April Tools

Recently Jerry and I were invited out to Wizards of the Coast headquarters to meet and play Dungeons and Dragons with two young men whose brother had a five year battle with Lymphoma. These boys had made a video about how important D&D was to their family during their brother's illness and how they are now raising money for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

The only time I ever use photomode is when I push whatever that button is on accident. The boss I'm fighting will freeze in place, no doubt as surprised as I am, and a ton of UI elements unrelated to boss killing will bloom all around him. Maybe he's surprised to learn that he is a character in a game at all; a mechanical speedbump on my ascent to martial excellence. It's rude in that context to go back as though nothing happened but once I figure out what button I pushed, you know, that's how it's gotta be.

I'm in the part of Monster Hunter Wilds that you get to in a Pokemon game, the After Story, where you dealt with the main campaign but then some flavor has been retained for an extended finale. They never asked me to trap a monster once in the entire campaign, and then when I'm here on the off-ramp they're like "go trap me one." I had to look it up online! Real tourist shit, but I just never really played that way before. Kiko was trying to talk to Gabe about it later, saying that it was simply faster to catch them and thus a more efficient use of the hunting time. It was as though Kiko was speaking in muted honks and fwonks like a jazz trumpet; like an adult in Charlie Brown. For Gabriel, "mercy" is a foreign tongue.

I’m having a great time with Assassin's Creed Shadows and I just wanted to share some of my thoughts after about 20 hours with this game. I know there is a lot of bizarre discourse about it online but the only thing that really matters to me is if a game is fun and this one is. 

There is apparently a significant introductory period In Assassin's Creed: Shadows, one Gabe almost didn't endure, because he felt like he had seen and done all this stuff before. Then he got really into sneaking around as Naoe. Then he started staring at foliage dancing in a gentle breeze. Then, well, he found "the real game" and he lost his mind.

As I was mentioning the other day, the people behind a card-based wargame called Gudnak I met out at PAX East asked Mike and I to make stuff for them - my contribution is a piece of fiction about a type of Rotborn character called a Pupil, and then Mork drew the same character for use on an in-game card. There are lots of Pupils, and none of them agree on what the lesson they're supposed to learn even is, but that's the least of their problems. This is what she looks like!  Eyrewood energy.

Chaotic Great, the team behind the game, has been incredibly fun to work with and speak to which happens sometimes on projects but rarely to this extent. I should have known they would be cool as soon as I figured out the game's logo was an Ambigram. The Kickstarter is kicking ass and they keep adding cool shit to it, including early access to a dangerous digital version of the game at a certain threshold. I hope we get to play around in this world again at some point.

(CW)TB

We did play some Kill Team Lite for a very particular reason which I won't spoil, but I haven't played it in a minute so I feel confident I got virtually every rule wrong. Plus, there was another issue that marred the studio session but because it is incredibly shameful I am loathe to relate it here. Not shameful for me in the least - if anything, I'm invigorated - but it is very shameful for someone else. So shameful I decided to put it on display in a public place where many, many people could see it.

The Rivals vibes were immaculate for much longer than is statistical; people were just in there having fun, looking at the cool art, figuring out how to manage a roster of more than thirty universal paragons at once. Quickplay has curdled a bit since then, which it would basically have to do.

When Gabe rides into one of my hunts, he's always dripped out in the latest monster guts. The first time I saw him he looked like he does in the strip, hugged by weird claws. Moist where he should be dry, and - crucially - dry where he should be moist. It's a heinous affront to wear this evil jerky anywhere, let alone… well, I guess that's what the strip is for.

I'm way down in the M-hole, which sounds bad, and maybe it is. Maybe it's not safe to be in the M-hole for this duration. One reason might be the prevalence of M down there, or Monsters. It's literally their hole and they don't like it when you go in. Obviously you need guild authorization to hunt monsters but, uh, it's not super hard to get.

Ed Zitron of Better Offline and Where's Your Ed At engages regularly in a unilateral war of aggression against Sam Altman. He has done a ton of research on Sam, as he has for other "rot economy" tech figures, and thus has a sophisticated factual scaffold built around them he can hold them to. For me, it's just like a… taste, or smell. I'm receiving information from some kind of sense, and it is setting off red lights on the panel. Is that fair? I dunno. If I saw a huge lizard gnawing at the roots of Yggdrasil, to what extent am I required to give it the benefit of the doubt? We clown ourselves when we hold ourselves to baroque standards of fairness around malefactors like this. They know about the rules, they just think those rules are for other people. They depend on this asymmetry. They rely on it.

I don't name the things inside Monster Hunter Wilds! That was not my job. But if it had been my job, I would have probably named it the same thing just to get an easy strip out of it. They're giving this shit away! They're giving this shit away.

I like this Josef Fares guy. He's whacked out and he says weird shit. A filmmaker who made a kind of wild, natural slide toward game development - I've known a couple people like this - he's carved out some kinda fuckin' lane. I understand that it's considered bad form to accrue all the valor for game development into a single person, but I also feel confident that you know that I know other people worked on it. Which is true! It would have taken way longer otherwise.

I played a lot of games over the weekend including Monster Hunter Wilds and Split Fiction. If you’ve got someone to play it with, Split Fiction is a blast. It’s full of fun, unique cooperative mechanics that will have you and whoever you're playing with working together to navigate each new level. Kara and I had planned on giving it a quick try and then playing some Marvel Rivals but once we fired it up we couldn’t stop and spent the rest of the night in Split Fiction. The hook is also great as the game has you bouncing between the imaginations of two different writers, one who does fantasy and the other who does Sci-Fi. Don’t skip this one if you have a gaming partner. It would also make a great entry point if you have someone who isn’t a gamer yet but you want to play something with them. Kara and I give it all the thumbs up. 

Now that Eric, Kiko, and Grib are all knee deep in monster guts, the idea of running with a full four is too tantalizing to resist. I've just been doing shit! It shouldn't be considered unwillingness on my part. I did grab the benchmark, and it seems like performance won't be too bad, but apparently this benchmark isn't a good indicator of performance? What kind of bench is it marking exactly? Maybe it just indicates how willing you are to install benchmarks. In that realm, dear readers, I've proved exemplary.

When I first talked to Grib about the new Monster Hunter, it was similar to talking to him about racing games before he actually liked cars. "The cars look like real cars," he'd say. "You drive them around on tracks and roads." One day later, his Hunter was Hunting some kind of octopus thing and now he's gone batshit for it. Kiko has never played one, but he's got a storehouse of skill he developed playing Bloodborne and a lot of that is gonna map. I'm comfortable saying that Monster Hunter is, itself, a genre.