Home - Penny Arcade
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
Ed Zitron of Better Offline and Where's Your Ed At engages regularly in a unilateral war of aggression against Sam Altman. He has done a ton of research on Sam, as he has for other "rot economy" tech figures, and thus has a sophisticated factual scaffold built around them he can hold them to. pen For me, it's just like a… taste, or smell. I'm receiving information from some kind of sense and it is setting off red lights on the panel. Is that fair? I dunno. If I saw a huge lizard gnawing at the roots of Yggdrasil, to what extent am I required to give it the benefit of the doubt? We clown ourselves when we hold ourselves to baroque standards of fairness around malefactors like this. They know about the rules, they just think those rules are for other people. They depend on this asymmetry. They rely on it.
New Comic: Holodick
I don't name the things inside Monster Hunter Wilds! That was not my job. But if it had been my job, I would have probably named it the same thing just to get an easy strip out of it. They're giving this shit away! They're giving this shit away.
New Comic: Narratoid
I like this Josef Fares guy. He's whacked out and he says weird shit. A filmmaker who made a kind of wild, natural slide toward game development - I've known a couple people like this - he's carved out some kinda fuckin' lane. I understand that it's considered bad form to accrue all the valor for game development into a single person, but I also feel confident that you know that I know other people worked on it. Which is true! It would have taken way longer otherwise.
I played a lot of games over the weekend including Monster Hunter Wilds and Split Fiction. If you’ve got someone to play it with, Split Fiction is a blast. It’s full of fun, unique cooperative mechanics that will have you and whoever you're playing with working together to navigate each new level. Kara and I had planned on giving it a quick try and then playing some Marvel Rivals but once we fired it up we couldn’t stop and spent the rest of the night in Split Fiction. The hook is also great as the game has you bouncing between the imaginations of two different writers, one who does fantasy and the other who does Sci-Fi. Don’t skip this one if you have a gaming partner. It would also make a great entry point if you have someone who isn’t a gamer yet but you want to play something with them. Kara and I give it all the thumbs up.
New Comic: Lazerion: Wand Raiser
Now that Eric, Kiko, and Grib are all knee deep in monster guts, the idea of running with a full four is too tantalizing to resist. I've just been doing shit! It shouldn't be considered unwillingness on my part. I did grab the benchmark, and it seems like performance won't be too bad, but apparently this benchmark isn't a good indicator of performance? What kind of bench is it marking exactly? Maybe it just indicates how willing you are to install benchmarks. In that realm, dear readers, I've proved exemplary.
New Comic: Beastie Boy
When I first talked to Grib about the new Monster Hunter, it was similar to talking to him about racing games before he actually liked cars. "The cars look like real cars," he'd say. "You drive them around on tracks and roads." One day later, his Hunter was Hunting some kind of octopus thing and now he's gone batshit for it. Kiko has never played one, but he's got a storehouse of skill he developed playing Bloodborne and a lot of that is gonna map. I'm comfortable saying that Monster Hunter is, itself, a genre.
New Comic: That Funky Monkey
In realspace, Gabriel has a tooth problem - several - and the arduous journey of taming this zone is nearly at an end. I wasn't aware that he was even sad about his toofs; I'm an eye looker, not some brigand crawsman. I didn't know until I was thirty two years old that my dad was literally missing one of his upper middle teeth and I had known the man since I condensed into this form. My fang trubs are the opposite - my teeth are goosed because I had braces and didn't, you know, one hundred percent wear my retainers all the time. I mean, they're fine. I can chew stuff. But there are a couple of 'em that lean a bit, like they're posted up outside the corner store. That leer. Rough characters.
New Comic: Eloi
Reacher is big, dumb fun about a big smart man who fucks people up. I can't even imagine the patience - the forbearance - to wait until the third season to put him against someone larger than he is. And I guess I say patience and forbearance, but there's also the possibility that it simply took a long time to find someone that large who wasn't the grim fruit of some blacksite military experiment.
