I mentioned Max: Curse of the Brotherhood yesterday and said I was having fun with it. Well, I was able to beat it today and my initial impression still stands. This is a great puzzle/platform game and well worth the $15 they are asking. In fact I’d say it’s my favorite Xbox One exclusive so far. I found a couple frustrating bits towards the end. They do the classic puzzle game thing where once you’ve learned a bunch of skills and you’re having fun solving puzzles they make you do it fast. I absolutely hate this mechanic in these sorts of games. I love the mechanics and I just want to solve the puzzles. Making me do it quick while being chased by lava just pisses me off. Thankfully there is very little of this and usually the game slows down at crucial moments giving you the extra couple seconds you need to draw in the element you need.

The new Acquisitions Inc. Pin set is in the store now! Also we’re still running the “buy and 2 pin sets get a Pinny Arcade poster free” deal. You can still take advantage of all our Holiday reward tiers as well. Just hit the front page of the PA store for all the details.

We’re going to spend this week counting down our top nine games of 2013. It’s been a long time since we did the “We’re Right Awards”. In fact the last real one we did was back in 2003. It’s been an incredible year for games though and I had a great time going back over my favorites.

We were very surprised to receive mails to the effect of "what happened to the We're Right Awards," seeing as we stopped doing them because it seemed sort of whatever, but I have to tell you that if I'm going to be spending a week in the fucking Pain Mines, scooping anguish out of blisters in the Earth with the largest, most contiguous skull I can find, "whatever" sounds pretty Goddamned good.

Max: Curse of the Brotherhood just hit the Xbox One and I've played a few hours of it. It's a side scrolling platform game with a bunch of physics based puzzles. You use a magic marker to draw various elements into the game world. It's a fun mechanic and I've been really impressed with the puzzles so far. With all the drawing going on it's a crime this game isn't on the Wii U but it works okay with a controller. If it was on the PS4 I'd stream it but It's Xbox One so you'll have to make do with the game clips it records automatically and uploads. If you check out my profile on Live you should be able to watch some of them and get a feel for the game. My XBL handle is just Gabe and I think if you follow me you can watch my clips? Maybe? I honestly have no idea how it works.

Tycho was right. Dungeon of the Endless is something special! I can't believe how cool it is for a game that's not even close to being done! You can grab it on Steam early access right now and I recommend you do just that.

I've got heaps of boardgames I've Kickstarted, and I mean heaps. It's fucking sick, and not sick like a 180 Kickflip Psychonator off the top deck. It's sick like I should probably be taking some kind of medicine to tamp it down. Additional medicines, I should say.

Just a reminder that this is the last weekend to bake your Dickerdoodles! So bake some dicks this weekend!

I play Killzone: Shadow Fall multiplayer every night. I love it. Maybe you do the same thing I do when you really get into a game? I hit up all the forums for it just because I can’t seem to absorb enough information about it. I checked out the Shadow Fall forums and saw that people tend to be pretty upset with it. There are apparently frame rate issues, they have “ruined the sniper class”, the SP is “mediocre at best”, it’s simply “wretched” and I guess almost no one is playing it online.

The very first Killer Instinct Pin Challenge is live today! If you picked up the Pin Ultimate edition of the game this is your chance to get your first “engagement” pin. You can find all the details over on the Play XBLA blog.

We have been known to make the occasional comic.

I’ve been having a ton of fun streaming my Playstation gaming via Twitch. It’s fun chatting with you guys while I play and it’s quickly turning into one of my favorite features of the PS4. Usually I’ll drop the Twitch stream in here on the front page just before I start gaming and I end up with three or four hundred folks hanging out in the chat. I’ve had a few requests to archive the streams but that’s not currently available. From what I understand it's a feature that Twitch is planning on adding to the PS4 streams in the future.

Today is the last day for what Brian calls "USPS Priority Mail (Domestic) Shipping," after which you're going through UPS and shit gets progressively more brutal cost-wise. But! We just got our scarves in, and by leveraging the Top Secret, impossible to decrypt code "w1nterscarf" you may secure an additional twenty percent off, regardless of the season you actually wear the aforementioned scarf in. Behold!

I thought there was a lot to like about Frozen; I could probably talk about it for a long time. The comic isn't about that, though - it's about the Match 3 Puzzler brand extension that Gabriel somehow became ensnared in, and cannot escape, and how it culminated in a kind of spirit quest which I sincerely doubt is even possible. Having played some Angry Birds Go(!), and seen its stupid energy thing which similarly punishes interest when said interest is not coupled with direct investment, I understand what he means. The takeaway is that regardless what type of game it is in some specific case, "free to play" must be considered the "genre." It reliably warps mechanics to such an extent that it probably offers more stability for the taxonomist.

Gonna play some Killzone Shadow Fall multiplayer tonight and I'll go ahead and stream. You will be able to watch right here and even join in on the chat.

So I had to look up “concomitant” while reading Tycho’s post. I was sort of surprised by how specific the definition was.