I let Paul Taylor from Mode 7 take over the post awhile ago when they were working on Frozen Synapse, which (and I'm sure he would hate this) I think of as a Roguelike, but for tactical combat. A lot has happened since then. The game has since been brought over to the Vita, and he's been transformed into a husband, a man now known as Paul Kilduff-Taylor. They also just released Frozen Endzone - excuse me, Frozen Cortex - which is a Tycho game, for better or worse. Probably worse for them. I've mentioned that the Indie cadre is completely obsessed with sport at the moment, specifically with its legibility and arcade immediacy, but what Mode 7 did instead was to make turn-based robo-rugby. They could have just made a sequel to the game everybody already liked, but nooooooo. So now they've made the wrong turn at virtually every juncture, and are almost certainly doomed. If they have McDonalds in the UK, they'll no doubt be very familiar with it soon - and not as customers, if you get my meaning. They'll be working there because they are completely out of money as a result of their bad choices. I let him post here again because I thought it would make a nice epitaph, but as you'll soon see, it's far, far too long.

PAX East is coming up in just a few weeks and it's going to be a huge show for pins. Here's the scoop!

I’ve never liked the time=quality argument that some people seem to want to apply to games. I took a look at my Destiny profile this morning and I’ve spent about 140 hours on that game. If you don’t count World of Warcraft I think that’s probably a new record for me. It’s pretty rare that I reach the 100 hour mark in a game. In the past it has only ever happened with Pokemon Diamond and Final Fantasy tactics. I loved those games obviously but I would not say I loved them anymore than a games like Rez, Brothers or Last of Us. At no point do I ever consider the length of time I played a game to be in anyway connected with my enjoyment of it.

I have "met" Jonathan Blow, only insofar as I was in front of him, we both asserted that we recognized each other, and then a junior designer at Bungie tried to start shit with him about a puzzle in Braid. That's when I got out. But that's the extent of it. I can distinguish him from other people. When I saw that people had taken his assertion that he can finish his own game very quickly and tried to make it seem representative of… something, I laughed. Maybe he cares. But he's not King Kong in this metaphor, swatting at planes. He is the Empire State Building. He's a frankly terrifying thinker and I am legitimately scared of him.

Aside from a couple high profile indiscretions - on par with, let's say, a dalliance with a footman - I haven't purchased retail software of any kind. As soon as they gave me the opportunity not to, I stopped doing it in much the same way we stopped marrying our cousins. It's simply not the done thing.

Lot's of fun stuff ended up in my Sketchbook last week. Check it out!

I was able to score a New 3DS yesterday afternoon along with a copy of Majora’s Mask. I’m excited because I actually missed this Zelda game when it originally came out. I remember I had to sell my N64 that year so that I could afford a plane ticket to E3. Since I never ended up playing it, the game is new to me. I don’t have much to say about the game or the system yet, but I do want to say that the improved 3D tech is really cool.

So I actually only read Tycho's first chapter a couple days ago. He's been working hard on it and I have to say the end result is even better than I expected. I loved Chant immediately and had to figure out what he looked like. So I went to my sketchbook.

When the lamp had grown too dim to see by, Chant fed in a few more bitter leaves. After a few moments, as was their way, the worms had turned the leaves to light.

Apparently, a vasectomy - vasectimism? - can be caught. I've started a powerful trend other men are powerless to resist, and Goribraleelon swayed and danced to my flute. This is like a Pied Piper thing, I guess. Except my dick would be the flute in this case? I need to think through some of these metaphors before I commit to them, maybe. Like, just consider some of the ramifications.

If you have a couple minutes, we'd really appreciate it if you took the time to fill out this little survey for us.

I have described previously how the pool of people who write professionally about games don't really overlap with my life. You can't really get in trouble for that; most people can't help being who they are. You gotta take people as they come. They have been alternately "fed" or "shocked" on this grotesque spherical laboratory simply for doing what came naturally to them at every juncture, and now they're human fucking wreckage, like everyone else.

I only know what the great mass of humanity knows about 50 Shades Of Grey, which is to say I know the salacious cuts condensed in Buzzfeed articles designed to condense salacious cuts. Except this dark enterprise has sold, like, a hundred million copies, so maybe I'm actually the one on the outside here. Things worked out alright for me, all things considered - there is the occasional rough patch - but in terms of cultural ingress, I will never accomplish anything even remotely on that scale. I'm perfectly okay with that, by the way. But if I'm gonna talk shit, I should at least include a footnote somewhere about who is actually holding the whip.

Time for another sketch dump. Here's a selection of my sketches from the last week.

Because it was Thursday, it was also Xursday, which is a kind of weekly holiday for the Destiny enthusiast. I mention this because it's something that you either know in your very mitochondria or it's something that you have no awareness of whatsoever. In any case, there is a drop currency like you have in games of this sort called a Strange Coin, and this Xur fellow is functionally a mercenary Santa Claus who accepts these coins and naught else. And until now, nobody knew why.

If the actions I'm likely to take were rendered in a fashion similar to a Final Fantasy game, "Leave Well Enough Alone" would not be represented there. Here's the reality: Spite is not a single item, but the header for an entire menu of Spite based attacks.