My friends Jerry and Ryan both told me that Borderlands 4 is cool and fun once you get far enough into the game. Like the comic suggests, I bounced right off the intro. I kept getting shitty sub machine guns while running through featureless grey rooms. Eventually I got to a shack and that’s when Claptrap started talking and I had to stop.  It’s possible it gets good but I’m just not wired to chew through the bad bits to get to the good stuff.

Lego Voyagers is great.  I heard it was three or so hours total, but I clocked in at just about five.  Some of the coolest parts of it were not "gameplay" but just being there in the world.  It's very impressionistic; there are actual lego pieces that look like scorpions, or fish, but Light Brick would rather evoke them with even simpler shapes.  It also made my computer run so hot that it shut completely off and wouldn't turn back on.  And that made me think about Borderlands.

Man, I need this shit real bad.

Apparently Amazon added a bunch of Price is Right episodes called "The Barker Era" to their hoard, and Grib is watching a couple of these things a night. I just pulled one up to verify what he had told me: that it's an incredibly robust Time Capsule that cuts through every layer. Fashion, palette, aspirations… the ambient radiation of an era. Dangerous Barker particles leapt straight through flesh - famously an enemy of animal cruelty, he had less chivalry perhaps for the human women who might share the stage. It's an insane diorama, and its descriptive power projects down into the substrata.

My eldest son Gabe is in his third year at Digipen and we like working on projects together. We’ve attempted to make some games before and while none of them made it past family testing, we both had fun and learned a bunch of cool new skills. Our latest endeavor has already reached the "testing with friends" phase which is a big step for us and a sign I think that this one might have legs. Speaking of legs, the project we are working on is an Eyrewood step tracking app.

I started playing Star Wars Outlaws when it came out last year on the PS5 and I really liked it. Eventually other games came out though and I didn’t end up finishing Outlaws. Well I heard the Switch 2 version was excellent and I honestly had a hard time believing that so I decided to grab it and check it out for myself. It supports cross save so I was able to pick up right where I left off on the Playstation. I was expecting to load it up, be disappointed in how it ran and call it a day but it was so good I ended up playing another 10 hours and beat the damn game. 

The insides of this computer haven't been touched since Quarantine with the addition of a 3080, which was the right time to have a good card. Everything else in this shitbox, what the ragged youth of my street would call a Potato, is from years before that. I'm actually in a position to take advantage of Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling precisely because it's so decrepit elsewhere. I'll Fuck Around in an .ini, and Find Out about marginal gains. I was up in Borderland's guts before I ever even made a character, it ran goof troop, and then when I reset to defaults it played great. PC Gaming, folks! PC motherfuckin' gaming.

I think you sorta have to read the patent that Nintendo was granted to understand the whole thing, but as a generality broad patents preemptively constrain possibility and so I oppose them. Also, the people who seem to grant patents don't seem to know anything about anything; they're like newly hatched chicks for whom all the world constitutes wonder and novelty. The early Internet was full of stuff where people were like, "Yeah, I came up with the idea of information itself" which people had to defend themselves from. I want to say that it's like a battlefield from a parallel dimension, except in a very real way it is a higher dimension, because it determines what we can do down here.

It goes without saying that the Deadzone is dangerous. It's not a preferred zone. If it had any other redeeming characteristics, we would be calling it something else. Still, when you shoot an enemy's weakpoint, the game makes a sound like a river of coins flowing from a garish slot machine. Whoever made it sound this way should receive the bulk of the proceeds for this game.

I thought Hollow Knight looked cool when Gabe was playing it on the couch about a million years ago; I have a memory that I might have made up of him using some kind of bug-oriented fast travel mechanism inside a big tunnel. He bounced off it, ultimately, so hard that he didn't even remember playing it. Hollow Knight: Silksong passed into myth, and myth into legend, and then in a startling reversal of the usual order of things it became a literal.

I saw a video online of somebody missing a jump and then falling directly down through what seemed like five or six zones until they found solid ground. At this exact moment, I'm not sure my controller would survive a game like that. I can already feel it flexing in my palms, the preamble to a crack that can be heard both by the dead and those not yet born.

After Jasmine and Gabe both pushed Deadzone: Rogue on me in the same weekend, and because it's twenty five bucks, I crumbled quickly beneath this assault on heart and mind. There aren't surprises on the surface; it's gonna do exactly what it said it was gonna do. Then you fall into the loop. Part of that is getting a slightly better shoe, but… Here. Let me go into it.

The last time I tried to write about the censorship of content on Steam and elsewhere, I proved unsuited to the task. Well, that may be a matter for debate. Maybe you would have liked what I wrote. Gabe certainly would have liked it; that's part of why I didn't post it. Let me try this again, in the mode of the Elder Statesman that I am.

I am back home after another great PAX West. Thank you to everyone who came to our various Penny Arcade panels and events over the course of the weekend. I am confident that someday Jerry and I will walk on stage for a panel and find a completely empty room, but that day is not today! 

Here's the strip from the make a strip panel at PAX West 2025, to celebrate a new vendor I'm really excited about. In other news, Ronia wants to get Alien tattoos together when she turns 18; she wants me to get the xenomorph and her to get the facehugger, because "that's the baby." I'm weirdly touched by it. We must consider that she may be, in fact, my girl.

What we can say for certain is that the eighties were a very interesting time for cross-cultural product. Gabe's verdict on Shinobi: Art Of Vengeance is that it kicks ass, and he says the demo is super hefty.  Usually if he likes a demo, he'll just stop playing it - doesn't want to spoil the experience.  This time, he couldn't put it down.

The official show store for PAX West 2025 is live, and there are some hardcore bangers in there this time around. Dabe was able to get access to take pictures in real metro spots, and even just the store page for PAX has a ton of amazing photography:

I just got the pages, and the Design Team has of course killed it.  Keep an eye out for the Blue Circles - those are the ones that will be available at our relaunched store.penny-arcade.com very soon!  The incredible Metro Jackets are an online exclusive this year because of a shipping issue, but we'll have them to try on at the show and they will ship free!

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(CW)TB