By Gabe from Penny Arcade:
Back in 2002 I wrote a news post about the multiplayer in the new Jedi Knight II game. I was apparently not impressed with the multiplayer and I suggested an alternative:

“Just take a second and imagine the wealth of possibilities. One of the multiplayer levels could drop you into the battle of Hoth. You would have rebels on one side imperials on the other. If you joined the rebellion you would play as a rebel trooper. Your objectives would be to defend echo base and protect the escaping transports. If you joined the empire you would play as a snow trooper in the Imperial death squadron. Your objectives would be to infiltrate Echo base and destroy the transports. There would be no Gamorreans running around using force jump. You would either be a rebel soldier or a snow trooper and you would have the appropriate weapons and abilities.”

Well that is exactly what I played last night until the wee hours of the morning and it’s just as awesome as I had hoped. I know there have been other games in this series but this one is just amazing. I honestly can’t believe the visuals and the sense of scale.

Seriously go grab the Star Wars Battlefront beta!

-Gabe out

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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
The rumor was that Dislike was en route to Facebook, but I don’t think that was ever an authentic option and would corrode the service. It was eventually determined that Liking Things wasn’t sufficiently granular, and so there are a raft of New Likings being rolled out. Except they’re missing a few key inflections that apply to ninety-nine point four percent of posts.

I have conversations with people all the time about whether or not they’re going to quit Facebook or they’re going to quit Facebook for real now, and I can’t think of a single time anything like that has happened. Well, one time. A friend of Brenna’s determined that this device was essentially a kind of comparison engine, endlessly assessing her vis a vis other people - all of whom were engaging in a rigorously performative perma-joy - and that being exposed to these rays was not a net gain.
I feel like the assumption of Facebook is more or less a preview of our cyberpunk future, where people who refuse or can’t afford the cortical implant will become pitiful creatures of exile. We offload a lot of our processing and memory to others, and to machines, and it’s simply a fact that appearing to know when someone’s birthday is grants social power. Foregoing it would be hard. This is why being presumed an asshole is so liberating. If I remember something, people are all like holy shit.

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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
The full strip and its accompanying postito go out later this month to members, and becoming a member is incredibly easy and is also rad for too many reasons to enumerate here, which is why there’s a whole page dedicated to it. I think this one is pretty Goddamn good:



(CW)TB

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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
Motherboard merely joins a raft of sites which have, over the last couple years, removed the ability for users to comment on their articles. It’s funny; the first thing I did was scroll to the bottom of the page to see what people thought about it. There was no comment section there, which I probably should have guessed. Force of habit.

Comments are what they are. “Don’t read the comments” is a phrase you have heard, and perhaps used. Sometimes people say that it’s not enough to say “don’t read the comments” and then they read the comments and get super angry, which, I mean, I don’t know. You tell me if that’s a good life strategy.

I go to the comments not to find consensus but literally to find people criticizing the article. I want to see the idea of that article discussed. I am not of the opinion that most articles I see are very good; and even if they were, they’re not scripture. For me they’re like the sausage casing that contains the actual food, which is the community processing the data. Independent of any other consideration, just at a lower level of magnification, I don’t think we get smarter this way. I don’t think we achieve robustness just rolling around in a bunch of ideologically hermetic spheres.
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By Gabe from Penny Arcade:
Tearaway is a game that came out awhile back on the Vita and I loved it. I’m playing through the PS4 version now and it’s even better in a lot of ways. It’s still a ridiculously beautiful platformer with some genuinely unique gameplay but it also has a really cool second screen application now. If you have kids in your house this is seriously something you have to try because they will love it. Let me tell you how it works.



