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Quick Review of Penny Arcade Game
Now that it has been in general circulation for a while, Kotaku has a nice simple review of the good, the bad, and the ugly in the new Penny Arcade game, On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness. "When you've been making fun of the video game industry as long as Penny Arcade's Jerry 'Tycho' Holkins and Mike 'Gabe' Krahulik have been, deciding to create your own game is one ballsy move. You have to know that every review site you've ever trashed and every developer you've viciously sodomized with your barbed wit is watching your every move, desperate to see you stumble so they can get in a few licks."
I've been trying to decide whether to get this for the 360 or the PC...I do like that they've made it available on so many platforms, though. /fp?
How Jaded Are You?
Decent review. A little harsh on the environments, given the engine. Still nothing about the crappy writing given there was so little of it.
see my review (after finishing the game): http://forum.playgreenhouse.com/jforum/posts/list/424.page#2684
see my previous vapid comment: http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=566489&cid=23577559
//for some reason criticizing PA writing always garners troll mods
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Outside of a few shining moments of wit in the writing, the game offers nothing in the way of real fun. It's sad, and at the same time very surprising. You'd think that after making fun of bad games for years, the Penny Arcade guys would know how to avoid developing one themselves.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
My wife & I just finished it last night (she helps with the planning, I click things and go "shiny!").
It's a Japanese-style RPG (I played final fantasy for 15 minutes and got frustrated with it), with some adventure elements and a wicked sense of humor (the Lucasarts guy who worked on it did a fantastic job). So there's the "how and where do I go to make hobo meat edible" adventure-quest element, the fights are all JRPG (which works out pretty well, though I'm sure others can do more with it and still others were turned off by the whole thing), and then there's the dialogue and writing, which are top notch. I have no idea what the requirements are supposed to be, but on my Athlon (single core from about 2 years ago) 3400 with a Geforce GT7600, framerates were great - the stylized "comic-book look" works well here (duh?).
Well worth the $20. We've been playing it for an hour or so a night since it came out, and just finished it.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
this game sucks and anyone who likes it sucks. penny arcade sucks and is as funny as something that's not funny at all.
ddf
There are at least two things to learn here:
First, you can hold the mouse button down. I was ready to write the game off as pitifully annoying after having to click everywhere, but when held down, it's not really worse than any other movement -- probably better than keyboard arrows would have been, in fact.
Second, I'm on Dvorak, so this isn't going to be a problem for many of us, but WASD is not in anywhere near a decent place to be able to use Tycho's combo. Looking at your standard QWERTY layout, my W is where your comma is; my S is your semicolon; my D, your H, and A is in the same place.
The trick to this, of course, is that you are allowed to use the arrow keys instead. I feel stupid for having beat the game before I figured that out.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I like what they did with it, they've managed to retain the humor of the comic strip (especially the dialogue and the facial expressions). Wish it was a lot less console RPGish and a lot more sandboxy, though. I won't complain for $20 though, though if it had been $40 I would complain.
I played through Grim Fandango, and recently finished the PA game. Frankly I think the Penny Arcade series has the potential, after all four episodes, to be just as good.
They are also different styles of games, the PA game being a mix of adventure/RPG with the other games you mentioned (I think) being pure adventure, making the mix harder to judge.
I really liked the combat dynamics, and the mix of RPG/adventure felt about right to me - but they will also be playing with that in future episodes, the next one supposedly being more adventure focused so you may like it more.
I thought it well worth $20 for sure... and will buy the next one as soon as it comes out.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I grabbed the demo off of XBLA a few days ago and decided I'd buy the full thing, due to a combination of intrigue and boredom. I felt it was tedious at first...
And then I stopped raiding every trash can and mailbox in sight, and started actually playing the game =P
The gameplay was fun, albeit a little predictable and linear, but it was interesting enough to keep me occupied. My only real complaint about it is the item balance. I think it'd be fairly easy to go through the entire game only using attacks. In fact, I only really started using them when I learned that they merited me an achievement.
I thought the game was great as far as RPGs go. I am a fan of the comic but I would have liked the game even without that element. To me it brought the best parts together of a forgotten genre. It felt like it vamped a lot on the mechanics of the paper mario series (which IMHO is one of the best RPG series ever) while adding in just enough of the real time elements along the lines of what silicon knights did with KOTOR. Im a dinosour by gaming standards which might be why I am not jiving with the rest of these comments but I couldn't be more pleased to see someone bring back the turn based adventure style of days gone by. I hope their success will encourage others to design more games in this vein.
Dick hats
I didn't get to play most of it. I bought the game specifically so that I would have something to play during the week or so that I knew I wouldn't have an Internet connection. The game even worked on my Linux laptop. Nice!
