I think we'll pause the experiment for now, but there's a lot of headroom in these ancient scrolls. We never even got to GamePro or Nintendo Power! Someone was saying that were we to stay this course, we would eventually get to comics about how long Sin takes to load, and I like that just for the internal loop. It calls to mind Pepsi's perimeter oscillations, and if it's sufficient to buoy that storied edifice we could probably make due with the occasional mystic whorl.

I did everything I could! Every legal thing, at least. God only knows when this will end! Although, if I had to hazard a guess, it’s gonna be once I get back into town.

When we were sitting down to make the strip… I don't need to contextualize any of this. Sorry! If your job is to type sometimes you just start typing. The strip (in the manner of a balanced breakfast) contains every nutrient.

As the sands of time rush faster and faster through the hourglass I have, like so many before me, begun to take solace in the trinkets and obsessions of my youth. Whereas a man of my father’s generation might have turned to model trains or the cars they dreamt of as a boy, I have hooked up my Genesis. 

I know he is having a good time with Horizon: Forbidden West because he keeps using the PS5's share capability to project mind-shreddingly beautiful clips of it on Twitter. He's simply trying to extend his time with it.

Late last year, as you might recall, Gabe had been sufficiently tantalized by Battlefield 2042 to pre-order for beta access. The practical outcome was that this beta convinced him that he shouldn't have bought it, but it was too late. There's an Alanis Morissette song about this I think. It's like one of those sci-fi novellas where the protagonist is assigned to kill themselves or some shit. There's a cosmic payload there and we're still unraveling it.

Obviously, one hesitates to engage in armchair psychology. That's sort of a joke: this is something literally everyone does all the time. For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn? And also to ascribe troubling psychoses to people we've never met? I'm not sure if you've heard of Twitter. It happens on there sometimes.

The news that Nintendo is shutting down the 3DS and WiiU eShops comes at an interesting time because I’ve been thinking a lot about the games I own recently. For the last few weeks I’ve been going through old boxes in my garage and trying to sort out what games and consoles I actually own physical versions of. As it turns out I own more 3DS and DS games than anything else when it comes to real physical media. 

I haven't played Lost Ark. I bounced off Diablo III, for fuck's sake; it may be that the genre has simply lost its grip on me. Or I can't grip it, or something. It's a grip issue of some kind. Gabriel was able to determine that he wasn't interested anymore very quickly and told me so.

I was hoping this Nintendo Direct would have some Breath Of The Wild II shit, which in my house is known colloquially as "botwatu." But they've suggested that they can't even say the subtitle without spoilers, and since it sorta seems like it might be the closing parenthesis on the whole story… maybe they don't put it on the mantle unless they intend to fire it.

"Playstation Exclusive" often means "Available On Epic Game Store," which I appreciate. I grabbed Sifu because Gabe advocated for it at full volume, but also because I'd seen some streams of it, and in the hands of some of these dorks it streams better than any game I've ever seen.

The best, most entertaining, more productive way for Gabriel and I to "play" a game together is for me to just sit next to him on the couch. That's more or less the ethos of the site anyway, it's represented by an incalculable (that is to say, deeply and profoundly calculable) number of strips where we do just that. I have a lot of valuable opinions on when he should jump and he shouldn't be deprived of that. A lot of it depends on the game. I feel like this is basically how it would go.

(This is the last day I'm pushing this - consider supporting the vast network of people who make a living connected to events.  There are a lot of them.)

I don't actually consider it a big deal if you change your difficulty, though the outcome in this case is legitimately funny. I've done it a couple times myself, but I have to be pretty mad at a game in order to do it. If Metroid Dread had given me the option to, I might have given in on one or two of those encounters, but in that case I'm glad it didn't. Outside of sequence breaks, I like that anyone who beat that game has a shared experience. I feel the same way about Soulsbourne games. It makes them a little less lonely.

Techno-feudalism - catch the wave! I can't even maintain this posture as a joke. Obviously, happy to license or even sell IP to somebody who we think could do more with some of our settings and stories, but probably not the whole thing.

Well, so, it sounds like Pokemon Legends: Arceus is both a cool, new direction for Pocket Monsters and the environments are… you know, they're environments. Right? That ain't nothin'!