Don't remember who the Merch is? Well then take a look at this comic.

It's only just occurred to me that what we do each year now around this time is to obliterate Christmas with an extended storyline. 

Severe time constraints remain in effect as I'm sure you can imagine, and so - in an almost calgonian sense - I luxuriate in each unfettered moment I am  allowed in those simulated realms.  I've purchased and installed City of Villains to this end, as creating characters has become in a way my game of choice. 

This was true before as well, when I lost myself (as sometimes happens) in City of Heroes.  But trying to create compelling villains is actually a much more difficult affair than I realized.  I'll go into that at some other time.  I doubt very seriously you want to hear about my character over the course of several excruciating paragraphs. 

My character John Legion.  Ahem!

I had it in mind to try and create a final run on the Child's Play wishlists, but I don't know how exactly you could make this year a more extraordinary success.  We're at over $420,000 already.   I suppose I could exhort you to take us to $430,000, and don't let me dissuade you, but money is still coming in from companies and sites that pitched in which will take us very near to a "cool half-mil."  My private objective was for Child's Play to reach a million dollars in donations over three years, and it's already done that.  Of course, I say it has already done that, but it doesn't have the power to do anything.  You have done it. 

We aren't very well equipped these days to manage truly unironic sentiment.  When we are overwhelmed by emotion, I believe it is the custom to make a very minute, nearly undetectable gesture - preferably inside a coat pocket or in a dark closet, hidden from view.  Well, as a purveyor of bulk negativity the rest of the year, let me thank you in the most genuine, most absolute terms the hypertext markup language will allow.  When I imagine the respite you have provided thousands of young people, the notion is so massive that I am nearly crushed beneath it.  

(CW)TB out.

mr. pibb and red vines equals crazy delicious

This Live Journal entry has some nice shots from the Child’s Play charity dinner. I brought my camera but I was so busy all night I didn’t get a chance to snap any shots. I’m glad someone was able to take some good shots. He’s also got a nice write up about his experience at the dinner.

Last night we delivered a little Christmas present to our Horde friends. Well we didn’t give them a present so much as we slaughtered them out in the Western Plaguelands and then chased them all the way back to the Under City before finally hijacking one of their zeppelins. Merry Christmas you filthy animals!

I'm not sure exactly what it is.  It could be the cold.  It could be the long-ass nights and almost infinitesimal daylight.  But every year 'round this time, defenses are low.  And from the shadows, like a...  like a shadow, doth that glittering serpent Continuity make himself known. 

Ebert Movieguy made a splash in our realm a couple weeks ago suggesting that videogames weren't now art, and couldn't be art because their interactivity disallows firm authorial intent.  I don't think that's a particularly strong point, particularly these days where what the author intends with their work is just a single azure twinkle in the manifold Lite-Brite of interpretation.

The conversation these ideas spawned has actually continued on his site in three (3) installments.  I find it almost incalculably boring.  Every now and then you get a nice turn of phrase, but it's so clear that the entire "conflict" isn't over core issues but over a syntactical clusterfuck like the definition of art.  Something tells me that Roger Ebert's letter column isn't going to get to the bottom of that one, but I have been called a cynic.

It is a conversation we have had and re-had with slight alterations any time some mass media know-nothing doesn't give "us" the respect we imagine ourselves entitled to.  But we have the conversation about some high-flown extrapolation of the real issue when I think the basic topic is somewhat more terrestrial.  

I don't think that all games aspire to be art, just as all movies don't.  Now we call comics sequential art, because they've gone through this cultural hazing and come out the other side emblazoned with the imprimatur of civilization.  But does the entire Marvel line-up constitute a body of bold works?  Probably not, but it doesn't have to.  It's disingenuous to refer to the most primitive, arcade exercises when trying to disprove the narrative potential of a medium, but that's what you get when you chat with people who don't know what they're fucking talking about.

