Brenna actually did find something on my computer, but the situation was not funny, and let me be frank with you and state that it was not sonnets.  I wish she had found the poetry, because it's there as well, and slightly less incriminating.  From age eighteen to twenty, I read nothing but E. E. Cummings as a rule.  Well, E. E. Cummings and Dragonlance.  Which I guess explains everything.

There is a lot happening at this chronojuncture, and I'm setting it down here just as much for myself as for anyone else. 

Star Wars: Empires at War has a single player demo dropping today, supposedly a Gamespot exclusive, but they've had "exclusives" before that have been channeled to every corner of the globe without complaint.  It's the first game from Petroglyph, a studio risen from the ashes of Westwood like a phoenix - look at the titles their team has worked on.  RTS is not what I would call my genre of choice, but I'm intrigued with their ground/space combat, galactic empire metagame, and their use of the expanded universe.

You might already have seen the Korean intro for "City of Hero," whose divergences I found fascinating, but you might not have read about the custom heroes created for that region of the globe.  There was a great catch over at 1up yesterday, where apparently the character creator - which I recently expressed was my game of choice -  was made available for the Korean Launch, and all it takes to make it legible to English speakers is a precision strike to your registry's fourteenth vertebra.

Heroes of Might and Magic V is gearing up for an open beta beginning this Friday, an event whose pleasure signals overwhelm this unit.  Essentially Heroes of Might and Magic plus Nival's ridiculous strategic chops and art department, it's an almost miraculous pairing.  We have a project coming up for Might and Magic, not Heroes itself, and it's not really a "project" so much as it is a savage critique of the  universe their new games take place in.  But, still.

There was an Escapist article in the most recent issue about Child's Play, which was nice of them, but the last page also mentions this year's new thing - the Penny Arcade Scholarship.  We're still trying to figure out what we can actually afford, but there you have it.  I never went to college, which my cavalier hypehanation no doubt makes plain - and Gabe did go, but mostly to the Student Union Building where I am told they had a Tekken machine.  I sometimes get people Transformers or flash memory for Christmas, things that I want, and I suppose this is the same thing.

Battlestar Galactica equals fuck yes.  When I heard that not only did Cylons look like people now, but that they had done away with Muffit - the most enduring robear symbol of our age - I directed all further inquiries to the hand.   I was wrong, wrong, a thousand times wrong.  People have been wrong about things in the past, but their folly never endured so, tainting the line of man.  

(CW)TB out.

i've been downhearted baby

There is now another signing, another scrumptious signing at B&N.  This is great, because I got a gift card for them like two years ago and I never used it.  The information is as follows:

The guys from Sabertooth came by last week and dropped off some copies of the PA CCG. The Game should be out in stores towards the middle of next month. From what I hear you’ll be able to buy it through ThinkGeek sooner though. I’d check for it around the end of this month.

We're just sort of messing around in the strip - but I think the idea of sanctified clans is pretty cool.

I'm actually sort of surprised that there aren't larger, more sophisticated projections of religion into this space.  I keep hearing that movies like Narnia are bolstered by some rushing current of believers, desperate to pile money on even allegorical representations of faith.  You hear about biblical games from time to time, usually in articles that seem surprised about the phenomenon, but I know kids who can only watch Veggie Tales at home.  Given prevailing fantasies about a child's mind being scourged by violent games, the man who could make such a thing work need not enter the gates of heaven to receive his "reward."

In terms of the content, even as a person for whom the document has lost divinity there is still a lot of material in the bible that is highly resonant.  The old testament alone is a (pardon the term) Goddamn quarry from which you could haul potent themes.   You've basically got all the raw materials:  flawed regents, a chosen people in bondage, charismatic leaders, prophecy, magic,  artifacts,  war,  wisdom,  folly...  You would literally have to be retarded not to make this work.  Given the quality of the writing in most games, developers cribbing from the good book would be a "blessing."

