The entire Kingdom Hearts collection is now available on Steam and I spent the weekend replaying some of my favorites. The games are divided into three different packages that collect games from various platforms. You can also buy the "Integrum Masterpiece" which includes all three packs with all the games. I’m lucky that all my favorite entries in the series are in the first pack called KINGDOM HEARTS -HD 1.5+2.5 ReMIX-. 

Apparently shit got pretty heated over at Chez Gabril night before last, as the youngest is now coming into his own - ready to contend with his elder brother in a truly ancient form of combat. I understand that really getting down into the Mortis Gods can have a certain intensity, but I would much rather discuss Tatooine or some shit than the crap I got going on over here. I'll tell you that much. Holy shit, man. I'd love to cross those fuckin' streams. I'd be overjoyed to discuss how, since Star Wars is in the ancient past of this universe, and Star Trek the near future, we have to consider if and how not just The Fast but also, like, The Furious fits into all this.

I left Twitter months ago and it has been awesome, I highly recommend it. Now I just post here on Penny Arcade which honestly has a couple million more viewers than my Twitter account ever had. Somehow I still have to deal with Twitter bullshit though. If you still toil in that wretched place you should know someone has picked up and started using my old account name. I’m not going to link it here and we have removed mentions of it from the site but I just wanted to make sure everyone knows that’s not me. I’m done with social media, if you want to know what I’m up to, just read this site.

-Gabe out 

I just received my own merch newsletter, which you can receive also by putting your email into the bow at the bottom right of this very page.  But it had cool stuff in it and I thought I should also post about it here, because it has some Cyberpunkian product - or, as the French say, les produits du ponque-cybre. 

Except for the time they went extreme with it, Ubisoft's Prince of persia games have essentially been bangers. I haven't played the roguelite one, but it's reviewing well and it's made by Evil Empire, which I'd say are two things that sort of naturally go together. There's been a remake on the books for a while it seems like, and at Ubi's Ubisoft thing a few days ago they dropped a teaser that said the new one was gonna drop in 2026. 20 fuckin' 26! That kind of optimism stirs the heart.

I’m not sure what games I’ll be playing in the year 2026, unless hiding from packs of wild dogs is a game. I can tell you what I’ve been playing in 2024 though! I’m still not really into any one big game at the moment but I’ve put a few hours into some fun stuff here and there. This is what I’ve been playing:

I just noticed that today marks the 15 year anniversary of the very first Lookouts comic. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long! You can check out more Lookouts stories along with other tales of the Eyrewood right here. You can also watch the Lookouts short film by Redgate Films, which we didn’t know was being made until they invited us to the premiere. I think "fantasy Boy Scouts" is still probably one of the coolest ideas we’ve cooked up. 

-Gabe out

Friday was the day that everybody decided to say all the deeply held gaming secrets at once, a policy that only echoed for the rest of the weekend and technically - technically - won't even resolve until today at noon my time, when Ubisoft does its thing. My favorite things from them were the pre-RPG Assassin's Creeds and Splinter Cell, which is to say I haven't been "addressed" as a "market" for a while. But Bungie also dropped the raid that unlocks The Final Shape's ending mission on the same day, with all the revelations that must certainly entail.  

I’m actually a big fan of Hero Shooters. I’m not nearly as sick of the genre as many other gamers out there seem to be. My only requirement is that the heroes in said shooter need to look cool and not like normal people they found in a Target or a bunch of cosplayers. Star Wars Hunters is a new Hero Shooter with some very cool characters and the game itself is fast and fun. The problem is that it is also free to play.

When I was talking to Mork yesterday about Instagram, it became apparent that describing the web accurately makes you sound unwell. You can leave one service because it has enthroned a cyber-tyrant who is training an AI on all your data, and then go to another service where only a few months later they will start training an AI on your data. You might open up an account for your art on an independent service, where your enthusiasm and the enthusiasm of others strikes their infrastructure so hard that it generated a hundred thousand dollars in overage fees after a few hours. How do you orient yourself toward such an environment? These aren't natural phenomena.

Meta is going to train their AI on all the artwork posted on Instagram. I have not deleted my entire Instagram account yet but I have already removed all my art. I realize that there is really no place on the internet where you can possibly hope to be safe from these monsters but I don’t have to literally put my head in their mouth. I heard that it’s possible to mail them and request that they not use your work to build their artist killing AI. How about fuck you instead? I’m not going to beg the creature devouring me to be more gentle, I'm just going to leave.

I messed with Wayfinder a bit in its original MMO form, and I have now messed with it a bit more in its new incarnation as a co-op action RPG. One of my fixations is imagining all the games that could be made with a specific set of assets; I often fantasize about that sort of thing when I'm about done with a game, just trying to think of all the possible creatures it could become or could have been. I've been in the soup of gamedev alongside different designers enough to know that there are points where the game's state - in the sense of material states - is a liquid. Seeing what the same mechanics and the same gameplay arc mean in the absence of a monetization scheme that (functionally) constitutes a genre unto itself is fascinating and I don't know that there are that many precedents for what's happened here. It's gonna be a heavy fucking lift - but I can't look away.

Famously, I don't own a Playstation - at least not a working one. My PS4 Pro is so angry at me that it won't turn on. My Xbox One X is also goof troop.  So I don't really have a dog in any kind of State of Play fight, except to say that as this website's resident PC stalwart it doesn't look like I'm gonna need a Playstation.

Wayfinder is a game from Airship Syndicate that came out last year in early access. You could purchase a “Founders Pack” to get into the beta but the game was designed to be Free to Play when it eventually released for real. It’s been a rough ride for Wayfinder but some massive changes to the game have made it a much better experience in my opinion. Let me break it down for you.

Gabriel, as his posts on the site reveal, has retreated into the games of youth - and now, having consumed them, has found himself bereft. I'm sorta in the same place; I've installed three comfort games over the last week. Last night I installed Paladins, which I unironically think is more fun than Overwatch. And I mean good, old Overwatch. Recent reviews are mixed, but I don't know why; in service games, communities use reviews to "communicate" with developers but I don't know precisely what they're "communicating" about because I only installed it yesterday.  

The Concord cinematic feels like what you would get if you asked Chat GPT to make you a Marvel movie. I can’t believe they threatened to release one of these story trailers every week once it launches! At least the new Astro Bot game looks cool. 

-Gabe Out