News: As Seen In Modern Lair
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Tycho:  So there I was, at the San Diego ComicCon, sidling past the Penny Arcade table on my way to say hi to Scott Kurtz at the PvP Online booth, when suddenly this Tycho person grabbed me and pulled me aside to rant and rave. He had an idea, he said. A crazy idea.
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Tycho:   The foe revealed, Armadeaddon is now almost complete.  Monday will see the promised epilogue, so at this point you have very nearly survived the ordeal.  We have endeavored these past weeks to reward the true "enthusiast," that man or woman who, brow heavy, has faced such cruel abuse at our hand for the last seven years.  It is apparently our policy to honor such dedication one every decade.    Since it was announced a couple days ago, the revelation that MS would be actively courting the hardcore boardgame player is something I've thought about almost constantly.  It may be that you weren't aware there was such a thing as a hardcore player of boardgames if your last experience with the context was playing Sorry! with your sister when you were eight.  Things have progressed.   There's a million experiences in this space I could use to lure you in, but one company in particular - Days of Wonder has already decided to make electronic variants of their tabletop crack, so they occupy a twilight space between the worlds.  I hope they see an opportunity to take their (already completed!) games over to the 360, or that Microsoft offers them a locked case containing an unspecified amount of untraceable U.S. Currency, because I'd love to see this prescient move by MS turn into a new era.   Days of Wonder makes a game called Shadows Over Camelot that could quickly become a dangerous obsession, obscuring biological realities with a single-minded focus on grails.  Well, grail I guess.  There's just the one.    But it's a completely cooperative boardgame, so every player is working toward the same goals - fighting back invasions, questing, all of it.  Except there might be a traitor in the group, determined by a hidden draw, who tries to derail the effort.  He's not always there, but the potentiality of that nefarious force can create unbelievable social tension.    The gaming table's fixed coordinate in space is its asset and its obstacle - managing space and time is actually the primary challenge of any gaming group, as opposed to banishing necromancers, though that also ranks up there.  Boardgames are so rich in design that, when one of these gets dropped in front of them on Live, I think many gamers will be shocked at their sophistication.    My thumbs hurt.  (CW)TB out.
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The word "gaming" is making its way onto the whiteboards of advertising conference rooms on a regular basis these days. As a proponent of this industry's viability as a communication platform for brands, I think that's great progress. We've collectively woken up to the fact that pimple-faced teenagers are not the only ones playing games (for those of you not in the know, these guys aren't even the typical game consumers anymore, nor have they been for quite a few years now).
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What appear to be pages from the eagerly awaited final installment in the series have been circulating online.
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Tycho:  In case you are wondering, cats apparently need regular maintenance, like cars.  And, like an oil change, this juicing process can be done (I'm told) at home, preferably with the curtains drawn and a couple inches of sawdust laid down.  That's right: you can wring out your own cat's asshole.  This is the kind of helpful information you can expect when you visit Penny Arcade.  Don't everybody run home at once.    I've been playing a lot of Prism on the DS, even though the Zelda cartridge seems to squeal as I remove it.  I understand there's some kind of Ghost Ship?  I forget all of my cares, and also the cares of Princess Zelda, once those beams begin to refract.    They've ginned up some ridonculous crap about light eating space monsters to support their gameplay, which is very solid, and requires no extraterrestrial photophiles.  It's a puzzle game.  When I put pieces of a puzzle together, I never think about how alone each piece must feel, longing only to congregate with similarly knobbed partial images.  So, discard that.  Discard also the truly nasty presentation, no doubt a result of hard time done in already the Mobile and PC Casual markets.  Part these imperfections like tall savannah grass, and gaze into the game's rich core:  the creation of sometimes very complex circuits.     Inside each puzzle grid, the player is given some combination of Light Emitting Entities, Reflective Mirrors, Splitters, or Prisms.  You must jigger the aforementioned until light of the correct colors is distributed to targets around the edge of the field.  That's it, and the fun comes from how complicated this process can become.  There are quite a few cooperative puzzles as well - where each player has access to half the grid, and they must work together to route everything.  If you try this mode - and I request that you do so, as you only need one (1) cartridge and a willing accomplice - I recommend that you each turn your DS sideways, so that the UI is along the bottom.  That will make it so that "left" and "right" and "up" and "down" all mean the same thing to each of you.  Trust me, you want this.  The game is hard enough without the horror of fully relative terms.    Prism actually taught me something fairly significant about why I play games, and I think it's because the gameplay is so clean and the presentation so spartan that I could pick up on it.  I like games that generate communication.  This is why team-based shooters, roleplaying games, and tactical games are my delight - every one of these entails a suite of custom language to describe it, they require constant dialogue, and, most importantly, all other things being equal these games can be won by the efficient use of language.  Working out puzzles together in Prism has a strong logic component, but in large part the challenge was communicating ethereal notions succinctly.    I suppose this is also why I torment you here, thrice weekly: even when playing a game by myself, I am harvesting the experience so that it may be reconstituted here.  So, thank you for reading.  You dignify my leisure hours.          The Playstation 3 in the office has been more than acceptable for playing the sometimes short, often bad games that have arrived on it - but this holiday, with the titles to prove out the claim, I had to "get mine" in the bawdy parlance of the young.  What tipped my hand wasn't the four hundred dollar system on offer, rather, it was the three hundred and seventy nine dollar model.  These are probably mostly a mail order proposition, but any of those rare twenty gig models the platform launched with got bumped down by the new price.  It's inexpensive by PS3 standards, but it's positively cheap for a Blu-Ray device.  Now fully franchised, flexing all the rich benefits of Sony citizenship, you may expect me to be even more brutal in my critique.