New Comic: Opfor
We exist in an incredibly weird space; we know a lot of people we really shouldn't know, given our irascible natures and rustic beliefs. We simply end up in the path of novel individuals from time to time and even if we start off on the wrong foot with them, which we often do because of the aforementioned irascibility, we typically arrive at some kind of positive relationship. I'm unfailingly polite in real life because my momma raised me right. This is a performance space; getting mad at me is like getting mad at an actor for something their character did.
New Comic: Face Facts
If you could watch a pringle instead of eat one, just look at it and absorb it, that's essentially Love is Blind. The show is Certifiable, definition 2. It's a dating show in its molecular form, it's clearly been designed by certified (definition 1) psychiatric experts to perforate human beings, to peel them like an onion. Its structure is something like a rocket - there's a Booster Phase where the participants can't see each other, and the participants wade through waist-high gossip to and from the little chambers they make them sit in. Then, once that phase balls into the atmosphere, they get fucking engaged with these people they've never seen before and this goes all the ways you think. You gotta meet a woman's dad who hates you and hates the show and thinks it's a mockery of the society they grew up in. Then you see if any of those people actually go through with it. Then they do an episode where they get all those people later and put them in the same room! Heavy sheets of plastic are laid down and stapled to the walls because three to four people get murdered in this episode, on average.
New Comic: Art Allegations
I guess it makes a little more sense that Amazon secured James Bond when you consider that one of the many, many, many things they have been allowed to buy is MGM. It's not just, like, for Prime Video or something. They're gonna make a real movie and stuff.
New Comic: Troubletown, U.S.A.
My comics knowledge is made up of modern weirdo auteur shit and whatever my friends were reading back in the oughts. World War Hulk I kinda sorta know about but not really, mostly because aspects of the lead up were parted out in other movies and my brain demanded that I spend a lot of time on wikis. So I didn't know until we were writing the strip yesterday that Red Hulk is called Rulk. Rulk! Okay, sure.
New Comic: Macaulay Hulkin
We borrowed the punchline from Dabe, who actually had this experience IRL. Or, in game I guess. But the game was being played in real life? I'll have to sit down for a second and really think about where the parentheses begin and end on this shit - I'm being seized 24/7 by incalculable whorls. You usually try to figure it out from the names, there's only a few total formats they use, but occasionally you don't know and you might feel compelled to ask. I feel like asking a person if they are a bot is probably worse than leaving it ambiguous; it's nice when they simply volunteer the information. I guess we also have to consider that these bots have become ensnared by carnal hungers. I'll keep an eye on it, I guess.
New Comic: Bot Or Not
We had seen something about a new show called Doc. Here is the trailer for it; I don't watch a lot of broadcast television but this is a show that looks and feels like a pharmaceutical ad, which I suppose is at least somewhat on-brand.
New Comic: The Ocho
Everybody in Marvel Rivals is completely busted in some way. Their low-key disregard for dogma in the traditional Triangle of damage and healing has given rise to all manner of moist and wicked chimeras. They'll let a duelist be - in the words of 2 Live Crew - as nasty as they wanna be, just utter demons, but they don't get to have any health not even as a treat. Tank is a deep genre in this game; I think there's a reason we haven't gotten any new ones since launch. Strategists also go extremely hard. There is a strategist whose ult essentially just calls halftime and you have to go do something else for a little while. It's an ult that projects out into the real world.
New Comic: Nuclear Winter
As someone who came into quote unquote prominence in the early Internet - and I say Quote Unquote because it was a matter of being big in a much smaller place - creative work existed within some very particular dynamics. The work we were trying to do was text and images, which the Internet of the time was adept at - it would take a little longer for people making music, video, or games to get the same opportunity. This meant that "distribution," previously a very thorny concept, could be a couple badly formatted tables and an FTP client. We still managed to find abuse at the hands of various demons trying to get paid for it, but this new problem is at least a novel one and the old one was gone forever.
New Comic: Andy Serkis
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is the kind of life-sim, Steam Charts pervert game I have a hard time engaging with. Well, that's not true. It's that I engage with one tiny part of it obsessively and then I have a sixty dollar game I've eaten the nuts and chewies out of and the rest of the box gets thrown in the garbage. It's like Disgaea Item Worlds; that just becomes the whole game. I watched somebody make a sword in KC:D2 and sharpen it, and though it didn't take the amount of time it would actually take it took a long-ass motherfuckin' time. Long enough to lose myself meditatively in the quenching, perhaps. Hmm. Hmm.
