By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
AW SHIT! It’s gettin’ kinda hectic. They closed “the pass” just before our trip over and just after, and I’m starting to wonder if we’re going to be stuck over here. In case I have left any doubt as to my position on these matters, that is not what I want. I should have strategized harder about this trip. The time I spent creating apocalyptic Spokane imagery is time I should have spent decanting boardgames into a compact form for travel. The Spokanite is a hard creature, to be sure, but they are not immune to the mournful whistle of a Mexican Train; I could have doused them with Camel Up and set them ablaze, or introduced them to one of the many manifestations of Lord Chvatil</s>, The Thousand Faced one - probably <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/178900/codenames">Codenames. The next time I’m summoned to this Satanic bunghole I shall endeavor to be more pragmatic. Merry Christmas, everybody. And if you customarily have a Happy Christmas, try a Merry one just to see if you like it. I’ll go with a Happy one, and next year around this time we’ll compare notes. (CW)TB out.

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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
One of the “delights,” which I guess I don’t 100% mind but whatever, is that before I can get a newspost typed up over here I typically have to spend a half an hour or so fixing the computer I’m working on. I wouldn’t even know how to compare the machines my parents own to my own machines or computers in general. I’m not surprised that people hate computers if this is their experience with them. Just as a point of reference, when I click the mouse on my computer, shit happens. Forces are marshalled and great engines roar. On my mom’s laptop, there is a mouse attached, but it does nothing, like a vestigial tail. Her house looks like some kind of aperture widened up between our world and the Pinterest dimension, and their denizens have emerged in force to seize territory. Snowmen and reindeer upcycled from precious bottlecaps flank wine bottles also dressed as reindeer or inexplicably wearing sweaters. I was able to barricade the door to her room with some tasteful Pier One wickered spheroids and now I am waiting for the police to arrive. When we first talked about Nightlight, it describes how some fathers are shields, but others are swords! With an Exclamation Point! And then for that and the next storyline with Grace we only talk about Swords. All Through The House is about how the other side works. (CW)TB out.

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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
We offer free booth space to game developers at the conventions, but it takes a little different shape depending on where you go: PAX 10 was the original “indie” showcase, at East it’s similar but focuses on mobile, and the newest show in San Antonio focuses exclusively on tabletop offerings.

And what a crop this year! Good lord. Don’t forget to check some of the official sites: a couple of these games already have Print & Play options, so you don’t even have to wait.
(CW)TB

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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
Running a total of four strips, Nightlight: All Through The House is a four strip Nightlight story about, you know. Things that permeate houses, I guess! You’ll know when you see it.

The 3DS is back in rotation hard with Pokemon Picross, which is like a Picross game where you make pictures of Pokemon which you also then collect. It would be nefarious even if it weren’t free to play.

For some reason, many of the people I talk to at a given PAX don’t seem to know about Picross. This sucks, not just because their lives haven’t been enriched by Picross, but also because I have some metaphors I’m fond of that require a working knowledge of the game. It’s supremely inconvenient to lead with a penetrating Picross themed insight and then have it just glisten there on the epidermis, wholly unabsorbed. It’s not clear to me how one of the best puzzle forms has somehow eluded universal worship. It’s like Sudoku, but fun and cool. And when you’re done, there’s a little picture, instead of a bunch of numbers. I’m sure that Robert appreciates a big pile of numbers but if I had to choose between Charmander and some numbers I’mma go with the Lizard Pokemon.
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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
It is really weird that there is a new Star Wars movie out! And they are just going to keep coming now. “There is another” hitting around next year around this time. I barely know what to do with this information, and even the information I do have is porous. I know that in The Force Awakens there is some kind of lightsaber person and one of the robots is round. That’s basically the state of play. It doesn’t seem like a lot to hang a movie on, but who knows.

Brenna and I attempted to catalyze a lifelong fascination with Stellar Conflict last Friday, with a preparatory viewing of what young people parsed as Episode Eye Vee, and halfway through it my son was begging me to let him go upstairs and read. Obviously, I can’t be mad at him for that. But what might have seemed languorous or exotic about the pacing of the first movie just seems slow to people growing up now; even their ringtones are invigorating.
Gabriel The Younger is still resistant to the
old ways, a dynamic I tried to illuminate for his father earlier. He will no doubt endure it to please his parents, and it will have all the thrills and emotional resonance of a child interminably practicing cursive. Gabriel the Elder suggested that for kids today, their Star Wars is actually Guardians of the Galaxy, which I thought depicted an interesting phenomenon. Maybe each Generation has a “Star Wars” that isn’t necessarily “Star Wars,” though I’m sure Disney would prefer a certain level of standardization.
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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
It is really weird that there is a new Star Wars movie out! And they are just going to keep coming now. “There is another” hitting around next year around this time. I barely know what to do with this information, and even the information I do have is porous. I know that in The Force Awakens there is some kind of lightsaber person and one of the robots is round. That’s basically the state of play. It doesn’t seem like a lot to hang a movie on, but who knows.

