I haven't "missed" E3 until this year. I went every year from '99 or so until it collapsed, and the last few years I've been fine; I have larvae at home which are molting constantly, and sometimes they need help writhing out of their dessicated sheaths. They need my mandibles. But it was nice to have an excuse to make full use of portables, a chance to leverage all those multiplayer features that were purchased but so rarely utilized.
I saw a single still used to promote a Hitman: Absolution trailer, a phalanx of leather-clad Battle-Nuns, and decided to skip it. I felt like I had probably seen something very similar at some point. But being mad at it is apparently a thing, a compulsory thing. Except I don't do compulsory, and I also don't do infantilizing chivalry. So I don't do well at these kinds of parties.
These last couple bundles have been fucking crazy, but this one is just balls out. Amnesia, AND Psychonauts, AND Limbo, AND Sword & Sworcery, and Bastion if you pay over the average? It does not compute.
Have you ever seen Art & Copy? It's by the rad guy who did Scratch and a bunch of other awesome shit. It's a documentary which is about Advertising, which is to say that it is about Mercenary Communication, which people have varying opinions about. My feeling is that once we are aware of its ubiquity, we may study it with greater safety; loss of containment is always a concern, but I find these weaponized memes fascinating beyond belief.
This past weekend we attended the Reubens down in Las Vegas. Tycho could not make it but I went down with Robert and our ladies to see what it was all about. On Friday the girls hung out on the strip while Robert and I went to check out the panels. The first one we walked into was something like “how I got two million dollars in free advertising!” Robert and I sat down and almost immediately we were uncomfortable. I’m not going to say the guy’s name because the entire focus of his talk was how he is able to get free publicity all over the place. I’d rather not give him anymore since I think he is a shameless monster. He showed some videos of himself on various local morning news shows circa 1989 and explained that you should always be trying to tie yourself to local news events in order to get on tv. He told us all a story about how “excited” he was when Elizabeth Taylor died because his wife’s family had some photos of the actress as a young girl. He ran to the papers with these on the day she died and used them to promote his animation business. It was at this point that Robert and I stood up and walked out.
John Carmack's bit about game stories, which are often porn stories, was controversial in the way that true things tend to be. It isn't always this way, and it doesn't have to be, but it often is.
Whenever we come up with something dumb, something that's supposed to be a joke like the game in the strip, a lot of times it starts to grow on me. I don't know! I think there's a lot of headroom there.
We'd only played about ten minutes of Ghost Recon: Future Soldier when we wrote the comic, but it was enough time for someone to ask me What The Situation Was, and whenever they do that this is always the conversation I hear in my head. It's ineluctable. I have to say the whole thing out loud, too. If I don't say it out loud, things begin to thicken up there. I can feel the words forming a clot in my brain.
Now that you can play Diablo III, you probably should. Sometimes you won't know if there is a problem with your computer or a problem with Blizzard or a problem with The Internet, that happens, but you can often click on things and then things will come out of the things, which is something all sentients deeply crave.
The new paradigm for loot in multiplayer action RPGs has been altered somewhat. Skeletons still explode with cash and prizes, that portion has been rigorously maintained. But the merchandise they drop essentially drops separately for each player, so you never have to worry if you picked up the wrong thing or got somebody's money or any of these other bookkeeping things (like Inventory Tetris) that used to be considered gameplay.
One of the things we wanted to to do with The Penny Arcade Report was to accompany it with an expressive visual aspect, and to that end we secured the services of Dabe Alan. We knew about him from his excellent resume, already: he applied for Erika's job, back in the day. I think he does great work in general, but I want to praise him specifically for the pictures he took at Bungie. Seriously, just shit hot.
This was a goofy joke when we wrote it at eleven or so yesterday morning, though it became less hilarious as the day progressed. During "normal hours," the failure of Blizzard to recall that Diablo is a popular game was a boon: I have my own shit to write. But later, when I began to prowl for leisure activities, and it occurred to me that I might utilize the sixty dollars of congealed entertainment I had recently purchased, I was not able to. And then I was, and then I wasn't, and then no wait it's still okay now it's back. Requiring that players be online is one thing - but we are! We're online right now! They're the ones who aren't online. Who watches the watchmen?!?!
In place of the word Anathem - which is the actual name of a book by Neal Stephenson - I inadvertently typed Anathema, a word that means "someone or something intensely disliked or loathed."
Neal Stephenson was my favorite author for a very long time, and The Diamond Age remains my favorite book, even if I can't read any of his newer books with so much as an approximation of enjoyment.