Penny Arcade

We’ve got Dead Space 2 more or less in the bag, now, practically sewn up, and it’s just…  solid.  It’s more of a compliment than it sounds.  They’ve created a very “firm” universe, studded with meaty bolts and secured by cascades of regularly spaced hermetic seals.  It has intimacy and scale; along with breakneck pace, from which no neck is safe.  Eventually we had to start running, altogether, just as we did years ago in games like Alone in the Dark or Resident Evil.  Obviously, this would have been before the latter game became about mowing down fifty zombies at a time with a man-portable minigun.

There was a part very near the end of the game that reminded me very, very strongly of another Electronic Arts title, this time from 1989, called Project Firestart.  I will give you a moment to amuse yourself at my expense - at my advanced age, and at my diminished vigor - but when this phase is complete, I will assert (as I have so many times) that more than twenty years ago Dynamix delivered the Survival Horror template in its entirety.

I like DLC generally speaking, though I rarely seem to actually purchase it.  I think I like the idea more than its case-to-case execution, the more-notion it represents, and perhaps also the couch-ness of its acquisition.  The last DLC I purchased was Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam, because I heard it was good (it was) and because it seemed like a way to launch a full game somewhat through the backdoor, something I wanted to blip on their quarterly report.  But what they’ve got up for Dead Space - thoroughly optional armor and weapon bundles - borders on the bizarre.  The game already has suits out the ass.  It even unlocks more armor in another fucking game.  This isn’t “must see DLC.”  This is like getting a tiny fork for your fork, so that it too may have a fork.

No.

I often lament the fact that downloadable content rarely expands the story, though, and in a novel twist, an upcoming pack does exactly that: offering up some closure for the crew in Dead Space: Extraction, the lightgun shooter for the Wii and Playstation 3 which was much better than it had any right being.  It is coming out…  at some point, unless you’re playing it on the PC, in which case the “novel twist” is that of a knife between the fourth and fifth vertebrae.

Oh!  We made another comic about Dead Space.  I could’ve mentioned that farther up, maybe.

(CW)TB out.

now i know it

We’re working on fleshing out PATV so it isn’t just shows about Penny Arcade. Ledo and Ix is one such show. The third episode went up on Monday and you can see it here.

I recently started playing in a pretty regular D&D 4e game. I’ve played before obviously but it was always a one shot or something similar. I’ve got a handful of games under my belt in this campaign now and I’m really having a good time. More than that though I’ve gotten a ton of great ideas to take back to my own game.

As a DM I am always searching for inspiration. Books, games movies anything that might spark an idea is fair game. Now that I’ve been playing in this other game I realised just how many great ideas you can get by watching another DM. 

The first thing our DM told us when we sat down was that we would not be keeping track of our own health. This sounded strange at first but he asked us to trust him and now I’m sold on the idea. The way it works is when a monster hits you the DM describes the hit, “it was a glancing blow.” or “The blade bites deep into your arm and your vision swims.” but never tells you how much damage you took. instead he keeps track of that on his side of the screen. He gives you general ideas sort of like a terrorist threat level. You are winded, bloodied, injured or teetering on death for example.

This does a couple things that I think improve the game. First it removes the ability to meta game damage. As a DM I’ve heard my players have this conversation more than a few times: “Monster X has only been hitting us for around 12 so you should be able to take another couple hits before I need to heal you.” It also takes away a bunch of number crunching and gives the players more opportunity to role play the combat. I’ve since stolen this idea and used it in my own campaign and my players fucking love it. I highly recommend giving it a try in your own campaign.

The other idea I’ve stolen from my new DM is to run the game on a laptop. I’m personally using the suit of tools over at Dungeon Mastering. They let you build your own monsters,traps,items and encounters. It’s a really slick set of tools. I’d like to see a couple more options like the ability to import monsters right from the online compendium and an initiative tracker that keeps track of health (see above) similar to this one.

So my recommendation to DM’s is to try playing in a game. You’ll be surprised how much better your own game will get as a result.

-Gabe out

To this day, any conversational lull between Kiko and I invariably turns to Chromehounds.

That’s right: boring old four-out-of-ten, six-out-of-ten Chromehounds.  A sim out of time, washed up on the strange shore of a system in its infancy.  If we may judge a game by how many stories it has generated, and generated, and are still being told, Chromehounds is my favorite game of all time.  There’s no comparison.

I like Armored Core games generally, like to build robots, I like acquiring targets and directing ordnance.  But after Chromehounds - a game which was about your squad at its core, a squad of people, who could have just as much fun designing machines and trading schematics all night as they could fighting anybody - it felt like it was missing something.  Armored Core 5 wants to split the difference, with an online, team-based focus and asymmetrical “commander” role to direct traffic.  I can’t wait to find out more.

Also from…  From, there’s a trailer up for Dark Souls, the multiplatform follow up to the incredible Demon’s Souls.  I feel another brutal holiday coming on.

(CW)TB

I think this has really gone too far. We have people on both sides of this ridiculous argument making death threats and worse. Kara was certainly upset to see someone mention on Twitter last night that it would be funny to come to my house and murder my wife and children. I know there are people who see themselves as being on our side that have made equally disgusting comments in the other direction. I want to make it very clear that I do not approve of this kind of bullshit.

