I like it when co-op games aren't bullshit. You know? I like it when they don't manufacture little interpersonal caltrops like divvying up collected resources per player just to transform your leisure time into a twisted and darwinian Squid Game. Deep Rock Galactic is the best comparison, philosophically. Everybody wins. Oh, fuck - didn't make it to the ship on time because your cat was shitting in a houseplant in your actual room, IRL? We got you: we'll fire you down from the station in a custom bullet and you can join in progress because why shouldn't you be able to. Arrowhead Studios got the memo.

DRG: Survivor is a dangerously addictive mutation of the survivor genre, newly unleashed upon Early Access. It is a progression beyond the state of the art and is yet another necessary game here in the first few short months of the year.

I was poking around on Reddit this morning like I do and saw this Magic the Gathering card from their new Fallout expansion. It looks like the card Fraying Sanity is based on our old Fallout 3 comic about Vault 77. One man and a box of puppets!

I can’t believe how many great games there are to play right now! Here’s a list of where I’m spending my time these days.

I was excited to hear Gigantic was coming back. You can try to fit it into some recognized genre box, but as we suggested in our 2017 strip and newspost, it doesn't readily map. That's part of why it didn't connect when it was launched, I think - in concert with its freemium dynamics perhaps, they actually did something kinda new. I think about that tragedy all the time. They were from here; we even went to their office to see it. One of the artists on the project had been on Strip Search. And it was good. It was really good. One always hopes that being good will be a factor in the success of a thing somehow, but… yeah.

But!

We are approaching a time where my innermost dreams are no longer the stuff of fantasy - they can be plucked, ripe, from any tree. Crew-serving allied weapons feels just as incredible as I hoped, and you've got a couple options for it. When I play with the two other people I often play with, at our current level, we tend to have two autocannons and a recoilless, which is the one I have in the strip. I really, really like the autocannon because it's just sort of a Swiss Army Knife for problem solving, particularly if that problem is shaped like the enemies of the blue-green jewel we all serve.

I had basically accepted that cosmetics were a way to support games over the long-haul that essentially made sense. But Blizzard is absolutelydetermined to test the border of that.

Helldiving ain't easy, but it's necessary. There's a lot of bugs. And robots. I haven't seen any robot bugs yet, but I wouldn't put it past the enemies of managed democracy to stitch together hideous, chimaerical Terminid-Automaton hybrids born to hate our way of life.

The Metaverse isn't a thing companies can truly say aloud, where the marks can hear, for a variety of reasons. One of these reasons is that it's more or less synonymous with putting good money after bad at a scale that an arboreal monkey brain, regardless of its revision number, can't truly understand. This story from last July suggests that attempts by Facebook to become Meta instead through the creation of a wholly-owned prison universe had already lost forty billion dollars. Some small part of that goes to the people I know who work there, and I authorize those particular expenditures, but the rest is a boondoggle. Anyway, you can still make a Metaverse and you can still basically sell NFTs as long as you don't call them that.

I’ve been spending a lot of time pouring over pictures of stickers and albums from the 80’s and it’s bringing back lots of good memories. I can still recall walking into a sticker shop at the height of the collecting craze and being blown away by what I saw. It was like a candy store for art and I was ensorcelled. They had stickers on sheets, on rolls, in packs of cards, holographic, puffy, scratch and sniff, googly eyes, lenticular, I can still smell the shop when I think about it.

As our Design Director Kiko Villasenor and I are the only two people to have attended every PAX, and as Kiko doesn't especially delight in public speaking, it falls to me to be The Chronicler.  We'll have other ways for you to travel through all that history this year, I think you'll be impressed, but there are a couple real things that are worth setting down.

We've been saying that Game Pass was the platform for a really, really long time. As soon as I heard about a rumored HDMI stick with Game Pass it hermetically sealed the deal. Both of my consoles are broken, and I don't use them enough to go through the process of repair - the amount of value I get from Game Pass, and I wouldn't even say it's the main place that service lives, is profound. The end of ZIRP means the end of certain forms of corporate psychosis - big companies actually have to make money, and in the same way that Minecraft lives everywhere it doesn't make sense to own some of the things Microsoft owns now and just… hoard them. But this has now officially gotten weirder than I expected, and I do wonder exactly how much history we'll be expected to live through in this bizarre and pregnant now.

Gab likes Granblue Fantasy Relink so goddamn much that after playing it for fifteen or something hours on PS5, he ended up reinstalling to play with Kara on PC. He's now way past where he was on a new save and hasn't slowed down in any way. It has "cross platform play," but only on PS4 and PS5, which… I guess I don't consider that cross platform? It could be my advanced age, and the attendant ossification of my thought-meat, but I consider that just, like… "platform."

Kara and I dropped off 200 february sticker packs at the office yesterday and got the details on the upcoming sticker roll out. 

It's just like I told Morak: not being down with hyperpigs is like not being down with OPP. It's simply an inconceivable state. A pig like this, so elevated above the others? Preapproved for a card with a good rate? He lives with somebody right now, but they're thinking about moving out? It's a full spectrum hog and these other hogs out here are fuckin' cooked.

I will admit I did no research before drawing the Hyperpig in the last panel of today’s strip. So I am not sure how closely my take lines up with the Hyperpigs in Alastair Reynolds book series. I assume they are pretty close though.