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Source:Review: Penny Arcade Adventures Works It Out

The creators of the webcomic Penny Arcade could not have taken lightly the decision to create their own videogame. Having spent the last few years voicing some of game criticism’s most no-holds-barred opinions and gaining legions of fans in the process, they had no choice but to deliver a high-quality product.

Luckily, Penny Arcade Adventures lives up as well as any game could to an overabundance of hype. That is to say, while it does try to bite off a great deal more than it can chew — and suffers for it — the game is a solid, clever, hilarious piece of entertainment that will more than please its audience.

Developed by Hothead Games, Penny Arcade Adventures has been given the purposely unwieldy subtitle Episode 1: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness. Yes, that does mean that this $20 PC, Mac, Linux and Xbox 360 game is the first in an episodic series, although Hothead has intimated that the episodes will come in less frequently than Telltale Games’ monthly installments of Sam & Max — although probably faster than episodes of Half-Life.

While $20 might seem like a bit much for a little over five hours of gameplay, there’s a lot of content packed into this first installment: four largish 3-D environments, a dozen or so main characters and reams of funny dialogue.

On that last point, I should say right up front what everyone likely already knows: Penny Arcade is likely to end up as one of the funniest and best-written games of the year. If the webcomic has you in stitches, so will this. The plot’s bizarre mix of Lovecraftian horror and 21st-century toilet jokes somehow makes perfect sense, and even randomly clicking on the scenery in every level is bound to turn up dozens of throwaway bits of humor.

The gameplay is a mix of point-and-click adventure games and Final Fantasy, with heavier emphasis on the latter. While you do in fact walk around by pointing and clicking on places, objects and people, and there are a few easily solved item-based puzzles, you’ll spend the vast majority of your time in the battle system.

I name-drop Final Fantasy because fans of the series will recognize the concept of “active-time battles.” While the combat consists of turn-based affairs where most of your actions are undertaking by picking items from a menu, you have to make your choices quickly, as the enemies don’t stop attacking just because you’re taking too long to decide.

There’s also a good deal of Paper Mario sprinkled in there. You can block enemy attacks by pressing the spacebar at the right moment during their attack animation. Do it right on time and you’ll take no damage, which quickly becomes crucial to success.

Also playing off Mario’s role-playing game are the special attacks, in which you have to execute a series of accurately timed button presses in order to do full damage. The mini-games that result are different for each of your three main characters. For Gabe’s fisticuffs, you have to slam on your spacebar to raise a gauge, then press it one more time with perfect timing to stop the needle in the center. To spray more bullets from Tycho’s machine gun, you must press the arrow or WASD keys in a certain sequence before a timer runs out. And for the character that you create, a spinning needle whirls around in a circle and you press the spacebar to stop it in four hot spots around the perimeter.

Penny Arcade’s character creator is an interesting bit of tech, as you create one character that is then used in both the 3-D battles and the 2-D, comic-style dialogue sequences and cinematic scenes. It’s not the most fully featured character editor around — I found the lack of bizarre facial-hair types not particularly conducive to creating a Penny Arcade-style Kohler — but the swapping between dimensions is a neat trick.

Penny Arcade Adventures began to go off the rails for me once I realized that despite all the potential in the intricate timing-based combat system, you never really need to worry about failure. Your health is automatically refilled after every battle, you can flee instantly from all but the three boss fights, and you can restart from the beginning of any battle when you die.

This isn’t necessarily a bad idea when you consider that the game lets you save anywhere you like, so it’s simply saving players from having to load an old saved game. But at the same time, the difficulty curve is basically reversed: It’s harder in the beginning as you’re learning the combat system, and a breeze toward the end once you get the basics down.

While the game will quickly fill your inventory up with 14 different combat items, I found I didn’t need to use any of them except for just a few occasions — and even then, I probably could have gotten by without.

And although I realize that this is episode one of many, it’s tough to ignore the feeling that the game ends just as you’re getting into the groove.