I am certainly guilty of being snarky, sarcastic and rude. I apologize if that gave anyone the impression that I would ever condone this sort of behavior. If you are out there making these sorts of threats thinking that you are somehow doing our good work, please stop. I never should have engaged them at all much less the way I did. Obviously Courtney Stanton has been very vocal about her dislike of us and our behavior. But she is not censoring us, she has not stripped away our freedom of speech. She didn’t even have anything to do with our decision to remove the shirt. I’m sure she is just as upset with the threats being made by people who consider themselves her supporters. So I’m asking you to please leave her alone.

Personally I’m done with this argument and I’m asking you all to be done with it as well. Don’t go read the blogs, don’t respond to the Tweets, just let it go. Thank You.

-Gabe out

One of the most important essays I’ve ever read is by Philip K Dick, entitled “How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later.”  In it, he describes his idea that people can experience reality in such different ways that they lack a common language and therefore can’t relate to one another.  He’s talking about schizophrenia, but he’s really talking (as is his way) about all people, everywhere.

The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown of communication… and there is the real illness.

If I haven’t been seen to discuss The Matter Of Dickwolves, this is the reason why.  I’m not entirely certain that a conversation is possible.  This isn’t mere cynicism - this is a fully rational assessment of the situation.  The perspectives in play, the lenses, are too different: one side believes that not according the issue of rape the proper respect fuels a kind of perverse, perpetual engine called rape culture.  There is a vast, specific lexicon and hundreds of tacit assumptions that gird it.  The other side (that’s me, but not just me) believes that when it comes to expression nothing is off the table.  It is the creator’s prerogative to create something - even something grotesque - out of anything they can find.

The fact of the matter is that the strip that started all this is about how empty, amoral, and borderline vile electronic heroism actually is.  When I look at it now, it’s hard to imagine the chaos this comic stands at the center of.  To the extent that it discusses rape, it is in the context of men and an imaginary creature.  It’s certainly not the “joke.”  The depicted scenario seemed so ridiculous to us, so unmoored from reality, and its indictment of player “morality” so complete, we felt like it was worth doing.

I have to tell you that we could never have conceived that people would construe the comic as pro-rape; this unfortunate fact may help you to understand everything that followed.  I have a daughter who is not yet two years of age, and I am flooded with hormones every time I look at her which say “this, this is why you are here.”  I don’t have any intention of going into specifics, but speculating about my own sexual history or the sexual history of the people we know is profoundly unwise.  I will also tell you that people deal with horror of this kind in different ways, and one of them is with humor.  There’s no monolithic “woman” just as there is no monolithic “feminist” just as there is no “man,” no “true” way of dealing with tragedy.  We think of the strip as one of those glass tanks with the gloves that reach in, a safe place to experiment with dangerous ideas, which we’ve more or less been doing continually for twelve years.

We make disgusting, immoral comics on occasion to be sure; we’re used to correspondence in that vein. But when mail started to come in to the effect that we were perpetuating a fundamental social conspiracy to rape, we couldn’t believe what we were reading.  That is the entire point of the second strip, which some people took as a literal response or apology, neither of which was its intended purpose.  The only people who are pro-rape are rapists.  The idea that you would have to specifically enunciate an idea like that is almost overwhelming.  It’s self-evident.  Hence, the comic.

I’ve received an incredible education during the ordeal, and been exposed to an amazing range of thought, from so-called “radical feminism” to a wholly opposed, Lewis Carroll, through-the-looking-glass mode of thinking called Men’s Rights Activism.  It’s my default position to figure out what is wrong with me so that I can make peace, and the web has been very good to me in this regard.  I have learned many new words and been altered irrevocably by the months long process.  I’m not certain we’ll ever see eye to eye.  But they’re not evil, or mendacious; I understand their intent, why this happened.  I’m not interested in a repeat performance.

The other reason I didn’t speak about it is because I didn’t want to draw unwanted attention to the sources of complaint.  Apparently, there are people who imagine they’re doing us some kind of a favor being jackasses and saying terrible things to critics of the site.  Well, I’m a big boy, and I can handle my own shit.  If you’re a reader, and not somebody just out for a scrap, if you love me at all you’ll put an end to that kind of bullshit.  When someone believes something about you that isn’t true, the optimal strategy isn’t to prove to them time and time again that they were actually right all along - that you may be dismissed out of hand, that you have no merit.  I assume that’s the opposite of what you want.

Can we all agree that threatening to kill someone’s wife and children, as happened yesterday, has no place in any fucking society?  This is why I had to say something: because people who imagine themselves to be “agents” of each side have now graduated to threats of actual, physical violence.

I don’t expect to mollify anyone with this - I think we’re long past that.  When I look at the state of play now, dialectically, I don’t even recognize it: in the absence of my participation, in the abdication of my responsibility to communicate, the entire dialogue is based on a sequence of assumptions about each party so long that it’s impossible to untangle.  It’s entirely possible that we will have lost readership, or worse, we’ll acquire a unique new demographic hungry for rape material that will be profoundly disappointed by jokes about tabletop wargames or treatises on forks.  As I said, so much of this happened because I assumed that a genuine dialogue was impossible.  Maybe I was wrong.  It’s certainly happened before.

But I am who I am, in the end; the comics I make are the result of my damage.  I can’t put it any more succinctly than that.