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."

Comments

The Review

[Jack9]

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

Re:The Review

[SanityInAnarchy]

From your review:

Fruit Fuckers are over-represented. Why did they keep coming up after you wiped out the source? I think this was mostly for the collection aspect. Where else are you going to get parts? Not an excuse, just an observation.

As my roommate asked, why is Tycho ALWAYS reading a book? That seems realistic, and part of the humor. Tycho is, in fact, always reading a book.

The toilet humor. Fair enough. I don't think there's disproportionately more in the game than in the comic, though.

Re:The Review

[TheRaven64]

The engine made me realise how impressive Grim Fandango was, with better visuals running on a machine a tenth of the power. The humour was predictable and only occasionally made me actually laugh in the demo, while the gameplay managed to feel tedious in places in spite of the short duration of the demo (and certainly didn't make me want to pay for the full thing).

When you compare it to something like Monkey Island, or Grim Fandango, or even most of the Space Quest series, it didn't come up to anything like the same standard.

The Game is Mediocre (At Best)

[morari]

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.

Re:The Game is Mediocre (At Best)

[Skrapion]

Let me be the first to say it's not for you.

The game isn't going to rank as one of my favourites, but I enjoyed it. For $20, I find it really difficult to complain about anything. They even managed to make JRPG combat fun for me again, and I've been jaded with JRPGs for years.

Re:The Game is Mediocre (At Best)

[Otter]

You'd think that after making fun of bad games for years, the Penny Arcade guys would know how to avoid developing one themselves.

There's no reason to think that. Complaining is far easier than doing.

I enjoyed the heck out of it.

[mbourgon]

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.

Re:I enjoyed the heck out of it.

[NewbieProgrammerMan]

So there's the "how and where do I go to make hobo meat edible" adventure-quest element... I think it might be worth buying just to see how that plays out...

My Review

[Anonymous Coward]

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

About the controls...

[SanityInAnarchy]

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.

Re:which to get

[vux984]

On the other hand, you can't increase your Gamerscore or collect achievements with the PC version >:)

This 'gamerscore'... what is the point?

The higher your score the more of a joke your life is? I've always thought people who cared about gamerscores were like forum rats who cared about their post count... as if being on top was something to be proud of.

Or is there more to it? Can it actually get you anything?

Re:which to get

[Mr2001]

If you don't have an HDTV, don't get the 360 version. It's letterboxed on 4:3 and the text is nearly unreadable (there's a zoom setting, but it doesn't help much).