Penny Arcade

After seeing Scott’s iPod storyline, Gabe had to see one of these things for himself.  He was very impressed with everything but the price, which quite naturally lead to a heated conversation with a person who doesn’t exist in a place that is not real.

This far out from the lights and odors of E3, the impressions of most games I saw have dulled somewhat.  There was one with a robot, for example.  As I recall, he did things.

And then there’s Savage.

Savage is no stranger to my newsposts, where I have hailed its approach to RTS/FPS hybrids as nothing short of rad.  Play Natural Selection as the Marines to see what integrating an RTS element does to an FPS, but essentially it transforms a game into a mystical Whitman’s Sampler that has one of everyone’s favorite candy.  Are you your group’s Sniper guy?  Take a Marksman’s Bow.  Do you play FPS games just because your friends do, but your true passion is Real-Time Strategy?  Jump in the commander’s seat, and boss your friends around.  Surely, you’re thinking that there must be some proclivity not served by Savage, but you can actually take this pretty far.  Do you want to strike enemies and buildings with a gnarled, uprooted tree?  Just sign here. 

I was actually just walking from place to place when I saw the booth, and I can recall telling Pork that we had to stop by and see it.  It was behind the showfloor proper, back in an area that was essentially just small meeting rooms built out of dividers, betwixt light and shadow.  They were inviting people in to play full rounds which lasted about twenty minutes or so, and we simply adore playing full rounds.

I spent most of my time in the commander’s seat, even though I don’t really have much intention of doing that online.  I just wanted to see if they had a mature enough interface that could both manage my tasks and sort of trick me into believing this was a good and proper RTS - and it does both of these things with aplomb.  I pumped out a bunch of peons and set them to work gathering riches and building shit, and from a first person perspective my team just saw these haggard looking men shuffling too and fro, entirely committed to my tasks.  Players can enter the “Town Hall,” where upgrades are made available to them - they can change to new unit types, up to and including catapults and whatnot provided their commander has been a dutiful steward of the team’s money.  There are even creeps, a la Warcraft 3, fairly dangerous creatures that players can clear out for gold and experience.  Though it was an improper use of my abilities, I would often sic Porkfry on a small group of howling simians near our base.  While we can’t be sure that they meant us any direct harm, never let it be said that I took the monkey menace too lightly. 

There are two sides, and though we were only able to play one of them very nice S2 Games people showed us some units from the Beast race, which accomplishes with magic those things the humans do with science.  This is where we saw the massive, tree-swinging troll type character.  There was also a lithe and primal cheetah man, which should make Savage a furry favorite.

I do expect an RTS to let me group players into easy-to-access teams, and maybe it lets you do that, but I couldn’t find evidence of it.  It’s hardly a gamebreaker.  EB’s site says the game is hitting in a month, and what I played was polished enough to make me believe it.

(CW)TB out.

she makes my head spin around

But, um…  I was sort of playing WarioWare when I was supposed to be doing my post.  Each game is like three seconds, but when you play a few hundred of them every now and then it sort of builds up.  It won’t happen again, at least, not until the next time I do it.

(CW)TB

Since I got such a good response to my last video I decided to make another. While the last video had some cool combos a few of the hardcore SC players mentioned that someone could “air control” out of them pretty easy. For those of you who are not hard core SC players, air control is when you hold guard and mash a direction while in the air in order to roll out of the way of combos. It’s true that if you time it right you can get out of some of the combos from my last video. Anyway, this second video is all guaranteed hits. As far as I know there is no way to air control out of these.

I will try to post some Vs. stuff soon.

I also got this e-mail from Loki, the guy who runs the shop I talked about on Monday.