Brenna and I attempted to catalyze a lifelong fascination with Stellar Conflict last Friday, with a preparatory viewing of what young people parsed as Episode Eye Vee, and halfway through it my son was begging me to let him go upstairs and read. Obviously, I can’t be mad at him for that. But what might have seemed languorous or exotic about the pacing of the first movie just seems slow to people growing up now; even their ringtones are invigorating.
Gabriel The Younger is still resistant to the
old ways, a dynamic I tried to illuminate for his father earlier. He will no doubt endure it to please his parents, and it will have all the thrills and emotional resonance of a child interminably practicing cursive. Gabriel the Elder suggested that for kids today, their Star Wars is actually Guardians of the Galaxy, which I thought depicted an interesting phenomenon. Maybe each Generation has a “Star Wars” that isn’t necessarily “Star Wars,” though I’m sure Disney would prefer a certain level of standardization.
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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
According to The Compact struck between Brenna and I, we must venture over the frozen Devil’s Teeth every other year to the hated Spokane, a corruption of Sa Pako Chaon which in the Bureaucratic Mode of the Mid-Hell tongue means “That Place Which Is Arguably Worse Than Other Places.”

At the Perimeter of that cracked and accursed rectum, men with three-eyed, hope sniffing dogs on leashes of cold iron prowl up and down the line of cars, for the second jaw of these “dogs” - the Dream Jaw - is never satisfied. It doesn’t open so much as it unfurls. They can use it to eat the part of a child that still believes in Santa.
I think I tried to soften it last time for some reason, no doubt as the result of some surplus holiday cheer, or the cloudy, tan liquor they ferment in the heat of their own mouths. There are probably worse places, but I don’t know of them. I’m just allowing for the possibility.

It’s a complete paradox. There are a lot of really singular people there, just top drawer human stock, but the town which has accreted around them is evil. There’s something wrong with it that can’t be enunciated but is instinctively recognizable. I meet people who are from there also, and eventually escaped, and there’s a look you pass each other in that moment of realization; a second where you see their spirit flicker out.
Hey! So, we sold through the Push Fight stock we had on hand, and we have more coming, but Brian was worried that trying to do some kind of presale this close to Christmas would just be stressful for all parties. So! They’ll be going back up on New Year’s Eve if you want to come in at the end of an incredibly weird story.
(CW)TB out.

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By Gabe from Penny Arcade:
Merry Christmas.



(Big Version)

I’d prefer we not speak of this.

-Gabe out

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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
One index of the esteem I hold Cliff Bleszinski in is that I can spell his last name without looking it up. He has been making games of one kind or another since basically forever. And, having spent more than a decade now in one long, perpetually interesting time, we’re going to check in with him at the PAX South Storytime and see what’s going on with him these days.

I’ll see you down there.

(CW)TB

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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
I mean, yeah; from a purely numerical standpoint the Child’s Play Charity Dinner And Auction was a roaring success, with just under two hundred thousand dollars raised in a night. This must be considered a joy spigot. But upon the completion of our noble labors, it occurred to Gribz that he might wring out a few more bucks from people by having me remove my coat and perform a little dance that has been called “by turns sad and terrifying” and “the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.”

A long time ago, I came into the possession of a fairly nondescript white box with a sticker on it that said Push Fight. I knew that it was a dedicated effort, because there was an exclamation point at the end of Fight, surely an indicator of business at a certain threshold of seriousness.

I think the game’s substrate was made out of pressboard, oddly shaped, possibly having arrived in a prophetic vision. It was so special, though. It’s a two player game, and both light and dark in this equation have two pieces with a round ball and three pieces with cubes on top. Your turn consists of two parts - you move twice, and then push with one of the cubed pieces. once you push, you place an “anchor” atop the piece that pushed, and it becomes unpushable terrain. If you manage to push off a single opponent piece, you win. Okay, but seriously. Check out this awesome, earnest video from the creator, clearly transferred to YouTube from an ancient VHS tape:


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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
Something I have been trying to figure out for a while is this weird inferiority complex some people who write about games seem to have about games. I’ve been thinking about it for ten years or so, and I only figured it out last night.

