strike playlist in Destiny. I enjoy PvP but Uprising is actually the game I want out of Overwatch.

I have had Rats, at one point the house I thought I was living in turned out to be a warm heap of mostly stationary rats. I have also had water that came into the house after it had fallen on the roof. This is super important: if water comes in, is that even a roof? Isn't it just a very expensive, tremendously inconvenient colander at that point? There was a discoloration in the ceiling at the center of the living room, and when I touched it, my finger went straight through. It had the consistently of oatmeal. People don't make houses out of oatmeal generally, and in that moment, I understood why.

Outside of the villain and a Krogan accomplice, I don't like the writing in Mass Effect: Andromeda. There's things they could do to create superior context, but there's simply too much of it for it to be an accident. They specifically chose this tone, an emotionally stunted, quasi-memetic cadence that often diminishes the reality of the game, and said "straight on 'til morning."

One of the more interesting things that happens in Dragon Age: Inquisition is that your actions all call back to the central quest; I liked the War Table way, way more than I can express with the human words. It was beautiful and had great writing, elevating some surface worker placement type shit into something I… well, believed. I thought it was really happening, on some level. I thought I was a woman moving important things on a real table. That's a good trick.