God help me. God helps us all.

I’ve been playing a ton of Rayman Legends on the Wii U for the last two days. This game is fucking incredible. The way it uses the Wii U gamepad is nothing short of genius. I’ve been playing it with my wife, me taking on the platforming while she handles the touch controls on the gamepad. If you played the demo you know that the person on the gamepad can do cool stuff like cut ropes to lower platforms or stamp out fireballs before they reach you.

PAX is over now and I’m at home recovering. It was an incredible four days and I wanted to share some of my highlights.

I would have gotten here a lot sooner if it weren't for Cookie Clicker. Man, fuck that guy. You work so hard to ennoble play and craft and systems as aesthetics and whatever other Goddamn thing, but if you put a cookie on the screen and ask me to click it I will apparently do that for hours and fucking hours. I'm creating three and a half million cookies per second and it feels like the apex of human achievement. I stand atop a cookie ziggurat, my arms outstretched; chocolate lightning strikes both palms.

Ordinarily at this time I'd be trying to disassemble an Incan stonework of tightly compressed memories in a more or less mute attempt to communicate the previous three days. But since PAX Prime is now four days, I'm still trying to do that while new memories are being added higher in the stack.

Just in case you think this is a purely fictional enterprise, let me assure you: it's all so terrifyingly real. I would tell you who we went through, or whatever, but I don't want to advertise for a service I haven't received anything from yet. Maybe they're huge jerks! Maybe you open the box, and in addition to your cravats or whatever there is also a ton of skin and hair. Man, I don't know.

I wholly standardized my clothing options some indistinct period of time ago - thick black shirts, black shoes, dark jeans. The socks and underwear are black also, so that I can wash my life all at once if needs be. I tend to ensconce commentary regarding my reasons for doing so - or, indeed, any kind of self-assessment - in an impenetrable ironic bulwark. I don't think this makes me a statistical outlier, by any means. I hope you won't be surprised to learn that I'm kind of a dork.

Pin trading at PAX East and PAX Aus has been absolutely insane. Now it’s time to bring the Pinny Arcade madness to Pax Prime and it’s going to be even bigger. We’re launching more than 40 new pins at Prime! That’s a lot of pins so I’m going to break up the announcement into two parts. So today I’m just going to cover the new Penny Arcade related pins. Next week I’ll go over all the new third party pins from companies like Ubisoft, Sony and NCsoft.

Last week I showed you all of the Penny Arcade related Pinny Arcade pins that will be launching at PAX Prime. Now it’s time to show you all the awesome third party pins that will be making their debut at the show. I love the PA pins but my goal with Pinny Arcade was always to make it about games in general. The idea was really to take Disney Pin Trading and apply it to all of gaming. Well I’m happy to say that’s exactly what’s happening now. Check this out, and remember, it’s just the beginning!

Tabletop Games The last of our D&D podcasts went up today setting the stage for our live game at PAX Prime. If you missed it there are seven episodes available over on the WOTC site. Acquisitions Inc. has gained a new intern named Viari played by Patrick Rothfuss. We had a ton of fun playing with Pat, he’s a great role player and really brought a cool character to the table.

Kara burst onto the scene with a succession of handles, which is right and necessary: the first one I knew about was Angel Eyes, which I always assumed was a Steelheart reference but never asked. Her ability to kill men from an elevated position lead to her being dubb'd Orbital Strike, which stuck for awhile. Various groups have formed and dissolved since then, and when she wants to play there's always a spot, but competing against John Rando isn't really her thing these days.

I read Ben's thing about EVE: Valkyrie, and I saw something over at Joystiq about some spitballed VR shit for the Oculus Rift, and it occurred to me that somehow we've never made a comic about the thing. This is after having the Goddamned future strapped to our heads. I was even eaten by a shark at one point! No strip catalogues the event.

Deciding what to play with your leisure time, let alone deciding what to make a comic about, is a non-trivial matter at the moment. Shit's dense. And then a will-o-the-wisp like Hearthstone shoots off into a cave, and you pretty much have to follow it.

I'm working on our new Daughters of the Eyrewood story line.

Perhaps the only thing my father and I ever agreed on was that videogames were pretty cool.