As for clans being a type of ministry, I'd be curious to see how productive it is, you know, soul-wise, but it's not particularly suprising.  My brother-in-law did "street-preaching" out in Maine, and it's hard not to see the parallels:  the message is more disarming when delivered in your own context, perhaps from atop a bitching skateboard. 

The reality is that gamers are tremendously difficult to reach.  Speaking only for a very specific subset near the higher age bracket, I essentially don't care about anything and I won't watch television without stripping the commercials from it.  The Army realized this years ago, manifesting a startlingly forward thinking campaign for what I think most people consider a fairly traditional role.   Engage, who recently got in trouble with Valve for doing it, injected marketing messages into rounds of Counter-Strike for the spectacular Chicken Bacon Ranch, which is only $3.99 for a six inch sub.  Coincidentally, it's also available in a meal, which comes complete with a drink and your choice of chips or cookie. 

Who knows how effective it actually is.      

(CW)TB out.

the sandcastle virtues are all swept away

I had my first real taste of the High end raid content in WOW last night. I ran Zul’Gurub with a mixed group of PA guildies. I’ve spent plenty of time in instances like Scholo and UBRS but ZG was an entirely new experience. In any other instance it would be pretty hard for me to wipe the entire party. I’m not uber l33t or anything but I’m no nub either. I know how to play my class and that’s what I do. I may get myself killed on occasion but I’ll never kill the entire raid because of a fuck up. That’s simply not the case in ZG. It feels like each person in the raid has a job to do and if they aren’t doing it perfectly all the time there’s a good chance everyone’s going to die. Honestly I loved it.

I didn't think D&D Online was quite as bad as the comments I've been reading - it'll be interesting to see what Turbine does with the "feedback."  Of course, what I'm playing isn't done, but there are some things in there that I like.

Many games have instanced dungeons now, and then you have games like Guild Wars in which every square foot of the game is instanced, but they don't handle it in the way that DDO does.  When you enter the dungeon, there is a disembodied "gamemaster" that fills in little details and builds tension.   What's more, these areas tend to be more acrobatic than their counterparts in other games:  one jumps and climbs, devious traps must be avoided.  These things combine to make it seem like you are going on little adventures, which is, I assume, the whole point. 

Of course, these are all places which must be constructed, plotted, and populated by hand, and even with three separate difficulty levels you can choose maintaining a high-pressure stream of content that can satisfy a ravenous playerbase seems like a tall order.  I think they legitimately are trying to create style of play which is outside the mainstream of Massively Multiplayer games, and that might actually be their problem.  It turns out that I actually like constraining spell usage to a certain extent, I think it could lead to some truly epic confrontations.  I imagine that - on this and many other points - I am in the minority.

There are experiential things about the game that need work:  I can't stress enough the value of a consistent, attractive, customizable interface.  If your UI does not look as though it was hewn out of raw granite according to firm usability principles, it needs to go.  I hate to compare it to World of Warcraft, and I'll bet they hate it too, but that's resplendent lord of the genre.  Take everything else off the table.  The way that a player interacts with your game needs to feel confident.

I feel like I've played World of Warcraft, and now I would like to play something else.  You might expect me to be dragged into recidivism on that score one more time, the Burning Crusade perhaps.  DDO has some neat ideas, but the presentation of the game's functionality needs to clean up a bit before I'd commit to it.

(CW)TB out.

***Update***

Well they’ve finally done it. Apple has succeeded in cracking my resolve. I was able to resist the siren song of their beautiful cinema displays but these new laptops are just too much. I can’t fight it anymore, I want one of these damn things and I don’t care who knows it.

It's a little weird to hear the virtues of an Intel processor extolled by Apple, but I am prepared to let bygones be bygones if it means we're talking about some dual core shit and ultimately some modern Goddamn clockspeeds.  Let the long war be over!  Let a single hardware spec run both operating systems and be done with it.

I'm wondering if it's possible to love my operating system.  Is that wrong?  I don't love Windows.  I like it, and though many people don't like admitting it Windows succeeds because it does everything most people need.  It's like the Phillips head.  But I don't love the Phillips head, it just happens to turn a lot of screws.

