Penny Arcade

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.   

I always want to be super mad at these people when I call in, the incandescent avatar of the consumer, but I was those people at one point.  I can’t purse my lips and nod slowly at those who, seeing paths clearly marked Good and Evil, chose evil as I had once done in my savagely misspent youth.  I only lasted a week and a half, which I saw then as evidence of my indomitable spirit.  I can’t really speak to that, I believed a lot of ridiculous things.  And it’s not as though I stopped believing them, but by now I’ve believed them so long that they’ve graduated to traditions.  It’s like, we don’t really ask why a rabbit would bring chocolate to a person anymore.  I can imagine a couple raised eyebrows on that score initially.  Now, we just accept that rabbits operate in concert with chocolatiers. 

I always think I’m going to say something clever when I call these places up, but whenever I try to start in I find it very hard to maintain my appetite for cruelty.  I don’t know why they work there, but it probably wasn’t an authentic choice.  What’s more, the job is so miserable that even if I were to level my considerable verbal skills, they are most likely suffering at a level beyond which any additional torment would be wasted. 

You make all these little deals with yourself to manage it.  It may be that he picked up a Caramello and it’s just sitting there on his desk until his break, waiting, centerfold luscious.  He will try to make it last the entire fifteen minutes.  He very nearly did, yesterday.  While he’s talking to me he is dividing the bar, in his mind, into discrete blocks which also represent the period of time each one will take.  The person he is talking to seems tense, but is making no effort to deviate from the script.  Sometimes they jump the rail and you have to improvise.  He’s letting me get all the way through it, first refusal, second refusal, third refusal, and…  Done.     

I always imagine looking up into the sky to see a great, black boot descending.  Does he also see the boot?  And does he then calculate where he can stand, safe, in the raised part of the waffle? 

(CW)TB out. 

  this is the way that the world is run

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.

Apropos to my prior communique, understand that you should expect several days of unalloyed fanservice.  And now, prepare yourselves - for Penny Arcade Armadeaddon.

We’ll have to go pick it up today, as we weren’t able make it to that special signing event at the Redmond Town Center.  Even though that place should only be fifteen or twenty minutes away geographically, in actual practice - between the hours of four and seven - Redmond might as well orbit the Earth.  Optimus Rhyme actually has two different songs re: this strange warping phenomenon. 

One of our first strips derided Requiem: Avenging Angel’s demo for delivering a few minutes of gameplay for a plump hundred meg download, and in the past week we’ve been treated to Dead Rising’s full gigabyte for fifteen minutes, and now the gig and a half Dark Messiah Demo which delivers roughly the same amount.  Both of these have a ridiculous amount of replayability, which dulls the sting.  That’s still quite a leap. 

Dark Messiah is a must, though.  In addition to most of the demo seen at E3, you’ll get a quick introduction that everyone is seeing for the first time.  At the E3 before this one, I described with displeasure how the swordplay in games like Oblivion doesn’t feel particularly integrated with the world.  Of course, Oblivion has a lot of other things it’s keeping track of - it can be forgiven if its simulation of one element is not absolute.  Dark Messiah could be considered a remedy to the condition I described, however - from the first finishing blow the sophistication and immediacy of their model is apparent.  I’m overjoyed that you don’t have to take my word for it, that you can know in an hour or so what I already do: future games which interpret melee had better start from here. 

I downloaded the open beta of PoxNora to see if it was something we would consider advertising, and quickly determined that it’s the sort of thing I’d promote for free.  Indeed, it’s the sort of thing I would come up with myself: piss drunk, a tattered copy of Scrye tastefully obscuring my genitals.  It is a game where you construct a deck of spells, equipment, and monsters.  This phase will not shock you.  But then, instead of simply playing these cards against each other, the cards become creatures on a strategy map each player is attempting to dominate.  So yes, they can advertise.  I should see if they’ll pay in cards.

(CW)TB out. 

  always where i burn to be