I should point out that the Xbox 360 version of the game, available Wednesday via Xbox Live Arcade, differs from the computer version in a few significant ways. Instead of pointing and clicking, you move your character around directly with the control pad. I found this to be a bit less fussy than the mouse control, although selecting from the menus in battle was more complicated.

The graphics haven’t quite been optimized for television sets — while the text size has been scaled up, the general layout of the screen is identical, and what looks good from a foot away on a computer monitor just doesn’t feel right on a big-screen TV.

But either version will surely be devoured whole by fans of the webcomic. I’d love to see a longer Episode 2 that makes deeper use of the clever battle system.

– Chris Kohler

WIRED Great presentation, pitch-perfect dialogue, engaging battle system

TIRED Short, could use more and deeper battles

$20, Hothead Games

Rating:

Read Game|Life’s game ratings guide.

Images courtesy Hothead Games

Read more about Penny Arcade Adventures:

• Penny Arcade Adventures Price, System Specs Revealed
• The Dorks Behind Penny Arcade, an Obscure Webcomic Turned Vidgame Empire
• Penny Arcade Harvests Cool Indie Games For Greenhouse
• Exclusive Interview: Penny Arcade’s Gabe and Tycho Talk Greenhouse
• Hands-On: Penny Arcade Adventures Hilarious Fun

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Source:Interview: Crackpot’s Ahern Sprays You With Insecticide

[Crackpot Entertainment’s Curse Of Monkey Island alumnus Larry Ahern has just debuted DS detective action-adventure Insecticide as part of an intriguingly decentralized and outsourced development effort - and our very own Brandon Sheffield has been chatting to him about how he pulled it off.]

Like many other members of the decade-long LucasArts adventure game veteran diaspora, Larry Ahern has been involved in a number of freelance projects since leaving LucasArts.

But he recently served as creative director on Insecticide, a Gamecock-published action/adventure detective title that shipped for Nintendo DS in March and is planned for downloadable release on PC.

During his ten years at LucasArts, Ahern worked on numerous games including Sam & Max Hit the Road and Day of the Tentacle as an artist and animator, and is probably best known as the co-designer of 1997’s fondly-remembered Curse of Monkey Island before leaving in 2000.

Insecticide was developed by Crackpot Entertainment, an outsourcing-heavy studio that reunited several former Lucas adventure developers including concept artist Peter Chan, technical artist Mike Levine, and, briefly, designer Dave Grossman (now at Telltale Games with numerous other Lucas vets).

Ahern sat down with us to discuss Insecticide’s odd platform pairing, how Crackpot and its decentralized structure work, and why the studio probably won’t have another project for a while.

You recently released Insecticide. Hooray! It’s an unusual target, PC downloadable and DS. What made you go that route?

LA: It’s interesting, we hear that a bit. But for us, given that we are doing some puzzle-y adventure-style stuff in the detective sections, it actually makes a lot of sense on the DS.

The stuff that you can do with the mouse makes sense with the touchscreen and the stylus, so I think it’s a good combo. It definitely seems that DS the market has taken a liking to a lot of the adventure-style products recently anyway.

How do you think the DS market is for original IPs? It strikes me it’s a little bit difficult in some ways.

LA: I don’t know, that’s probably more of a Gamecock question as to how they’re positioning it and marketing it. I can just speak to what we wanted to make and what made sense on the platform.

The DS wasn’t initially part of the plan, we just came with a general pitch, and then we talked about what platforms made sense and Gamecock was helping us figure that out, and so…

Oh, I see. That makes sense. It was an interesting decision to have the DS game have the whole extent of the narrative, and then the PC version be broken up into two spots.

LA: Yeah, like I said, it’s mostly based on trying to keep the size of the download pretty small. I know some of the downloadable games can be pretty big and you sit there for hours, but the feeling was, we’re not a next-gen title, we’re not some big licence that everybody knows, if we’re going to him them and catch their interests, it probably makes sense to make the price point low enough so that it’s intriguing, and make the download quick enough that they’ll go, “Oh, yeah, let me try that out.”

