Penny Arcade

I did refer to the Nintendo DS as a “useless novelty factory” at one point, which I will admit was impolite, but so many of the games that come out either don’t make good use of the device or posit some novel idea and then don’t follow through.  Kirby’s Canvas Curse has absolutely nothing to be ashamed of in this regard.  It is beautiful to look at and plays with a sensibility that feels classic from the outset.  Imagine that gaming history had followed a very different course - with pen interfaces de rigueur when the immovable tenets of platform gaming had been conceived - and you will be very near the thing.

The adorable Kirby can be tapped to dash through enemies, stealing their abilities, and once they are stolen in this way Kirby can be tapped to utilize it - but primarily you interact with our elastic hero by drawing beautiful rainbow bridges for it to roll and bounce on.  Whatever direction you draw the bridge gives it momentum, like unto a conveyor belt, and curlicue shapes can even be drawn to ream foes.  Shields can also be created from the same whimsical material.  The entire game is played with the pen, there’s no additional button presses that require “monkey paw” style hand positions to manage the stylus and whatever other gameplay fantasies the designer attempted to inflict.  So the levels just fly by as you react to situations in intuitive ways, with a level of interaction that truly requires the machine.  I love it.  I am a grown man who draws rainbows.  It should probably be me in that strip, but we prefer this formulation.   

Tried to jump on Battlegrounds with my other hand-selected gourmets and come to a final conclusion on World of Warcraft, but demand for their multiplayer battle spaces was such that one member of our guild waited two and a half hours to get into Alterac, the larger of the two areas.  We jumped into the queue and waited for a half an hour before we realized that our timer wasn’t even moving, and had on several occasions even added time.  What I’ve heard is that the wait is often caused by Alliance/Horde disparities on your server - if the balance is off, supposedly you can expect to spend a lot of time queued.  Gabe got in just before I logged out, I’ll see what he thought of it today.

The server balance thing, if that is even the problem, seems kind of intractable to me.  Personally, I don’t care if I’m fighting characters that are specific to my server or not, and I wonder if there would be some way to make the Battlegrounds themselves server agnostic.  Also, the way that you get in line for the Battlegrounds themselves doesn’t really make sense to me.  Essentially, you travel out to hell and gone, usually someplace that has no compelling content for your level, to touch a red instance gate and get in line with your party.  You’re free at that point to go wherever you want to, and it will teleport you back from wherever.  Tonight when we try, we’re going to hit the gate, hearth back, and then adventure as per usual while we run down the clock - it’s not that onerous a procedure, but I don’t understand why it’s strictly necessary to do it.  I’d love to see “recruitment” drives in major cities where I could jump in the queue, or even a form like the existing “guild charters” parties could sign and mail.  The gates I went to last night were completely crowded with people just sitting around crossing their fingers, waiting for the server to pick me, pick me when there is an entire game world in need of their heroic service.

(CW)TB out.

it ain’t no victory

So last night I waited 45 minutes to play an eight minute game of CTF in the Warsong Gulch Battleground. Those eight minutes were pretty fun but once it was all over the server booted me back out to wait in line again for another game. I guess I didn’t understand how Battlegrounds was going to work.

You can’t just go and play BG. A person couldn’t say “tonight I’m just going to play a bunch of Battlegrounds.” and then do that. It’s not like Quake or Battlefield in that way. I guess I sort of thought it would be. What you do is get yourself in the Queue and then you go off and play Wow just like normal. You do your quests and you grind your mobs and maybe once every hour or so you get to play a BG game. It seems like it’s designed to compliment your regular WOW play, rather than provide an alternative for people tired of grinding and questing. 

I quit playing wow about a month ago at level 51. I’d been playing it since early beta and I just felt like I was doing the same thing over and over again. I guess I was, I mean that’s what an MMO is all about. I think WOW is certainly the best of the MMO’s but it’s still an MMO and I can only do so many kill quests before I get tired of it. I figured BG would bring me back around to WOW because it would give me something else to do with a character I am very fond of in a world I love.  It isn’t exactly what I thought it would be though.

I can say that it has inspired me to grab those last nine levels so that I can be more useful in BG. While waiting in line tonight for some BG action I’ll probably run up to Felwood and try to grab a level or two. If nothing else my month long hiatus has given me quite a bit of rest that should make the next few levels a breeze. I’d also like to give the Alterac BG a try as I understand that one provides a much more robust play experience beyond basic CTF. I’ll give it another go tonight and probably talk more about it this week.

-Gabe out :o:

I wish I knew every particular, it’s just not possible unless somebody tells us - but at first blush DICE axing Desert Combat creator Trauma Studios after they completely renovated their franchise is ice fucking cold.

My friend Steve Bowler made a post over at Game Girl Advance that takes the notion of “Unionization as a Panacea” for the industry’s ills out behind the woodshed. 

I don’t have any balms worth applying to the games business - but when I think about the best times I’ve had with Battlefield, I want to emphasize that they came to me care of Trauma. 

(It’s now clear that it was DICE that did the axing, not EA.  I’ve noted that above.)

(CW)TB

Not too big a deal, if you wanted to you would have signed up when we bludgeoned you with it earlier - but the last day to be entered into the Omegathon II is July 1st, after which we’ll be choosing the contestants.  Pre-registration can be reached at this link.

Whoops, that link goes to the lyrics for The Mariner’s Revenge Song, by The Decemberists.  I apologize.  Here is the correct link. 

(CW)TB

I have some pictures of our new limited edition print to share. Here’s your first look at the new CTS print that will go on sale at the San Diego Comic Con.

Once again the Laser Cell technology has produced an absolutely gorgeous lithograph. This one is just missing the laser etched medallion as well as the signature card. You can see how they will eventually be fitted into the double mat down at the bottom. Pictures just don’t do justice to the actual piece. This technology produces an image that you really need to see to believe. I got mail from people who purchased the Twisp and Catsby print telling me that they were shocked when they opened it up for the first time.

With this print we’ve bumped up the print run to 750. Like before each one will be signed and numbered and will come with a certificate of authenticity. We’re also going to give you a lot more advance warning before they go on sale. We’ll have a limited number available at our booth at the San Diego Comic Con. Then we’ll be releasing the remaining prints for sale via the online store.

-Gabe out :o:

My friend ConfigSys.boy (from the Starsiege: 2845 project) dropped me a line about his own time in the Battlegrounds, which couldn’t have been more different from what we experienced.  Or couldn’t experience, because of electronic lines which recalled The Happiest Place On Earth.

Hey, just wanted to chime in briefly on your BG experience (or lack thereof as it were.)

The question then, once there are three or four lvl60 BGs to choose from, is will there be enough players to fill several instances of each one?  And the answer is no, not unless the faction imbalance gets reigned in somehow.  The more BG choices you offer the players, the more difficulties the imbalance will introduce for the players on the larger faction.

(CW)TB

Do you remember this old thing?

When we started Penny Arcade, I really cannot express to you how much I hated User Friendly.  It was utterly impenetrable to me as a piece of comic expression, in that even perceiving the joke required a comprehensive grasp of the Linux command-line interface.  The art, shall we say, lacked power.  Of course, these reasons were just things I decorated my hatred with.  The truth of the matter is that I hated User Friendly because it was more popular than Penny Arcade.  That we would go on to make something just as impenetrable about a topic in the same general neighborhood is not a point that’s lost on me.  That we play the role of “the reviled despot” for new comics is not a surprise to us, and one day it will be your comic about relationships that the next ravenous generation will endeavor to unseat.   

Penny Arcade essentially represents “entrenched success” for many people, and it is resented, perhaps even reviled, and I can understand why because we’re super entrenched.  So they hate it for that reason in addition to manifold other reasons, and sometimes we make it easy for them, like when we suggest that their emperor may not be fully dressed.  You might recall that this is not the first time we have tangled with the man.  I can’t imagine what it must be like when your revolution goes on without you.  What does one do with the armbands and the elaborate podium?  The fact of the matter is that people are making their living at online comics, and they don’t owe him for the privilege.  They’re doing it with a combination of donations, merchandise, advertising, and conventions.  No-one has thus far employed fairy dust to a positive economic effect.  To put it succinctly, I think our great sin is that we’ve managed to stay afloat without his imprimatur.   

If you don’t keep up with the webcomics scene, it may surprise you to find out that something I wrote just over a week ago has since become infamous.  I felt confident that the initial conversation generated would eventually split into the two now well-known camps who would iterate the same tired process they always do until someone else managed to deviate from Webcomics Orthodoxy and call down the same automatic response.  Never did I imagine that my fairly uncontroversial statements - which I’ll go into in a moment - would warrant a new sermon from Scott McCloud himself, because they don’t. 

People have decried the post for my use of an image of Cat Garza, who they all say is a very nice person, but the image I used isn’t some weird screencap I waited and waited for to cast him in a bad light - it’s the image I got from the site itself.  I’m not sure when it became offensive to suggest that a person who smokes pot is a pot-smoker.  And as far as the points themselves, made in the most offensive, juvenile way possible, all I’m suggesting is that a) There is no fucking The Man, and b) I Hope Your Infinite Canvas Comics Double As A Nutritious Meal, because creating a comic that can’t be printed out is not pragmatic.  That’s the long and the short of it, but the discussion ended up going elsewhere. 

The first way it went is that I was opposed to art.  This is not actually true, but if you’re the sort of person who thinks that an independent comic constitutes some oppressive edifice that needs to be eradicated, it’s possible you believe a lot of things simply because it is expeditious to do so.  I am not opposed to the creation or codification of human experiences utilizing sequential or heretofore unknown visual relationships.  I happen to believe that the magic of comics is their almost universal legibility, but that’s a personal thing and I don’t expect you to subscribe to my newsletter. 

The second way it went is far, far more effective.  This way, the thrust of Scott’s demand that I apologize, is based on a quote he got from Scott Kurtz out of an IM conversation he and I had.  I’ll reprint it for you here:

“Somebody’s making a video documentary about webcomics without letting on that either of our sites exist (again).”

With the exception of accidentally selling our website and then subsequently selling the print rights without reading the contract, I’m proud of what our strange site has accomplished.  That said, I was being sardonic when I typed that into MSN.  Scott says that the creators of the documentary did contact us, but something you might not know is that all of this filming took place two years ago.  I don’t remember being asked, too late to help them with it now, and it’s not relevant anyhow because being in a documentary or not being in a documentary is not a big deal.  I feel like Penny Arcade has achieved just about all it’s ever going to.  I know that we were lucky and continue to be so.  I am typing this post wirelessly from the top of an elephant made out of pure gold.  I think we’re doing alright.

Scott can say that I based all my opinions about the film from a seventy second trailer, but

and

There is a lot to be said about revolutions and whatnot, or creative expression, and if listening to people drone on about it frustrated me I don’t know what to tell you.  Discussions about the act of creation and the resultant output can and are looped endlessly.  I don’t have a problem with that being part of the conversation, but when it is the only conversation I may say something you don’t appreciate.  The only revolution I care about is the one that gives creators the ability to make a living.  I don’t know when this happened, but it’s true now and I’ll force it into the dialogue if I have to.   

We don’t play Webcomic Community reindeer games or laud their aging sovereign, and near-universal antipathy has always been the result.  At the core of it is a discussion about business, whether Scott McCloud wants to phrase it that way or not.  It is about the ability of a creator to earn a living.  We will never see eye to eye on this because he is a charlatan.  Imagine if Moses had lead the Israelites not to the promised land, but to an empty fucking parking lot.  Now, imagine that they loved him for it.  I’m not so sure I should be the one apologizing. 

(CW)TB