I haven't had a chance to play Halo Infinite's campaign at all. Well, mostly not at all. I have seen the introduction, and then I jumped up on a conveyor belt. As conveyor belts go, it seemed like a good one; it definitely had the belt on there. But that intro might be the best cinematic to ever find expression in a Halo game. Beyond that, I can't say too much about the single player stuff, except to say that Gabe thinks it's probably his game of the year. And he doesn't like shit.

I came out here to Philadelphia with the whole family this time, an excursion we haven't undertaken since the first PAX Aus, and this kind of thing is way easier when your child's vocabulary consists of more breadth and richness than just penguin sounds. They can tell you directly, with only the occasional chirp or trill, that they'd rather be at home.

D&D Beyond is back sponsoring Acquisitions Incorporated at the show, and I'm so pleased. If I were, perhaps, a more savvy businessman, I would have stopped using it for AcqInc or The "C" Team shows when our deal ended with them but no!

Morak and I were talking about this Saturday's Acquisitions Incorporated game, an authentically star studded affair that sees Jeremy "J-Craw" Crawford with his firm hand once again on the tiller. We did wonder what precisely Jim has been getting up to in the interim, a subplot I have every intention of raising incessantly at the table, but Gabriel has delivered concise answers to these questions with only slight prevarication.

I wouldn't have write about it if it didn't keep coming up.

I was watching a sponsored stream last week where, between rounds of Warzone, the streamer was engaging their audience with hydration trivia. Thirteen thousand people were watching it and they all seemed to have strong opinions on the water issue. I aged so quickly at this point that, in the space of perhaps twenty seconds, I became a few dessicated strips of jerky wrapped around a grey ribcage. My skull rolled under the bed and disappeared.

I know that I have certainly wondered why they don't just fuckin' 86 this Kotick guy. Life can be incredibly complex. Even an attempt to buy spaghetti sauce is confronted with an impossibility of options. Easy choices are an opportunity to celebrate, and this is the easiest one yet: Fire Bobby Kotick.

My eldest son Gabe got way into Arcane and once he had seen all of it he convinced Kara and I to watch it as well. I thought the first episode was cool but by the third I was 110% in love with this world and these characters! I just had to do some fanart of VI and Jinx. 

When Rito announced a couple years back that they were going to do everything, literally everything, all the time, I was like, "Damn, that's a lot of things." You're trying to beat CS and Hearthstone and Street Fighter and also, like, Dota again somehow, which is sorta funny because this last one kinda brings the company full circle.

I ended up having two separate Thanksgivings; It's not really Thanksgiving in my house unless it culminates in a cathedral of rich bones I can morph into a week's worth of dinners. I go into all that in the Club PA strip that drops tomorrow, but in any event we discovered the endgame strats for Thanksgiving and it involves doing major surgery on a bird.

The Child’s Play Charity dinner auction has gone virtual again this year and that means you can pick up some tickets and bid on cool stuff from the comfort of your own home. The auction will be on December 2nd this year and I’ve got a sneak peek at some of the items you can get your hands on. 

At first, I thought Ridley Scott was laying the blame for his movie's failure at the door of milliners - hardworking folk whose craft is plied to the delight of the head and scalp. But no! No. It was instead placed on the brow of that oft maligned cadre, The Millennial, whose disinterest in the schemes of their boomer forebears is well known.

I was telling Mark about this new Riot fighting game, because a trailery thing just came out, and how I'd played its philosophical predecessor Rising Thunder at PAX fuckin'... years ago. I can see why that team would get bought, even just off that sliver, because I've thought about it consistently ever since then.

The idea that I delight in killing players is essentially a fiction, and the way you know that's it's not true is because - as suggested previously - a bunch of dead characters and their resentful, starving players aren't a receptive audience for my intricate statue puzzle, whose solution is contained within twelve lines of immaculate, technical verse.

I only knew about this because Gabriel's son, who is actually named Gabriel, was incensed enough to bring it to his attention. People watch this for the trailers, that is simply… a fact, but Gen Z is such a spicy cadre that it is hard not to be delighted by it. Servants of Nidhoggr, all.

At the very highest level, looking down, I think that the Halo Infinite Battle Pass has progressed thinking on this form of monetization in a way that suggests that they have, uh, parents on the team. Or, at the very least, that they have a philosophical bone to pick with the typical FOMO pump that a timed season creates. This is the part I like: you own the Battle Pass. It's like a TTRPG supplement or something, and it even occupies a space on a kind of shelf; the pass itself is something you own, and you can shelve it when a new one comes out if you're excited about that, but you can always come back to the other one, or swap to a third, whatever. This is what respect for my money and time looks like.