I made sure to have a notepad with me, because that's what you do when you are playing tricky games with your friends. You write important things in the book! That is, you write them down if you are a good and true ally. You pay close attention to the shadows that are cast when the sun is at its zenith - you ponder the reliefs and objet d'art, the statuaries, the occasional mysterious shrub. That is certainly what I did. Some do not do this! Some do other things.

Thursday night is race night for the Penny Arcade iRacing league! It’s like your parents bowling league back in the 80’s except we drive pretend cars around laser scanned virtual race tracks.  

I showed these special Sonic & Knuckles controllers to Brenna, the hairy ones, and her face turned inside out. The middle part just kinda went in and then all the other face parts swept forward to claim the rest of the space. I itch just thinking about the clumps of matted cheese-hair and the waves of hatching larvae you would have to shake off every time you picked the thing up. Both hands are held in front of me, palms out, and my head is turned slightly in judgment - I am become ISO 3864-1, the international sign for no.

At this point, what else could you call it but a "doom"? A judgment passed, the cruel sentence revealéd?

Gamers Give Back day is a massive concentrated effort to raise funds on one particular day for Child’s Play. This year it will be on March 26th which is next Saturday and I along with tons of other gamers will be streaming and encouraging donations to CP that day. 

Welcome to the new Penny Arcade website! Before I go into all my favorite parts of the update, I want to say thank you to Gavin and Buland  and Kiko who are the ones most responsible for bringing this incredible new site to life.

I played Tunic until I stopped and called Mike, saying that I couldn't believe how amazing it was, and I was gonna stop playing immediately.

When I was pulling up our Gran Turismo 7 video to link it, I ended up skipping through a few parts of it to appreciate just how otherworldly some aspects of it are. I mean, look. I haven't played the last few games, so I don't know if this perverted oligarch is like the final car boss of the franchise now or what.

I went over to Mr. Gribbz'z house to play Elden Ring, and presumably to chew gum, though gum was not in ready supply. Then we started up the stream and checked out Gran Turismo 7; if that is your kind of shit, you can join us as we struggle to escape a car-obsessed billionaire's cafe slash car sex dungeon.

DioField Chronicle looks fucking sweet. It strikes at a number of my glowing, exposed targets, threatening incredible damage and perhaps even debilitating status effects.

Gran Turismo has always looked as ridiculous as they could make it at that particular time, and there seems to be some arrangement between Polyphony Digital and the parent corporation that they get to take the time required to do things correctly.

I mean, I don't know why you would buy Bandcamp. I mean, not "you" specifically. And even if "you" wanted to buy Bandcamp, you couldn't! Epic already did. Actually, wait a second. PC Gamer is right, I'd just forgotten about it - they also bought ArtStation, which has very firm parallels in other media. They have a ton of acquisitions on the tools side of game development, and companies like this can be thought of as asset libraries or pipelines. I think of them as containing end products, of course, because that's where I exist in the food chain of global capital. That's what's eye level to me.

I feel a strange compulsion to read the messages in Souls type games, even though the actual utility of the practice is uneven at best. A kind of real-time information warfare, they're about a one to five admixture of crucial, timely, life-saving information and "Try fingers, but hole." I've seen this last one many, many times. I like to think it's all the same person, which is sorta what the strip is about; a dark fantasy Johnny Appleseed, but for fingers in your butt. What a sentence! 2022 is going great so far.

I just checked in another post and Elden Ring strip in the Club PA Patreon, but Elden Ring content is thick on the ground now and I am prepared to deploy it in abundance. Even though we managed to escape the time warp, apparently some GamePro vestiges remain.

I think we'll pause the experiment for now, but there's a lot of headroom in these ancient scrolls. We never even got to GamePro or Nintendo Power! Someone was saying that were we to stay this course, we would eventually get to comics about how long Sin takes to load, and I like that just for the internal loop. It calls to mind Pepsi's perimeter oscillations, and if it's sufficient to buoy that storied edifice we could probably make due with the occasional mystic whorl.

I did everything I could! Every legal thing, at least. God only knows when this will end! Although, if I had to hazard a guess, it’s gonna be once I get back into town.