Warhammer Online saw a few deep cuts in content, designed to ensure a launch that would

a) be something they could be proud of, and
b) occur in the Year of our Lord two-thousand and eight.

Cutting four classes and four capital cities seems pretty grisly, but without playing the game in its current state I don't know what that actually represents. For cities, I guess i'd have to see it. I do know that there's still twenty other classes, so... that seems like a lot. Maybe people could play one of those? I don't know. In some cases, the classes they pulled just didn't work.

After being badgered for a full week by a person on my friend's list who refers to himself as "The Green Onion," I grabbed a copy of Battlefield: Bad Company against my better judgement. I'd played the ready available demo, to be certain, but I've played this Goddamned series since the beta for the first one and I feel like I've got a pretty robust understanding vis a vis the arc of play. I've also played the thin dilutions of the franchise they've been spraying on the console owner for years, and I had little enthusiasm for another go 'round.

I was, um... wrong.

In terms of "feel," it doesn't feel like console or PC Battlefield, it just feels like "Battlefield." Indeed, it feels like a logical projection forward, the "sequel," which is why I don't understand what it's doing on consoles. Playercounts are scaled back from the larger outings, capped at 24, but even on the Xbox you're shunted over to EA's internal dedicated servers so it plays right. Again, as I've said, the number of players in a given game is not some base value you can use to extrapolate how fun it is. The number of players needs to fit the context and the mechanics. Haze, though I think it was more successful in multiplayer than most gave it credit for, put its players in huge, lonely maps sometimes far away from the fight. In Bad Company's base mode of play, Gold Rush, which is its only mode, the spawns and bases are constantly shifting so that you always feel like you're in the good part of the movie. I'll finish the single player campaign eventually, it's well written and enjoyable enough, but it always comes down to whether I want to "hear another joke" or "earn experience and unlock devastating equipment." I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one making this choice. I always thought this was going to be co-op, and maybe it was as some point, but the squad-based multi here is a hell of a substitute.

That's not to say there aren't some weird, sort of schizoid elements in their approach, but I'd say these are confined to some of its multiplayer notions. To get the most out of the game, you should be playing as a squad with friends. That goes without saying, but these squads need to be formed before you join a map - there's no mechanism for adding a friend to a squad during play, and if you join a friend who is currently playing, you aren't put into their squad. Since you can only talk to people who are in your squad, they've basically invented a way to join your friends without actually joining them! They try to shore up this communication deficit by "calling out" on your map enemies and vehicles that friendly units have fired at, which goes a long way. Not a dealbreaker, and the destructible environments are as cool and as useful in practice as you'd expect. All in all, as long as you know the idiosyncrasies up front, this is a solid, almost obvious purchase.

(CW)TB out.

smiling bastards lying to you everywhere you go

I got a lot of mail from people asking if we would be making prints of the Paint the Line series. I guess I only mentioned it once so it shouldn't surprise me that some people don't know that you can purchase a print of almost any comic in the archive. Just look for the "buy a print" button underneath the comic strip.

Since PTL was such a popular storyline and there are so many comics in it, we've put together a special package for people looking to pick up the entire series. You can find it here in our store. If you want all of them, you save about fifteen bucks by getting the package. We also have an Armadeaddon package in there that will save you about twenty bucks. These are all really nice 11x17 prints based on my original PSD files. In fact I actually started working at 600 DPI rather than 300 about 6 months ago just so that the prints would look even sharper.

We've also added greeting cards to the store. These are custom cards based on some of our more popular panels. We've put together packages based on things like "violence" and "supporting characters" but you can also just go in and make your own pack based on the artwork you want. You can even customize the cards if customizing cards is something your into. The entire process has a pretty slick interface and you can check it out right here.

Since I totally forgot to do it for Emerald City I figured I should make a point of mentioning that we will be at San Diego Comic Con at the end of the month. Just like every other year we'll have a booth full of our stuff and some cool con exclusives. Signatures and sketches are always free and except for the occasional bathroom break we try and spend the entire show at the booth.

Also if you haven't seen it yet, there is a Penny Arcade parody over in Sunday's Foxtrot. Bill is a great guy and definitely one of the top three shaman in our guild.

-Gabe out