Penny Arcade

I’m sorry to say it’s not true - Gabriel wasn’t actually

href="http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/04/29">

able to
see the film - but a healthy number of people will be
watching it next week while I wail and clutch my boxed set.  I clicked
the link
the moment I knew about it, but by that time a wave of browncoats had
already crashed over the limited supply and absorbed every ticket.

I must have grieved for an hour.  There is nothing I want more than to hear those beloved characters swearing in Chinese.

Those gifted with prescience or whatever, the ones who will caper and exult in the preview theaters, I hope they understand that there are some secrets propriety demands they hold until the film is actually released.  I mean it.  If you come up to me at San Diego and tell me “so and so is a robot” or some shit I will buy a bat’leth and I will cut you in fucking half.  They sell things like that at the convention, legendary weapons, and believe me when I say that being rent stem to stern by a Klingon warblade is probably the least exotic death I could manufacture under the circumstances.

Moving on.

Some of you might be curious as to the status World of Warcraft‘s “Game of the Year” award, believing perhaps that we either did the right thing and should maintain the position or that we are imbeciles unworthy of a text editor.  I can’t really speak to the second one, but I can certainly provide you with an update.

Since withdrawing the award I have on several occasions returned to the game or sought to return to it, and my timing has often been inauspicious.  On more than one occasion I have sought to re-enter Azeroth during a bout of pre or post patch server misbehavior, and I’d rather slip in there during a more “ordinary” period, or whatever passes for ordinary in a land where dragons roam free.  The most recent patch added an “honor system” with the concomitant rewards for said valorous combat.  That’s not a type of play I typically seek out - it’s the Battlegrounds, plot-based consensual combat areas they will deliver in the next patch, that I’m genuinely curious about.  The award is stored in a hermetically sealed vault, pristine as the day it was bestowed, and it seems like any modern assessment might as well take this imminent feature into account.  Yea, let it be done.   

The honor system and the related Battlegrounds have come along fairly quickly, by WoW patch standards - and it’s theorized by some that Guild Wars is responsible for that sudden spring in their step.  This is probably bolstered by the fact that many employees at Arena.net were once from Blizzard.  There’s no doubt that the community has positioned the players in this adversarial fashion, thirsty for conflict, but these games could not be more different.  Yes, I realize that they both have warriors and magic.  That does not qualify as a keen insight.

Guild Wars, and I do not mean this in a pejorative sense, is a medieval Phantasy Star Online.  No portion of this game is “massive” as we understand that term in relation to online role-playing games, although I would describe the elementalists’ tower in Wizard’s Folly as “quite large.”  My five hours yesterday was enjoyably invested, I look forward to additional hours in that state, collecting special abilities as one might “cards” and hand selecting the eight powers I will bear to a specific scenario.  WoW snaps off some of the more annoying elements of the massive genre, but many things about it - long travel, high level grind, kill quests - circumscribe a fairly traditional experience in raw terms.  I maintain that - when all cylinders are firing - is it the best example of an MMO.  But when you take a game like that in one hand and then hold up a kind of swords and sorcery deathmatch in the other hand seeking to compare the two, I guess I don’t know what that’s meant to accomplish.

(CW)TB out.

if you’re the queen of california

Usually when we make a new shirt, we end up with tons of them left over because we never ask anyone what they think we should make and end up crafting shirts based on evil line dancing troupes.  It’s a lesson I’m not sure we’ll ever learn.  Let’s see if these do any better:

Kara’s Wombat Shirt is available in “babydoll.”  I don’t know what the etymology is on tht term, but there you have it.

Also, and I can’t stress this enough, please purchase The Merch shirt.  I’m serious.  The consequences are too grim to contemplate. 

(CW)TB

It is true that, sometimes, things which are truly fresh will find their way to the office from this or that PR department.  Most of the time they’re just odd, for example a cat carrier or wildflower seeds.  In numerical terms, Nintendo’s heartfelt missives tend to promote the most eyebrow raising.

We once received a box from them around the time Starfox Assault came out.  The box in question did not contain the game, it contained another smaller box, with a label that encouraged us to enjoy our Assault and Peppy.  Inside the box was a pair of Starfox salt and pepper shakers, which were…  I guess they dispensed salt and pepper, which is really all I ask of something like that.  Appraised in this narrow fashion the devices were an unmitigated success. 

Today, we opened a yellow envelope and were terrified to find that it contained a mold of a human hand.

It was grasping a piece of orange paper the contents of which we were honestly too terrified to digest.  If the message they have intended to send is that Nintendo knows where we can be found should we lose favor with them, the message has been received. 

If we had placed the salt and pepper shakers in an innocuous location, they would not have created much of a stir.  They are tiny jars with perforated tops, not severed limbs, and so if you were to place one on Gabriel’s retracting keyboard tray he would not think much of it. 

We replaced Gabriel’s regular coffee (keyboard) with Folger’s crystals (a human hand), and he did notice,  barking the following once his breath and vigor had returned:

“Do you fuckers not understand that you need me?  Do you understand that if I have a heart attack and die, you all have to get real jobs?”

(CW)TB

We did a one page comic for Empire Earth II, and it’s just been made available over at the main site - check the news.

The game has been well received by and large, always a relief when we take on a project, but I’ve talked with people who tested their expansion for Dungeon Siege who said working with them was like a dream - they were actively engaged in the process and didn’t think themselves above the trench where people slave over their code.  I wanted to recognize that. 

(CW)TB

I don’t know what characters look like long term in Guild Wars, just because I haven’t played it enough or seen high level characters floss for real on the avenues of Ascalon.

I do know that everybody basically looks awesome from the moment you click create.

Each class has a different style of head (or “face”) armor altogether, which is something I didn’t realize right away because it’s often not visible in social areas, and when I head to an adventure area it’s instanced so it’s just me in there.  Mesmers, one of the spellcasting classes, have a kind of “landed nobility” aesthetic you can see in play here on Gailgwynnid Harjast:

I guess I could shrink the image, but I think that looks pretty cool.  So they use masks, necromancers have different scar patterns, and monks have scalp tattoos.  There’s other classes, but I just thought it was a nice touch. 

(CW)TB

I thought of myself, a select group of friends, and a minority of Penny Arcade readers as the only people who would find something like Silent Storm delicious - but I guess it’s possible I was wrong.  Somebody is buying these, at least, enough to sustain a niche title, and they appear to be

We just read about their new tactical tie in with Night Watch, and as a turn based game which leverages a world of modern fantasy it can accurately be described as my bailiwick.  Today, they announced the followup to Silent Storm itself - a more complete role-playing experience called Hammer & Sickle that takes place after the world war.  It is as though a lever became stuck somehow and a machine began to spit out tactical games at a remarkable rate. 

The only issues I have with Nival games have to do with their completely inadequate localization.  Understand that I am paying them a kindness when I describe it in that fashion.  When it was rare to see an entry in the genre, particularly one built on serviceable technology, I was willing to put up with a lot more.  It’s something they’re going to have to start taking seriously. 

(CW)TB