In some bizarre way, I feel like they're taking a step closer to me by utilizing a traditional PC component.  I feel like the hand is out and they are saying Tycho, I mean Jerry, whoever the fuck you are, haven't you seen how our windows warp when they are minimized?  You can minimize a window, and your video will play in there, only smaller - a small person could watch that tiny screen and be happy.  Why can't you be happy, Jerry Tycho? 

Come mimimize one of our elastic windows.

Minimize them.

I had a fantasy where I completely segregated work and play onto different pieces of equipment, and this appealed to my left brain immensely.   Initially I had typed  "my left Brian," and no doubt he too would be pleased by the shift.  But it's simply not realistic.  A low end Mac for my "writings" and a next-gen system for my amusements simply won't satisfy in aggregate.

I don't get excited when I hear that Dell has announced a "quad SLI" gaming rig, I actually get a little sick, imagining the day when such a thing becomes de rigeur - along with dedicated physics processing and God knows what else.  I can do without the mutant, fetish extremes of the hobby.   But as frustrating and costly as gaming on the PC is, I can't be without games like Neverwinter Nights 2 and quirky Korean Massives.  The independent channels that are now beginning to course with content aren't delivering at full pressure on the Mac or home console.  Bioware would be a comfort to me in that cold place, but I can't give up the PC even in protest.     

These are all the things I tell myself, and usually they work.  They've almost entirely lost their vigor.  Don't be surprised if I upload a post  via Safari next month.

(CW)TB out.

but them boys shot him

Between now and the last time I talked to you, Chaos Theory started working - it just downloaded another package.  I really have no idea what's going on with this thing.

(CW)TB

I had some questions about our new book that I figured I’d answer here rather than in emails.

Chaos Theory doesn't work any more than it ever did.  Summit Strike still does, so I guess I'm not sure which universe the "official" 360 compatibility list refers to.

(CW)TB

After seeing that Barbie Horse Adventures was on the list, and recalling this old strip, we really had no choice.

Xbox compatibility for the new system probably hits the high notes for the vast preponderance of gamers, and it should, because they know what people use their console for.  I've been in the frigid room with the equipment that runs Xbox Live, I know that they know what games are being played, how long, by whom, what they were wearing at the time, as well as their top ten albums, and if a constituency for a given title was ou there it was most likely prioritized - and then, whatever just worked got thrown on the list as well.

The issue is that playing old games isn't what I use backwards compatibility for.  I know there are "peeps" who need constant Halo 2 infusions, but I don't look back - I think of the original Xbox as a damned place, a Sodom and/or Gomorrah.  What I need is a technology that will ease the middle period, while the old box is still a viable development target at retail.  My audio/visual shelf is already a treacherous, high-stakes game of Jenga as it is.  There's no physical space for some Goddamn artifact up there.

I had access to the compatibility list when I brought it home, so I'm not saying that I was somehow deceived regarding the capabilites of the machine - they are simply unfolding a different strategy than the one in my naïve fantasy. 

They released a compatibility update earlier in December that added much of Ubisoft's Live ouvre for the original box, but a Halo issue caused them to pull it.  Between the time we wrote the strip on Friday and the time I finished this post, they appear to have re-released the compatibility update.  I'll verify this of course, I haven't seen it anywhere.  But having Chaos Theory back would take the sting out a litte bit.

(CW)TB


I know it's past visiting hours

The last two missions in the Chaos Theory co-op campaign - the ones that were available for download, didn't work, and were then removed - have just been made available again.  They already hit for the PC version, and months ago - but that's not the version I own.

(CW)TB

Our new book "Attack of the Bacon Robots" ships on the 25th of this month. To celebrate we’re going to do a book signing that day over at the Comic Stop in Lynwood. They will have around 400 copies of the book available. You should also be able to order it via Think Geek within the next few days, although it won’t ship until the 25th. This is really exciting for us. Dark Horse has been great to work with and the book turned out awesome. I hope you guys will come out to the Comic Stop at the end of the month and help us celebrate.