As someone with experience in these matters - on both sides of the retail divide - Gabriel simply stays home for Black Friday. And it's not because he doesn't like to buy things. We discussed it all in the podcast you may absorb at some future date: he feels that the "deals" are illusory and that he doesn't especially relish the thought of his heel on a retail worker's trachea while he pours into the Consumer Battle Arena. He has been that motherfucker in there, the one with the human throat, and even if there is still a pitched melee with or without him he can (at the very least) guarantee one less heel.

Thanksgiving is tomorrow and that means Black Friday is just a day away. Brian has cooked up a pretty ridiculous assortment of Black Friday deals and it’s my job to let you know about them. So I’ll start with the stuff we’ve got.

World of Warcraft creates "social media campaigns" without even mounting social media campaigns because you talk about it a lot when you're playing it. This just naturally happens. And it floats in the shared air of the internet like a spore waiting to hatch in your sinuses and grow a knobbly spar into your brain.

The last page of Silverside went up today. I was talking with some friends at lunch the other day about the project and they were surprised to hear that I don’t actually like drawing Automata. Of all our projects I feel like it is the one I am least qualified to draw. I just don’t feel like I have the skills to do Automata as well as I think it deserves to be done. I’m happy with a lot of the work I did on Silverside but it’s so much harder for me to draw than something like Lookouts or the Daughters of the Eyrewood.

There is a very fixed menu of ingredients at Taco Bell; it can be conceived of as an alternative to the standard Periodic Table, whose quasi-edible permutations constitute a distinct flavorverse. Far Cry 4 has a similar catalog of "elements," like Honey Badger, Falcon, Tuk-Tuk, Assault Rifle, Boar, and so on. (I would consider AK-47 an isotope of Assault Rifle). After the latest of Gabriel's misadventures, it became clear that he was basically dipping a ladle in that soup of possible events and coming up with treachery every time. He was, in effect, panning for devastation. And the creatures of that place responded in kind.

I am really enjoying Dragon Age: Inquisition. One of my favorite features is the War Room with its massive map of the regions. Your party navigates this map and unlocks new locations on it by spending "Power" which you can earn by completing missions. This is super fun.

Yesterday I was playing some Farcry 4 here at the office. Robert came out and watched for a bit. He was unimpressed with my driving skills. I found a rad little Tuk-Tuk and told him I was gonna show him some incredible driving. This is the result:

He's playing Dragon Age!

I spent the weekend playing a lot of games but not the games I expected. I tried to get into the new AC Unity but just couldn’t do it. It looks amazing but I found the game super boring. I wonder if the reason I liked Black Flag so much was because it wasn’t like a traditional AC game. I beat COD’s single player campaign and thought I’d dig into the multiplayer but ended up back in Destiny for my FPS fix. I think if I had my freinds on the PS4 it might be different. I tried switching over to the Xbox One to play with them but that only lasted one night. I spent the most time this weekend playing Diablo 3 on the PS4. I had grabbed it on Friday when I was sick and looking for something to play. I thought I’d just check it out real quick and ended up playing for three hours straight. When Kara got home she saw me wrapped up in a blanket on the couch and said. “why are you playing Diablo 3...without me!”

Gabriel and I are largely CoD adjacent. We purchase them, like them, and play them, but they rarely become a lifestyle. Black Ops II - "blops" - was the exception, at least for him, when he discovered that playing it via the Wii U's remote screen allowed him to play it more or less constantly. He plays the new one with Keek sometimes and experienced some of the classic concerns, but he's got a bad cold that has placed him betwixt life and death. I think he got it from Australia; it's essentially a bioweapon. He probably should have declared it on that sheet they give you at the airport. I haven't been able to play with them as much as I'd like. Barely at all.

Gabriel's Sonic Boom Verdict was similar to other Sonic Verdicts and ultimately resulted in us wondering to what extent we had manufactured the Sonic that we liked from whole cloth, and then just draped that engineered affection over new titles as they came out. I don't really believe it yet. I feel like I remember having fun. Maybe not everyone is. I feel like there's a gruesome career retrospective coming for this beleaguered hedgehog, one with heartfelt interviews interleaved with black and white reenactments. I think he's in a bad place.

Child’s Play has become a year round event but things definitely pick up around the holidays. One of the things I look forward to every year is the dinner auction that we put on here in Seattle. As of right now it’s about 80% sold out but you can still grab tickets if you act fast. Once a year it’s nice to ditch the black t-shirt for a black tux and get a little fancy. As usual we will have tons of incredible items from the videogame industry to bid on. It’s in amazing night and it’s all for a good cause so go grab your tickets today.

There are only a few series I "run a scam" to get advance copies of. Assassin's Creed is one of them. I'd beaten the game by the time it came out proper, through frenzied play, so I felt like I was missing something. Except I still am. I am either missing it, or it isn't there.

It's so lightly euphemized in the strip that it might as well be documentary footage: we are dealing with platform rancor the likes of which I haven't seen since junior high, only it's made a thousand times worse, because back then we could like whatever we liked in our own basements. Now, if you aren't wholly synchronized with this or that cult, the investment you have made in a piece of hardware is severely deprecated. With every friend who goes the other way, it becomes more lonely and strange.

The last console war I really participated in would have been the Sega Genesis vs. the Super Nintendo. I chose Sonic the Hedgehog as my lord and savior. I got a Genesis for Christmas and managed to convince myself that “Sega did what Ninten-don’t.” Eventually I got my first job though and purchased a Super Nintendo for myself. From that point on I made it my mission to try and own all the consoles. I never had great jobs but when you don’t prioritise things like food and clothing you can afford things like a Saturn and a Playstation. I’ve certainly had preferences over the years but I’ve never felt like that rabid console fanboy again. At least not until last night.