YOUSAID SOME PRETTY MEAN STUFF ABOUT MY PLACE. MOST OF IT GROSS EXAGERATIONS, SOME OF IT TRUE, BUT AS YOU WOULD SEE IF YOU OPENED A STORE ITS HARD TO MAKE IT IN THE INDEPENDENT SMAL STORE ARENA IMEAN THERE WAS ONCE OVER 25 FAMCOM STORES ALL CLEAN AND NICE AND SUCH AND THEY ALL FAILED.  YOU SEE MY STORE IS MESSY I AGREE BUT ITS GETTING CLEANER ALL THE TIME.  WHEN I GOT THE PLACE THE BACK ROOM WAS COMPLETLY FILLED TO THE CEILING WITH JUNK, ITS TAKEN ME A LONG TIME TO CLEAN IT AND MOST OF THE NON JUNK FROM BACK THERE I HAVE JUST PUT INTO BOXES AND THROWN BEHIND THE COUNTER.  ITS A SLOW PROSESS CLEANING AND ORGANIZING WHEN YOUR TRYING TO PAY THE RENT BILLS TAXES ETC.  EVENTUALLY THE STORE WILL BE CLEAN OR AT LEAST SOMEWHAT CLEAN.  ANY WAYS I DID NOT CONTACT YOU SO YOU COULD COME DOWN AND GIVE THE STORE A CRITIQUE I JUST WONDERED IF YOU WOULD WANT TO THROW EVENTS WITH ME OUTSIDE THE STORE I NEVER MENTIONED USING THE STORE FOR AN EVENT I WAS REFERING TO SOMETHING LIKE SPLITING THE RENT FOR A VENUE SO WE COULD HAVE A TOURNAMENT ETC.  ALSO IF YOU THINK THE STORES SO MESSY THEN WHY NOT COME DOWN AND HELP CLEAN IM ALWAYS TRYING TO GET PEOPLE TO HELP CLEAN, BUT MOSTLY PEOPLE JUST LIKE LEAVING FOOD HERE FOR ME TO CLEAN UP.  ANYWAYS WHAT IM TRYING TO DO HERE IS HAVE A PLACE THAT HAS THE STUFF YOU CANNOT GET AT GAME CRAZY ETC. ALSO ITS REAL EASY TO POINT OUT THE BAD BUT YOUR REPORTING IS VERY ONE SIDED AND NOT UNLIKE ANY OTHER GLORRY HORE OUT THERE IN THE REGUALR BIASED PRESS, I GUESS YOU WANT TO BE JERRY SPRINGER OR THE OLD OPRHA. ITS COOL WHATEVER. ANYWAYS IT WOULD HAVE BEEN COOL IF YOU AT LEAST MENTIONED A FEW GOOD THINGS ABOUT THE STORE BUT I GUESS YOUR NOT THAT KIND OF GUY.

LOKIS

The “clean and nice” stores failed so….you thought a filthy one would succeed?  No I’m not gonna come down and help you clean your fucking store! The fact of the matter is you could have that place spotless in two days tops with a little help from a couple buddies and some Oxi Clean. You can’t hand a fucking broom to every customer that walks in the door. That is YOUR store and if you really cared about it you would take care of it. I’ve never been asked to help vacuum the QFC. “Yeah, your groceries come to $65.50 and grab a mop there’s a spill in aisle six.”  I can appreciate the fact that you want people to get stuff they can’t find at mainstream game stores but that shouldn’t include infectious diseases. I’m sorry I couldn’t think of anything nice to say about your rat trap in my last post. You do have a lot of great merchandise, you just aren’t taking care of it. I got a lot of mail from people in the area who have been into your shop and they all agreed that my description was spot on. Many of them actually questioned my sanity upon reading that I went back to your store a SECOND time. I guess once is enough for most people.

-Gabe out  

I just got this from Fatrick who is setting up NWC 2003:

The site for registration is on the PACult page
Click Here for the page itself
Prices for the Con are listed on the site, feel free to ask me questions in the Forum, if you need clarifications of any kind.

-Gabe out

You might recall my enthusiasm regarding this game, drawing parallels between it and what the early screens seemed to represent - a sort of modern day Archon.  As it turns out, that’s not far from the mark - I received a mail from the developer regarding my comparisons, assuring me that they were all big fans of that classic game.  How is it different?  Well, let’s see.

For starters, instead of Dark and Light you have four armies aligned with elements, made of individual creatures of varying ability.  While creatures fought in Archon, it was most certainly not a Fighting Game as modern players would define the genre.  You each had a guy and you would go at it in arenas af varying complexity.  This is contrasted with Wrath Unleashed, whose combat portion is virtually indistinguishable from other fighting games.  That can be good or bad, I suppose - lately I’ve played fighters of such craft and sophistication that I’ve become almost gourmet in my expectations of the genre.  What’s more, with fully four potential players I might have liked to see brawler-style gameplay - more along the lines of War of the Monsters where all players could do battle.  Hmm.       

