We've sorta gone over the Helldivers issue, in a potent strip and an incomparable Newspost Malone. Now that the worst is behind us, now that ointments have been applied to the affected regions, has the healing begun? I mean, you tell me. Player count seems solid, and the Reddit has descended into its classic ratio of crunchy memes and internecine warfare. So, nature is… I dunno, man. It's doin' somethin'.

I am dropping the May sticker packs off at the Penny Arcade offices today! These should hit the store and be available for Club PA members to order soon. Here’s what you can expect to find inside!

I was too busy this weekend to engage with what was easily the story of the weekend, that is, if you aren't fully enmeshed in USDA Choice rap beef. Helldivers 2 announced that they would begin requiring PC players to sign into the game with a PSN account. I started posting panels from the strip over the weekend on the Tweeter which people seemed to enjoy, but by the time it came to act the largest part of the conflict had been resolved.

Had a blast last Friday getting my new tattoo, the full contours of which you can see on this sacred VOD - I'm up first, and then there's a cool video that Tony made, followed by Gav's Outer Wilds themed piece complete with the rich lore that birthed it. Cool guests materialize from time to time, like Durty Dwab, also known as Dwab Triple, who was in the office taking pics of new stuff for the store.

I wasn't aware that this wicked entity persisted! I'm surprised there isn't a TLC show entirely dedicated to finding and trapping these tormented rap spirits. Would watch!

Late in the night, Moraq likes to send me the little treats he has discovered on Reddit. I wouldn't last an hour in the asylum where they raised him: outside of an occasional trek to What Could Go Wrong that concludes after I cringe my face inside out, I do not dwell in that place. It feels very Old Internet in a way that I like, but I had a hard time on the forums of that era also. One of my defining characteristics is that I'm always uncomfortable everywhere.

He was born in that darkness.

Even just on PC, the Fallout 4 "Next Gen" update has been pretty goof troop; those who owned it on GOG managed to pull the ripcord via its ability to rollback patches. It broke a bunch of mods, and it's important to note that while there are lots of mods that add content many of them just sand the edges off UI concerns or make the game easier and more fun to play. On Playstation, the whole affair gets stranger: it wasn't clear originally which versions of the game were entitled to the update, which I sorta just thought was free. I'm gonna paste a paragraph here from the IGN Article about it - try to parse this:

At one time or another, we have all done something expressly for the 'Gram - or at any rate, with the 'Gram firmly in mind. As those who exerted our will even pre-gram, and whose work largely exists online, I wonder if the dark energy described in the strip is an us thing or a thing that is just part of existing in a time where any given moment might become infinite.

You can apparently watch Dune: Part Two at home now, and since that's where Mork watches movies it's been a boon to him. It isn't the case that I'm done with the theaters; literally one of my favorite things to do is go to movies alone, and not just because trying to go with the family would cost three thousand dollars. It's so dark and quiet. And a medium popcorn is plenty.  But going someplace to be impoverished and eat popcorn just doesn't parse for him anymore. Ah, well; Legendary Pictures may have to content themselves with seven hundred million, I guess.

This is just a quick post to recommend Tales of Kenzera: Zau which is a new metroidvania style game that just dropped today. I played for about an hour and had to force myself to stop so I could come tell you guys about it right away. The visuals in this game are stunning but beyond that the combat and movement are just flawless. Switching between two magical masks gives your character ranged or melee abilities and alternating between them during fights and traversal is described in game as a dance. This could not be a better description for the gameplay. I love it. Don’t sleep on this one, I can already tell it’s a winner. Okay, I’m loading it back up now!

-Gabe Out 

Now that you can watch it at home, I finally got around to seeing Dune Part two over the weekend. I’ve only read the first book in the series but I’ve read it a few times which is not something I normally do. I love the movies and think they do an incredible job of translating one of my favorite books. I also caught the final episode of Shogun and that’s one of the best TV series I’ve ever watched. Personally I prefer artful and ambiguous endings to ones that break everything down for the audience. It’s probably obvious from the stories we tell but I think it’s important to leave room for the reader to bring their imagination to the world. 

We saw a Cybertruck in the wild when we were coming back from a funeral. It bore a kind of gentle symmetry, because Elon Musk will be buried beneath one figuratively and possibly literally because of how the gas pedal can slide off and get stuck under a manifold, locking the pedal into its highest level of push-downedness. It's fine, though - the thirty-eight hundred or so cybertrucks out in the wild are being brought in to have the footplate pop-riveted in, like they were shoeing a horse.

I saw a Cybertruck in real life for the first time a few days ago. That is the ugliest vehicle I’ve ever seen and I can remember when people were buying the PT Cruiser. I can’t imagine a normal, human person seeing that monstrosity and thinking “That’s the truck for me!” What I’m saying is, Cybertruck owners don’t deserve rights. 

I considered some more Vault 77, but the new Transformers trailer had just hit and we talked about that instead. I always think that I like Transformers a normal amount, that there is something universal in these warring cults of conscious machines, but I think that I might actually like them way more than other people and quite possibly I like them a weird amount.

With people talking about Fallout now that would never have previously talked about Fallout, it's a great time to direct you to Bethesda's Vault 77 Page, which catalogs the origins of the entity known in the wasteland as The Puppet Man. There's also a lot of other text on the page, what your fifth grade teacher Mrs. Prang might have called a "primary source," which serves to situate the entire affair in that place and time. Bethesda was fully down to clown; it's a canonical vault, with item and holotape support. Seemed like it might be fun to go back.

In the modern era of course, Gabe is a petrol-huffing speed demon. In Wheel Saint, he made me anodize his filthy carnography with a Catholoid sheen. But even if we weren't obsessives in the past, we usually kept up with the big franchises because there was a lot of fun metaphors they could bang into unique gameplay. Burnout is the, I don't know… racing platformer, I guess? Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit was a really fun version of tag. We grabbed The Crew back in the day, sometimes called a "CaRPG," and Ubisoft allowed it to live and breathe and develop a unique audience. An audience they would scourge at the beginning of the month by seizing access to the game they bought.