And, obviously the cart on the DS, you can get it all on there. The PC side, there’s a heck of a lot more visual detail and a little bit more interactivity that’s not critical path stuff on the PC side, so we wanted to have all that extra stuff in there and we didn’t want a huge download for it, whereas with the DS you pretty much have to say, this is the product: what is it, start to finish?

Were you able to share any resources over the two?

LA: In terms of reusing models or geometry or any of that kind of thing, no, that didn’t happen. But the basic design, yes. The storyline that got put together, the basic gameplay structure, how the level designs were working – essentially we put together the PC versions of those levels and then handed those off to our team who’s our co-developer which is actually Creat Studios.

They’re a Boston-based American company, but they have a studio – the ones we worked with were in St. Petersburg, Russia, so the team we were collaborating with were over there. They had the DS engine technology, so they were taking a lot of our levels, a lot of the design lead, and fitting it onto the DS there.

How has outsourcing some of that stuff been working for you?

LA: You know, it has its challenges, but I’d say at the end of the day, it’s one of those things where, how we did this and what we did, we couldn’t have done this if we’d done it any other way. There were specific people that we’d worked with that aren’t going to want to be hired as employees.

Peter Chan, our concept designer, he works exclusively in film except for a couple of people he worked with at Lucasarts who he’ll do some game work for, kind of the old crowd. And a bunch of people who are like that, there’ll be people who we used to work with, like the music guy – some of those things are more contract work anyway – but a bunch of that stuff is: these people are out there doing freelance, that’s how they want to do it, they have their own service company, and you just plug them in.

Whereas if you’re going to bring staff on, you’ve got more overhead, more stuff to worry about – what’s my next game the minute this is done? – so we liked that structure and we think it worked well. The downside is that you’re a virtual company and there are some communications issues long distance.

Working with Creat there’s a little bit of those issues, but it’s balanced out by: they’re a separate group, they can pull on more staff to meet a milestone, because they’ve got a bigger studio, and they can go, “Oh my gosh, we’re not going to make this milestone unless we steal some people from some other project that’s not in crunch and put them on here to meet that milestone.”

Or, we’re working on something and it’s late at night here, and you can say, “Hey,” because the workday’s about to start for them in Russia. The flipside of course is that, “Oh, I really need to talk to the guy in Russia” and it’s the middle of the night. It’s back and forth.

Did you find there was more asset management you had to do, making sure deliverables were alright?

LA: Yes, it’s a combination of more headaches with that and there’s a little bit more of – I just had to let go of things. [Laughs.] I think I said this in some interview elsewhere recently. This is more like, I tried to put together this train and design, what is the train? Here it is.

And now I’m running along behind it, trying to catch up. It’s still my train, I still came up with where it’s going, but sometimes things are happening and I’m not totally in control of it.

Eventually, by the end of the project I jump on and I’m driving again, but before that there’s a little bit where you have to let go and say, “That wasn’t how I wanted to do that, but it’s still good, so it’s good enough I guess.” You sort of deal with it that way, and that’s the trade-off.

You said before about the LucasArts thing, it does seem to have, to me, a bit of LucasArtsy – more like Lucas-related – stuff. More like Psychonauts…

LA: We’ve heard that before and it’s interesting. It’s “Did you try to do that? Where did that come from?” Honestly, the best answer is I worked with Tim Schafer as his animation lead and designed characters for most of his games, except for Grim Fandango, so if my stuff looks like his game…

And Peter Chan – the art director who did a lot of the environments and he did some of our character stuff too – worked on Psychonauts. So we have similar tastes, I think. That’s where it comes from. We like a lot of the same stuff.

Makes sense. Where are you guys going to go from here?

LA: The bad answer that I’m not supposed to give is that we don’t have something lined up next, but, again, that sort of folds back in to the whole virtual studio thing. We like how we put this project together – it’s more like the film model where it’s project by project and that’s how it goes.

