I like Pokemon, but if it were to pass me a note in class with an option to indicate whether I like-liked it, I would have to think about it for a while. At the individual game level for new mainline releases, I rigorously follow the stories because… they're legitimately kinda cool? But the specific grind loop in the game is something my brain will only tolerate for around ten hours total, after which it's like asking me to put my hand on a hot stove.

Gabe has been getting into Cris Tales, and one of the main reasons for that is that his psychological reward structure has no defense against the onslaught of beautiful art in this game. Because our world is a fallen and decrepit place, we never had a collaboration between Square Enix and Mary Blair so it's nice to see these devs making up for some lost time.

Alright, so: let's go down the list of fascinations Gabriel has undertaken during The Plague Years.

This space shit is the most thoroughly dunked phenomenon; it comes pre-dunked, in the package. Dunk runs off it, down your arm, until it pools and drips from your elbow.

If you aren't sort of a dork, the fact that cheat prevention software and emulation is in a problematic state currently and the impact it might have on a device like the Steam Deck isn't broadly understood. Before we entered The Hell Dimension a year and a half ago, my main work machine was Linux Mint, and I really liked it. I had to stretch my mind taut over a hoop and embroider it meticulously to resolve a couple issues I had, and I got way smarter, but I'm by no means an expert. The official Known Issues section in the Proton documentation goes into what they consider best practices a bit, and these practices differ from the current state of the universe in some ways.

I think Loki is probably my favorite Marvel thing. I like the weirder parts of the whole enterprise, though; for mainline Marvel stuff my pick is probably Captain America: The Winter Soldier. You can sorta see why they gave the Russo Brothers the store after that. But even as a moist larva, I sought the weird shit. Guardians of the Galaxy - a movie where a spaceship goes into a large head - and it'is exactly the type of shit I'm still trying to get up to when I run a game. Doctor Strange, that's the other one I like, not least of which because it concerns a threat that can't be managed by repeatedly hitting it in the face.

Mr. Gribbz started with the demo of Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings Of Long Name, which seemed to run kinda raw on Switch, and swiftly moved up to the PC version where it essentially looks like an animated series running in 4k. There's a demo of it on Steam, too, if you want to see what we're talking about.

Honestly, I think The Witcher: Monster Slayer - their take on the "scour your neighborhood for beasts" genre - looks kinda cool. They're trying to approach it their way, which is sorta Questy. That's what they do best. That's why I thought Cyberpunk 2077 was gonna be cool, independent of any issues with basic functionality - because they knew how to tell inspiring little stories inside a relatively small amount of gameplay verbs. I played the whole thing on PC, where the worst of its technical behavior never expressed itself, so I think I understand what they intended, but… the problem is that it had no Andrzej Sapkowski and it very, very much needed a Sapkowski. The game is like a shopping list without a recipe. I recognize everything that was intended to invoke Bolognese but the ratio of every ingredient is fucked.

The Penny Arcade iRacing league will join the Draw4Charity stream at 2PT today for 2 fun races to help raise money for Child's Play! Join the Pit crew this afternoon for some wild racing all for a good cause.

It's probably clear what we're referring to in the strip, but I really like the scenario where you aren't familiar with that catalyst and you've simply been thrown into the deep end.

It's race night and we have a wild one planned. The Penny Arcade league is hitting the dirt at Crandon for some off road action. Quite frankly, I expect a bloodbath. The Pit Crew will open around 7PT on Twitch for the Stream Racer (no download required) pre-show. VROOM VROOM!

I was doing some light baking that was misinterpreted by my cohort! A classic hijinks type scenario.

The title of this post is a real URL, and you should go to it! That is Washington State's nexus for COVID-19 stuff. I used to use the Dashboard at the Seattle Times, that was my sort of go to ritual for the last year and a half or so, but you can actually interact with the official one - and it has big progress bars at the top, which clearly indicate that by either the CDC or our DOH metric we're doing this shit right. The State came back to us for another comic, a full three panels this time, and it was our pleasure to get incredibly real with it here. We hit our metrics, which opened the state, but if you're feeling like he's feeling, that's okay too. It's okay to say, "Hey, we are living through history, and it might take us a minute to figure out what that is supposed to feel like."

One of the weirder things about Mario Golf: Super Rush is that purely from a mechanical perspective it demands more technical play than PGA Tour 2k21. Or, I should say, the subset of PGA Tour 2k21 that we play. For the mostly social way we play the latter game generally, Amateur Swing Timings and the raft of variables and interpretations of the game state provide ample opportunities to fail because it is still fuckin' Golf. We strip out putt previews, which are normal at that level, but if you want to play the game something like a sim that strips away UI elements related to swing timing and scourges you for your shortcomings that game is in there also. Mario Golf, by comparison, is… Mario Golf, the irreducible sigil. They can add things to it - lightning, or rain, or super shots, or running-around-very-fast, but the baseline has some heft. The ball feels like it's the size of a cantaloupe and the cup seems like a salad bowl but it's still tricky.

Gabe hung out for the first half of GOLGOLFA this week, which obviously we appreciated fully - frankly, he stayed a bit later than we even had him for technically. He wasn't able to check out Speed Golf with Gary and I, and he explained why on the stream I've linked above plus today's comic. I expected to hate it - and I still don't think it has a lot of virtue against AI opponents - but against people? Those dynamics are pretty great, actually. I've played it since, and done alright, but what's interesting to me is that the people who found the best success in the rounds I played were those who chilled out and just tried to sneak through and take their time. People who were playing Slow Golf routinely found success against those playing the Speed version. All the traditional machinery is there and it matters a lot, even in the new context. It's cool.

This isn't an affiliate link or anything, I think it's just the best example of what I'm talking about: Gundam Converge is a line of super-deformed Gundam models that are small and cute. They're collectible figurines essentially, impulse buys, which is strongly reinforced by the fact that they include literal candy in the box.