There are too many games to name which conform to the brutal PVE/Survival model, and more coming out all the time; they spread like wildfire, they mass and hatch in people's extremities. Spintires, catalyzed by Kickstarter, has been making the rounds - and even though you don't brain spiders with pipes, or make shanties, I'm comfortable saying its situated in that storied continuum. You explore, and contend, and amass, and rarely, rarely succeed.

Plus, it let me define a new medical condition. Goaty, for certain.

I just watched a forty minute video of a dude trying winch his own truck out of a hole he got it stuck in. It wasn't even a muddy hole, it was just a regular old Goddamn hole. It was way more exhilarating than it should have been on paper.

Ultimately, I think Spintires is going to be a platform for a specific type of experience. No fucking way is this thing done. The sky is the limit when it comes to objectives, especially when you take the shared-misery, convoy aspects of multiplayer into account. It never really has to stop; even the mud, so definitional here, doesn't even need to be mainstage. Being at the yoke of these worshipfully realized Soviet gargantua feels… important. I don't like anything on Earth as much as these motherfuckers like trucks.

As moist, newly hatched larva, we used to dare each other to eat sour candy at school. I was a particular fan of Mega Warheads, a handful of which could be purchased with the shrapnel left over from buying lunch. I would eat several a day, one right after the other, and after a prolonged period of ritual observance I noticed that the top of my tongue felt "loose." I was not familiar with Loose Tongue as a generalized condition, so I asked to go to the bathroom for another reason and went there for this reason instead.

There was a white, perhaps too white carpet of no-longer-skin clinging loosely to the top; I tugged on it, hesitantly. It was like pulling a sticker off a window.

That part isn't like survival games. But the social challenge aspect does help explain why they travel so fast via social channels and bloom the way they do. They are sour candy.

(CW)TB out.