And it turns out that my partner Mike Levine, he has another company and does a lot of web development, a lot of online casual MMO-type stuff, and he’s swamped, he’s got a bunch of projects there.

And I already committed to a freelance project that’s going to keep me busy through the end of summer, so you look at that and it made sense to set up this company to do this project the way we did, and the great thing is then we can do those projects and we’re not freaking out on how to hire somebody to step in because we’ve got to do something else.

We can bounce back and forth, we can do the freelance stuff and then say, what do we want to do next as Crackpot?

How big is your core team?

LA: The core team, right now we’re down to five or six guys as we’re finishing up – we’re almost done, so nobody was officially an employee. Essentially Mike is the only guy that’s Crackpot because the company’s in his name and we co-own the IP, so even I’m a contractor in terms of getting paid for it, until royalties kick in or something like that.

But we had staff that we brought on – we had four or five level designers that were working for us for a while. We subcontracted out animation with the FMVs, we subcontracted out the character models, so a lot of it was subcontracted out.

The people who were officially managed by me as individuals was maybe fifteen guys, but then there’s also subcontracting groups where it’s like the animation studio doing the FMVs, which I would do primarily with one person – the guy who was the production manager there and I’d talk mostly to him about, “This is what I need”, and then he has to put his team on it. And that works a lot better I think.

That’s the good thing, it leaves us to be pretty flexible – the people that we’re working with: you don’t have employees that you have to lay off if you don’t have another project, so you can kind of plug them in if you want to do it again.

Like I was saying, the animation company that we worked with, they do a lot of subcontracting for stuff like that, so if we do another project like that next year, we can plug them in again, because that’s what they do. They’re a service company that does animation. So it’s a good set-up.

The fact that there’s enough infrastructure that you can work as a virtual studio, it’s like the Hollywood model. The reason the Hollywood model works is that there’s a workforce that’s around Hollywood, and they know there’s jobs they can get on.

But because of the versatility of being able to work virtually from wherever, we’re starting to be able to do that, because a lot of game developers are spread out, but if you can handle it all through phone and email and instant message and Skype, that’s what we did.

The guys doing our character models were over in Europe, we got the development partner in Russia, so it’s nice having that ability, because these are people that you’re not going to hire and have them come work for you, you’d have to find someone else, because they’re not going to move.

So there’s no home office for you guys?

LA: No. I have an office in my house, Mike has an office in his house, he runs another company out of it. Some of the people we work with have their own studios – like the animation company we work with has its own facility.

I found definitely that working with subgroups, people set up that way - that was the easiest, because you talk to one key guy at the animation group, he’s got everybody there with him, and then he can disseminate that info and they can focus on that and really get the details right.

Whereas some of the people we work with, we worked with level designers – three or four guys in a bunch of different locations – and it was harder to pull all of that together than if it was our level design team all together somewhere. So I would probably do that a little differently in the future. Some of them work, some of them don’t.

Our concept designer lives up in the San Juan islands up near Seattle – he can be wherever because he’s doing an isolated one-man job and he just has to work with us, whereas the other thing is you have to work more closely with the people in production. The production work gets trickier that way.

So it will be probably be a while before we see another game that is technically from you guys – from the name anyway?

LA: I don’t want to make it seem like, “Well, we’re done!” but we don’t have something that’s currently in the works or we’ve signed a deal on, so I’m guessing it would be later in the year before something got put together. Like I said, we’ve got some freelance stuff keeping us busy through the summer.

It’s definitely an interesting way to go about it – to come together for a single project.

LA: Yes, and what I like about it too is because people are working on other stuff, you get the ability for people to bring in other influences. Even myself going out to do other freelance stuff, you get a different perspective and then you can roll that into your next project.

