During the writing of this strip, I was still in the grip of fever. I had spent the entire night consorting with entities of various kinds, slick with sweat, trying to figure out what to do with all the "excess nitrogen" (among other important tasks). After hours of recursive agony, I came to find myself in a canoe with a Native American. This seemed a little run of the mill as visions go, and I told him so. He seemed to find that amusing.
As near as I can tell, because the act of writing it is completely lost to me, the strip is about this - a chat with Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro about the upcoming Hobbit film, but also the untitled, entirely new film that takes place between the established trilogy and The Hobbit itself. It's a fascinating transcript, with two very human voices. These men are prodigious talents. Even so, I'm not sure I'm ready for the Tolkien equivalent of the Expanded Universe.
The arc of my enthusiasm for Army of Two must have been as mystifying to you as it was to me, but let me condense it for you: the longer I played it, the more I became immunized to the truly awful characterizations. This left me free to earn and invest money, which had an addictive, RPG quality to it. You find out fairly quickly that the weapon selection isn't robust enough to act as a full game, but even so, it's possible to enjoy the time you spend there - and to see it as the groundwork for a sequel that recognizes its virtues.
They have announced free content for the game, which I will happily snap up, but there is definitely something odd here. Free content from EA is completely mystifying, though I suppose it's not entirely free since it's sponsored, similar to the first maps for Gears. Even so, this is a publisher who has for years now tried to sell you things that you already have on your disc. The other thing about this "pack" is that, as near as I can tell, it's the rest of the game - what they meant to create originally, whatever they didn't complete by ship. By appearances, it includes the final showdown that the retail product lacked, and was punished for in reviews. Bizarre.
Joystiq tells us that Target is selling twenty dollars worth of MS points for fifteen dollars, twenty dollars being a very useful sum. Ahem hem.
(CW)TB out.
