I hate to do it but let’s talk about Jack Thompson for just a moment. He’s been relatively quite since our last encounter but with Bully on the horizon he’s popped up again. His recent appearance on G4 has everyone talking about him and that is exactly how Jack wants it. The man is a media whore and by putting him on television you’re just giving him what he wants. Not only that but G4 decided to put him on television with two people who are incapable of going toe to toe with him. Whatever you want to say about Jack, the guy is a lawyer and he knows how to handle himself in these sorts of debates. We all think Jack is nuts but Adam is the only person on that tape who comes off as being crazy. The guy can’t even preach to the choir for God’s sake. Mark seems like a decent guy and he stays calm but I don’t think he did any preparation for this. You can’t go up against someone like Jack and just “wing it”. Jack keeps is cool and essentially runs the show. G4 should have just given Jack his own half hour program. Maybe only schedule twelve re-runs of X-Play and then just slip in the Jack Thompson show.

Penny Arcade Armadeaddon continues - into territory more horrifying than you could possibly imagine.

Finally some video of this game hits.  I found the fourth one pretty frightening. 

Defcon is the latest game from Introversion, the ones that brought us Uplink and then Darwinia.  All I've seen of it thus far was the intriguing WOPRian screenshots they had released - I've essentially only had those shots and my strong faith in the developer to keep me warm on cold nights.

(CW)TB

I had a lot of requests for a wallpaper based on Frank and the last panel of today’s strip. So here it is:

Ever since our brief but torrid alliance with the game at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, we have been trying to figure out how to work Dead Rising into the strip. Producing comics about games we despise is a good deal easier, as our browbeaten foes can attest - that array fires iron slugs from our orbital platform in torrents unceasing. Funny things happen all the time in games we enjoy, but when trying to distill this quantity sometimes the muse is reticent. This said, I do believe we have discovered the path.

I wonder if lightning flashed when they came up with this. Did the lights dim? Also, I imagine shaking arms raised in triumph around an oval of rich boardroom oak. They signed me up for some kind of "payment insurance," and if you do not read every sheet inside their twenty pound envelope you might miss it. I would love to know how much money they make, annually, because people have chosen to live their lives as opposed to scrutinize every paragraph of their cyclopean document for hidden treacheries.

We only have a taste of Saints Row in the demo that was made available, but that taste was odd. There was also an aftertaste. They're trying so hard to produce an "authentic" "urban" voice that it strikes the ear as parody. It sounds like one of those soundboards you might use to do a prank call - not that it will matter overmuch to the target demographic.

We ran up against the limit in the last playthrough.  We kept leaving the demo early before, sometimes after what felt like pretty significant amounts of time, which made it difficult to tell.  It hardly matters - independent of larger storylines or light character advancement available in the retail product, you'll know in a couple minutes if this is the sort of thing you could do for hours on end - for example, do you want to stuff a dismembered limb in a zombie's slavering maw, and then take a funny picture of him?  It's a course of action I endorse without reservation.

(CW)TB
 

I know that Dead Rising uses time limits in the actual game, but I don't know where I came up with the idea there was a time limit on the demo itself.  It's a limited area, but there's still a lot of fun to be had there, to say nothing of strange weapons to discover.  I left the mall and got a cutscene which ended the demo, but I'll have to play it again right now to see if there's anything approaching a hard limit otherwise. 

Sorry to be a source of misinformation.  I hate lies, and love truth!  Honest!  That has been my policy since 1672, when I was apprenticed to a sorcerer in Prussia.

(CW)TB

Someone asked me this week why I only seem to post about Penny Arcade related business lately. It’s a fair question and I guess the answer is we just have a lot of shit going on right now. Someone needs to talk about it and honestly I don’t mind doing it. So here I go:

You basically need to watch this now.

(CW)TB

Just one more heads up that online pre-registration for PAX 06 ends tomorrow at 6:30 PM.

San Diego is an opportunity not only for wookiees and slave girls to be joined in holy matrimony, but also for readers to suggest we bring this or that back into rotation. Div has been requested many times. Also Annarchy, who will return the moment we can do her justice. Today, the vocal Twisp & Catsby lobby gets their due.

When Gamespot did that recent piece on the new practice mode being introduced in the sequel, I was hoping there'd be a couple track announcements to go alongside - it was not to be. Luckily, IGN just dropped some coverage of an Australian event where three new songs are being made available - Anthrax ("Madhouse") and Stone Temple Pilots ("Trippin' On A Hole In A Paper Heart"), to say nothing of that most Motley of Croos ("Shout At The Devil"). They have videos of each one, but these aren't straight gameplay vids - they're more promotional vehicles. The one for STP is probably the best of the three from a raw information perspective, and the song looks to have some exceedingly tender gameplay.