The game is designed to look like the entire thing was made out of construction paper. It’s really an amazing effect and the game sells it 100%. Creating new stuff is a big part of the game as well. You can actually draw out designs on the touchpad and see them come to life in the game. One of the first tasks in fact is to design a new crown for the king of the squirrels. You’re given different colors of construction paper and you just get to go to town. Drawing on the touchpad works okay but if you have the Playstation App you can use an iPad instead. This gives you a great big screen with construction paper, scissors, and even the use of the camera. You can use all these tools (or even better someone else can) to constantly change the world while you play.



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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
The HBO extras contract for Westworld is fascinating reading, and gives one an idea about what it must be like to have sex with a lawyer. The excerpts you’ve seen online only represent a portion of the depravity: there are deeper, more erogenous zones.

I don’t go in for Toy Games at all, not really. But I do go in for Lego shit, and I have occasionally tried to describe the quandary that the adult Lego Maniac is bound up in. When you are a young person, and you look at a box of Lego shit, you are more concerned with the number of pieces than the number of dollars required to own it. You can turn the box over and over in your hands, and feel the weight of it, which is the weight of a soul minus the body it is contained in.

I could buy them now, and thus far that satisfaction when I see a Death Star or whatever has been enough for me. I can make anything I want, which is the power of these devices; I cannot meaningfully desire any more bricks. I still have all my old stuff downstairs, some still in the ancient Star Wars pillowcase I used to keep them in.
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By Gabe from Penny Arcade:
Today’s First Fifteen was a train wreck of a game, but I think it made for a funny show:



-Gabe out

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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
Because art is the main way you manipulate Gabriel into doing what you want game-wise, he’s always been a big fan of Tearaway. Also, he owns a Vita, and those with Vitae are forever on the prowl for an excuse to use them. Except that a Vita is no longer required to play it now, because there is a remake of it for the PS4 called Tearaway Unfolded that has its phasers set to “charm.” Gabriel was telling me about how it works with such glee that I suggested we should skim and then refine that glee for your use.

I feel like we’re at the top of the roller coaster, gaming wise, and we’re about to crest it and start collecting speed very quickly. The 6th is sort of where it starts next; for me that means Disgaea and Rock Band, both legendary time consumption engines, along with a Transformers game from Platinum that I’m excited about for what is essentially no reason. I can’t prove a single one of the assertions my heart has made about this game, but I will clutch that little hope in my hands and keep it warm. Anyway, all stuff I want, on one day. That’s why I’m glad that The Beginner’s Guide came out a little before.
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By Gabe from Penny Arcade:
We will be heading to Australia at the end of October for PAX Aus and we need to make some comics ahead of time. Generally we like doing a little multi part story while we are gone, but this time we just can’t decide. So here’s a poll!

We’d like to do a series of comics during PAX Australia but we don’t know which one. Help us

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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
As my psychic aperture widened to encompass all, I realized that Gabriel was actually super gross.

Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer is doing exactly what I wanted, which is to get a DS in Ronia’s hands and make it feel like it’s hers. Most games are too hard; the fun to stress ratio doesn’t work for leisure activity. Minecraft in creative mode isn’t hard, by comparison, but provides no narrative impetus, which for her is probably worse.
I had mentioned that the lack of traditional game metrics was a sticking point for some reviewers, but if you’re a six year old? Or if you are the supposedly omniscient satellite which revolves around one? We need games like this. The rest of that stuff can come later. But, beyond the two classes of mortal I have just described: the motivation is to try and make people, or… animals, or whatever, happy. It’s not a metric. The “story” and the “actions” are part of a single, revolving, polychromatic orb that defies unraveling. I think it’s a type of game our ordinary tools aren’t good at perceiving.
Something I like about it is that she has to really know letters and words in order to do the thing she wants.
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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
This</i> was the conversation I had with Gabriel on his birthday, and we have rendered it for your consumption. He’s basically impossible to buy things for, it’s a tremendous pain in the ass, but I have learned and thus absorbed an undulating truthwave: that you may purchase a gift for a father’s child and they will react as though you have purchased them two gifts. I secured for his brood the “<a href="https://anki.com/en-us/overdrive/supercars/guardian">Guardian,” an Anki Drive car, which I am given to understand is a car.

