Penny Arcade

Jesus Christ, sometimes I get the hiccups.  I don’t get them on purpose.

The first day of the Nintendo thing was, as you could probably gather, focused on the DS - but there was free play the next day on every Nintendo platform, and though the coverage of the event was pretty thick it’s possible that I focused on some element that someone else didn’t.

Before I played Tales of Symphonia, that and Baten Kaitos made me vibrate with anticipated pleasure.  I like the feel of a wavebird, and even the standard controller is a departure, and so I relish any opportunity to use one for the kind of extended period an RPG promises.  Typically the ‘cube pulls Party Game duty, it’s rare that I have a real solitary experience with it.  Since Tales of Symphonia is compressed hell, all I have left to buoy that fantasy is Baten Kaitos, and from what I saw at the event I was able to relax as much as I’m capable of.  It’s been suggested that I would prefer that all the objects that surround me were replaced with cards representing those objects, with their statistics and unique properties made explicit - which is an idea that Baten Kaitos takes to heart, with its card based battles and inventory.  I had the good fortune of being able to talk to someone who has tested it thoroughly, and I was able to find out some intriguing elements of the combat - like being able to block with attack cards in some instances, using “camera” cards that take snapshots of enemies, and put together “pairs” and other poker hands for bonuses.  I found a great post in the Nintendo forums by someone who had imported the game, and obviously his experience is a bit more encyclopedic than my brief dalliance with a highly constrained press demo.  You might hit it up. 

Metroid Prime 2: Echoes was there, and they drew attention to the fact that the graphics and lighting had improved in this version, and I guess I didn’t really see that.  I’m not trying to be a graphics snob, either - turning away the steaming dish with an affected gesture, exhorting the waiter to direct further inquiries to my open palm.  Metroid Prime looked great.  This also looks great.  They did show us a suit while we were there, a new suit or at least a new take on a suit that was a radical departure from old interpretations and made me excited to begin earning powerups and jolting space pirates with progressively more potent beams.   

A brief note on Metroid’s multiplayer:  it’s a lot more fun than you’re expecting.  Out of the Deathmatch and Bounty modes, we found ourselves pulled toward Bounty where every hit and kill produces coins that you snatch up and run away with.  Unlike Hunters, the DS variant of the series, you can indeed use the lock-on button to center your view on an opponent - but this is no guarantee of victory, as you can easily dodge shots or go into the morph ball which breaks it.  It’s not the reason to get the game, but there is a spark there which I disregarded even the remote possibility of. 

Lord Of The Rangs:  Third Age is a multiplatform title, not even locked to the platform we were there to see - but it really needs its own post.  I’ll handle that later today.  I’m going to go through the Pikmin entries and fish out some winners.

(CW)TB out.

i know that you’re smart

It’s almost midnight, so if I want even a passing chance at not being a liar I’d better crack out that Third Age thing.

I’ve been meaning to talk about the ways EA has been using Lord of the Rings ever since I saw Battle for Middle Earth at the San Diego Comic Con, and by now of course everyone probably knows every God Damned thing there is to know about it.  Squad level combat, unparalleled graphics, unfuckingbelievable world maps and a crafty UI and resource system.  I would go over there and bother the EA guys at their booth in the morning before the hall opened and it was always one of my favorite parts of the day. 

See, they’d done some neat stuff with the “franchise,” by which I mean Tolkien’s much beloved work of genre defining and globe consuming power.  They had published some perfectly amusing hack and slash games that didn’t overstay their welcome and were released in a timely fashion.  Battle for Middle Earth was something else.  This was the C&C Generals guys with their balls out, motioning passersby to gaze upon them, to gauge the size comparative to balls they might have seen hanging from other games.  They were starting to take real chances with the setting, and when you look at Battle for Middle Earth you get the impression that they aren’t sparing any expense.     

Understand that this is a game that looked pretty good, great even, at E3 - but there wasn’t really gameplay to be seen.  It was essentially showing scenes from the film rendered in engine, which was a nice effect, but it gave me the impression that safety was still the primary concern.  There was another game on the same demo reel, on the screens right outside the typically gargantuan, “EA In The Hizouse” booth that is usually the first thing you see at the annual event.  Wasn’t a whole lot to it, but it was clearly an RPG in the vein of Final Fantasy X where your guys were on your side and theirs were on theirs, turns were being taken, and I was intrigued but this was the first I’d seen of it.  I performed the mental calculations and presumed I wouldn’t need to pay attention again for another year, two years at least.   

It comes out on the second of November.

I don’t think it is going to consume the world in fire and usher in a pure age, but I think it will be a game with a serious story, feature characters set in a world I want very much to explore on my own terms, and be executed in a way that is stylish and technologically savvy.  The game actually winds through the events of all three films, which surprised me - I thought for sure they were already counting their RPG Trilogy money.  It’s important to note that the characters that form your core group are not people you already know about.  Your party is made up of the races you’d expect, with the abilities you want desperately to utilize against the ravaging Uruk-Hai - they’re similar to the protagonists from the books and films, but have their own motivations and cross paths with the Fellowship on more than one occasion.  Just how vile your opponents are has been captured with their modeling and their striking animation, and the sound - coming as it does directly from a film trilogy costing hundreds of millions of dollars - is applied to the game with grace and strength.  I actually found the audible ferocity of my foes a little unnerving, and the cues which accompanied the more potent techniques I saw were simply perfect.   

Just as in Final Fantasy IX, a friend can plug in a controller and effectively play through the combats co-operatively.  Right now, we’re wrapping up (the still excellent) Shadow Hearts so we can start and finish Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne before the second of November.  I don’t know if we can do it.  But God Dammit, we’ve got to try.   

(CW)TB

There’s a lot to read in these Pikmin 2 entries!  I started this weekend, but it’s taking some time to get through.  I’ll keep on keeping on, winners announced Friday at the latest.

And no, I didn’t forget Third Age.  It’s comin’, it’s comin’...

(CW)TB

I apologize for the lack of sketch dumps lately. Things have been pretty crazy since the baby. I do have something new to show you though. We had originally planned on doing a story called Sand for a future edition of Flight. It was essentially a techno western. Then we read Kazu’s totally fucking incredible Daisy Kutter and realized the techno western was already in much more competent hands. So we sat down and tried to come up with something new. What we came up with is Automata.

-Gabe out