I sorta thought the fight was going to be somewhere between PGA Tour 2K23 and EA's Incredibly Long Name Game, but it's not - it's between PGA Tour 2K21 and nothing. I literally returned 2K23. Golf is a very simple game, actually, so when it comes to making it "gamey" it's really just a matter of how you want to ruin it. PGA Tour 2K21 ruined it the least, and because it had an industry leading course creator and attracted community talent that rivals the included courses, you don't have to buy anything from either vendor ever again.

Shit, man. I thought I dodged a bullet here!

Watching the last couple days of this thing go bonkers has been an experience. I was already happy with it! I just wanted to make the show and pay everybody what they're worth, which we had dialed in. Certainly I hoped you would want to see this book. I think you would like it, if you did. But now I just feel tenderly about the whole thing and I need to lie down.

(CW)TB

I don't have a problem with Bo-Katan Kryze. She was a rad addition in Season 2 of the Mandalorian, and after a bumpy start in Season 3 I feel like she's earned a spot. But Disney has a very difficult time getting out of its way - this is just as true in their Marvel excursions as well. They understand at some level that the network effects of a shared universe can result in potent value - they manifested this with the MCU. It's reasonable that they would like to see this happen again, but when they don't let these things develop organically - when they crowd out shows that already have an established dynamic - it's not the same show anymore. In Biggie terms, they're determined to get high on their own supply - in flagrant abrogation of the fourth Crack Commandment.  It's mercenary shit, and nothing is served by it - not this show, not the shows to come, not the service, and not the brand.  This type of shit is precicely why intellectual property is supposed to have limitations on its ownership.  They're out of fucking gas.

West of Loathing is a great game, definitely one of my favorites. So when I learned of a sequel that dropped by complete surprise, I was intrigued to say the least. Upon playing through it, I discovered that it was every bit as good as West, and even better in some places! So let's get into that, shall we?

I have a set of stacking plastic drawers whose purpose is to hold the strange and forgotten Twilight Cables which bloomed for a time and were gone. I have never failed to find the cable I needed in there. There is also a Protoss Zealot in one of the drawers, it's been in this thing since ninety-eight or so, and every time I see it I get sad because I spelled Aiur wrong in a post once and person mailed me to say that I wasn't a real gamer and I should kill myself. That's just in case you were wondering what having a good memory is like. It sucks!

Monsieur Gribeaux has ever been a wanton creature when it comes to gadgets. For a warped and deviant manwhore like himself, your run-of-the-mill Best Buy is a fallen place - a kind of cyber-brothel. We sold a lot of shit to go to E3 in the year 2000, but I didn't have to sell as much because when you live with somebody who gets high on technology you save a lot of money on technology. He was going through one of these ancient cassettes - cassettes, people - and found novelties of various kinds. After seeing his boys take their first damn'd steps on this blasted orb of sin, he found the Elder Content, which was also of young men just slightly older than the other ones:

Check out that young ⁦@TychoBrahe⁩ in the Xbox booth! This tape is wild! pic.twitter.com/yn9sCJYMIx

— Gabe (@cwgabriel) March 31, 2023

Once, when I was twelve, my father swiped the glass slider away and stumbled into the house. His eyes were closed tight, and he was possessed of a preternatural calm that was so calm it ceased to be a comfort and pushed back through the membrane into a pallid and clammy unease. "Get your mother," he said, and I did. He said that he needed her to drive him to the hospital. She made a sound like those crying dolls. It doesn't really sound like a baby. It sounds like something else.

The content in the first panel was essentially meant to be silly gallows humor, the idea that the process of using Ubisoft's Ghostwriter app makes it more able to obviate your position, but then I saw the official video for it from GDC and that's precisely what it does do.

I am 100% hooked on Gran Turismo 7 in VR. I’m in there for at least a few hours every day and I can’t get enough. I’ve played a lot of racing sims but nothing compares to the sense of speed and the fidelity of GT7.

My neighbor, who has made games in all kinds of places but playing and designing Magic: The Gathering is probably the most recognizable, told me once that "Gamers gonna game." Even as a snip of text, there is the psychic implication of a shrug. In another context, it might be called Bias Toward Action. He deployed this language to suggest that when engaged in a system, the desire to poke, prod, and otherwise manipulate that system is very strong, even when doing so might be suboptimal.

Today iRacing is hosting the 12 Hours of Sebring and there are a number of Penny Arcade League teams participating. I’ll be racing with Team Red Shift and should be getting in the car around 1:30PT this afternoon!

Gabriel's youngest had never seen anything on the order of a Dave - let alone a Busters. These two primal forces juxtaposed obliterated his thirteen year old mind. Gabriel and I recalled our exposure to Chuck E. Cheese, which my mother called Charles Cheddar because... she's my mom, and all my novel predilections had to come from somewhere.

Shit I want to check out is always coming out around PAX, when it's not really actionable for me - that is the norm. The most recent incarnation of this dark tendency is Cereza and the Lost Demon, which I guess is technically the subtitle. The first part of the name is Bayonetta Origins, and it looks like a watercolor storybook so Gabe is losing his shit. It's one of those games where each analog stick controls a different character, so it's also testing him - mind and body.

Now that my body is handling VR much better I am back into sim racing in a big way. I had been using an ultrawide monitor for my racing display but VR is SO much better! My lap times are more than 5 seconds faster in some cases. That’s huge when winners and losers are often determined by fractions of a second. 

I remember playing the original Dino Crisis, apparently they made a bunch more, but after we'd seen a velociraptor come through a window in precisely the same way a zombified dog had come through a window previously I felt comfortable moving on to something else. Also, I kinda like dinosaurs. I like them just as much as I did when I was, like, eight. I honor them. I guess they're birds or something now? I'll ask Abby Howard at PAX, she'll know.

In what must certainly be the most clever, most wicked of techniques, Wizards is making a single, special version of the new One Ring card. There'll be thousands of the normal one, but the fancypants version will be foil and emblazon'd with the Black Speech, which seems like a dangerous business all on its own before you start thinking about the ramifications. Also, I want to warn you before you click: this strip features disturbing anti-me imagery, fashioned into a cruel barb by my best friend in the entire world. I wish someone had warned me.