The Penny Arcade design team has been on fire lately! They have delivered unto us a beautiful new website, the incredible space theme for PAX and now this collaboration with Magic the Gathering!

I was sorta hoping the Playdate might materialize just before my trip out to PAX East, as this would be optimal, plus now my ardor has been stoked by all the reviews - the Eurogamer one is great, just… exactly what I want in a review, as is the IGN one. Shortly after I was sad online, I received a notification that it was being shipped which was just funny at that point. I'm way bullish on it and when I get back from East I'm gonna go hog fuckin' wild. Gabriel has been informed that he should not under any circumstances turn the crank while I'm gone. And if he simply must turn it, at least consult with a cranking professional beforehand, such as Soulja Boy Tell 'Em.

I only knew that D&D Beyond wasn't owned by Wizards of the Coast already because I'm a huge dork, and I've partnered with both companies in the past. Except… this isn't even the first time D&D Beyond has changed hands! That makes the fact that many, many people were surprised Wizards didn't already own it very surprising in and of itself.

PAX East is almost upon us and the opportunities for pin trading are abundant! 

As someone who came up in a radically different version of the Internet, one that wasn't really mobile let alone omnipresent, it's hard to imagine our particular origin story happening again. I mean, for good or ill: the pathways to an audience, and the monetization schema, even the idea that forms in a person's head when you imagine that notoriety and the life it might allow is already sequestered by the corporation that would enable it.

They've gotten Elden Ring down to a seven minute speedrun apparently, and I think we can all agree: that isn't a very long time. I regularly stare at a blank screen that long, sometimes between sentences, and I don't have anything to show for it. I certainly haven't been the culmination of a prophecy or anything. I haven't culminated shit!

I’ve managed to play about 12 hours of the new Gundam Evolution beta since last Friday and I really like it. Is it a lot like Overwatch? Yes, but it’s also like Team Fortress 2 and Paladins. It’s a Hero Shooter and so it’s going to feel very similar to those other games. The question is whether or not Gundam Evolution has enough of it’s own flavor to differentiate itself from those other games. It's hard to say for sure if that is the case after only a few hours with the beta, but personally I’m impressed and excited.

I think it's totally fine for Overwatch to be a genre, and it's even finer if it's all robots instead. That's essentially the premise of Gundam Evolution, whose robots are very large indeed, and which basically plays how you expect it to if you expect it to be Overwatch with Gundams.

I played D&D and got into huge trouble when I was a little kid, so the next time I played D&D was utterly in secret. It was also on the Commodore 64 - technically, on the Commodore 128 booted into C64 mode - and I would play it in the middle of the night with a pillow over the incredibly noisy drive. That particular game was called Curse of the Azure Bonds, and was essentially a digital sequel to a book I'd never read, which suggested to my thirteen-year-old self a vast, coherent space literally beyond my ability to conceive it. Thirty-three years later I still have not found the borders of it.

Thursday night is Race night for the Penny Arcade iRacing league!

The comic is about this:

Take a culinary journey through the Continent with The Witcher Cookbook — created by Anita Sarna and Karolina Krupecka of @WitcherKitchen & @NerdsKitchen, it includes 80 mouthwatering recipes inspired by the world of The Witcher games!

Pre-order now: https://t.co/RG8os78PRS pic.twitter.com/QPvEK4ipKH

— The Witcher (@witchergame) March 31, 2022

I don't really know anything about Moon Knight, except that he looks cool; the main thing you gotta know is that if Star Wars is your only sample of Oscar Isaac you're about to learn that he fuckin' kicks ass. See Ex Machina if you haven't. Or, see the first episode of Moon Knight, which will make you long for a second episode of Moon Knight that does not yet exist.

It must have been a very difficult time for professional observers of pop culture, this Morbius business; clawing and scratching at one another for the best vampire-related metaphors in their headlines. Dead on Arrival. It lacks bite. It's batty. It's anemic. It treats us like suckers. Well, that last one is marginal I guess. It's possible they meant the regular kind.

I couldn't be more pleased with Dabe's new Good Game collection:

There's a lot of conversations about what Sony's gonna do about whatever Microsoft is doing, and how they gotta do stuff, and they gotta counter this, or address the other thing. So, this type of rhetorical framework makes Sony's bog-standard service refresh - with a side of trying to make PlayStation Now happen - into some kind of console war salvo when it's actually just whatever.

As you might know, I was first introduced to Dungeons and Dragons while I was in my 31st year and the game was in its 4th edition.  It’s true, Acquisitions Inc. was my first time ever playing D&D!