What made it confusing was that I was missing data. I don’t suffer under the yoke of Validation Syndrome; I am glad when people like what I do, but it is no impetus. And I certainly don’t wring my hands over a barrel fire, wondering what people who don’t know me think. I don’t particularly desire rehabilitation to a fashionable mean. That is not to say people have not tried, with occasional success, to impart this idea. I have every intention to make up for lost time.
There are people who walk on eggshells out of fear, but there is a second type of person who literally distributes eggshells for other people to walk on. Try to imagine how I feel about this second person, who is the negative space around which the exploratory, human work of creativity is allowed to take place.
This is what I would tell you, and you can take this advice or not take it. Its truth is not dependent on your willingness to believe it, so your reaction isn’t super relevant. But goes like this: you will be an observer - that is to say, not a creator - forever, until the day you find a way to stop using creative people as a proxy for your own stunted drives. You can emerge from this cocoon you’ve made, or you can die inside it, half-formed.
(CW)TB out.

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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
I realized, with some horror, that we had not covered Gabriel’s perspective on Rainbow Six, which is that it is “bad” and also “not good.” What’s more, perpetually descending into fortified lairs is not, for him, a scenario correlated with relaxation.

What’s strange for me is that I hear every one of his arguments on the topic - the shooting is not especially slick, it doesn’t really look that great - and not even disagree with them. It’s just that in the overall mix, assessed with a kind of Ludic Spectrometer, these aspects are rigorously deprioritized.

Just as I suggested in the strip, Portal is actually the touchstone for me here. Remember that Rainbow Six as a franchise didn’t even used to show you your fucking gun. Shooting here is like the period at the end of an elegantly constructed sentence; it is simply the demarcation between this and that, without any claim to its own state or properties. Apologetics, to be sure. I get like this when you show me something I haven’t seen or even considered before. I’ve been looking at this shit for a long time. That’s getting harder to do.
No, somehow these warlocks have made a kind of competitive puzzle game, a spatial one, that pretends to be about the GIGN or whatever when it’s actually about manipulating Euclidean space. It’s about physics and communication and tactics before it’s about submachine guns. This is the closest thing to a competitive IQ test I know of.
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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
Otherwise, it’ll be the shortest Q&A ever. Here is Robert’s magical form you can fill out!

(CW)TB

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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
Most of the Heroes of the Storm we played happened in the Alpha, and then the Beta, beginning when it didn’t really have anything like a unified interface. The general rule is that Blizzard doesn’t release something as a Beta unless another company would release it at retail, and I think that mostly held true here also.

Cho’gall is a new character that you already know about, I’m sure - I got in late. He’s the “one dude that two players embody simultaneously” guy. I decided that I couldn’t do HOTS and everything else I wanted to do, and judging by the last couple days I got fucked by that policy. I’m starting to think that I should instead exclusively seek out the things I’m afraid to play, because I think they will be dangerous, or because I think they may be safely avoided, like Vermintide. I think that if I institute - consciously or unconsciously - a policy that involves me playing fewer games, the moment it’s discovered I need to, you know, deinstitute it or whatever.
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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
Just Cause 3, the game that launched a thousand streams, hasn’t really been on our radar. There is always more than one game out when a Just Cause drops, which is inconvenient, and we’ve always been playing the other ones. But God Damn. I think Gabriil has more to say, but if you were wondering what his play loop could possibly look like, here you go.
I wanted to play Rainbow Six: Siege a couple nights before I said anything more than the most general, top level things. There’s plenty to cover, though, even there.
I don’t expect the game to be a success from a financial perspective, which I think we can all agree is one of the more crucial perspectives. The last time Ubisoft did something like this was probably Splinter Cell, which is to say they made new game and called it the name of an old game. I don’t know if it Conviction “worked” as a retail artifact, by which I mean as a contributor of revenue, but I also don’t care because it was a fascinating refraction of the original ideas. Rainbow Six has many traditions, going back to the first, some of which are mirrored in a modern form here. I expect it to be divisive both for series stalwarts and newcomers, which is to say, I expect a lot of blood in the ledger. Vegas made big changes, too, but all of them within the accepted shooter milieu, and with what I still maintain is the best cover system in any game, ever.
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By Gabe from Penny Arcade:
I’m having a blast with Just Cause 3. It’s a sandbox game with a heavy emphasis on the “sandbox”. Like a real sandbox, I’d say that the amount of fun you have in Just Cause will be determined by how much of your own imagination your bring to the game. You can sit in the sand and complain that there’s nothing to do, or you can make your own fun. I feel like Just Cause 3 is pretty much the same. The tools they give you like the grappling hook, the wing suit, the explosives and all the crazy vehicles are there but it’s sort of up to you to decide what you want to do with them. I’ve spent nights assaulting bases and blowing shit up. I’ve also spent nights attaching cows to cars. The physics are pretty goofy but they emphasise fun over realism which is fine with me. I say give it a try, or at least watch some streams of it because some of the shit that happens in this game is totally bonkers.