Then, I sat down to play another session, but I couldn't start the full version of the game anymore. I just got some error about my hardware not matching the hardware the game was activated with (even though I hadn't made any hardware changes). The game wanted me to go online to activate again -- which of course I couldn't do. Thanks a lot guys.
I poked around the binary with GDB for a little while, but I didn't really have the motivation to do that for long.
--Justin
Anyone can gripe about what makes a game good or bad, but who is going to listen?
Aren't there enough "surprise, you're NOT at the end and you have 2 more boss fights to go with NO chance to save" games out there?
You'd think Capcom would learn, but not only does Mega Man not overcome this, it makes its way to Zack and Wiki.
There's a tendency to auto-dismiss the opinions of the consumers, after all, if they knew what they were talking about, they would be showing their point instead of speaking it, putting their (development) money where there mouth is.
Also, how broken is a game if it still sells millions? There's a lot of bad gameplay in good games that gets ignored because when the good game is in its element, it blows you away. (Zelda, awesome dungeon, annoying minigame, repeat)
Also, while I may despise minigames (I payed $60 for Zelda's HACK AND SLASH and puzzles! Why do I have to put up with [insert random minigame here] before being allowed to go back to the game proper?!) there's a number of people who happily bought Mario Party. Now if I can just convince Nintendo that the two DON'T need to intersect...
For that matter, why was typing (other than the main character's name) EVER a part of Paper Mario? What did it add besides annoyance?
PA, having made a game, has shown how seriously they take their opinions on what makes a game good or bad. Even if other designers don't care about PA's opinions, if listening to feedback causes better reviews for later episodes, producers will see that changes X, Y and Z made the difference between a 7 and an 8, or between X thousand sales and 1.5 * X thousand sales, then strongly suggest similar improvements in their own games. There's plenty of griping about how the industry is hamstrung by its focus on the bottom line, this is a golden opportunity (through throwing feedback about EXACTLY what's good and bad about the game) to use that to our advantage.
This also begs the question on repetitive series like Mega Man, is a large part of their reason for so little change per iteration to isolate individual tweaks (greater focus on movement MM2, slide in MM3, Charging gun in MM4, independent Helper attack animal (Beat) in MM5, Movement / charge tweak (rush adapters) MM6) and compare sales to see exactly what affects sales and how much?
The choice of format for the game was great as well. Standard JRPG style games tend to be easy for anyone willing to put in enough time to over-level as needed. It's easier for a person used to Street Fighter to beat an JRPG than an JRPG lover to beat Street Fighter. To get away with low difficulty on an action game you tend to need incredible humor.
Now that "gaming common sense" has some money behind it, and will try 3 more tweaked versions coming up to lend some hard evidence to what's most sensible perhaps it will be heard a little better across the industry.
Too bad gamerscore isn't a reflection of the games you beat but the extra silly tasks the developer makes you do. You may get points for finishing a game but more often than not you get points for doing things that have nothing to do with completion and often run contrary to actual play. All too often achieves are like "padding" where gaps in gameplay are made up be this other meta-game.
I'm all for "meta-play" in games. Whatever a gamer wants to do in a single player game by themselves that entertains them is fine by me. I just don't think it is worth advertising it as some sort of number. I definitely don't think it is any more or less valuable than any other system's "fun points".
A missed item from the "Hated" column:
Yet another PC game with depressing BioShock style product activation. Sounds like a cool game, a shame I'll have to skip it.
It looked promising, until I discovered that there was no way to change the refresh rate in fullscreen mode. 60 Hz sucks on a CRT, and it's bad form to relase a game that doesn't have such controls.
So, I decided to give up and play it in a window, which means lower performance. It also means that as soon as I try to clean the yard (the first task), my mouse cursor disappears, and never re-appears.
I uninstalled the demo and didn't look back. That's a real show-stopper bug for me.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
I'm a bit baffled by the occasional negative review. As a game, it's a slim but cleverly implemented JRPG sped up to the point of nearing the action genre. It's fun and does the job well, and the game is short enough that I can't imagine anyone managing to tire of it before the credits roll. The environments are pretty and amusingly constructed, and the writing - well, it's simple: if you don't enjoy PA, you won't enjoy the game.
I guess the best argument I can make in its favor is that once I'd started playing, I didn't move - not to eat, not to check my email, not to see what's on TV - until the last boss was dead. As I grow older and my patience wanes, that's really saying something. The last time a game managed to enthrall me for the entirety of its experience was Portal. It's also the first time I've ever actually looked forward to episodic content, though I suspect that's because I'm used to that delivery method in the original comic, so it just sort of "fits."
The controls were hideous and unbindable, quite a dissappointment on an otherwise neat game.