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Tycho

Alright, so, now his Downton Abbey thing has found its way into the very bones of the strip.  Nothing to worry about, I’m sure.  I’ll pay very close attention to him, I’ll see if he takes “tea.”  I’ll put myself on Sconewatch.

As I suggested (not that it required much in the way of Divination) Double Fine Adventure will clear two million dollars easy.  Unless Kevin Smith or Joss Whedon decide to Kickstart a movie or whatever, I don’t see this being broken anytime soon.  And when you take into account the fact that there are donation tiers beyond what Kickstarter will even let you establish on the official site, they’re almost certainly there already.

I want the game, obviously; but I also want the kind of granular documentation which 2 Player Productions can be relied upon to provide.  They did the first season of our show as you might recall, flitting away to realize the dream of longer-form work, and they’ve basically burrowed themselves directly into the meat of the industry.  Even when they were here with us, a Double Fine documentary is what they were aiming for.  It’s been my experience that making games is essentially impossible, an act which struggles and scrapes against an invisible but universal law.  There’s “sausage making,” which is generally considered something people don’t want to see, but creating games is the act of making sausage out of yourself, which is probably worse.  I expect slash demand long, silent shots of a comatose Tim Schafer, his viscera spooling into a device of Venusian origin.

I received a game called Hive for my birthday last week, secured on the good word of the Friendly Game Store Person, and it’s functionally crazy superchess plus insects.  The pieces are themselves the board, and the unique way each bug skitters occupies a nontrivial portion of my conscious thoughts.  It packs up real nice, which is becoming something I actually consider when purchasing physical games now - Flash Duel taught me the advantage of a game that fits easy in the pocket.  Hive is free on iOS at the moment because they’re working out some kind of a problem with it, but you can get it now and simply download whatever update they have in the wings.  This way, you’ll already know how to play it when Cool Gamer Steve asks you to, and he will be impressed, and you’ll just like shrug or whatever.

(CW)TB out.

(instrumental)

Tycho

Seriously, though.  Are you up for it?  Grab the application here, and mail it to Kristin Lindsay at klindsay@penny-arcade.com.

(CW)TB

Gabe

I had quite a few requests for a large version of today’s strip minus the text. Kara and I have been watching two episodes of Downton Abbey every night since we discovered it. I am so in love with the look of the show that I just had to drop Tycho and Gabe into Downton.

Click for a high res version.

-Gabe out

Gabe

I debated talking about this but I think it’s important. If you’re playing SW:TOR this post will have some spoilers with regards to the end of the first story arc.

I was incredibly disappointed and frustrated by the ending of the first arc In SW:TOR. I am playing a Jedi Consular and my class story was really the thing that kept me playing the game. Around level 35 the story started to wrap itself up and this involved a ridiculous amount of planet hopping. I kept getting sent back to Tython and then out to another planet and then back to Tython. Each time running to the space port, to my hanger to my ship to an orbital station to a different hanger to another shuttle to a space port. I was repeating this bullshit dance over and over again until my story finally concluded and that’s when the worst offense happened.

After wrapping up my storyline I was told that the Jedi counsel wasn’t quite ready to give me my next assignment and I should head to the Republic Fleet for some R&R. I assumed this was all apart of the story. I arrived at the fleet and found the person I needed to talk to standing next to my class trainer. I clicked on them to initiate a dialog and they had nothing to say. Then the quest showed up as completed and told me to return to Tython. Let me say that again. The person had nothing to fucking say to me. They did not even try and pretend that they were doing anything other then making me run around for no God-damned reason.

I will put up with a lot of bullshit. I’ll run back and forth between these stupid spaceports but you have to meet me half way. I understand that there are all kinds of things MMO’s do to extend playtime. But this was too much. There was absolutely no reason for me to go all the way back to the fleet. In fact they couldn’t even be fucked to make up some half-assed reason to send me back there. It was so blatant and so insulting that I have not played the game since. That was probably two weeks ago and I’ve had no desire to log back in.

I recognize that these games represent a sort of player abuse, but at least tell me you love me after you slap me.

-Gabe out