That, uh… seems like an expensive hobby.

Something happened with Taken King: Kara decided to start in. The three of us used to play games all the time, actually - mostly the more tactical shooters, like an R6 or Halo. These days she goes by something else online, but when we were all playing as a group her handle was Orbital Strike and it was good. It’s nice to pop the seal on the old jokes, and find that some of have retained their flavor.
It’s related to something else weird happening with The Taken King, which is I learned that I’m completely unable to play this game by myself. Not skill-wise. Enemy heads still erupt on cue. I mean I just can’t fucking do it.

I really, really like Destiny. At least, I thought I did. Grob and I talk about it constantly. I mean, there’s stuff we complain about, but it’s like Doctor Who - constantly complaining about it is generally understood to be the mark of the true enthusiast. We complain about how we can’t just bring six people into the Court of Oryx and have to resort to the Digital Age equivalent of Voodoo talismans to play the game we want. You know. #justdestinythings.
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By Gabe from Penny Arcade:
Today’s First Fifteen was pretty crazy. I’m not sure I ever would have tried a Godzilla game on my own. We don’t pick what we play though. Sometimes that’s cool. Other times it’s…less cool.



-Gabe out

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By Gabe from Penny Arcade:
I’ve had the opportunity to play both Disney Infinity 3.0 and Skylanders Superchargers now. Ideally I think one of these ridiculously expensive games would suck and you could ignore it in favor of the other, but they are both pretty great.

The new Star Wars characters and levels in Disney Infinity are awesome but I have not been able to play much of it. My boys just want to play the Toy Box mode so I’ve actually played very little of the new content. In Toy Box mode my 10 year old builds levels and sets up fun stuff for the 5 year old to do. They play it together and they are both playing the game they want. The older one just wants to build and the younger one just wants to make Darth Vader fight the bad guys from Tangled.

I tried asking my boys if they liked 3.0 better than 2.0 and Gabe just grunted at me. “uh huh, WAY better.” he said over his shoulder as he built a landing pad for Olaf to land the Slave 1.

I think I may have to wait until they are in bed to try and play the new story sets with my wife.

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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
It seems like it’s getting more difficult to retain one’s identity. Is anyone else getting that impression? It’s bad enough that you need to fucks with all your autopay shit and get a new card, but settling on a new identity can be fraught for real. You might want to have one on deck just so you’re ready when the inevitable happens. Next time I get “the call,” I’m gonna go with Burnaby Swaggler and I’m gonna be super into teak. Yeah, I mean the wood.

That’s gonna be my thing.
I really liked the first two Amnesia games. I think SOMA is also an Amnesia game, for a lot of reasons, but also because you can’t really talk about it without ruining it.
There is something kind of strange about trying to approach a “Lovecraftian” project, as they did with the first Amnesia: the Mythos trades on the unknown, and indeed the unknowable. So in order to do something that is Lovecraftian in the truest sense it can’t be Lovecraftian in a material sense. Bloodborne is an amazing example of something that feels “right” while only evoking the broadest strokes, and it gets there because its mythology is its own. You have a right to disagree on this obviously, but deep down these stories are about what we can know. What it is possible to know. One concentric ring out from that idea, one parenthesis, we start talking about who, or what, actually contains this “knowing.” It turns out that it is a super good thing to make a game about.
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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
A note, which is secondary to the topic of the strip: something is happening with this motherfucker’s art. The panels look like they’re about an inch deep apiece, and I feel like if I tilted my head to left or right a little bit, I could see behind the characters. I don’t know anything about art in general, but I know about his art, and the way he perceives space has been altered.

