I don't know how much I can actually say about the inspiration for this strip.  My guess would be very little.

The last Electronic Entertainment Expo foretold - as a wizened sage might - the rest of the year as far as the handhelds were concerned.  You could see that Burnout and Virtua Tennis were, by and large, the whole of the PSP offering.  I liked Gripshift, but I'm fairly certain that's not the majority view.  You could also see a DS line-up that would come to seize me with a secular penitence - the online functionality began to coalesce there on the showfloor with Animal Crossing and Kart, strange stuff like Phoenix Wright was like "Hey," and there was a little golf game called True Swing Golf - no more than a tech demo, it looked like - that if watered and weeded with diligence could become one of the four or five games you carry with you everywhere.

That's not going to happen anytime soon. 

I mean it.  I thought I was looking at the gutted infrastructure of the thing before, and that's pretty much the delivered product.  It is lackadaisical in execution, form, and function, as though no human hand had ever touched it, as though the code had spontaneously generated itself.  The swing mechanic feels alright, and had the follow-through elsewhere been more uniform they might have been right to place their faith in it - but there is almost nothing here.  The helpful indicators on-screen are so helpful that they virtually play the game for you.  Usually I would criticize that, but here is a case where not playing the game provides a kind of soothing relief. 

Four player golf off a single cartridge is nice, and the only thing I will laud without a vicious parenthetical attached somewhere.  I've never actually leered at a cartridge before True Swing Golf.  It may have seemed to an observer that I was merely displeased with the small square of grey plastic, but it was my secret hope that my rage could sear the label.

(CW)TB out.

make way for the s o v

We put CDs from a couple bands we like up on the store, right now that means Optimus Rhyme and MC Frontalot.  Probably be a few more up there eventually. 

(CW)TB

The open beta for HOMMV got pushed back it looks like, all despite the rituals performed and the auguries...  Well, I guess you would augur those.

(CW)TB

Well ThinkGeek sold through more than 1000 of our books over night. That’s all they actually had so they are sold out for now. They have another 1000 on the way though and they are accepting orders for those. They will ship on Wednesday of next week from what I’m told. They’ve ordered even more from Dark Horse and it looks like that shipment will be available online around February 2nd.

It's fun to imagine that we do not traverse the Land Of Isolated Phenomena, but are instead bending the wild wheat of trend country.

Dan "Shoe" Hsu's manifesto of sorts and his somewhat brutal interview with Peter Moore seem to be coming from a similar place:  what he thinks the role of  the gaming journalist is.  Dan actually went in there and asked the sorts of questions you see every day online, in the indecorous language of the hardcore forum.  I don't know if the industry is actually rigged up to handle this kind of interplay.  Watch them spar over whether or not Peter Moore actually called for a re-review of Kameo.  See the crazy setup they build that leads into the backwards compatibility concerns.  You simply haven't read anything like this.   

Absolute as the barrage is, it doesn't really penetrate the fortified enemy position.  Moore is on message the entire time, and as the Corporate Vice President of Worldwide Retail Sales and Marketing for Microsoft's Home and Entertainment Division it's his job to create and project brand messages so I suppose he can be forgiven.  It genuinely appears to be candor, until you hold it up to the light.  I'd like to know the actual answer to a question like "what worries you about the PS3" without hearing about how he's growing marketshare or something.  It is my assumption that he wants to grow marketshare. 

He is in marketing.  

The idea behind launching the 360 months before the competition was, of course, to stake out a claim.  While that did happen, what has also taken place is that the entire burden of the next generation - the perception, the promise, etcetera - rests on those sports titles that developers could get ready for launch.  I know people who only play Geometry Wars on their box, and they seem perfectly happy with this state of affairs.  I've no urge to rouse them from that state. 

The machine is going through a kind of adolescent period at the moment, a chain of events exacerbated by the rigors of next-gen content creation, and in two or three months none of this will matter.  There's nothing to compare the Xbox 360 to, except hopes and wishes I guess, ideals to which physical objects have historically fallen short.

(CW)TB out.

'til she got her hooks in him

You can get it from our store, if you want.   I think it turned out pretty good.

(CW)TB

We spoke at MIT last year and had a really good time. One of the guys there apparently recorded the entire talk and has gone through the trouble of transcribing the whole thing. We spoke for a couple hours and answered all kinds of questions. If that sounds like something you’d like to read, you should check out Brad’s site.

The PAX 05 DVD is now on sale. You can see a trailer here.

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***