If you liked the Lookouts piece from earlier this week you can now purchase a print of it. This particular piece was based on a poem by Patrick Rothfuss and all proceeds from the print sales are going to his awesome Worldbuilders charity. You can get it here and it’s even signed!

-Gabe out

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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
One of the the things that make PAX the best show of its kind is the Enforcer corps - a elite cadre that makes the event possible. PAX South is a new show, there has only been, you know, one of them, and we need more Enforcers down there to help it while it grows. Does that sound like you? Sign up and let us know.

(CW)TB

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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
We’re working through a backlog of Child’s Play strips bought at auction, and Pat’s got dialed in first. Pat, as rendered here, is our friend Patrick Rothfuss, whose book arrived in the mail one day and I have been a fan ever since. I judged that book by its cover, The Name Of The Wind, and was well served. Pat has also undertaken many excellent turns as Viari, noted sub-employee of Acquisitions Incorporated. I think someday we’ll do something big together. For now, we’ve got this!

Pat actually knew more or less what he wanted, and it went through a couple edits, but when Gabe started drawing the middle panel he fell in love with it and only wanted to layer on more detail. The original script went like so:

Frame 1:

Tycho: What were you thinking of for your Child’s Play comic, Patrick Rothfuss?

Pat: [ Holding a couple pieces of paper] Well, I’m a big fan of Lookouts. And… I had an idea for a story, I’ve written some script….

Tycho: Oooh.

Frame 2:

They both look over the pages while Pat reads:

“Bring your best tools. Iron and fire.

Call upon your oldest lore.

You will seek what you desire.

Deep beneath the forest floor.”

Pat: You know? Something like that.

Frame 3:

Gabe: How about I draw you as a goat instead?

Pat (as a goat): Goats are cool.
—-

So, now you know.
Let’s take a second to really consider how insane the new Rainbow Six is.
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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
We launched a whole bunch of new stuff on Thursday. Pins, tees, hoodies, etc. I believe I made a decree to that effect.

But we already HAD a bunch of delicious stuff on the store. And I don’t want to you to forget about those. So… Cyber Monday!



The full First Party line, our fanciest stuff, is on sale for 30% off. It’s worth noting that this is your last chance to get the First Party notebook in its current iteration.

Also, we slowly released a full line of new mug designs this year. They’re all available now and are all 25% off.

There’s also some scarfs that are 50% off and the PAX Poster set - a travelogue, really - available for under $20.

All of these supreme deals will go away at midnight PST tonight. Hashtag Cyber Monday, etc.

(CW)TB

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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
He has different problems at his house than I do. It’s funny, if you let it be. It is hard to. But you can see, with your physical eyes, the moment a person learns that what they say doesn’t have to be connected with real events.
They’ll lie about any Goddamn thing. They’ll lie about things you just saw them do! They’ll lie about previous lies. They’ll lie about lying about lying. And they don’t seem to understand a hundred percent that it’s happening, either. They seem just as surprised as anyone else that language has the power to describe unreal events. They’re still grappling with the idea of permanence. For example, teeth are permanent. Well, technically, only some teeth are, but yeah. And Ronia, I know you haven’t brushed your teeth because your mouth smells like ground beef.
Like some ground-ass, motherfuckin’ beef.

My son is “on the spectrum,” and there are a bunch of letters doctors have told us to use when describing him, but one of the things that isolates him from other people is that in order to live in our society (and maybe other societies, I dunno) you have to lie 24/7 just to get by. He has a hard time figuring out some of these nuances. People lie and call it being “nice” or “diplomatic” or some other little tiara we place on the good lies. There is also a class of behaviors which are not lies exactly, but abrogations of self, though it still feels like lying. People smell gross and you can’t notice. People are wrong about, you know, Ambystoma Mexicanum sometimes and you must make peace.

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