Welcome to the new Penny Arcade website! Before I go into all my favorite parts of the update, I want to say thank you to Gavin and Buland  and Kiko who are the ones most responsible for bringing this incredible new site to life.

I played Tunic until I stopped and called Mike, saying that I couldn't believe how amazing it was, and I was gonna stop playing immediately.

When I was pulling up our Gran Turismo 7 video to link it, I ended up skipping through a few parts of it to appreciate just how otherworldly some aspects of it are. I mean, look. I haven't played the last few games, so I don't know if this perverted oligarch is like the final car boss of the franchise now or what.

I went over to Mr. Gribbz'z house to play Elden Ring, and presumably to chew gum, though gum was not in ready supply. Then we started up the stream and checked out Gran Turismo 7; if that is your kind of shit, you can join us as we struggle to escape a car-obsessed billionaire's cafe slash car sex dungeon.

DioField Chronicle looks fucking sweet. It strikes at a number of my glowing, exposed targets, threatening incredible damage and perhaps even debilitating status effects.

Gran Turismo has always looked as ridiculous as they could make it at that particular time, and there seems to be some arrangement between Polyphony Digital and the parent corporation that they get to take the time required to do things correctly.

I mean, I don't know why you would buy Bandcamp. I mean, not "you" specifically. And even if "you" wanted to buy Bandcamp, you couldn't! Epic already did. Actually, wait a second. PC Gamer is right, I'd just forgotten about it - they also bought ArtStation, which has very firm parallels in other media. They have a ton of acquisitions on the tools side of game development, and companies like this can be thought of as asset libraries or pipelines. I think of them as containing end products, of course, because that's where I exist in the food chain of global capital. That's what's eye level to me.

I feel a strange compulsion to read the messages in Souls type games, even though the actual utility of the practice is uneven at best. A kind of real-time information warfare, they're about a one to five admixture of crucial, timely, life-saving information and "Try fingers, but hole." I've seen this last one many, many times. I like to think it's all the same person, which is sorta what the strip is about; a dark fantasy Johnny Appleseed, but for fingers in your butt. What a sentence! 2022 is going great so far.

I just checked in another post and Elden Ring strip in the Club PA Patreon, but Elden Ring content is thick on the ground now and I am prepared to deploy it in abundance. Even though we managed to escape the time warp, apparently some GamePro vestiges remain.

I think we'll pause the experiment for now, but there's a lot of headroom in these ancient scrolls. We never even got to GamePro or Nintendo Power! Someone was saying that were we to stay this course, we would eventually get to comics about how long Sin takes to load, and I like that just for the internal loop. It calls to mind Pepsi's perimeter oscillations, and if it's sufficient to buoy that storied edifice we could probably make due with the occasional mystic whorl.

I did everything I could! Every legal thing, at least. God only knows when this will end! Although, if I had to hazard a guess, it’s gonna be once I get back into town.

When we were sitting down to make the strip… I don't need to contextualize any of this. Sorry! If your job is to type sometimes you just start typing. The strip (in the manner of a balanced breakfast) contains every nutrient.

As the sands of time rush faster and faster through the hourglass I have, like so many before me, begun to take solace in the trinkets and obsessions of my youth. Whereas a man of my father’s generation might have turned to model trains or the cars they dreamt of as a boy, I have hooked up my Genesis. 

I know he is having a good time with Horizon: Forbidden West because he keeps using the PS5's share capability to project mind-shreddingly beautiful clips of it on Twitter. He's simply trying to extend his time with it.

Late last year, as you might recall, Gabe had been sufficiently tantalized by Battlefield 2042 to pre-order for beta access. The practical outcome was that this beta convinced him that he shouldn't have bought it, but it was too late. There's an Alanis Morissette song about this I think. It's like one of those sci-fi novellas where the protagonist is assigned to kill themselves or some shit. There's a cosmic payload there and we're still unraveling it.

Obviously, one hesitates to engage in armchair psychology. That's sort of a joke: this is something literally everyone does all the time. For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn? And also to ascribe troubling psychoses to people we've never met? I'm not sure if you've heard of Twitter. It happens on there sometimes.