Anthem continues to unfurl its dark fronds, casting doubt on the fortunes of a once legendary house. Such houses generally fall either to dissipation or treachery. I don't know what it would be like to toil on something with the understanding that absolutely everything relied upon it. I can scarcely imagine what it must be like to spend years in the manufacture of my own mausoleum. Who could withstand it? What happens now?

Anthem came out eleven days ago and so far I’ve managed to play about 8 hours of it. It’s honestly the game I most want to play right now and I try multiple times a day. Most of the time when I attempt to play I simply can’t log on. Sometimes it will act like it connected and start loading but it’s actually loading a screen that tells me I have lost my connection to the EA servers. Fun! When I do manage to get into the game, every load screen is a 50/50 chance I’ll get disconnected. If I survive the loading screens I’ve never managed to play the game for more than half an hour without a hard lock that makes me restart my entire computer. I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled 5 times. I tried playing in French because someone said that fixed their connection issues. I turned graphics settings down and updated drivers for every device I own. No matter what I do Anthem still crashes, freezes, and shits itself every time I load it up. A quick glance at the games subreddit tells me I’m not alone either.

I like Devolver. I mean, yeah. They definitely have a thing. It might best be described as a "kink." I tried to find the particular phrasing I had used once before, but I think I might only have used it in my mind: Devolver often publishes the kinds of games your parents would hate.

Okay, so, now he's done with voice chat? When he just instantiated the policy?! Yes. Now you know the torments I writhe beneath. Now you know his scourge!

I’ve been playing a ton of Sea of Thieves lately with my family. The four of us have been playing off and on since launch but in the last month or so we’ve been playing nearly every day. It’s a great game but it’s also an incredible team building exercises for a family. When we first started I will admit we had some frustrating experiences. My boys are 14 and 8 and I love them very much but getting them to work together can be... challenging. Sea of Thieves really requires you to work as a team and that’s been a great lesson for my kids.

At lunch, while Kiko and I took turns attacking the banchan, we tried to get Gabriel to try Crackdown 3. I'd never been able to get Gabriel to try the other ones, but because Crackdown was free with Game Pass (here, "free" means "ten dollars a month") it seemed like we might finally have him cornered.

This is almost exactly the conversation we had with a beleaguered Rando, one whose only crime was being matched with us. We were dead perhaps two hundred seconds after we landed, which is much, much worse than our average I'd say. Every malevolent force aligned to shear this young man's head clean off. Arguably, in a cosmic sense, I was the blade - and Gabriel, the hand that held it.

Fortnite was always trying to get me to add 2fa, like… a lot, but it wasn't until Apex hit that they started pushing free Battle Passes on me. My email was full of it, and through the blinds as I was waking up I thought I saw a cloud shaped like a Fortnite entreaty. Then, when I ironically opened Tik Tok it came up at the very beginning, obscuring the e-girl factories, Senzawan permutations, and the unlikely, enduring vigor of Mia Khalifa.

We have sponsored streams today, a couple of them more or less back to back, one for a game I own but have been too intimidated to learn and one for a game I have taught many people to play. It's all happening on our Twitch thing. Thanks for stopping by, Level99!

The last time I really took PC gaming seriously was honestly around the time the comic strip started. So, about twenty years ago I guess. I can still remember keeping up to date on the latest improvements in Voodoo graphics cards. As time went by I played on consoles more and more until I had fallen off the PC entirely. I usually had a laptop or something that could run a game or two but I lost track of where the technology went. About a year ago I decided I wanted to give PC gaming another try and so I bought a computer for the sole purpose of playing games. We even made a comic about it at the time.

EA's premium digital offerings - EA Access on Xbox and Origin Access on PC - grant early play for their titles. Except when it doesn't work, and you got the same error message people were getting in the betas. I once suggested that EA games came with "free misery," nearly ten full years ago, and it's a policy they've maintained with pride.

The main new things I've learned about Apex Legends are as follows: one, the Wingman is the return of the old Pistol from Halo. Remember that? How it was a pistol, but also kind of a sniper rifle? Yeah. Except here there's also a mod for it called a Skullsplitter; I'll let you tumble to its purpose on your own. It is surprisingly, perhaps even comically effective.

Gabe heard Titanfall downstairs, but on multiple axes - none of which made sense. His sons were playing multiplayer, which they were able to find enough players for somehow, and Kara was playing the single player campaign.

There was a spike of normal functionality mid-week, like one might expect from a modern city, but just as soon as we'd tasted civilization it was gone again. Brenna went shopping for the End Times, like she was stocking for a radical shift in governance from something like we have now - with established channels of authority from Federal, State, and County - to a marked declension of it centered primarily around tattooed despots with shotguns on quad bikes. It has served us well.

I was watching Ninja stream Apex Legends this morning, and the title of the stream implied that while it had previously been a sponsored stream, he was now playing it because it's fun. I mean, I think so too. We just made another comic about it. It's had twice Fortnite's viewers on Twitch since it came out, but of course that's two-fold; the dynamics are such that you can pay a person to play your game, but you're also paying them not to play the other game for a 2x perceptual swing bonus. I'll be very curious to see where this is at in a week's time. But, again: it's always worth remembering that royalty is a temporary condition. I have a theory that suggests these cycles of Fame to Famine are getting shorter, with more explosive crests and more subterranean falls, but that's mostly because it seemed weird to me how quickly they seem to reboot Spider-Man.

The only bad thing about Apex Legends is the name. And it's… You know. It's probably too late to change that.