Mr. Gribbz started with the demo of Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings Of Long Name, which seemed to run kinda raw on Switch, and swiftly moved up to the PC version where it essentially looks like an animated series running in 4k. There's a demo of it on Steam, too, if you want to see what we're talking about.
Honestly, I think The Witcher: Monster Slayer - their take on the "scour your neighborhood for beasts" genre - looks kinda cool. They're trying to approach it their way, which is sorta Questy. That's what they do best. That's why I thought Cyberpunk 2077 was gonna be cool, independent of any issues with basic functionality - because they knew how to tell inspiring little stories inside a relatively small amount of gameplay verbs. I played the whole thing on PC, where the worst of its technical behavior never expressed itself, so I think I understand what they intended, but… the problem is that it had no Andrzej Sapkowski and it very, very much needed a Sapkowski. The game is like a shopping list without a recipe. I recognize everything that was intended to invoke Bolognese but the ratio of every ingredient is fucked.
The Penny Arcade iRacing league will join the Draw4Charity stream at 2PT today for 2 fun races to help raise money for Child's Play! Join the Pit crew this afternoon for some wild racing all for a good cause.
It's probably clear what we're referring to in the strip, but I really like the scenario where you aren't familiar with that catalyst and you've simply been thrown into the deep end.
It's race night and we have a wild one planned. The Penny Arcade league is hitting the dirt at Crandon for some off road action. Quite frankly, I expect a bloodbath. The Pit Crew will open around 7PT on Twitch for the Stream Racer (no download required) pre-show. VROOM VROOM!
I was doing some light baking that was misinterpreted by my cohort! A classic hijinks type scenario.
The title of this post is a real URL, and you should go to it! That is Washington State's nexus for COVID-19 stuff. I used to use the Dashboard at the Seattle Times, that was my sort of go to ritual for the last year and a half or so, but you can actually interact with the official one - and it has big progress bars at the top, which clearly indicate that by either the CDC or our DOH metric we're doing this shit right. The State came back to us for another comic, a full three panels this time, and it was our pleasure to get incredibly real with it here. We hit our metrics, which opened the state, but if you're feeling like he's feeling, that's okay too. It's okay to say, "Hey, we are living through history, and it might take us a minute to figure out what that is supposed to feel like."
One of the weirder things about Mario Golf: Super Rush is that purely from a mechanical perspective it demands more technical play than PGA Tour 2k21. Or, I should say, the subset of PGA Tour 2k21 that we play. For the mostly social way we play the latter game generally, Amateur Swing Timings and the raft of variables and interpretations of the game state provide ample opportunities to fail because it is still fuckin' Golf. We strip out putt previews, which are normal at that level, but if you want to play the game something like a sim that strips away UI elements related to swing timing and scourges you for your shortcomings that game is in there also. Mario Golf, by comparison, is… Mario Golf, the irreducible sigil. They can add things to it - lightning, or rain, or super shots, or running-around-very-fast, but the baseline has some heft. The ball feels like it's the size of a cantaloupe and the cup seems like a salad bowl but it's still tricky.
Gabe hung out for the first half of GOLGOLFA this week, which obviously we appreciated fully - frankly, he stayed a bit later than we even had him for technically. He wasn't able to check out Speed Golf with Gary and I, and he explained why on the stream I've linked above plus today's comic. I expected to hate it - and I still don't think it has a lot of virtue against AI opponents - but against people? Those dynamics are pretty great, actually. I've played it since, and done alright, but what's interesting to me is that the people who found the best success in the rounds I played were those who chilled out and just tried to sneak through and take their time. People who were playing Slow Golf routinely found success against those playing the Speed version. All the traditional machinery is there and it matters a lot, even in the new context. It's cool.
This isn't an affiliate link or anything, I think it's just the best example of what I'm talking about: Gundam Converge is a line of super-deformed Gundam models that are small and cute. They're collectible figurines essentially, impulse buys, which is strongly reinforced by the fact that they include literal candy in the box.
Relationship stuff hasn't stopped him from enjoying Scarlet Nexus at all, when it ordinarily would, I think because it's all tied back into the fast, interesting combat. I watched streams of it for a while, long enough to see it was way cooler than I expected, but I can't do a JRPG right now. Even if it's really cool and the story is good. Well, maybe I can. Let me see if it's on Steam. It is! But it's sixty bucks. Maybe we'd get a strip out of it? I guess we already did. Now, I'm making money by not buying it. Welcome to "Jerry's Mind" Theatre. There are no refunds.
We've been obsessed with T-Pain for a really, really long time. He's just… legitimate. I was having a great time with Epiphany literally from the moment he spelled and then defined the word in the first track, a practice I'd like to become an industry standard. But once I got to Time Machine, near the end of the record, that's when I got it. I could see the whole structure. And then, to have the new Netflix docuseries This Is Pop break it down further on the second episode - with actual shots of him burrowing through pirated software to recreate and then master a sound he'd heard… I've seen it. I watched Mike enter this same monastic funnel to figure out his thing. I remember when people were super surprised at his Tiny Desk concert, like, He Can Sing? When it's like… look. First of all, that's most of the people you listen to. Most of the time when people use Auto-Tune, you don't fucking know. Second, I don't think you get to the style he pioneered without that ability, the same way cartooning is rooted in an understanding of actual anatomy.
I know that Mike is playing Dark Alliance over on the PS5, and instantiating cats. I downloaded it on PC through Game Pass, which unfortunately doesn't have crossplay with Playstation like it does with the Xbox version. I'm playing as Catti-brie and the archery is a little weird, plus it always sorta feels like I'm walking through knee-high maple syrup. That's not really a review but it's what I know so far.
I played the first Dark Alliance games approximately one billion years ago on the Xbox; I recall very specifically that I played the second one on my computer monitor, because it was a co-op game and computer desks aren't really set up to have a second person at them so it was kind of a pain in the ass. I had Neoya's X2VGA adapter and, like, multimonitor switchbox and shit. It was nice to have a full res picture but the main reason it was in there was because Crimson Skies was always saying that this person or that person Had The Booty, over and over, and Brenna decided that hearing this phrase with such frequency had not improved her life.
The dynamics of my relationship with USA Gundam Store are exactly like ordinary relationship dynamics. I literally get pics. I signed up for it, I'm not mad and I can get out whenever I want, but there's a level of increasingly cyberpunk intensity when I'm getting texts, and mails, and these texts and mails are informing the ads I see on literally every website.
As PAX returns to real life venues I want to announce that I am actually retiring from real life venues. That is to say, I’m no longer going to be attending the US shows. It’s possible you might see me with my family at some future PAX but every show every year is just no longer doable for me. Like a lot of people the recent life pause has given me some perspective and I’m changing my routine coming out of this pandemic.