I don’t attend every PAX these days because traveling and crowds are difficult for me. I probably should not have invented a massive gaming convention then but you know what they say about hindsight. I am very excited to be at West this week though and help celebrate 20 years of PAX! If you’d like to see me at the show, here is a breakdown of my schedule over the weekend.

I can't stress this enough - Gabriel is a feral, protohuman wretch who routinely gnaws on human bones. I've tried to disabuse him of this behavior, suggesting that it's ghoulish not only figuratively but literally, but he says that all this bone stuff is just "his thing." That said, regardless of his unique diet or hulking, bestial frame, his allegiance cannot be bought - though many have tried. I on the other hand am utterly for sale. Consider me his inverse: I'm ready to engage in the sort of thing you meticulously scrub from your browser history. Liking a trailer for you is so mundane it doesn't even appear on the price sheet.

If you like weirdo story crap - and I do - Soulslike games might be the foremost genre. Twisty-ass stories you need to almost literally wrest from their hideous talons, even genre entries not made by The Progenitor tend to inherit a certain kind of ethos, ambient storytelling, and horror roots. I'll tell you straight up: I think I might not be buying these games anymore. Most of the fun I get out of them is . I like to make fun of myself or whatever for having had the temerity of getting old without the noble grace to die, but even at the shining zenith of my powers I wasn't gonna be accomplishing these feats. Ninja Gaiden, I could do - I made it my personality for a time. Those were fast! The New Difficult is a very peculiar, spiky kind of slow. All I want is the lore, and I can't get it! It's like I'm in a life or death fight with a book.

I mentioned that I'd jumped into the Krahulik Family Server for a few rounds of the new Rainbow Six, or… the newest Rainbow Six, which at this point we sorta gotta say is the old Rainbow 6 because it came out in twenty fucking fifteen. A couple things to note: even as a proponent of technology in general, and even with science fiction as a guide, the ubiquity of technology in family communication still shocks me a little bit. And two, playing games with the younger cadre - ones who haven't aged out in decrepitude, filth, and loss - is pretty baller if you like winning.

At first I was just playing Rainbow Six because my boys are into it and it was a way for me to play a game with both of them. After a week or so of playing I was honestly ready to give up. To say that this game has a steep learning curve is a criminal understatement. I was dying constantly, usually within seconds of the round starting and most of the time I never even saw my killer. I felt like not only was I not helping my boys, I was actively dragging them down. In fact I told them at one point I had no business playing this game. I was trying to decide if I should keep trying or just give up. 

It’s nearly time for the annual Child’s Play Charity Auction and we would love it if you joined us. This year’s diner auction will take place on November 22nd in downtown Seattle at the Seattle Convention Center Skybridge. You can also get a special discounted rate on a room at the Sheraton across the street. I did this last year and it made the whole night super convenient not having to worry about driving home after the event. You can get your tickets for the auction and see details for the Sheraton rooms right here.

I don't know what all of it means, yet; nobody does. I'll be right backstage when Phil Spencer discusses the manifold futures that may occur. Outside of a couple very specific instances - and I think this applies almost exclusively to a few Sony owned, marquee studios - the exclusivity that once allowed a platform to differentiate its silicon is just a new way to lose money. Helldivers 2, whatever else it may be, showed Sony and maybe everybody else what good it was keeping your toys to yourself. Square Enix learned that the tentpole games it wants to make barely make financial sense as exclusives, even on a console with almost sixty million units. So what does it look like when you represent the most massive agglomeration of game development talent, brands, and resources that has ever existed? Is exclusivity real in that case? Is it real, chat.

Pictured here: young Noah, who for some reason shares a fascination with Alien and Aliens with my own youngest creature. Called Ronia, she has red hair and blue eyes, which I think is the rarest phenotype. Anyway! These youths could not be more different, but they are absolutely united on this: Alien and Aliens ball hard. That is to say, they ball out of control.

