With the original comic we did, correctly entitled "Fan Fiction," I only polished up what Gabriel had written. What I call polishing up might not be what you call polishing up. I would never say what I wrote and what he did, because it would diminish the honor which should rightly accrue to him. It wouldn't exist at all if he hadn't been the crazypants Destiny addict that he is; I just wanted to help. When I wrote the new ones, I did it for him.

What was Black Tusk and is now The Coalition has a mandate to return Gears of War to its horror roots, which I'm okay with; something was definitely lost there. Horror games have a tendency to become Action Games once numbers start getting bolted to the end of the title. Part of the reason is that horror is a niche. Horror is also hard. It may even be at conceptual variance with the core interaction of a shooter, which tends to coalesce around shooting. They're also hard to write. Lots of reasons to focus on the gun and not the person holding it. Totally get it. Still.

Today is Wednesday so here is your new DLC Podcast Show.

So it turns out some of the folks over at Bungie were fans of the Destiny Fan Fiction comic I did a while back. They reached out a few months ago and asked if Tycho and I would like to work with them on something. This was just before House of Wolves was scheduled to drop and I thought maybe they wanted some comics focusing on the expansion. That wasn’t the case though. What they showed us when we visited their studio was the Taken King. They let us play with the three new subclasses and then asked us if we wanted to create a comic (similar to the fan fiction piece) about each one.

I was once on the Time 100, alongside Taylor Swift, but I'm still just me and now she's TAYLOR SWIFT in all caps, diamond-hard global goddess. When she was playing her guitar at the event, suggesting into the microphone that a song was "just poetry put to music," I said, "You know what, this kid's alright." It's much the same here. I think learning to yield, in the Tai Chi sense, is the only medicine for something like this. I have been given many opportunities to observe my annihilation, many remote cameras are cataloging the process. Soon, I will just be a bleached femur a few hyenas are listlessly fighting over.

It's Monday and that means there is a new First 15. In this one Tycho and I take a crack at a co-op puzzle game called Kalimba.

It turns out that running a press conference for a virtual reality thing is very hard when you can't actually communicate what makes it special in a normal video. It's similar to a few E3s ago, when the Playstation 3 was poised to herald an era of 3D. I can't remember: did that end up happening? It seems like it didn't end up happening. But the problem was the same: it would be like trying to tell someone about what it's like to be drunk, and then showing pictures of drunk people. It's incoherent.

I use Spotify for the same reason people used to use Xbox Live; their friends had it. Right? How much multiplayer do you want to play, and how much of that consists of you being ground into a powder by abusive strangers? It doesn't describe a truly authentic choice. Likewise, if I want to make sure I'm hearing a sufficient quota of weird-ass shit from the people I know, Spotify trivializes the "here is my playlist" process. Then I can split this playlist from the bottom to the top and throw out the garbage.

Our first week of the new and improved PATV continues with the DLC Podcast Show today. It's the same old DLC podcast but now you can watch me draw the strip as you listen to us write it.

We decided that we had to commemorate this bizarre crew somehow, and what better way to do it than to publicly shame my lack of everything that is required for valor. See if you can recognize any of the members of my incredibly high profile squad. The upper left and lower right are, in the manner of Bingo, free squares.

On Friday we launched a bunch of new shows on our YouTube channel and laid out a new schedule. Today is Monday which means there is a new First 15 available. This time Tycho and I sit down and play some Motorcycle club. Check it out!

My NINETY SIX year old GRANDMA just TWEETED me about my new YOUTUBE show.

Hatred really isn't a big deal. I don't mean, like, hating. Don't do that! I'm talking about the game Hatred, which is crazypants. If you want to know about it, it's basically a twin-stick shooter, which is whatever. I would never have known about it if there hadn't been such a breathless, plainly mercenary attempt to capitalize on the game's unvarnished, thoroughly amateur depiction of violence. That said, if someone is super good at Hatred call the police.

After a year long break we are finally getting back into producing Penny Arcade video content. We’re not just bringing back the old series though, we’re trying something brand new and honestly way cooler I think.

When we were running the original Club PA, in what almost certainly qualifies as Back In The Day, we would sometimes offer up bonus versions of comics or even exclusive ones. For a time, we did an extra strip altogether. It seems like if you are a member of a club called Club PA, maybe more PA is a good idea for that person. I understand such things are known as "incentives." Business is not my department! But an extra comic still seems like a good idea, so we're gonna do that. You'll get the new strip and a mini-post ("postito") that accompanies it in the Newsletter each month, though they'll eventually be archived for members on the site also. I really liked the first one.

There are tons of games I would like to write comics about, but there are a couple very specific challenges in this truly bizarre line of work. I am using the term "challenges" specifically for its hyperbolic thrust; I got it pretty fucking good here. But this is what I mean: