I'm almost shocked at how indulgent Gabriel was on this comic. Earlier, I suggested that the sort of thing I'd do by myself would largely revolve around commas having sex with each other. That's not exactly true, it's infinitely more likely that they would take the form of musical extravaganzas. Indeed, he even put in a reference to Weyland Darkspurr there at the end, which marks the last occasion he let me take the reins: allowing me to blend dancing and the occult toward some questionable purpose.
I keep forgetting to mention things here in the post, because the basement where my computer rests is infested with vile fleas. I believe we've finally tumbled to a kind of solution, but all through the last week I have felt them on my legs, whether they have actually been there I could not say, save for the raised welts of their innumerable bitings.
(Strange Fact: in the sixth grade district-wide Spelling Bee, I spelled the word innumerable when I should have spelled the word enumerable and lost in the final two. They give you a gift certificate for the shop there, not for losing but for participating, and I remember the Lifesavers I purchased with it actually tasting bitter.)
I'm out of things to say about Mario Kart DS. I could go on, but the reality is that the game itself is like thirty-five Goddamn dollars, and it's as near a sure thing as there is in this pastime. I've run the battery down twice between Friday and this morning. It's a long battery.
I've been meaning to discuss the 360 thing we went to, though.
I didn't get to play games from start to finish at this thing, I came away with extremely light impressions on a bunch of things that are so content free as to be insulting to relate them to you. In any case, individual games weren't the focus of the event: the non-matchmaking elements of Xbox Live - the free ones, what they call Xbox Live Silver - were (I would say) the entire point of the visit.
Things like your GamerCard, which tracks your achievements in each game and lets you compare yourself side by side with other people on the service. As I've stated, I'm not competitive in any sense of the word - I actually find this feature somewhat intimidating. The Voice over IP service isn't really matchmaking, per se, so that's in Silver as well - and such connections persist while you're switching games, futzing around in the UI, pretty much anywhere you go in the system completely unbroken. That's sort of handy, and it's a great advancement over the initial implementation.
I have to say, though: it's the Marketplace in general that has me kind of excited. The many other things that the system does and does well are simply 2.0 products, which it is said that Microsoft excels at. There's probably a pun there about Excel, but I refuse to engage in that sort of behavior. Marketplace is something that came essentially out of left field. These are the things that intrigue me about it:
Independent Gaming On A Mainstream Platform: "Marketplace" covers a lot of ground. You've got customization of the cell phone variety. You've got demos and HD videos of upcoming games. That's simply the way it should work, and I'll give them their propers for doing it correctly. But then they've gone a step further, throwing games like Marble Blast, Wik: Fable Of Souls, and PomPom's excellent Mutant Storm on the service for nominal five to ten dollar fees. Now, all those links go to perfectly functional, downloadable demos of all those games. You can grab the executable, install it, etcetera. If you had the choice - and in a week, you will - I imagine you'd prefer to simply press a green button.
The Xbox 360 Is Being Used To Wedge Micropayments Into Consumer Consciousness: I don't know that I went into it, but Scott McCloud came by the booth a couple times at San Diego Comic Con. In addition, I ended up at a bar with him and some of the Dumbrella Guys at one o'clock in the morning. He's unbelievably charismatic and almost impossible not to like. We don't see eye to eye on the role of "micros" as they relate to the working artist, though - that's true. As I have said in the past, I vastly prefer macropayments.
A large part of this is that, while systems exist for the transmission of sub-dollar transactions, I've never heard of the guys offering those services. It's not that I want Scott to be wrong so I can be right. In fact, I want desperately to knuckle under to an authority figure and absorb some of that received wisdom. I don't think that's strange, in fact, I think that's pretty much how our society works.
When I said that games were five to ten dollars up there, I didn't exactly lie, but it wasn't full disclosure either. They cost some amount of "points," which I read somewhere might be around eighty to the dollar. These points are a Goddamn tokenized, internal currency system. Look at the premium "Gold Pak" or whatever for Live on the 360: it comes with points on it, right there. They just gave you money. Not a lot of money, but it's still some Goddamn money. It seems highly unlikely that these points will remain corralled on the service. They'll bust out, I'll be made wrong about micropayments retroactively when they usher in the Age of Goddamn Aquarius.
(CW)TB out.
The very first page of our Prince of Persia 3 comic is now online. This is a really cool project. Ubisoft is allowing us to sort of investigate the relationship between the Prince and the Dark Prince. It’s an eight page story that examines what the internal dialogue between the two characters might be like. If you’ve been following the game at all you know that the Prince actually transforms into the Dark Prince. Our story essentially illustrates that process and suggests what might be going on inside the prince’s head. Tycho obviously is writing this one. I’m handling the pencils and the inks. My stuff is then being masterfully colored by Joe Pekar. I think this is some of our best stuff, hopefully you guys will dig it.
Those of you who are lucky enough to find an Xbox 360 here in a couple days will get a cool surprise. You will be able to download Penny Arcade skins and avatars to customize your Xbox Live experience. These items will be available via the new marketplace feature in Live.
I’m playing a few different games right now and I just wanted to drop some quick impressions.
Shining Force Neo – A great action RPG with one of the worst stories I’ve ever been forced to skip through. Not only is it bad but it’s delivered through terrible voice acting and some really half assed cut scene art. If you can stomach the ridiculously long and boring intro there’s some good gaming to be had in there.
Lord of the Rings Tactics – Christ this game is hard.
Karaoke Revolution Party – This game got some pretty poor reviews but those people don’t know what the fuck they are talking about. It’s easily the best of the series. They’ve added a very robust set of character creation tools. They’ve got a really good selection of songs for all kinds of players. In my opinion it feels pretty heavily weighted towards 80’s rock which for this 28 year old is awesome. They’ve also included a few mini games which in a party environment are a real treat. If you are a fan of the series then you’re going to love KRP. Don’t pay any attention to the bullshit reviews out there.
I’m looking forward to picking up Magna Carta tomorrow. I’ve heard a few different people mention Shadow Hearts when discussing Magna Carta and that has me excited. I’ve been hungry for a more traditional RPG experience lately and since Square seems unwilling to deliver it I’m forced to look elsewhere.
This week Penny Arcade is turning seven years old. We decided to celebrate by alienating our readers with a new website design. I’m kidding, we’ve actually had this design in the works for just over a year. Obviously we’re big fans of the look, I especially like how PAX, Child’s Play and PA all have a unified design now. Penny Arcade has something like four million readers though, and there’s no way we could ever come up with a site that would appeal to everyone. If you don’t like it I apologize, hopefully it will grow on you and you’ll be sending me hate mail in another three years when we change it.
Along with the slick new visuals the guts of the site also got a huge upgrade. Penny Arcade right now represents one of the largest implementations of "rails" on the intertron. I went and looked at a website about rails and then I got a headache. From what I gathered it’s either some kind of cutting edge programming language, or a way to liquefy a man’s brain inside his skull. I'm told that it means the site looks better and loads faster regardless of whatever hippy web browser you decide to use. Fuck M$!
For me, it feels like I was given the keys to a brand new hot rod. I’d like to thank Erik (Alphamonkey), Sean (Chittenden) from GigAve.com and Kiko for doing such an incredible job on the new site.
-Gabe out
Try out the PBWiki I set up for this most powerful of franchises, make your own additions, etc. What I had originally was really loose, but then I couldn't stop typing. I have new sections to go up eventually, about the Artifact Guild and Ice Elemenstation. They'll get up there at some point.
If this one is no good for our purpose, we'll do another one somewhere else. There's a Ruby wiki too, maybe that's something we could screw around with.
(CW)TB
Um... Yeah.
All the machines I use must be logged into the wiki already, because I haven't seen the login page in a while.
Anyway, the password is "elemenstorsaywha".
(CW)TB
So many dedicated Epic Legends fans have come out of the woodwork to help fill out the PBWiki, and it's really amazing to see the enthusiasm with which they've dedicated themselves to the task.
It's a lot of fun to see some of the old names I remember from rec.arts.elothtes again - especially poetfox, Mack, and Joel. They're putting in a bunch of stuff I didn't remember well enough to sound authoritative, especially about Wizbits Season One.
Gabe is working on a bunch of Wizbits fan art. He was always more into that stuff than I was. I always had a hard time swallowing the idea that four kids could vanquish Char Reyarteb, let alone Moo Maa. My novellas don't really cover that period, thank God.
(CW)TB
