The ritual one undertakes unlocking heroes in Fire Emblem Heroes creates a kind of dangerous, addictive momentum. Each time you go to expend your Orbs and summon stalwart allies, you draw an initial hand of five "stones" that you can choose from to become a character. But. Each new stone you turn over is cheaper than the last one, so not turning over all five is as difficult as not eating an entire cylinder of Pringles. For me. Maybe you can do that: maybe it's possible for you to pop, and then, having popped, stop. I've never been able to.

Good God; I always wondered what would happen when Nintendo went hard on mobile, and we're starting to see it. Super Mario Run and Fire Emblem Heroes couldn't be more different in terms of their relationship with the platforms, but they represent a kind of flanking maneuver on phones that increases not only damage but chance to hit.

It's my actual, real birthday today, which is a little scary, because from a perceptual standpoint I feel like I just did all this shit. Partly because of how the PAX half of the year is constructed, and partly due to the ossification of my brain with age, the second half of every year is the going-down-very-fast portion of the roller coaster and I often find myself waking up here in February or so, blinking as though at a bright light. I put it this way last year, and I have no qualms with that presentation - it still feels more or less true, from the harrowing draconic imagery up to the heartfelt thanks enunciated at its culmination.

Gabriel got home from PAX South a day before I did, so he had a chance to dig into Astroneer. I don't have time or inclination anymore to play everything that Steam decides is important; I've had a very similar experience with what rises there, over and over and over, the bizarre, strappy, masochistic fetish gear that runs rampant in that space which reliably delivers experiences of the form:

Monsieur Gouribeau and I used to play through every Resident Evil together. Occasionally a dog would jump through a window and he would jump and I would jump, but I didn't actually understand what was happening yet. He was jumping away, and I was jumping toward.

Here's the strip we did during the Make a Strip panel, which, now that I think of it, you can totally watch even after the fact. There are always Twitch Elves embedded in the Main Theatre staff trying to juice the show for video content, and you can swim in that multisensory reservoir anytime you want to. For example: have you ever wondered if I am as insufferable in real life as I am in text form? Or, more likely, would like confirmation that this is the case? This is a question you can answer there.

It took some doing, but we finally got it down here. Join Omin Dran, James Winifred Darkmagic III, Viari, and Morgaen on Saturday at 2PM CST for whatever DM Chris Perkins has planned for us. If you aren't at PAX South, we do weep for you - but we've got you covered. Hit up PAX on Twitch to watch it live. Thanks again to Wizards of the Coast for helping put all this together!

Two or three times a night in Overwatch I might undergo what I'll call a "Competency Spike," where I deliver a moment not incredible but merely… conscious. Performance above that which might be delivered were a cat to knock your gamepad off the pouf, generating wholly random inputs on the way down. Or a gentle zephyr which causes a branch to press the buttons of a controller inadvertently.

I talked to a man from NASA once who told me, just straight up, that space travel was going to require recreational drugs. It wasn't even a question. The whole conversation was Philip K. Dick as a motherfucker. I mention this because, whatever else the Australia flight may be, its prolonged unreality and bottled loops are made tolerable by their relentlessly positive flight attendants. I wonder if there isn't a test program for these drugs on those flights, at least for the crews. Flying to Mars and flying to Australia don't take exactly the same amount of time, but it's close.

Everybody on the Thornwatch team has been hammering away on the game and we have lots of new stuff to show/test at PAX South this week. I am in full on art production mode now. There's so much art that needs to be made for this game that I'm bringing in some very talented folks to help me out. Strip Search fans might remember Nick Trujillo from the show. He's on the Thornwatch team now and he's working on all the map tiles that need to be painted for the game. Each of these tiles is a little window into some strange part of the Eyrewood. When I sat down and talked with Nick about the direction for these I told him that each one of these tiles shouldn't just be random bits of forest. Each on needs to be a place in the Eyrewood that the Lookouts would have a name for. There is something about each one that is interesting or unique that would make it a point of interest in the wood. Ideally I want judges to be able to grab a handful of tiles and find in those paintings the inspiration to make up their own adventures. This tile Nick painted is a great example I think.

I had to change the title on this one, too; Ben Stone of The Twitterlands suggested Mad PAX and I gotta go that way. That's what's happening.

Pax South is just less than a week away now and already people are calling it the Pax South of the year. I will be in attendance although you might see me zipping around on a scooter sometimes. I'm feeling much better now but my doctor doesn't want me to push it and the scooter has already been rented. Let's talk pins!

Now that it seems like Gorobriel's stuff is staying in, and he can laugh without terror, he's back to his old haunts. He loves Symmetra's playstyle, and he loves her comic, which I love also. The moral dimension of Overwatch is deliciously robust, even before you broach the subject of erotic Tumblr comminglings.

Octavio Abea, who does the Welcome to PAX series, just delivered unto us this morsel:

I was trying to figure out why Gabriel would be playing Diablo III; I kept seeing his PSN account logged into it. If you're down with the D or whatever it's fine. Lots of people play Diorblo, specifically, lots of people not named Mike. Overwatch or Titanfall 2, certainly. I asked him about it, and he said that while his guts are still fucked up, playing "exciting" games hurts too much, and that playing Diablo - a game where you beat back unrelenting waves of hell monsters - is relaxing by comparison. Relaxing for the heroes, at least. It's less relaxing for everybody else.

So, did sitting up for the amount of time it took to draw the strip feel good, or bad? Some combination? Good enough to offset the rest of it? I'll ask him when we record the podcast today.