Here's what I think the discussion has skipped over:  I don't think that engineering, of which I consider game design a subset, is considered an art form by most people.  It may be because I am something of a nerd, or it may be that my own work is so meager that I want the definition of art expanded so that it will apply to me.  It might also be that I have had strange experiences with well made, almost psychic bits of technology that I found powerful.  But I simply accept that the cleverness of inventive language or visual composition or a stirring string movement has some engineering analog. 

Look at something like Final Fantasy, which is a single machine - a machine designed to produce amusement - with some traditional expressive elements that no-one would even consider disproving as art.  Uematsu is an unbelievable composer, Amano is a powerfully expressive artist - if you were to combine their contributions, do they somehow cease being art?   Now, if characters are created to give the art and music context, does our construct lose the potential to communicate meaning?  I think that's a hard case to make.  But when Sakaguchi introduces rules to govern world behaviors and resolve conflicts, allowing the player to collaborate with the course of events, now the whole thing becomes tawdry, somehow? 

Anyway, that's what I was thinking about.

(CW)TB out.

chalk marks in a rainstorm

Shirts bearing the Goldfarmer, Aggro, /spit, and Dupe designs all just hit the store in sizes I am told suit "the ladies."

I don't know if it is important to you, but I have seen this sort of warning at other comics:  Monday is the cut-off date for two day shipping, and Wednesday is the cutoff date for overnight.  Please internalize this deep wisdom.

(CW)TB

Rise of Nations was a great game, but if you were flipping through screenshots seeking out some new addiction it wouldn't have stood out - you'd get the impression that you had played "that game" before.

It's hard to dismiss Rise of Legends in the same way.  Big Huge Games could probably have put out another Rise of Nations in the same vein and done alright, but instead they chose to go completely batshit insane and I think we're all the better for it.

(CW)TB

All eight pages of our Prince of Persia comic are now online. The script is by Tycho the drawings are by me and the colors are by Joe Pekar. Let me know what you think.

As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has some issues.  As a model of how and where distributed intellect fails, it's almost shockingly comprehensive. 

When we were first considering making Epic Legends Of The Hierarchs available as a publically manageable satirical metanarrative, we dropped the basic timeline on Wikipedia because I liked the way their software went about things.  Of course, a phalanx of pedants leapt into action almost immediately to scour - from the sacred corpus of their data - our revolting fancruft. 

That's okay with me.  I wasn't aware they thought they were making a real encyclopedia for big people at the time, and if I had, I'd have sought out one of the many other free solutions.  I had seen the unbelievably detailed He-Man and Pokémon entries and assumed - like any rational person would - that Pokémaniacs were largely at the rudder of the institution.

I am almost certain that - while they prune their deep mine of trivia - they believe themselves to be engaged in the unfolding of humanity's Greatest Working. 

Reponses to criticism of Wikipedia go something like this:  the first is usually a paean to that pure democracy which is the project's noble fundament.  If I don't like it, why don't I go edit it myself?  To which I reply:  because I don't have time to babysit the Internet.   Hardly anyone does.  If they do, it isn't exactly a compliment. 

Any persistent idiot can obliterate your contributions.  The fact of the matter is that all sources of information are not of equal value, and I don't know how or when it became impolitic to suggest it.  In opposition to the spirit of Wikipedia, I believe there is such a thing as expertise.

The second response is:  the collaborative nature of the apparatus means that the right data tends to emerge, ultimately, even if there is turmoil temporarily as dichotomous viewpoints violently intersect.  To which I reply:  that does not inspire confidence.  In fact, it makes the whole effort even more ridiculous.  What you've proposed is a kind of quantum encyclopedia, where genuine data both exists and doesn't exist depending on the precise moment I rely upon your discordant fucking mob for my information.

(CW)TB out.

i'm not sorry if i do detest you

DOA is very much not our series when it comes to fighters.  I play them, because they are beautiful to look at - but the fighting has always felt pretty loose to me in comparison to a Soul Calibur or a Guilty Gear.  All this said, it's a game that gets popped in at social gatherings because it's extremely accessible. 

