Penny Arcade

I don’t have solid data, just my own year-to-year experience, but it feels like gaming cosplay has been on the rise since we first started attending Sakuracon.  The Team Fortress 2 crews you’ve seen showcased on the gaming blogs are one of the newer ones, but Valve seemed to rule the crossover space this year:  there were several Chells as well, as well as Aperture Science Technicians, their Weighted Companion Cubes in tow.  These cubes were sometimes literally in tow, hoisted up on crates for easy transport.  There was even a GlaDOS.

I kept my distance.

The more insular the group, the richer the jargon - Scientology is the ultimate example, of course, but strange things grow in any hidden place.  I always thought bedwarming had a nice ring, for example.  I have actively tried to mill lingo useful and appropriate to the gamer consciousness from the moment this venue became operational.  Anime culture obviously has a lot of Japanese cross-pollination, so many of the words I learn at these things (like “hakama”) just mean “hat” or something.  But there is also con specific language that deals with particular customs, like Peacebonding.

When a weapon is peacebound, it is marked with a pink ribbon that substantially diminishes its drama and gravity.  This signifies that you have entered into a contract with the convention not to draw steel and gut another attendee.  This is solid policy, and we support it, because we bring our guts with us to this show.  The policy continues:  you can kill a person with almost anything, if you really put your mind to it.  Technically true, but but now things are a little scary.  Now you’re starting to consider the very real danger you are always in.  It gets lighthearted again quick, though, because you realize that the policy is being applied to virtually any object, granting it a malevolent connotation.  When Robert was serving up ice cream, I noticed that they had peacebound his ice cream scoop.  I saw one grimoire with the pink strip applied, which - given its perpetually shrieking cover - seemed pretty sensible.  But a medic’s healing gun?  A weapon that “shoots” life?  No, now we’ve come full circle.  The train has left the station, and is en route to Crazytown.

(CW)TB out.

So we got a lot of questions at Sakura-Con about the state of our game. Everyone seemed to want to know when it would be done. Well the truth is that episode 1 is done or at least what they call “content complete”. We’re actually hard at work on Episode 2 now and have been for a little while. Episode 1 is currently going through some hard core bug testing as well as Microsoft’s own certification process. In the meantime we actually need your help to make sure that once the game is ready we’ll be able to deliver it.

I’d like to introduce you all to Greenhouse. We developed Greenhouse along with Hothead originally because we needed a way to deliver our game to you guys. what we needed was a platform agnostic digital distibution portal. Once it was done we realised that it could actually be super useful to other independent developers. At first Greenhouse will be the place to get our game but eventually we’d like to use it as a way of promoting great independent games that might otherwise slide under the radar. Like PAX and Child’s Play and all the other stuff we do we’re starting out simple. We’ve got big ideas though and I’m excited about building Greenhouse into something really special.

The site is in beta now and we could actually use your help to test it. Tycho and I recorded a podcast about our experience making the game and we purposefully left it uncompressed in order to mimic the file size of our game. We’d like you guys to head over there and download it so that when we send you over for the actual game we don’t destroy the hardware. This is a test of the equipment so please even if you don’t care about the podcast so much we’d like for you to try and pull it down. If you encounter any problems with the downloader please fire off an email to support@playgreenhouse.com. Thanks for your help with this.

Also, there is an interview with us over at Wired about Greenhouse.

-Gabe out

So many surreal things happen at an Anime convention that it would be difficult to choose one item.  Well, usually.  This time it wasn’t very hard at all.

This anguished man dressed as a female hedgehog communicates a great deal about what it is to be human.

(CW)TB

Tom Chick is just the Goddamned king of games writers.  Just…  wow.

(CW)TB