Close


Too Much of a Good Thing?

Too Much of a Good Thing?

Look, we love Tim Schafer too, but this is just getting silly.

Learn More
Ping Pong as card game

Ping Pong as card game

The design of Penny Arcade’s Paint the Line

Learn More
Hitting gold on the bus:

Hitting gold on the bus:

An early look at Devolver Digital’s Dungeon Hearts

Learn More
The 2012 Child’s Play Invitational Golf Tournament

The 2012 Child’s Play Invitational Golf Tournament

Join us June 8th at the Angeles National Golf Club in Sunland, CA to have fun and raise money for the cause.

Learn More
First Party v2.0 Polo

First Party v2.0 Polo

Our supple, 100% cotton First Party polo shirts are back with some familiar features and important upgrades.

Learn More


Whenever I read things like this I always feel as though I’m going a little crazy, but it’s possible I am more sensitive to shit of this particular variety.

I’m susceptible to ideas, in the pathogenic sense - I catch them.  The condition that follows exhibits the normal pattern of infection.  There is exposure, incubation, fever, recovery, and dormancy.  Topics as random as Scientology, turntablism, Grime, coffee, or hive insects have plundered whole weeks, perforating restful sleep with their insinuations and truncated revelations.  I’ve finally emerged from a 50 Cent phase, weighed down with truly useless trivia that I suspect will not improve my life.  There are indentations in the surface of my mind which are receptive to certain shapes of information, and there is no guarding against it.

One such “shape” is corrupted or malformed communication, of which this SyFy announcement is almost certainly a case.  My cognitive apparatus is designed to digest language quickly, and so when I stumble into some mutated corporate phraseology it’s like eating a meal which suddenly transforms into to washers, bolts, and strands of oily bike-chain.  I have to disassemble my entire prefrontal cortex and put it back together.  Read this paragraph and the one before it to get a sense of what that looks like.

We managed to create a comic sometime before I blacked out.

As a focus of consumer rage, it seems as though Capcom’s Premium Versus DLC might have come off boil.  The conversation was exceedingly strange, acting as a coda to the overall bizarre coverage of a game that is a triumph of execution.

Many of the arguments against the DLC are, simply stated, either made in bad faith or delivered from a position of ignorance.  Resident Evil 5 offers value commensurate with or exceeding its price.  Uncharted lasts half as long, and offers no multiplayer of any kind.  Nor does Dead Space.  Or Bioshock.  When talking about “Triple A” titles this generation, there’s no way to credibly assert that Resident Evil 5 doesn’t represent a complete product.

The Biohazard 5 disc on my desk, the review copy I played to completion, is dated January 7th, 2009.  Given the quality of this build, it is entirely possible that these bits went into production as the retail game now available in stores.  It didn’t even include an online Mercenaries mode, which was added free of charge, but of course there’s no room for that data in the accepted narrative.  With no evidence of the fact, dark assertions that content was somehow withheld currently reign supreme.  That’s actually not an argument, it’s divination.  Please put the wand down.

Competitive multiplayer was never announced as a feature, and was never in the product’s charter, which was to produce a co-operative Resident Evil.  In general, DLC is expansive: it offers greater width.  More of what you have currently.  Except in rare cases, it doesn’t extend the product into areas beyond its original concept.  Experiments and new interpretations of the games I own are precisely what I want out of downloadable content.

(CW)TB out.

in that instant, it started to pour