Idle Thumbs

The cockpit lid closes, the engines fire up, the atmosphere melts away, and the infinite vastness of space is laid before you. "VHERH THOO?" flap the disgustingly real rubber lips protruding from your cockpit dashboard. "STHOMWHER NICE I THOOPE." You know the lips are still learning, but this knowledge does not endear you to them. You zoom out to check the galactic map, enter a destination for yourself, and prepare for a long trip. "DTHID YOU KNOW" the lips started, "I KNOOW THREE DITHVERENT PLEPLE NAMMED SEAN MURRAY?" You violently claw at the cockpit lid, spring it open and are sucked into the void, barely missing a resplendent space whale that happened to be cruising by. You think there's something written on the side of the whale, but before you can read it, you die in space.

"This has happened, look what you've done," the robot wrote. Chris sent Danielle to her death in deep space, but her estranged husband still comes to visit. "It's just garbage," the robot continued. Smirking, a besunglassed Nick Breckon catches a ride on a dolphin and breaks the surface in a graceful arc. "Video game & pop culture cast, hacking and robot-mongering awaits," the robot concluded, incorrectly. "It's a good one!"

Join us on two very different journeys to the future... of the past. We crack open our briefcase-sized laptop and hack through layer after layer of security in the 80s cyberpunk world of Quadrilateral Cowboy, then take a wrong turn and find ourselves in the polished fiberglass and shag carpet Fondlarium of Headlander. Batman is destroyed.

Dear Mom: Life in the new colony sucks. No one knows how to hunt, the clothes they give us keep falling apart, every night there are literal wolves at the door, and Nick (or "Goldblum" as he has fashioned himself) can't keep a handle on his most basic impulses. The cable package only has ESPN 1, so Evo's out of the question. I had a pet rat for a while but I don't know what happened to it. Probably something terrible. I never thought space would be like this. I hope I can go home soon.

You pass someone on the street and immediately you know. The light hitting their face, the way they amble forward, aware of the world but maybe simultaneously inside a totally different world too. You pass them and keep to yourself, knowing that you are apart from them, not of them, but you also know, deep down, that you could become one of them at any time.

This week we do our best to unpack the criminal scandal surrounding Counter-Strike: GO gambling sites and the streamers who secretly own them while publicly promoting them, then we play a game exclusively about criminals packing things.

The robot hovers silently in front of you; its micro-props keep it nearly still in the hot evening breeze. System Shock buzzes on the screen behind you. Next to it on another screen, the new Hitman runs idle, waiting. You've made a little easy cash from the robot tonight already - no big scores but better than the alternative - which means your luck has to be running thin, but how thin? You're not sure if you imagine it but as your hand approaches the palm acceptance plate the robot seems to pause, as if to breathe in. You lower your hand, slowly slide the balcony door shut and go play video games.

Look, I am amazing at sneaking. Everyone knows I’ve always been amazing at it. It’s breathtaking–just incredible–how well I hide in a box. Cheatin’ Hitman has all the codes and tricks, and everyone still sees him. Ruins all credibility of the franchise. Just pathetic. Can’t even find the secret ghost window. Sad!

It's E3 time again. This is a weird E3, landing in a transitional time when everyone might have preferred to not come but felt the obligation all the same. We untangle our own understanding of Sony and Microsoft's announcements, get stoked about Zelda, and visit the world's largest bag of Doritos.

Maybe, somewhere beneath the games you play, somewhere too deep to feel, there is another battle taking place between forces so staggering, so total, as to be invisible. You choose a hero, enter the arena and attack, then hear a faint echo coming from miles away, or maybe the past, the future? An assailant vaporizes before you, your leaderboard lights up and you smile, but way down deep in the earth, deep in your bones, you hear the muffled cries of the Heavy and all the heavies that came before and after him, and you know what you are a part of. You change loadouts and respawn.

This week we're joined by special guest Danielle Riendeau to wander the abandoned hallways of Mars, where we create a Hell of our own, one where there's no one to bother us and all the time in the world to relax and take it in. Meanwhile, Chris takes a risky assignment in Marrakesh and is killed on the toilet, but makes it home to regale Jake with accounts of how good Overwatch is.

This week we're throwing away our traditional hyper-competitive leaderboard and focusing on hand-selected stats that show us what we've accomplished. Chris plays Overwatch and discovers that, after years away there's still a Blizzard for him. Nick goes to Disneyland, comes home and finds a new release of Planet Coaster. "This means something," he says, burying his theme park under mountains of dirt. Alone, late at night, Jake builds the Nublar.

In the middle of an awkward conversation you accidentally press down the left and right sticks at the same time. It turns out to be for the best: Your buddies look completely ridiculous frozen mid-sentence and you decide this is a perfect moment to preserve as a photo. You try to clear up the shot by setting any enemies to hidden... and find yourself suddenly alone in the room. Realizing you have no friends, you go load up Steam and play Doom for eight hours without interruption.

Before Chris disappears deep into Russia on assignment, we check all our dead drops for incoming correspondence with readers abroad, and find some gems, long forgotten and wedged way in the back. Enjoy tales of babywalling your identical twin, of vile things left in jars, of theme parks gone wrong, and of the time Nick Breckon played Dark Souls 3 alone with nothing but a bottle of rum.

Join us as we wander the world without a map, pecking away with tiny pointed attacks at anything perceived as adversarial, navigating with only the barest remembered scraps of where things were, what they were like, how they should be.

Our descent into Dark Souls 3 continues, but we started over with a brand new guy. This new guy is less lucky than the old one, but otherwise actually equipped to fight the charge guys, tree guys, ice guys, bendy guys, etc, that he encounters. He's still working on remembering their names. Meanwhile, in an Italian villa, Agent 47 visits a Spirit Halloween Store, tries on some cellophane-wrapped "Charge Guy," "Tree Guy," "Ice Guy," and "Bendy Guy" costumes, and is unimpressed.

You roll the sausage along the ground. In the far distance, lumbering beasts wage ancient battles, and a naked multicultural society roams the prehistoric plains. You roll the sausage on to a grill, and it acquires a satisfying char. Beyond the horizon, teams of highly-armed warriors fight lightning-quick pitched battles and acquire ever more advantanced technology. You drop the sausage into the ocean. Crap. Isn't something supposed to, like, happen?

It's game time. You're confident. You know this. You load up Dark Souls 3. You have some trouble with the menus, but it's alright, you figure it out. Forty minutes later, something on the screen almost resembles a human face. Enter the game—it's brutal, not what you remembered. As your grotesquely-faced wizard is wrecked beyond belief time and again, you reflect on how one can feel so old and yet like such a baby. You load Super Hypercube and watch a small cube slowly and satisfyingly descend into an appropriate receptacle. You make a drink on the rocks.

Outer space is burning, ravaged by the never-ending military-corporate conflict factory that is EVE Online. While reports are still coming in from deep space, we can confirm that just like real wars, Spacemonkey's Alliance is involved, as is Killah Bee, 1ronBank, and the Moneybadgers. If this is all too much for you, know that IKEA has released a piece of VR software that lets you chill out in a perfectly clean, virtual kitchen forever.

It is 2017. The stench of scorched mozzarella stings your nostrils. Brand warfare has emerged as the dominant vector of economic and military conflict. A delivery bot rolls your way, and you frantically dig a receipt out of your pocket, showing a recent order for a medium half-sausage, half-pepperoni. Too late, you realize your mistake: this is a Taco Bell bot. "Okay, I will destroy humans," it offers cheerfully, then everything goes black.