Club PA members of any level can order our August sticker pack today! You’ll just need to be logged into the PA store with your Club credentials to see it in Gabe’s Sticker Shoppe. I got a Cricut machine for Christmas last year and this is our 8th straight month of producing a sticker pack here at the Krahulik household. I design all of these myself and then they are printed,laminated,cut and packed by my lovely wife Kara. This month’s offering includes a sheet of Merch Friend Tokens (MFT’s) and a large Automata sticker.

There’s lots of big games dropping this month and plenty of reasons to be excited. I am cautiously optimistic about the new Visions of Mana game. I played a bit of the demo on PS5 but I don’t like demos that will not let you carry your progress over. It might be weird but the game I’m actually most excited for this month is Gundam Breaker 4.

Yeesh. It's been rocky for a minute, you could say since the PSN debacle, but the relationship between Arrowhead and the powerful audience their game built has always been somewhat testy. In the company's Twitter profile, it leads with the phrase "A game for everyone is a game for no one," which I think is just a fascinating thing to say. The version on the page is even surrounded by tildes, which lends the affair a kind of insouciant charm. At the end of the day, it's a profound statement of intention. Maybe a little aggressive. But you can't say they don't live by it.

Valve has a new game in the works that got a big writeup on the Verge even though there is a message when you start the game asking folks not to talk about it yet. In the 25 years we’ve been making Penny Arcade Jerry and I have had the opportunity to see more unfinished projects than I can count. We’ve seen games that never even got released, hardware that is years away from release, board games that are just the designers notes and doodles on 3x5 cards. Occasionally we are asked to sign an NDA but most of the time it’s just a request not to share any of the stuff we see commonly referred to as a “Friend-D-A”. Actually it’s usually someone kindly asking “Please don’t make a comic about this.” and guess what, we don’t. We don’t talk about these projects for two main reasons:

They don't have Spongebob yet - yet - but boy do they have a lot of other shit. Fortnite's "one weird trick" is ingesting intellectual property in such a way as to unify it, aesthetically. You can also see the skin all the time, because you're looking from outside. It's clearly a kind of collectible figurine that is wearing a bunch of other collectibles. PUBG had crates and stuff too, but they were always very… odd. This is something else. There is something about the juxtaposition of milsim lookin' tacticool and… I dunno… Cheech & Chong?

I actually love Call of Duty and play the new one every year but I could do without all the IP crossover skins. Watching Cheech kill a Zaku or Homelander teabag Nicki Minaj is not what I’m looking for in my military shooter. I understand why they do it. Obviously it’s money but in my opinion that money comes at the cost of your games identity whether the game be Call of Duty or Magic the Gathering. It works for Fortnite because fortnite isn’t a game with an identity. It is a big blank billboard ready to advertise the latest movie, TV series or shitty truck. You can't dilute something that was never concentrated.

I always sort of feel bad for films that people use to calibrate the zero point on their scale; once that consensus rips through, and all the switches get flipped down. I haven't seen it, but I have a hard time imagining that a movie that doesn't literally kill the viewer rests at some point above zero. I mention that because I'd heard it had a zero on Rotten Tomatoes! But it doesn't have a zero. It has a six! It's not much better, but… still. It isn't the other number.

Colin Kaepernick getting into turnkey IP theft reminds me a little bit of when people were taking the FTX money. They couldn't really have understood everything that went into that decision, and I think it's more or less the same thing here. "AI" is a variety of things, many of which are almost toys at this stage of adoption: social media filters, chatbots, that kind of thing. That person probably isn't going to have a strong understanding of what underlying processes result in a picture of them on a couch being transformed into a picture of themselves as an Anime Paragon. I think this is most people, frankly. It's a buzzy space because people with draconic amounts of money slaver at the prospect of a neofeudal order. Similar to a few years ago, when "blockchain" and "Web3" were the magic words that gave petitioners entre to the secret vaults, now we just got some new words. "Online" was once one of these sacred words, for example. "Social," etc. If all you have to do is say some words, I can understand why a person would say the words. Especially if it could mean freedom - blessed freedom, once and for all - from artists.