Gabriel has apparently made an enemy, perhaps I should say another one, as he does every few months the site is in operation. The man in question can barely put one word after the other by the time he is done with his bizarre soliloquy, rage at my cohort had swallowed his intellect whole. Now he understands one tenth of what it's like to interact with Michael Fucking Krahulik every day.

Basically, I think of myself as an arms dealer. Like Destro.

The train of benevolence keeps chugging along, trailing behind it cars of good cheer.  Occasionally, a toy will bounce from these heaped cars and land in the grass alongside the track.  And, when this happens, know that blooms and juicy wild fruits burst from the spot. 

We have ticked forward the joy thermometer that we maintain on the official Child's Play site, bringing the total to $330,000 dollars.  That's steady.  I expect a few significant leaps as we enter December, because as a fully peer-to-peer charity event there are considerable donations currently tied up in local nodes which are still growing.  Also, the Child's Play Charity Dinner & Auction - now an annual staple - is not only a fantastic time, but has been a tremendously successful event in years past.  It's less than two weeks away, so if you'd like to attend please let us know.

(CW)TB

Robert suggested we create Facebook accounts, I think in an effort to establish that we were "down" with whatever "new jives" the kids were flexing on the mean streets. I refused. Gabriel buckled, and the bullshit that ensued verified my initial assessment: that maintaining Facebook would quickly constitute another job. Of which I already have several.

I don't want to make a huge deal out of it, but yesterday Penny Arcade turned nine years old. This seems like a good time to thank you all for my totally awesome job. I hope you'll let me do it for another nine years.

Mass Effect is an odd game. I find the overly complex/poorly designed menus really frustrating. Also there's the almost complete lack of a tutorial, frequent loads and an auto save feature I'd describe as punishing. I actually almost gave up on the game all together. I'm glad I didn't though.  I just wrapped up a pretty major mission and I finally feel like I have a pretty good grip on the combat. I'm not 100% sure but I think I actually enjoyed myself. Entering a menu still makes me want to snap my controller in half but I think I can put up with that to get this story. It's a really odd game. It sort of oscillates between being totally amazing and sort of sucking. I'm not sure I've ever seen anything else like it.

In my opinion, the best part of the game is the branching dialogue trees. I find myself slogging through combat sometimes just so I can see the next conversation. If you end up digging these directed cut scenes as much as I do you might enjoy our latest shirt offering.

We've talked about the hacking, and the challenges the game has pulling everything off the disc. They don't really teach you how to play the game, either. At first, because the game often looks and feels like a shooter, it is hard to know if the shooting is tremendously difficult or poorly executed. Once you start building your character and get a handle on the deeper systems, it falls into place.

At the end of November last year, Child's play had raised $260,000 dollars, which is super noble and I think we can all agree that it is a lot.  At any rate, it was a lot.  Now, it's shameful.  Because only two weeks into this month, we're already sitting at just under 200 kilodollars.

Here's my order for this year, and I might have overdone it, but once I saw that total it seemed like the bar was set pretty high.  Behold:

You might have already noticed a new button under the comic strips. the "Buy A Print" feature is something we've been working on for a long long time and it's finally ready to go. So for $9.95 you get a high res 11x17 print of the comic strip on a really nice heavy stock paper. These prints are made directly from my original PSD files so they look awesome. Kiko took some pictures this morning so you could see exactly what you're getting.

Mass Effect is odd in that it is simultaneously an argument for and against the 360. Utilizing their northern devilry, BioWare managed to jam a ridiculous amount of content onto a single platter. They've realized their cinematic ambitions in a way that will deeply alter your expectations, and they've done so in real-time sequences that probably kept the game from ballooning to three or four standard DVDs like other RPGs on the system.

I want to talk about Assassins Creed but first I need to get something out of the way. I have a lot to say about the game and I want to talk about some of the bad reviews it's getting but I want to make sure everyone understands I'm not saying this because of the comic we did for them. So I'm going to link you to an old set of news posts about Prince of Persia 2. Feel free to read those and come back if you like.

Now I'm going to tell you how advertising on PA works. Every other game site out there takes ads for whatever game they can get. It doesn't matter if it's a pile of crap, if the publisher pays for the spot IGN or Gamespot or whoever will run the ad. That's fine but that's not how we do it and the news posts you just read are part of the reason why.

We were huge fans of the first Prince of Persia game so when Ubi came to us and wanted to run ads for the second we said yes. We had no idea they were going to completely fuck it over. So from then on we started demanding playable copies of games before we'd agree to advertising. No matter how early the build we tell the publishers that unless we can see it played in front of us or play it ourselves we won't run ads for it. Obviously a lot can still go wrong during development but we make the best decisions we can. We do not think of the ads you see on our page as ads. They are recommendations and we try extremely hard to insure that anything we put over there is worth your time. When Prince of Persia 2 came out and we saw that it was crap we said as much on the site. Ads for the game appeared right next to those news posts slamming it. Needless to say Ubi wasn't very happy and Robert got some angry phone calls but our loyalty is to our readers not the people paying the bills. We explained to Ubi that the reason our ads perform better than any other site out there is because our readers trust us and that means we have to admit when something we advertise doesn't turn out as good as we hoped. Obviously they understood because we're still advertising their games but like I said this isn't the way other sites operate. I actually give Ubi a lot of credit for not just telling us to fuck off and buying more ads on IGN and Gamespy with the extra money.

I'm telling you all this because I want you to understand that if Assassins Creed actually was a 7.0 game I'd tell you. I also want you to know that when I tell you it's fucking incredible I'm not bullshitting you because we're running ads for the game.

