Chris Perkins so regularly generates fanciful sums donating his time behind the screen for Charity that we have a good sense, by now, what his time is actually worth - and it's not looking good for us.

Hades is sick with the fever.

We were watching some high level tournament play for Smash, as one does, and while I've played tons of it I got the sense like I did with its predecessor: there is a whole other game here that I didn't know about, and may not even be able to see.

It's quite true, unfortunately. I stuffed my Switch full of rad shit to play, but then I ended up reading the Kill Team manual the whole way, dreaming of ways in which I could better serve our twisted Patriarch as five long hours evaporated. Shortly thereafter, I left the row and also left the Goddamn Switch in there, which burns us.

I got the opportunity to help announce a new Overwatch skin over the weekend and I’m still giddy about it.

Our Merchandise Manager, the incomparable Lidija Piper, has given me a code for the store. The code is KTHRISSMAS. It will give you fifteen percent off. That's real good. The only question is what you're gonna do with it.

When we wrote the strip, what I said wasn't true - but when I went into the Epic Games Launcher just now to poke around for SuperGiant's new roguelike Hades, it looks like it?

The cards in a given Keyforge deck are pulled from the whole set, and the names are generated by some kind of computerized madness. Occasionally it's lead to some, uh… Hm. There's a standing offer by multiple retailers I know where they just replace your deck if it turns out to be named in an incredibly offensive way, but if I were them I woulda been much more careful with my corpus. Most names are just goofy though and I suspect we could make comics like today's for quite a while and still find it amusing.

The Keyforge discussion is very long and I won't be able to do it right now because I have only partial access to my brain and also I was up playing Kill Team with some Germans until three o'clock in the morning.

It was the first 'frame he'd ever made from blueprints, so I think he might have been extra excited to wear it? In any case, paying to accelerate time is a core freemium notion and even though it's not efficient to pay for something that would happen anyway, it does allow a very particular, very limited form of Time Travel.

We've popped in and out of Warframe a few times - typically when it's arrived on a new platform and we want to check it out, but sometimes it's just to see where it's gotten to.

Lidija sent them over to me, and now I reveal them with a dramatic flourish!

The only game by Tetsuya Mizuguchi I haven't played is Tetris Effect. Miz, as he is sometimes called, possibly, I think I read that somewhere, was behind games like Space Channel 5, Rez, Luminez, and Child of Eden so he sits at a nexus of gaming that's always been a fixture for me - where music and gameplay are muddled with ice, lime, and a few sprigs of fresh mint.

I reconfigured the basement to be more conducive to Virtual Reality, and it has seen a spike in usage, but it never really went away. My house is a place other children go to explore these realms and has been since before the advent of retail VR. Gabe generally can't access them because his frail, rodent body revolts against the sensory input in what you might describe as "a vomit way." Every now and then, though, games his that either don't create this effect or are so good he endures it. Beat Saber's legendary rhythm gameplay has already developed a constituency among PC players, and it's now been deposited on PSVR where Gabe can get to it. The hooks are in deep.

(Here's the comic. I'll talk about it later.)

As of last Sunday, Penny Arcade has been going for 20 years. I can honestly say that right now in 2018, I have never been more proud of the work we’re doing. To help celebrate, our designers have cooked up a selection of awesome anniversary merchandise!