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Source:Grilled Box

Grilled Box is an action game which resembles Every Extend, developed by TERU-soach for a recent Three Minute Game competition. Blocks appear from the top of the screen at a steady rate, and players have to destroy as many blocks as they can before they reach the bottom. Left click on a block to start a chain reaction, or right click to use the magnet and bring the blocks closer to each other. Use these two actions sparingly, as clicking rapidly will decrease their charges faster and render them inactive for a short while when completely depleted. A time penalty is incurred for every block that escapes intact.

Name: Grilled Box
Developer: TERU-soach
Category: Action
Type: Freeware
Size: 1MB
Direct download link: Click here
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Source:Finally: WiiWare to get beer pong game

Filed under: Nintendo Wii

Sometimes blogging is really hard, like when Microsoft or Sony mails us a whole bottle of Dom and a platter of foie gras and we have to eat it all before 1. It goes bad or 2. The housekeeper tries to hide some in her apron. But there are sometimes when it’s very easy, like today, when you come across a post that’s so intrinsically hilarious it requires practically no work.

Frat Party Games is an actual new division of JV Games and they’re actually making a beer pong game for WiiWare that’s actually called Beer Pong. And the image above? That’s literally what you see when you click “Features” on their web site. Because we totally hate your eyeballs, we’ve put a trailer for it after the jump.

[Via Satan/NWF]

Continue reading Finally: WiiWare to get beer pong game

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Source:Three new roguelike devlogs

Krice’s Kaduria Devlog discusses the development of the game as well as the rants from one of the controversial posters at r.g.r.d (here you go, a bit of attention for you )

Perdurabo’s Kharne Devlog sports interesting articles about random dungeon generation and several interesting roguelike development topics

Mr. Donick’s LambdaRogue Devlog shows off his advancements toward a finished version, including screenshot and articles

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Source:Games incentivam a violência

Aha! Você estranhou o título do post, né? Bem, foi por meio do Lucas que conheci o site engraçad [leia mais]

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Source:To Hideo Kojima stalkers: He’s in London next week

Filed under: Sony PlayStation 3, Action

According to Eurogamer, Metal Gear heads Hideo Kojima and Yoji Shinkawa will be in London next week to scribble signatures across their latest work, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. Kojima and co. will be at the HMV Oxford Street, London store as of noon, though fans are encouraged to prepare their stampede at 9AM. With the meeting occurring on June 2nd, there won’t be any copies of the game available, though HMV will provide 300 game sleeves to those who drop five pounds on a pre-order. If you want to show Kojima how much you care, ask him to draw a little heart on your sleeve.

Not in London? Catch the man in New York on midnight, June 11th. He’ll look marvelous in your collection.

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Source:GRIN Mouse Pad, Put A Smile On Game Developers

Game developer, GRIN, together with Swedish pro gaming equipment brand Qpad, has launched an official GRIN mouse pad. The design of the mouse pad is GRIN’s official logo which is yep, a large GRIN. The pad is just one of the many upcoming gaming peripherals in the GRIN Gaming Edition series. I guess that every gaming item of the series will have a BIG smile engraved.

GRIN’s employees are the first to embrace the GRIN mouse pad. A mouse pad for game developers?

“Our goal has been to have our offices equipped with the best possible products to create a good work environment for the staff. Professional game developers need professional equipment. After looking over different mouse pads we decided upon the Swedish brand Qpad. We also felt that it was great that we could design the mouse pad ourselves and the result turned out so great that they now can be bought in selected stores.” says Gunnar Johansson, Brand Manager, GRIN.

Image & Via: GRIN

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Source:Pink Tisdale Dress

Yesterday I offered Ashley Tisdale for your downloading pleasure.

Today, I present to you a pretty smokin’ dress that Tisdale was photographed wearing.

Now you can have Tisdale and her hot pink dress.

Tags: Ashley Tisdale, Free Sims 2 Download, High School Musical, pink dress, sims-2, The Suite Life of Zack & Cody

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Source:360voice GTA Weekend - Inside Xbox Mention

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