Penny Arcade

My own son pulled a Zekrom in a booster pack, all shining foil, and he was confused about why you would use an attack that damages yourself until he noticed that, wait a second, dad does that mean yes, that is what it means!  Yessss.  It won’t be hard for you to tell what is advantageous about it, particularly since every ten points of damage is a distinct “counter” in game terms.  But the idea of trading temporary disadvantage for long-term advantage isn’t entirely inbuilt.  The ratio of hand-birds to bush-birds, and when you should choose between them, is something you have to learn.  It might even have been your father who taught you.

My father was a brakeman/switchman, which meant (among other things) that he more or less didn’t exist; I had no Shadow Dad to be a proxy for, which had advantages in its own way.

I want to emphasize however that these advantages did not extend to race victory.  My own Pinewood Derby car was so objectively bad that I laughed as it lurched down the slope.  I was given a Sportsmanship Trophy for it, in fact; either because my laughter was interpreted as laudable equanimity or because it had that edge of madness associated with previous Dark Scout incidents, and they thought a bit of recognition might tamp down the voices.  But you couldn’t not laugh!  It was horrible.  My nominal “car” was largely unchanged from its primal state, except for the addition of a single black and white pinstripe on either side.  I don’t think they were the problem, but I am no expert; I’ll look into it.

My son’s projects look as though a child made them.  He was commanded to make a diorama about Washington State, and he fabricated and (subsequently turned in) a “rocket sled prototype.”  He’s in Kindergarten, who gives a shit.  Brenna felt bad, because she had seen - as I had - the projects with the functioning boats, the expert calligraphy in a dozen languages, origami croissants which had never known the touch of a child.  She felt sure, and this may even be true, that we would be judged as parents on “his” craftsmanship.

I laughed again, and it was the old crazy laugh from before; this time, no award was forthcoming.

(CW)TB out.

walling in or walling out

So the current storyline is indeed taken straight from my life. My son attended his very first Pokemon League night on Tuesday. I played the game very seriously a few years ago but have not touched it recently. My son went in with a deck cobbled together from some of my old cards. It was comprised mostly of pokemon he really liked but had no synergies to speak of. I helped him a bit just making sure he had enough energy and talking to him about how many of each stage in an evolution you should have. He got to the league event and ended up losing all five of his games. Some of them after only a few turns.

I’m incredibly proud of him though. For one thing he kept playing which I can’t immagine was easy. Also he asked if we could practice before he goes back next week. The fact that he wants to go back makes me extremely happy and you can bet we’ll practice. The problem though was more than his inexperience with the game. It was also the fact that the meta for Pokemon appears to have changed drastically since I played.

When I was playing the game decks were built around powerful evolutions. The level X cards appeared on the scene just as I was getting out of the game. All the decks I saw at this event seemed to be built on EX cards. These cards come out quick because they require no evolution to set up and they hit like a ton of bricks. I recognize that it is a poor craftsman who blames his tools but in this case I really feel like we took a knife to a gunfight.

So today’s comic isn’t too far off the mark. I didn’t buy all new cards from eBay but I did make a few strategic purchases from CoolStuff Inc. I’m not going to build his deck for him and we’re going to focus on his favorite Pokemon (Emboar) but this weekend we will need to talk about some things. I can’t teach him how to hit a baseball but I can sure as shit teach him about synergies, draw engines and probability.

-Gabe out

So I just posted this in our Kickstarter comments and I figured it would also be worth posting here.

“The ads are awesome, don’t get rid of them!”

This is very nice to hear. We’ve worked very hard over the last ten years to make sure that our advertising was actually useful. This is not the industry standard. There are many publishers who balk when we tell them we need an early copy of their game before we can commit to advertising. We also don’t allow many of the popular styles of ads like pop-ups, and site take-overs. We also make PA presents projects which are (let’s be clear) ads but actually cool ads. So hearing that many of you appreciate this is great.

It’s a great system but it has some problems in our mind. One problem is that all of these ads lock us into the page view model. That is to say we need people to come read Penny Arcade on our site. So when someone takes the comic and shares it on Tumblr, or Facebook we get screwed out of a pageview. We also can’t put the comic in the RSS because we need you to come visit the site. The advertising model is just not designed to be compatible with the way people want to share content these days. Going forward I think that not being tied to advertising on the site would be best not just for us but for our readers.

That doesn’t mean we’re going to stop talking about awesome games. That is our job! It just means that you will get those recommendations from the comic and the news posts. We love games. We love tearing into the bad ones, we love poking fun at the good ones, and more than anything we love telling you about games you might have missed otherwise. That is what we do and that’s not going to change because we remove the ads.

The important thing to remember here is that the ads are not your trusted source for good games. Tycho and I are and we are not going anywhere. In fact if there are no ads, that is to say no point in the chain at which we accept money from publishers, it makes things even easier for us. A while back I wrote a post about quitting SW:TOR and how disappointed I was with some aspects of the game. I don’t mind telling you that because of that post I was not able to do a Star Wars PA Presents project we’d been talking with them about doing. If you know me you know that the idea of getting to draw official SW stuff was incredibly exciting. I knew that when I posted that article I was throwing that project in the garbage. I don’t want to ever have to think about hurting our relationship with a publisher or making our ad guy’s jobs any harder. This KS is about working for you guys not for publishers.

-Gabe out