Penny Arcade

Human beings wanted to know how Gabriel losing his pants could possibly lead to continuity.  Now you know.

Weird things kept happening this weekend.

A while ago, God only knows how long but a very long time ago, I was looking at GBA games at EB when a person recognized me.  I do not own a blue shirt like the one in the comic, nor do I look like Tycho, so maybe he checked one of the Cam Portals I am on?  In any case.  This was one of the first times anyone had just come up to me and said “Hi” outside of some event, so I will admit that it made me a little agitated.  I can produce a reasonable facsimile of “personable” virtually on demand, but I developed this weird mannerism on the spot that never really left me.  I rub the right side of my jaw with my thumb.  I don’t do it all the time, just when I get tense, which is…  Most of the time.  On Friday, I’d been thinking about that encounter.  Does that guy just think I shuffle around public places like malls, rubbing my jaw with my thumb?  It made me want to do it immediately, just rub the right side of my face raw.  So when I got out of X-Men 2 - awesome, no longer review is required - there is this guy standing by the railing, I knew it was him, and I went up and said I’d been thinking about him that day and that I rarely, if ever, do a lot of rubbing on that side of my face.   

That is Bizarre Scenario #1. 

Bizarre Scenario #2:

I know a guy whose roommate knows a guy whose roommate works at Sucker Punch, which makes us practically best friends.  He was having a party I guess, on Saturday, and under ordinary circumstances maybe I would have gone willingly, but I’d been playing Planetside for three or four hours and I was sort of focused on that.  I angrily consented to Brenna’s request, but I told her that if the Faro Technology Plant fell to New Conglomerate dogs, she was to blame - and she was okay with that.  It felt like a waking dream as I entered the party, seeing the guitarist from Seattle hip-hop group Optimus Rhyme, and lots of other people who obscuring my view of the liquor.  I saw a man walk through the room a couple times and look at me with what seemed like familiarity, but I was talking to the guitarist guy, and besides - it couldn’t have been who I thought it was, because that would have been impossible.  Having exhausted the kitchen’s meager store of intoxicants, I began to prowl the house for a fresh supply.  Parting the beaded curtain to the Soul Funk Dance Party, I saw another kitchen, containing Seagram’s Dry Gin and also Monarch Vodka, which often goes by its trade name “Poison.”  Without a mixer in sight, I poured myself a straight gin and began to seriously consider where my life had taken this turn.  The mysterious stranger who was Tim Fucking Schafer approached me then and introduced himself as such.  You might recall that I stole his yo-yo, he certainly does, but we were able to discuss other matters without returning to the Yo-Yo Issue overmuch, which I appreciated.  He talked about how it’s all well and good to take three years making a game, but that he would like to leverage the artistic and development talents of a full studio to make episodic games no more than perhaps four hours in length at smaller intervals.  Of course, I support this one-hundred percent - not just because Tim Schafer is my hero, but because I think as technology improves it gets less and less feasible for teams to create games as we know them.  Tim then got out his cell phone and pretended that his ride called him, and that he had to go, which was nice because it allowed me to save face when he was essentially just ditching me.

Sunday was fairly normal.

(CW)TB out.

no-one needs to know

Dammit, I thought I had time.

We had some ads up for a site called Game Table Online, and the concept for that site is pretty hot.  I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m into tabletop strategy, weird board and card games, all of that - but Gabe is impossible to get into that kind of stuff, and what’s more, I don’t always see the people I know that play my kinds of games. 

Essentially, these guys license and code these strange games for play online.  Go check it out, they’ve even got a few CheapAss games coming - I don’t know.  It just seemed like a really good idea to me. 

(CW)TB

Phone no worky so I call the phone company:

Gabe: Hello I have a problem with my long distance phone service. When I dial a long distance number it says “the number you are calling from has been disconnected.”

I guess I will call the local place back now. This is so much fun.

-Gabe out

Are you going to talk about that “doodling” game?  Or what?

(CW)TB

Well I can’t play it yet so I can’t really talk about it.

Here is the deal. I got a copy of a game called Magic Pengel: The Quest for Color. It’s a new game from Agetec with a really interesting hook. The problem is it’s a pre-release copy and I can’t play it on my regular old PS2.

The game has you draw doodles and then battle your doodles against other doodles in arena style combat using an enhanced Rock Paper Scissors type of system. Your doodles are rendered in 3D and can even be given simple animations. Individual doodles have different attributes and abilities which can be upgraded over time using color gems and other items. I’ve read over the instruction manual that came with the game a few times and I’m super intrigued by the concept. I just wish I could play the damn thing.

I am assuming I need some kind of super special PS2 that plays these sorts of games but I have no clue how to get my hands on one. I am gonna make some calls today and see if I can’t track one down.  I’ll let you know if I have any success.

-Gabe out

I’ve been hearing about “Xbox Live 2.0” for quite a while, now - some of the ideas they’ve implemented might even have come from that “Xbox Live Boot Camp” event we went to a while back, where they seemed fairly genuine in their interest as they asked our opinions.  So, lobbies separate from any game with voice support to get games started up.  A very cool feature, but check this shit out.

I saw this entire story mentioned on Evil Avatar, so let me give them their propers first.  The quote they quoted talked about how this Xbox Upgrade would allow the console to grab music files from your PC and so forth.  Very awesome, but get a load of this:

With the new upgrade, Xbox users would also be able to transfer properly encoded video from their personal computers to the Xbox and view that video on a television screen.

Holy shit.  When they say “properly encoded,” I’m sure that’s just another way to say “Windows Media Player 9.”  It doesn’t matter.  This seems like a media pirate’s most delicious dream! 

(CW)TB  

This site is about games right?

I played the demo for Lost Kingdoms 2 over at EB the other day. The first one is on my top ten list of all time favorite games for sure. The demo for the sequel knocked me out just like I hoped it would. All the stuff I loved from the first game was there except now the battles happen in the actual environments in real time. No more random encounters that take you out of the action. All the card battles happen right there in the level. Plus there are puzzles that you can only pass by using cards. The graphics have been taken up a notch and I saw some bad ass new monsters and cards. I can’t fucking wait. The only thing that could make it better would be online play but they gotta save something for Lost Kingdoms 3 I guess. Anyway you should hit your EB and check it out.

I played the Elite Force 2 demo and I thought it rocked. I am not a huge Star Trek fan but I think that’s mostly because they have totally fucked that franchise in the ass. The guys doing Elite Force are showing a side of the Star Trek universe that is actually fresh and interesting. Personal transporter buffers that you can store weapons and equipment in. I mean, that is just cool as hell.

I played the Unreal 2 demo and it was only okay I thought. If that was designed to make me want to purchase the full version, it failed. Aside from the graphics I could have played that game 4 years ago.

Could you do me a favor and click on our sponsors?

-Gabe out

On the PC, I seek out cool utilities that provide rich functions all the time, but apparently I need to widen my view a bit and examine what is available homebrewed on Consoles as well.

Damp humans have sieged my inbox since the recent post about upgraded Xbox Media functions, and made me aware of truly wond’rous apps that will make your consoles sing.  Observe:

Qcast Tuner for the Playstation 2 allows browsing and playing media of almost any type you can imagine from a remote machine on the network - essentially, all the stuff I was talking about for the Xbox.  Looks like that runs about fifty bucks, what you’d expect to pay for virtually any other software on the system.

Obviously it wouldn’t give you access to enhanced Live lobbies and so forth - and a modded Xbox can get your machine blacklisted from the service altogether - but the Xbox Media Player is already out, provided your Xbox has a mod chip.  I must admit to being completely entranced by this software. 

(CW)TB