It seemed like there was a gift opportunity there, a strikingly rare window, but no because of who he is as a person.

Kiko and I are going to start playing Dust or other wargames on our Thursday afternoon streams soon, that’s essentially how I want to spend my time these days, and I wonder if Gabe will pop in sometime with his Soviet menace. He was talking to me about a winter camo scheme he was gonna do, and implied very strongly that it was all my fault, which I don’t disagree with. Things typically are. But it was Kiko, that old warlock, who sired all of this and so the shock of my own shame and betrayal must be contextualized within a larger, more terrifyingly vast deception.

I’ve been playing Shovel Knight: King of Cards, which is a fucking triumph, like every other Goddamn thing these people make. I didn’t even back the game on Kickstarter, I can’t even imagine how richly that cadre must feel rewarded for their pittance, but the Treasure Trove collection has regularly increased in value until its current state, which is… ripe, I don’t know how else you’re supposed to say it. It’s dumb. This has got to be the easiest call in fucking history, especially on the Switch. You literally can go home, and they proved it.

I used to feel for some reason like I had to choose between Yomi and Exceed, because they were both card games that tried to emulate the nuances of fighting games and it seemed like one needed to have dominion. Now, I think maybe that’s dumb. If there were a fighting game called “Fighting Game” that represented the totality of the concept, serving as an avatar of the form, maybe it would require some kind of Highlander tournament to establish card game primacy but there isn’t. There’s more than one fighting game, and each of them asks varying things of the player. Indeed, the creator of Yomi - which is quite technical - made the fighting game Fantasy Strike specifically to reduce ritual input complexity to make the genre’s strategic gameplay more broadly accessible. So maybe I can like two different card games, and it’s fine.

This isn’t actually a separate topic from Shovel Knight, though it probably looks that way. Each set of cards for Exceed is called a Season, and Season 4 is dedicated entirely to the denizens of Shovel Knight. The titular chivalroid was already released as a Solo deck, like Automata’s Carl was back in the day, and Level 99’s genius for adapting known characters (as they did with Season 3, when they got the Street Fighter License[!!!]) is so strong on SK that I can’t wait to see it brought to the game more broadly.

(CW)TB out.