Ryse: Son Of Rome is one of those games where you dice and julienne human beings until you earn enough XP to unlock the brunoise techniques seen in the finer houses. It is a lot of things, and rude is definitely one of them.

The conduits for industry commentary on hardware have been fairly reasonable, but the rest of the dialogue is fucking goofed.

I’ve had almost a week with my PS4 now and I thought I share some quick impressions with you guys. I’ll start with the games.

Okay. So, chkdsk:

Not Dessert Bus! That is a totally different bus.

I found it interesting, maybe you will too. Good God, this whole thing has turned out weird.

My co-conspirator Mork Krahalo one hundred percent cannot explain what it is that keeps he and his son affixed to Super Motherload. He has described it to Kara and I on more than one occasion, with mixed results, to the extent that now we understand what on some level but not why.

Today is a big day for PA merchandise. All of our 15 year anniversary stuff goes on sale today at 2pm PST. You can see a full list of what’s going to be available in this post right here. There are only 2000 of the anniversary pins so if you want one of those I suggest being ready right at 2pm. The Hanna pin was a run of 1000 and sold out in about 15 minutes.

Sometimes people send me stuff so that I’ll try it and maybe talk about it on the site. It’s not a guarantee that I’ll talk about it, in fact most of the time I don’t but sometimes I really like it. The Surface Pro is a good example. They sent me one of those and I can’t stop talking about the damn thing. Well I got something else cool the other day and I wanted to share it with you guys.

The Playstation 4 is an act of such contrition, such respect, that I hardly know what to say about it.

It’s hard to believe but this month (November 18th specifically) marks Penny Arcade’s 15 year anniversary. We honestly had no idea what we were doing when we started. Certainly we didn’t intend for it to become what it has. When I look back at those first comics I remember those 21 year old kids living in a shitty apartment, eating Top Ramen, playing games and making comics. It seems like such a long time ago but when I read one of those old strips I remember exactly what we were doing and why we made it.

Pinny Arcade has gotten so big that we felt like it deserved its own site. You will probably still see Pin News pop up here until we get people used to checking the new site for Pin info...pinfo? It has its own blog that we will use to highlight upcoming pins as well as give you a behind the scenes look at how they get made. You'll see sketches and designs from me and the rest of the pin team here at PA. We will be using it during PAX to announce pin meetups and trading opportunities. We will also try and give you more in depth looks into projects like the Pin Ultimate edition.

Maybe I should have tried to buy one at the store...?

Our PS4 orders should be at our houses "by 8:00pm," so we are at our respective houses awaiting the cyber-stork. I bought mine on the eleventh of June, probably some time very shortly after the now legendary press conference, so getting it now has a feeling similar to Kickstarting something. The purchase and the acquisition are strangely attenuated. That is to say it feels less like a "purchase," and more like harvesting a crop.

So, I wrote that sea shanty comic thing, and then Katie Rice drew it, so my life was more or less complete. But then we got a mail that Ubisoft was going to have a real band actually perform it, which wasn't anything we'd talked about previously, but obviously I was fine with that. So pirate rock outfit The Dread Crew Of Oddwood got hold of the lyrics, and then they made this. Which is fairly (if not utterly) wow. You can by the track here if you are so inclined, but I thought that was pretty cool.

We recorded a podcast which also covers all this stuff, and the enthusiasm with which we anticipate it, but while I've been clearing the deck game-wise my demonic counterpart has been clearing it physically. For the most part, if you needed a new box or needed to replace an old one, you could still leave the sinews back there largely intact. This means that these thick, signal-bearing trunks are ancient of days, imbued with a strange kind of life, flexing and slacking like the myomer bundles of a Battlemech.