The new God of War Valhalla DLC has been a really nice surprise. I will start by saying I was not a huge fan of God of War Ragnorok. I like the combat in these games but unskippable cutscenes absolutely killed the second one for me. I don’t understand why they will give us a “story” mode for people who don’t like combat, but can’t give us an “action” mode for people who don’t like the story.

I’ve had a couple weeks with my new Steam Deck OLED and I thought I’d put together a list of what I’m enjoying on it. 

A lot of people did a lot of great work in gaming, for years, but a significant amount of the conversation around The Game Awards was about how The Game Awards were a singularly poor context in which to celebrate that work. I literally turned it off - I couldn't look at it anymore. I can't look at this smug goon mugging with puppets, and I can't tolerate how this goblin merely stands adjacent to incredible work, and some measure of that talent - that light - somehow accrues to him.

Merry Christmas! I feel like we're sufficiently beyond the turkey threshold to make such an entreaty. I'm in the market for a Merry Christmas; having returned from PAX Unplugged primarily with a sense of profound gratitude, all that remains really is to… actually feel it? I'm gonna try. Let's both of us try.

It's probably too inside baseball, or… inside mucous-encapsulated ova, but occasionally we must be allowed to amuse ourselves on our own website. I hauled a case of ravenous insects all over hell's half-acre, and only had a chance to use them the very last night of the show - at 3am, we had to pause right in the middle. But that's when this conversation came up. Technically, it was with Eric but if I'm gonna call someone an idiot multiple times in one panel it's probably more strategic to have it be the same person I've shamed for three decades.

I hardly know what to say. PAX Unplugged is always a highlight of the year, for various reasons. For one, it's just very good. I like all kinds of games but with the advent of Battletech: Alpha Strike and various Tendrils of Warhammer I think that painting and playing with dolls is steadily rising to the fore, alongside anything that involves the scooting of various chips, wooden people, and the clattering of cubes varied and lovely. Even by these standards, this show was a supernatural portal to a Realm Beyond.

Gurb turned me on to a kick-ass book called "The Mysterious Case Of Rudolph Diesel," and I think you should read it if you're interested at all in the world, but you should buy it with cash in a town you don't live in and read it in a dimly lit cavern. Because if you don't, if The System finds out you read a book about a fascinating historical character and his mysterious disappearance, you'll be clocked immediately by their tendrils as… whoever this is.

This motherfucker was on Reddit immediately after opening the box because it was already goof troop somehow - already brutalized by his cyberdeath nimbus. He just had to go to desktop mode and restart it. But still! I'm confident it was his fault somehow.

Bullet was one of the things that made the last part of the Dark Times tolerable at my house. I'm glad Mork found a character he could get into for the art, because I like this game a lot and I wanted us to be in there somewhere. Anne-Claire is a an optional item in the new " Bullet Universe" Kickstarter, but we'd launched it as a charity goodie originally and that turned over ten thousand and change to mental health charities. So, yay! But her design is really neat, and deserves to be part of a larger set too.  I had a lot of fun filling Google Sheets fields with her custom text.

In lieu of buying ads, the folks behind the Bullet♥︎ Kickstarter have decided to spend that budget on commissioning original art for their game! This is an idea I love and not just because I am one of the artists they approached. I'd love to see more companies take this approach honestly and they don't even have to come to me!

Lots and lots!  In the manner of our ancient feline forebears, "let me show you them."  

Every now and then I'll click somewhere on Steam and see that I have some wealth of Steam Points, I think it's something like eight hundred and sixty thousand, and get curious about what can be done with them. Not much, friends! Not much. You can buy gifs and stuff. You can also award people's posts with badges you buy with them or some shit. They could be sort of a profound thing with all kinds of ramifications but I don't really think anybody "owns" that internally. At least, I hope they don't! That would make everything else I said very hurtful and mean. It could be ballin', an industry defining loyalty program I would actually give a shit about, but it isn't and I guess it doesn't have to be.

Again, that's just what it looks like. Most of my friends in the industry have been in it long enough to have escaped into the Indie space, which isn't without its own bloodletting, but the dynamics are very different. It's starting to reach down into there, though: I've heard horror stories of a single missed milestone that dissolves an entire contract, or the increasingly Darwinian terms. Bad seems insufficient, but it's also a very broad spectrum. So: things are bad.

There's a remaster coming for The Last Of Us Part Two, which is a very Naughty Dog thing to do in general. I'd read a thing about how the remaster was "feeding a misguided narrative" about how these are taking resources away from making new games, but I don't care about that shit. It's the Internet - you will find every conceivable position enunciated with full-throated vigor. No; the problem with it is that it's boring - and potentially dangerous.

Sorry, these were too silly not to show off.  I got the okay from Lidija to show off Dabe's newest, authentically wacky shit.  

I had an incredible time playing in this new season of the Acquisitions Inc series.The 10th episode premieres this afternoon on YouTube and the finale will be played live at PAX Unplugged next month!