Before PAX I mentioned that I had drawn a few cards for the World of Warcraft CCG. I posted the Leeroy Jenkins card and mentioned I had a few more. Things got crazy when PAX hit and I forgot. I remembered this morning though that I still had those cards to show you so here’s another.

If you played on Dark Iron in any of the Penny Arcade Alliance guilds you should recognize Dudefella here. He’s the character I founded the PAA with and he eventually became guild leader off the Fancy Lads. Seeing him as a playable character in the CCG is almost too much to take. I feel like my fan boy gland has become dangerously swollen.

-Gabe out

A crafty puzzle/platformer 1) from the first person perspective and 2) with a unique gameplay hook which is also 3) set in the Half-life Universe is more than I can handle mentally.  The existing materials point toward a clinical, detached, (but most importantly) truly original sense of humor, which I guess is what happens when you hire Old Man Murray to do your writin's.

Another reason I have positive associations with it are that, yeah, this team is originally from DigiPen, our local game development institute - you can check out work and games from other students here. They showed their final project to the guys at Valve, and (to hear that interview tell it) before it was even over they'd been offered jobs developing an advanced version of their concept on their in-house technology.  Valve pulls directly from the community with extraordinary frequency, a philosophy so intensely moral I can hardly articulate it. 

Episode 2 is hitting along with Team Fortress 2 and Portal, in a single purchase, and it seems crazy that I would get all of that for twenty dollars.  They haven't announced pricing yet, and I imagine that's why.  I don't want to pay more than I need to, certainly, but one of the things I like about buying things directly from Valve is that I perceive it as being humane.   I don't want them to kill themselves entertaining me, and if they suffer at my expense, then I at least want to compensate them fairly. 

(CW)TB

The whole reason I wrote that other post was to link the new article about it at 1up, and I didn't even manage to do that - here you go.  In a way, I'm glad I didn't link it before - in the intervening period, a new episode of the 1up show has dropped that has a ton of interview and video material for every part of Episode 2 - including TF2 and Portal.  It's the top video on this page.  Unbelievably delicious.

(CW)TB
 

Wild of eye and manner, Gabriel burst into the room and offered up these choice morsels. Given the sensitivity of today's topic, I should stress that he did not offer up choice morsels of horse, horse morsels, which I suppose might be called horsels.

I thought it was fair to ask where he came by this sort of incendiary rhetoric, rhetoric so hot  you could roast a horse on it.  "Willie Nelson," he declared, with (I think) more sincerity and devotion than was strictly necessary. I asked him if William Nelson was considered an expert on... this, this brand new topic which before this moment I had never considered, and he said that he wasn't entirely sure but that we couldn't be too careful and that horses were in the Wild West, which made them American Citizens.

"Abraham Lincoln even married a horse," he added, arms folded in a manner that suggested he was operating from a position of inviolate truth.

As is reflected in my Wikipedia entry, my Grandmother is a horse - so these revelations hit close to home, or barn.

I thought Enchanted Arms had seized me altogether, a task at which magic limbs would no doubt excel, but I simply could not resist the lure of those baying HOUNDS. It's nice to return to familiar territory - I felt this when I'd gotten pulled back into World of Warcraft by the stalwart Knights of Arcadia. Trust me, I've been to fucking Westfall. VanCleef actually came to my birthday. But looking down from Sentinel Hill toward the lumber mill and seeing an unbroken cord of friendly guilds ranks near the top of my memories (of simulated events).

Like the original MOHAA for the PC, a game whose multiplayer game was not actually complete and was probably included on accident, there are almost - almost - unforgivable networking issues with Chromehounds. But it's not even about Chromehounds anymore, not really. Chromehounds is just the place we're hanging out, with a crew that hasn't played together since (easily) 2002. I think of it as the reunion tour. Reviews of last night's performance are already coming in from enemy squads, who have called our combination of dynamic tactics and precision ordnance "unrelenting."

(CW)TB out.

i can be your confidant

Have you heard Weird Al's new song?  It's pretty much required listening for Internet Enabled Citizens - made even easier to recommend by the addition of a video animated by Bill Plympton.

(CW)TB