Gonna get down on Rivals with Dabe and Mike until noon, then more of the incredible Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. When we left off we had just entered a darkened crypt! I bet that's gonna happen a couple times. I'll see you there. (CW)TB
New Comic: Kingdom Come
With the acquisitions of Lucasfilm and Marvel, Science Fiction and Comics themselves - as they exist in the public imagination - became the property of Disney. After some initial success, and up to Endgame what might be one of the most effective and lucrative cinematic engines of all time, they have waned in dissipation and arrogance. Even the cool stuff they manage to get out on accident is catching strays because they've fucked this up so royally. Disney has invented a machine that kills golden geese.
New Comic: Overture
DeepSeek - we all know about this, right? The Chinese model that came out of nowhere, became the number one installed app and remains so? And it's way cheaper, plus it's open source? That DeepSeek. That's the one I mean. Anyway, if it were possible to detonate a nuclear bomb inside nVidia's stock price, that's essentially what happened. How did it get so good, so fast, so cheap? Is it actually cheap? Who knows. But there's rumblings from OpenAI that one reason is that it stood on the shoulders of illegal, copyright infringing giants. Boo fucking hoo.
New Comic: Vengeance is Mine, Saith The Lord
Dabe and I played, like, two hours of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle weeks ago and I still think about it all the time. I would play it more, just install it myself, but I feel very strongly that you need a witness to extract the most out of it. I think there's too much texture, too much detail for a single person and I am prepared to sign up for either side of the dyad. It's also updated the genre itself - something like an immersive sim, immy simmy perhaps, with some creature comforts for players that jettison some of the drudgery we associate with this sort of game.
New Comic: Whip Smart
I’ve been playing a ton of Marvel Rivals recently. I’m even playing ranked, which is something I almost never do in these sorts of games. I just hit Silver 1 yesterday and I hope to get to gold before the season ends but holy shit you can lose a lot or rounds in a row. My favorite character to play is Cloak and Dagger and I did a quick sketch of them just for fun the other day that I shared over on my Blue Sky account.
The war over whether it was Guy or Gay raged in the schoolyards and cafeterias of Ridgeview Elementary School. We did not live in an age where such things could be resolved immediately. No, we lived in an age where such things were casus belli even though nobody actually had any grounding for their positions. We had not yet arrived at the era of a Resident Evil, where the game Resident Evil begins by literally saying the words "Resident Evil" out loud. We could agree that it was hard as fuck and that the ninja dude looked hellafied running in the intro. This allowed our congregation of youthful, callus-thumbed warriors to unite against the true threat: Jacquio, and his demon-cult.
New Comic: Is It Ninja Guyden Or Ninja Gayden
I once had a customer service experience with an Apple phone that was so Kafkaesque that I bought a Pixel the same day. I'm not saying that the Pixel is good or that you should think it's good or that Apple is evil or anything like that. It just occurred to me that it was within my power to never have this particular experience again. I can have other bad experiences, but when I realized I could consign this particular one to The Void I leapt with ravenous hunger.
New Comic: The Tooth House
New Trek has its ups and downs. Statistically speaking, I think downs predominate. I absolutely loved the second season of Discovery, and either liked or couldn't understand why they had done the rest of it. Picard was… man. Lower Decks (Lower Decks!) is legit, and Strange New Worlds balls out of control. Out of control.
New Comic: Dirty One
For whatever reason, Gabe simply has never been subject to TikTok. Whatever it's doing, however it's trying to do it, it simply doesn't plug into his dealio. I never got into Reddit really, whatever its charms, and that's the bifurcation. They could ban TikTok, or not ban it, or only make it available between the hours of Midnight and One O'Clock, and he literally wouldn't know. I have sent him three to four hundred TikToks over the last six years or so and he just says he doesn't have it and will never have it. I suspect it's like when your cat gives you an inside-out mouse, and you're supposed to appreciate it, but you want nothing to do with it in any way, shape, or form. For a variety of reasons. You won't suddenly be inspired to investigate mouse recipes. You know?
New Comic: Thanos SNAP
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