There are about four or five reviews of the game with scores in the low to mid 7's. I want to cover some of the common complaints these reviewers had in case anyone out there is worried about them.

Many of the reviews say that the ending is bad. Obviously I don't want to give away any spoilers but I will say that the final confrontation was exciting and gratifying. It was an extremely satisfying ending to this chapter of the game. Chapter is the important word here. This is a huge story, probably a trilogy at least. The game does end with a cliff hanger and it certainly sets up the rest of the arc but that's how the first part of any multi part story ends. If Star Wars had ended with Luke jumping into his X-Wing to go take on the Death Star that would be a shitty fucking ending. It doesn't though, Luke destroys it and then we get hints about what's in store for our heroes. I'm telling you right now Altair destroys his Death Star.

Mass Effect is good: I have already established this in the post, and my glowing appraisal echoes what you feel in your own heart to be true. But it has things to answer for, and it will be made to in a new series called Nitpicking.

I got an interesting mail this morning from Daniel Erickson the principal lead writer over at Bioware Austin. He says they have an opening in their writing staff and he's having a hard time filling it. Daniel wanted to know if he could put the word out here on Penny Arcade and I'm more than happy to help. So do you want to write for the new Bioware MMO?

----------------------------

Hey Guys,

So here's the situation we're in. BioWare games require a great deal of
writing. Storylines, world building, characters, journals - and about a
bazillion lines of dialogue. What makes my job harder is not only does
all of this writing have to be high quality - something not always
demanded in our industry - it can only be done by writers who understand
the complexities of interactive fiction. Take the average screenwriter
who doesn't play RPGs, place him in front of the writing tool from
Neverwinter Nights and you'll get a linear story with a complete lack of
Player agency and no interesting decisions. Just trying to explain the
concept behind writing without a protagonist to someone who has never
even been a dungeon master can be like showing card tricks to a dog.

Which brings me to the current problem. The BioWare MMO is the largest
thing we've ever done by leaps and bounds. We're talking a double digit
writing staff working for years (yes we've already been working for well
over a year). Now I've realized I need even more writers and I've got no
reliable way of predicting where they're going to come from. In the
history of the company, we've had published fantasy authors,
screenwriters and editors all wash out of BioWare's training program. On
the flip side, we've had fantastic kids right of college, an ex CNN
producer and a former gift wrapping clerk from Singapore all succeed in
the BioWare writer family. Previous job of lead writer for Baldur's Gate
2, the highest rated PC RPG in history? Travelodge manager.

So yes, we're shaking the usual trees and our HR folks are turning over
all the rocks they can think of but I had to go through over three
hundred qualified candidates to find the team I have now so a lot of
those trees have done already been shook. With that level of challenge
around finding writers, I want to throw out an open invitation for
anyone out there that thinks might be the strange combination of RPG
fiend and talented writer to grab a copy of Neverwinter Nights and start
putting together a writing sample. I don't care if you can script, just
put three guys in a field and attach conversations to them. Make the
plot compelling, write the NPCs as real people who could exist in a
believable world even if the PC wasn't there, give me an interesting
choice or two and you're done -- easily something can be done over a
weekend and there's a ton of great community support online if you're
really tech deficient.

Anyone out there want to write for the game company with three of the
top five rated RPGs of all time on their biggest project ever?

Head here: BioWare Jobs

The Arcadia Battle Academy is meeting again tomorrow night. We're meeting every other Tuesday now at the Comic Stop. If you're interested, it's 6pm to 8pm and it's all Pokemon all night. I just wanted to post a reminder to all those attending that the new Secret Wonders expansion is nowavaliable . I know some of you guys are working hard to beef up your starter decks. The most important thing you can do is get a good bunch of supporters in there. Secret Wonders actually introduces some great new supporters like Roseanne's Research and Team Galactic's Mars. It's also got two new Lvl. X Pokemon for the Psychic and Dark decks out there. I think we've got about twenty people right now, kids and adults. We'd love to have more though. If you're into the card game or you want to get into it you should definitely come by.

I'd also like to direct everyones attention towards a couple Child's Play auctions.

The first is a PAX 2007 signed Guitar Hero Guitar. I actually remember seeing this thing making the rounds at PAX this year and the list of autographs is pretty impressive. Here's a "mostly complete list":

* Tycho and Gabe
* Wil Wheaton
* Jonathan Coulton
* Caitlin Glass (Winry from FMA)
* Gus Sorola, Geoff Ramsey, and Burnie Burns (Simmons, Grif, and Church from RvB)
* Harmonix Employees (Makers of Guitar Hero): Alex Rigopulos (Co Founder), Sean Baptiste (Community Director), Dan Teasdale (Senior Programmer)
* Dave Grossman (Co-Creator of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and the new Sam and Max)
* Ron Gilbert (Co-Creator of Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion)
* Members of Optimus Rhyme
* Members of The MiniBosses
* Liz Enthusiasm from Freezepop
* MC Frontalot

The auction actually ends tomorrow so if you're interested best to get over there now.

The other auction is for all your WOW players out there. Shelbi of the Bronze Kettle is auctioning off her ridiculously cute Warcraft illustrations. You'll get a drawing of your character that you can use however you like as well as a little charm you can attach to the mobile device of your choice.

The auction ends on the 15th so follow this link for more details and to make a bid.

Also a reminder that you can now purchase tickets for the Child's Play dinner and Auction. Details and tickets here.

Thanks to everyone out there in the community supporting Child's Play this year. We should have our first update to the donation bar soon.

-Gabe out

Everyone is grabbing Super Mario Galaxy, right? Right?