I've tormented my cohort with it, and now I will torture the readership: Bookworm Adventures is linguaphile crack, and games with much larger budgets have been losing to it daily since its release. Describing my cavern of amassed lexical artifacts might take weeks, but let me say that the collection is so comprehensive, so robust, and so well-organized that I'm thinking about charging admission.
Essentially a kind of Scrabble RPG, this thing is a Goddamn vampire and I can't escape its clutches. I don't want to have the sort of conversations with people that we describe in the comic, but I can't help it. It's like a "gear" that my mind gets stuck in. When I fish something like this
out of a pile of random letters, I must say, I think I could create a galaxy if I really wanted to.
Rainbow Six remains our nightly diversion, and we've got a gallery of dependable opponents we can rely on for quick invites to fill out a game. While we're enjoying it quite a lot, there's a fairly serious technical issue that I feel a responsibility to accentuate. There are things that I wish worked differently, but they work: dedicated server support exists, for example, but this support is not complete enough to be of any real use. That is inconvenient. But it is not broken.
It is often the case that players will simply "drop out" of voice communication, and if they dropped out for every person on the team that would be one thing. What actually happens is that a person will drop out for one or two people, while the rest of the server hears them beautifully. You run into situations where you need to act as the relay between two friends who can't hear one another, which is an "inconvenience" when armed soldiers are on the prowl. We call that sort of thing bullshit around here, but we are a cadre of coarse, rugged men who often prefer the company of wild creatures.
The same thing would happen when we were playing Gears from time to time. We've been playing multiplayer games since the system launched, and we've never seen issues of this type. Is it some dark legacy of the Fall Update? Poking through the R6 forum, it looks like this and the Face Mapping bug are both slated for a future patch... with no timeline established. I wonder: will they resolve these issues before I quit in frustration? Let's call it a race.
We've standardized on Friday for updates to the Child's Play site - so, every Friday, you'll be able to able to hit the site and watch the bar "level up." We'll try to make it less ethereal - we always ask the hospitals for pictures, but they are hard at work every minute of the day in the service of mercy. When it was just one hospital and everything was in Gabe's garage, it was much easier to chronicle what was happening. Now - with hospitals dotting the globe, and with toys delivered directly instead of hoarded somewhere - it's more difficult to communicate the progress. It's made it look like there is no progress, when in fact it has been substantial.
We currently stand at two-hundred and sixty thousand dollars in donated toys, games, and cash. Your application for sainthood is in the mail.
(CW)TB out.
I realize I haven’t talked much recently about the Penny Arcade Alliance over on Dark Iron. That’s not because they aren’t still out there slaughtering Horde. It’s just that with all the console games that hit recently I haven’t had time to join them.
A couple of nights ago they actually held a massive raid party. The Penny Arcade Alliance was able to pull together 23 full 40 man raids. That’s a fuck ton of people.
Here’s a couple choice screen shots from the night’s adventures.
They actually crashed the server at one point. Someone thought it would be funny once the servers came back up to send a GM a ticket about the event.
Dear GM’s
We crashed your servers, What did they drop?
Sincerely,
PAA
What’s funny is the GM actually had a pretty good sense of humor and responded.
<GM>[Kaznata] whispers: You crashed our servers and want the loot?
<GM>[Kaznata] whispers: They dropped a whole room full of angry IT people. They are EoP. That is Explode on Pickup. =P
Good to see a GM having some fun.
So congrats to the PAA. It’s good to know that you’re all still out their fighting the good fight.
-Gabe out
Since we launched so many new products this week I just wanted to draw your attention to the store one more time. Here’s a look at our new batch of shirts.
Don’t let the teacher catch you.
Fruit Fucker Prime!
Mommy where do fruit fuckers come from?
DS pride.
We also took a bunch of our old designs and threw them on hoodies.
The response to Kiko’s Fruit Fucker Apocolyps design was overwhelmingly positive. In fact so many of you requested a wallpaper that Kiko went ahead and whipped one up for you. Choose the resolution that fits you best
-Gabe out
