I’ve had a few weeks now with my Switch and that included a trip over to Boston. It is hard for me to separate my feelings about the console from Zelda: Breath of the Wild. So far the Switch has really just been a Zelda machine for me. With that said I still feel like the Switch might end up being the ultimate console for me. I don’t know how your house is set up, but we have a family room where we spend most of our time. It’s got the big comfy couch, all the video game consoles and the nice TV. It also has all the boy’s Legos and toys so it’s where we all hand out. If my wife is watching shows or the boys are playing a game I can still be in there playing Zelda on my Switch. I’m not playing a portable game or a different game. I am playing the real deal and when it’s my turn for the TV I can just pop the Switch into the dock and pick up right where I left off. This was already awesome even before I took my trip to Boston.

In strips like Apophenia and Potential Thingness, we go into the type of puzzle that The Legend of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild has wedged in literally every crevice: puzzles you must recognize are puzzles. The distinction I would make is that every time we think something is a puzzle in Zelda, it has been. That might also be true in The Witness, but I simply wasn't smart enough to perceive it.

We made a snipperstrip about Snipperclips.

Having discussed it with Gabriel, he says that Jim Darkmagic is more "magician" than "wizard," but not in the synonym way. He thinks of him as a performer at root, one that occasionally becomes a piece of bipedal mystical artillery. So finally hitting 9th level with him unlocked some fairly bonkers stuff in that vein, things for his growing toolkit of battlefield manipulation over direct damage strategy, and he made some cool stuff happen at PAX East. We did have to have a conversation about when a magical person gets what shit. I should talk to him about THAC0 sometime.

In addition to being shredded five or six at a time, the doomed creeps in For Honor also have informative barks that they kick out - like, if your friend is perforated. It's nice to have a second or two to process the fact that it's about to be 4v1 and you are not on the "four" side of the V.

If Gabe is playing a game at home and then decides to play it at the office, there's usually a point at which you need to make absolutely certain the save has been copied up into the cloud from his PS4. And then you need to make sure that you've copied it back up after you play, which doesn't, you know… always happen. Since last Friday, he's been playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on his Switch, and then… just bringing in the Switch. Like, the whole thing. It's still kind of a weird idea even though I've seen it happen multiple times. Obviously playing while in transit to and from isn't a great strategy. Y'know. Don't do that.

It wasn't quite this simple, but it was fairly simple.

I was able to pick up a Switch on Friday although I probably made it harder than it needed to be. I showed up at my local Fred Meyer around 5:30 in the morning and stood in the cold and the rain until they opened at 7am. Later that day a bunch of folks from the office went over to the local Amazon store and just walked right in and bought Switches. Of course if I had done that, I wouldn’t have this awesome cold I caught. Looks like I might be patient zero at PAX East this week!

The second Banner Saga game just hit in that dealio I was talking about before, so I wanted to remind everyone and I also wanted to expose human minds to our insane video that we made with Kris Straub again:

You might have heard that another “For the Watch” is in the works. This time we’re playing For Honor and I intend to maintain my history of success. Before I get into my team of murderers, I want to say a special thank you to the folks at Twitch Prime who sponsored this event. You might have noticed that we’ve been doing a lot more Twitch stuff recently. Someone is streaming from the PA office pretty much every day of the week now. I play games with Tycho on there but I also draw the comic strip live every Tuesday. I’ve really enjoyed drawing on Twitch and chatting with folks in the chat. Twitch Prime is actually a pretty slick deal and you can hear all about it over on their site. We’ve gotten a ton of incredible support for a bunch of our projects from the folks at Twitch Prime. I’m incredibly proud to have them as a sponsor and I hope you’ll take a minute to see what they’re offering.

A midnight launch was not attended, let's get that out of the way. I have every faith that I would turn into a pumpkin, just like in the old story, where a man is too old and tries to hang with feral-ass youths. How real do you motherfuckers wanna get? I'm typing this post on my phone in the parking lot of Best Buy. Mr. Gribs got up at fuck o'clock and has hardware in his possession; everywhere I've been has only power supplies and grey Joy-Cons, storm-toss'd flotsam in the ravenous wake of the Switch.

This is all a real thing that happened. I've been there every day since it launched, in case we were able to play For Honor: For The Watch, and… well, here. Let my friend Kris Straub tell you all about the event, as though it were a Monster Truck Rally:

I have a whole new appreciation for the art of game design after watching Rodney Thompson and Mike Selinker inspect and construct Thornwatch. I knew I had a cool idea and some genuinely new mechanics but I had hit a wall. Rodney came in and looked at what I had done and saw all the little problems, but more importantly he saw what I wanted the game to do. He cut out old rules that only hurt that game and built new rules to support the Thornwatch I wanted. When Rodney isn't working at Bungie or helping me design Thornwatch, it turns out he is making his own game! Tycho and I actually played the game, and we both loved it. It's true! You can watch the video of it for yourself:

You'll be playing Horizon: Zero Dawn soon enough here, but since you need to manufacture practically every shot you fire from your weapons, it might be worth keeping an eye on what you're putting out. Sony's had fairly strenuous limitations on streaming the product, much more strenuous than you might think for a game whose reviews came out a week ago and are all incredible. I asked them, actually, because I wanted to stream it last Wednesday with Mr. Gribbz. Alas; there are authentic mysteries here, most people still don't know much about the game, and they want to safeguard that for as many people as possible

Hey! I backed Banner Saga hard, like, so hard that I got to write a Godstone for the sequel and create an item and stuff. I was asked to help with a promotion for The Banner Saga 3, and I know the second one was a rough ride for the studio so I said yes several times in rapid succession.