Penny Arcade

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. Pokemon UNITE, though, is…

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. One thing he won't, physically can't do is listen to characters - even lovingly rendered, visionary characters - talk…

Alright, so: let's go down the list of fascinations Gabriel has undertaken during The Plague Years. 1. Simulated Racing Of Cars, which became Real Racing Of Cars2. Building Gunpla, which became watching something like a hundred hours of Gundam And now, improbably, startlingly, Digimon. I grabbed one of the new Digimon X devices just for kicks and it’s pretty cool. I never did the virtual pet thing in the 90’s but so far I’ve kept this little bastard alive for three days.…

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. They've managed to make space boring. And then, in the manner of a Moses returning from Mount Sinai, Bezos has returned to these benighted shores with a moral framework around something called "civility" with some tactically deployed love bombs to inoculate them from criticism. When you start talking about this shit,…