You would think, even I would think, that this strip came about because I had seen a sparkly word somewhere and had endeavored to integrate it into my nest. Not so!

More details about the Killer Instinct Pin Ultimate edition came out today. You can head over to the XBLA blog right now and read through them. You should jump over there and read them before continuing on with my post. Go ahead I can wait. I have to catch this Zubat anyway.

I’m really loving Pokemon X. I put about 150 hours into Pokemon Diamond back in the day but could not get into any of the games after. I tried White but it just felt to similar. I don’t know if it’s the updated graphics or the amount of time that has passed but I’m hooked on X now.

For a game that is relentlessly cheery most of the time, in palette and texture, there's a lot of weird implications about its world. There are some problems friendship may not be sufficient to solve. There are the monsters you breed, of course, but there are also the monsters who do the breeding.

As I discussed with Gabriel, in a conversation that will ultimately be distilled into podcast form, there is such a thing as a Pokemon Fan. There are many routes to this fandom - Pokemon has the highest brandwidth, both in burst and raw throughput, of any property on Earth.

Looking over at the page, it has nine or so hours left to go before it funds. They've got about 20k left to go on a 500k ask, so they're close. I said I would say what was up with it, and I never did, partly because I'm a bad person but also because no that's why.

I wanted to talk a little more about the Pin Ultimate edition of the new Killer Instinct. The KI team originally came to us with a question. They were making a digital only game but wanted to know if there was a way to give it a cool physical component that would sort of take the place of the game box you would have put up on your shelf. We all put our heads together and what we came up with is the Pin Ultimate edition.

NUCLEAR THRONE!

I’ve got some cool Thornwatch news to share. Last time I talked about my game I mentioned that I got some great advice from Mike Selinker. He told me I needed to let someone else run the game besides me. Since I started working on it almost two years ago I have been the only one to ever GM it. Putting it in someone elses hands was incredibly scary but I did it last week. It was nerve wracking but Selinker was right, the notes I got were better than any playtest I’ve done since the first year of the game’s development.

Gabriel tells me that "Orange is the New Black" is very good, but he doesn't know exactly why. The reason he gives each time is a little different. Like happens so often with shows, hearing about it mostly makes me want to read the book.

We’ve got some really awesome Pinny Arcade news for you guys! We are teaming up with Microsoft to release a special “Pin Ultimate” edition of the new Killer Instinct for the XBox One. I know penultimate means there is something even better but the pun was just too good not to use.

As part of the Kickstarter we did, there were a number of Game Nights on offer, and without fail they've been a blast. Videogames never get played at these things. We always provide a selection, tastefully arranged, with the electronic equivalent of a tangy dip to the side. Nobody cares. Boardgames! That's what's up.

I would say that I have a complicated relationship with my father if I didn't think that "complicated relationships with fathers" weren't the functional default. I don't know, maybe that's something I made up. Maybe I've just self-selected a cohort messed up for the same reasons I am.

The sky being the "limit" isn't as inspirational as you might think. Paralysis tends to be the only product that state of affairs produces in any volume. That's been my experience. Limitations, of one kind or another, channel the effort. It's the conceptual version of what Gabriel might call Negative Space.

Katie's finished all the pages, so the whole thing is up now. Thanks for reading!

I got into the Gestureworks Gameplay beta last night and I’ve been playing around with it all morning. I showed it to Tycho and we both agree it’s incredible. Let me tell you why.