There’s a new Animal Crossing which isn’t like the old Animal Crossings, in that it’s basically just the decorating part and that’s it. I’ve seen a few reviews of the game which lament the fact that Happy Home Designer places too much emphasis on designing happy homes, which is fine, but you can’t exactly say you weren’t warned. My mom would probably say something similar; she’s kind of an OG in Animal Crossing. She likes the whole loop. I guarantee there is an audience for this, though. And, like a spooky call, it’s coming from inside the house. By which I mean my house.

Not me, no.
In The Sims, Brenna didn’t mind that people had jobs because that was a part of their character - but the idea of waiting actual time to earn pretend money is not even a thing for her. I would hesitate to generalize overmuch, I’m simply giving you information: the arc we tend to prize in games isn’t a sigil with universal power.
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By Gabe from Penny Arcade:
I got the Anki starter set last Christmas “for my kids” and we’ve had a lot of fun with it over the last year. I saw That the expansion was set to come out and made a tweet to my wife suggesting she get it for me for my Birthday. Then a big box of it showed up at my house a couple days before release. It seems the Anki folks saw my tweet and found out where I lived.

So that’s pretty cool.

and a little scary.

Regardless! I spent some time this past weekend playing with it and I figured I’d share.

If you’re not familiar with Anki, it’s essentially robot slot cars with weapons. You control the cars from an app on your phone or tablet. The cars themselves are smart enough to stay on the track most of the time. You control the speed and steer it within the borders of the track. You also use the app to fire your weapons and upgrade your cars.

It was already pretty rad.

The big difference with Overdrive is that the tracks are modular now. The tracks used to be pre-printed on big sheets that you rolled out and then raced on. Now you build your track from various pieces just like the old slot car tracks. They also have added elevation so now you have risers and jumps. Once you build your track, the cars do a couple slow laps as they scan the layout. The app builds a little map of your track and then it’s off to the races.

Literally I guess.

I thought I was a cool guy because I made my track go under the couch.



Then I saw this shit.



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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
The office I share with Gabrickle always manifests certain properties, certain ratios, which are designed to retain a configuration we have deemed holy. At every turn we have endeavored to replicate Apartment 26 on the off-chance that it was the apartment that was responsible for all of this and not something we did. There is a couch and our desks and a television arranged in accordance with the mysterious weft of the universe.

So it is as much like a living room as possible, essentially. And it was into this fully armed and operational idea gestation engine that he did bring his Man Candles, an assortment of them. I did a search online for “Mandles” and found no less than six purveyors of candles whose scent profiles are optimized for today’s man(?). One was even called Mandles, which makes me want to fight. There’s low hanging fruit, and then there’s just buying some fruit in the produce section of the grocery store. The brand Mork has is called Old Factory, which certainly evokes a realm of productive masculine virtue, but I prefer to think that there is someone over there who managed to sneak the word olfactory into the name of their candle company - and to this person or persons I doff my metaphorical cap.
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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
For a long time, you could make the case that - no matter the role - that Nolan North was basically playing Nolan North. Because this is the Internet, I have to append this suffix; I’m not even saying this is a bad thing. I like Nolan North. I mean, I don’t know him, but I like his whole thing. Nolan North as the Ghost in Destiny though is a sometimes energetic, sometimes fragile, always a little nervous thing. It’s great. He also has the best line in the new Destiny, at least from my perspective.

There are these evil balls you need to open doors sometimes, called Tomb Husks - the balls are the husks, not the doors - and they are the Needed Object to progress. Sometimes, when you grab one, your Ghost says that “It is better to have a Tomb Husk and not need it than to need a Tomb Husk and not have it.” It is simultaneously true and also takes the entire notion of a Tomb Husk grates it into confetti. But that combination of words is too funny, sorry. When we were playing a quest that required them the other night, we started to wonder about their origins and what structures we were reifying by being party to their use.
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By Gabe from Penny Arcade:
Are you playing the Taken King? Do you like the new sub-classes? Then check out these comics we did for each of the new roles!



Hunter



Titan



Warlock

-Gabe out

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From Penny Arcade:


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