Gabe: I ended up enjoying FF XIII by the time I got to hour thirty or so. My biggest problem with that game was how slow it was to start. Also the story didn’t make any fucking sense but I don’t really care about that. By the time I got the hang of the paradigm system I was bored with the game. FF XIII-2 gets rid of all the bullshit set up and throws you right into the fun stuff. There is a bit of a tutorial but for the most part the game assumes you know how Paradigms work. In

Tycho: Gabriel played Final Fantasy XIII the requisite number of hours to know that he liked it, and so he was well prepared to like Final Fantasy XIII-2: the XIIIening.  He was also well equipped by his previous experience to dominate the game’s earliest chapters, as he’d already long mastered the Paradigm system.  I never quite got there myself, because I quit too early, and also because I was playing a game that I’m not entirely sure even exists. I was playing the one where instead of simply calling “plays” in the form of tuned Paradigms you do that and

New Comic: Le Chat Avec Le Chapeau

New Comic: Transposition

Tycho: Readers are lashing out at William C. Deitz’ addition to the Mass Effect ouvre, with his new novel “Deception.”  Indeed, they feel deceived!  And they are cataloguing this beast-man’s transgressions in an endlessly elaborated upon codex with such terrible granularity that I’ve begun to feel sympathy for the man.  I was under the impression that I liked Mass Effect, maybe even liked it a lot, liked it more than most people.  But, no.  I’m not entirely certain I want to like Mass Effect this much. Tie-In Fiction seems like a tough racket, all told.  It has a mercenary quality

Tycho: Douglas Adams suggested in his opus that mice were not simply mice but rather the unassuming projections of a pan-dimensional race into our universe.  I’ve met Daniel Cook before, wiry and lean, compact, an organism apparently designed for fold-up travel, and I wonder if there isn’t something similar going on with him. If you’ve played Panda Poet or Triple Town, you’ve played his games.  There is a very interesting (though perhaps “inside baseball”) account of his dealings with publisher 6waves that we have taken great care to summarize in today’s strip. Gabriel wanted to know if I had

New Comic: The Creative Spark

Tycho: Gabriel the Younger expressed intense delight at the prospect of Minecraft Lego, a state of affairs his father could not entirely understand.  A member of the forums awaits with great anticipation the inevitable Lego Minecraft videogame.  This is the Circle of Life; one can very nearly hear Elton John. I didn’t even know about any extra quests or whatever in Kingdoms of Amalur with new copies, but learning that such a thing exists isn’t as startling to me as it is to other sentients.  The version of Kingdoms of Amalur we have contains no DLC code, it was just

New Comic: Plurality

Gabe: We have just finalized the concert line up for PAX East. Check this shit out! Friday: VGO Protomen Metroid Metal Minibosses Saturday: Supercommuter Paul & Storm Jonathan Coulton MC Frontalot Also a reminder that PAX East 3 day badges are sold out. You can still get single day badges though.  One last thing: We need Enforcers! You can download the application here and then mail the completed form to: klindsay@penny-arcade.com -Gabe out

Gabe: Once again I was able to beg an early copy of a game. This time I scored Kingdoms of Amalur. I’ve been playing it now for a few days and I am in love. I’m probably not supposed to talk about the game yet but I figured it would be much easier to ask for forgiveness rather than permission as the old saying goes. I’m not incredibly far in the game and I don’t want to spoil anything but I do want to give my impressions. Yesterday on Twitter I said I thought it was better than Skyrim and I

Tycho: There are many games where box breaking is core to the experience, a cultural practice, a folkway, and this happens in Kingdoms of Amalur as well.  Games are developing more robust approaches to assessing your moral coordinate with precision, but they’re still several long miles from basic etiquette. I’m sure they’ve already printed the cases for it, which is too bad, because it would be fun to have the cover say something like AMALUR? MORE LIKE AM-ALURRING hoooooo - TYCHO BRAHE, PENNY ARCADE You guys can have that, if you want.  That’s a freebie.  I think Gabriel wants to talk about

New Comic: Boxinalia

Gabe: After playing so much SW:TOR and really enjoying it I decided to try a Star Wars book. I had given up them a while back after a series of extremely bad books. I ended up grabbing Darth Plagueis. If it had just been incredibly boring I might have stuck it out but it was also stupid. I was listening to an especially lame chapter when the narrator started talking about ancient Sith lords and their lost techniques. One such lord was a sort of ancient necromancer and his name was Darth Andeddu. I don’t care what stupid space way you

New Comic: Hope Springs Eternal

Tycho: The dialogue in the second panel isn’t true, not exactly, but it might as well have been.  Gabriel told me not to discuss the strip in any detail, and so I wont.  Apparently he wants it all to himself, and being almost paralyzed by this novelty I was in no position to refuse him. It’s perfectly fine with me; that means we can talk about Kingdoms of Amalur, which I had more or less decided wasn’t in the schedule. That’s worth unpacking, actually: If I determined it wasn’t in my schedule, and my time is in some ways much

Gabe: I love it when Tycho asks me if I want to go learn a new card game with him and then I proceed to destroy him at it. I would not be surprised if he never plays it again. Which is too bad because it’s a rad game. -Gabe out

Tycho: The demo for Mass Effect 3 comes out next month, with both single and multiplayer attached, and it will apparently leverage all the Kinect “betterness” we have been promised.  I have my, um… doubts. I’ve found that voice commands in general have lost efficacy since the abysmal, nightmare cloaked Dashboard update; I was a proponent of the Kinect in that regard initially, voice being a daily use case in my house.  They’ve really fucked this thing up, in my opinion: I genuinely hate using this device.  I want to fight the people who made it, and I can, because

New Comic: Efficacy

Tycho: Wise. (CW)TB