There is a great preview of the game at The International House of Mojo, which I had not heard of prior to the feature.  That there’s a hell of a site.  I quickly added it to my bookmarks.

(CW)TB

It’s out, and you’re welcome to grab it.  I could never really come to a conclusion about the test they released for it, I’d like to see how things play out on different maps.

(CW)TB

I’m typing this on Thursday morning, because I’m going to that Europe thing.  I mention these things because

It’s a chance I’ll have to take.

I was always a little hazy about what happened between developers 2015, now producing Men of Valor, and Infinity Ward, which is now producing Call Of Duty - but here is the condensed version.  The game Medal of Honor:  Allied Assault, which most people agreed was pretty good even with the sniper level, was developed by 2015 - and after the fact, something happened there that caused fully twenty-two people to leave and start their own company called Infinity Ward.  God only knows what, maybe it was on Fatbabies.  All I know is, when you look at what was shown for their respective titles at E3, it quickly becomes apparent that something is missing from one title that the other one has.  It would be easy to dismiss Call of Duty as another World War II first-person shooter, and the description is certainly accurate - but when you see their floor demo and watch the Stalingrad video they had sequestered away, you see the work of people who made the finest entry in that genre, and then thought, Yeah.  We can do better.

Moving on.

Uru:  Ages Beyond Myst was not really intended to have a strictly single-player portion, as I recall.  I believe it had been their intention to produce a surreal multiplayer space with cooperative puzzles from the get-go.  Someone, somewhere changed their mind on the issue and now the retail purchase will include ten “ages” or levels full of puzzles and large mushrooms.  I think that was probably a good move.  I spent almost an hour with this game all told, I love it to death, and it also makes me sort of sad.  Let’s take those one at a time. 

So, you do get those ten Ages in the box.  Subscribers to Uru Lives - what they call their online component - will not only have the ability to play any of those single player levels with friends, but also receive a new age they can download every month.  Since we’re talking about multiple players now, there is of course a fairly robust capacity to create avatars.  From a “Personal Age,” a sort of private home for your character, you have access to all the books you have found, as well as other things you’ve discovered - Treasure Pages, found elsewhere in the game, allow you to customize your Personal Age with ponds, geological phenomena, whatever.  You can share your access to new ages by holding a book open towards another character, and then following them through it.   

The multiplayer extends beyond just doing the puzzles - you do, after all, need to meet those people somewhere.  Either by typing or using the built-in voice chat, you can communicate with other humans in one of a few explicitly multiplayer areas, some public, some private.  There is a library in the gigantic main public age that contains recently unearthed linking books, you’d go there to obtain the new content.  There’s a story that underpins all this stuff that you can investigate if you want to, I’m just telling you about the game.  These areas can change as you play, as time passes, and by virtue of player activity - new areas will be revealed, even in social ages you might not have expected them to.

The game itself would be a good purchase for anyone who liked Myst - every age I’ve seen, including ones I wasn’t supposed to see, gives one the impression that they are traversing some meticulous sculpture.  But the hordes of casual or non-gamers that made earlier Myst games so successful, those are the same people that were supposed to make The Sims Online a sure-fire proposition.  They never materialized, as far as I know.  And the hard-core gamers, the true players that prop up companies like Sony Online Entertainment with their monthly charges, I don’t know that they want to subscribe to a puzzle game.  Believe me, I wish none of that were true.  Hopefully I’m wrong, and there is this huge contingent of people slavering for a surreal multiplayer puzzle experience.  As a gamer, I do have a certain amount of what you might call “Activist Money” to invest in games from small publishers or untried concepts.  I just wonder what the response from the larger community might be.   

(CW)TB out.

now i’ve got to rock for three

Tycho is gone and the place is going to shit already. I couldn’t get the strip uploaded correctly so for now you can see it here. Christ he hasn’t even been gone a whole day. Within a week I figure I will have destroyed the entire website.

-Gabe out