Frankie did a really great write-up on Spartan-458, the Halo character that ended up in Dead or Alive 4.  There's some information about the way an armored cyborg might fight, etc.  I found it delicious.

(CW)TB

Fans of Epic Legends have put together a few auctions for Child's Play, if you're interested - custom garments which I'm told adhere to every Item Law.

If you are currently naked, this is certainly one way to resolve that.

(CW)TB

I am still recovering from last night’s dinner and auction for Child’s Play. To say that the evening was a huge success would be the understatement of the year. Just to give you an idea of how incredible last night was let me give you some numbers. At the dinner last year we raised just over $17,000 which we thought was a respectable amount. This year we raised $82,100.

Typically Gabe just scowls when stubborn traces of French II surface in a conversation, but yesterday he decided instead to mine la belle langue for his own perverse ends.

Most of us are probably still familiar with the term "Foxed," I imagine - it is the process by which your Aliens mod, done in reverence, a natural outgrowth of your obsessive enthusiasm for a corporation's intellectual property, gets you sent a terse communique on official letterhead.  The old Cease and Desist, as it is called.  No actual foxes are involved.  I know there are still furs who read the site on occasion, and I apologize if I got your hopes up.

Since it is usually my presumption that things will go terribly awry, off the rails so to speak, possibly off a cliff to be submerged in lava, whenever I hear about a fan project - pure of heart, as I said, done only in reverence - I try to avoid mentioning it.  I hate that, but if the powers that be can pinpoint a single S&M Strawberry Shortcake amongst the high-grown wilds of Interspace, I don't want to be the one to instigate a good and proper foxing.  Again, just so there's no confusion -  it's a neologism, jargon:  class, legal.  No foxes.

So it's actually kind of fun to mention King's Quest IX: The Silver Lining, because Vivendi Universal has (in what I find to be a startling manuever) given them the go ahead.

I hope that this "royal seal" draws talent out of hedges and holes that might otherwise have simply observed the process from a safe distance, outside what you might call the effective range of the legal apparatus.  Such a game is like a no-cost expedition into the dark twists of Sierra's sleeping archive.  If it produces a hit, a strike somewhere in that twilight realm, they already own the rights and can make excellent decisions regarding the franchise in the future.  

Halo Zero I saw mentioned over at 1up, a sidecroller like Codename: Gordon but locked into the Halo franchise instead of Walve's own scrumptious continuity.  I don't know if it gets much bigger, in raw brand terms, than Halo - and I haven't heard word one about retaliation of any sort.  It's pretty neat, and I get the impression that H0 is a codification (perhaps?) of Eric Nylund's prequel novel, The Fall of Reach.  It was made in France, which I think lends this post a nice sort of concenptual continuity.

(CW)TB out.

sun so hot i froze to death

Don't forget, Brooklynites:  Tonight is the night of Fünde Razor!

(CW)TB

A lot to cover:

First, our newest comic strip has been made available - with a strip where Gabriel performs help desk functions for his own father, Penny Arcade has become twisted hybrid of the foul PVP Online and the inscrutable Illiad's User Friendly.  It's hard not to believe that this sort of thing doesn't presage our final days.  At long last: the onrushing darkness, the ignominious end!

Second, the finalists in the 2006 Independent Games Festival have been announced.  This almost always means good times, as many of these things have either free demos or are simply free altogether.  You have no doubt already heard of Darwinia, either here on the site or as a part of their recent Steam announcement, but I'd imagine it's the exception.  Strange fighting games where the object is to pile bodies high enough to escape is only one of the new ideas I saw over there.

There is a game called Thomas and The Magic Words that I enjoyed.   Pay close attention to the second bullet point:


YES.  Fuck yes. 

Picture something like Scrabble, something scrabbelian, where the words you lay down become tiny bridges for a young wizard (!!!).  Clearly, this is what the medium has been working toward.  After entering the word Gourmet, I actually began to hyperventilate.

Third, the title of today's strip is from a song off of Pond's album Rock Rollection. 

(CW)TB

the waters close over my head