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Please quote me on this Stob There's another of those lists of supposedly amusing/sage/cute adagesÂ going around, bouncing from blog to email, accumulating fresh contributions and occasional edits and doing all the meme-ish things that memes do. This one differs from all the others that you have deleted irritably from your email inbox in that it includes a contribution taken from this very column.â¦
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Tycho:  To fully communicate Lair, you really to need a video component - and the review over at Gametrailers really sets things straight.  The abrupt storytelling, technical stumbles, and strange behavior are all much better delivered by the game itself than by my hyperbole.       (CW)TB
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Gabe: I didn't realise it before but the comic we did for Assassins Creed is also being shown online. You can still get the printed version in the collectors edition of the game. The first page just went live today over on the official site. Here's a direct link if you're interested. It's an eight page story and I'm actually not sure what the release schedule for the rest of the pages is. I'll be sure and let you know here as they become available.   I drew this one and the the colors were handled by Imaginary Friends. Tycho is responsible for the words. The story takes place before the game and gives a little insight in the character of Altair. Obviously it's only one page right now but once you've seen some more of it I'd love to hear what you think.-Gabe out
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted this month's Zend Newsletter for those wanting to keep up on all things Zend-ish.   They have kindly allowed me to republish the most recent issue here for your enjoyment. If you want to read it on a regular basis though you are going to have to subscribe. So take a moment and head over to MyZend, login (or register) and on the preferences panel you'll find the checkbox to subscribe. Go ahead, we'll wait.   This edition is just a preview of all of the news that Zend provides each month on its activities, events, product updates, updates to the DevZone, and offers promotions you might want to be aware of.   As Cal mentions, though, you'll need to sign up to get future releases of the newsletter - they won't be posted over on the Zend Developer Zone.
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Gabe: The Penny Arcade Battle Academy Will be meeting next Tuesday the 8th at the Comic Stop. We're an official Pokemon TCG league now. Those of you in the Academy who haven't done so already, should register with Go Pokemon.com. Once you have a POP ID you can post it in this thread and Joe will get you added to the roster. As always, new players are welcome. Just grab a starter deck and be at the Comic Stop around 6.PM. There will be plenty of people willing to walk you through the game if it's your first time. For our regulars, if you're looking for a place up north to get cards and boosters I highly recommend the Cardhaus in Lynnwood. He's got some singles in stock but he also has the best price on boosters I've been able to find. Also, Kiko and I picked up some great tips and a few interesting rules that we did not know about while at the tournament. We'll share our "key learnings" with you all on Tuesday. It should be a fun night, hope to see some new faces. -Gabe out
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Also: Windows worm travels with Tetris [News.com Extra]
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Tycho:  My heart went out to the woman in the recent clip for Dungeons and Dragons: Stormreach.  At one point, a green face is shown.  Maybe it was a jade face.  Anyway, it looked like it was entrance to a dungeon that I had no interest in raiding for ancient wealth.  Your dungeon entrance says something about you as a subterranean civilization, and this one said that I could avoid it altogether, and not miss much.
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Matthew O'Phinney had the chance to present the Zend Framework during a meeting he attended of his local PHP user group (BostonPHP) as a part of a series their doing.   Horde was also represented as part of the evening's fare. It was the first time I've attended a UG, so I got the double whammy of that and being a presenter. Oh, make it a triple whammy -- Boston is a 3+ hour drive from the Burlington, VT area I now call home.   He mentions a talk that Chuck Hagenbuch (of the Horde project) gave on the current state of the project and a bit about his presentation (including some portions that pointed out problems with the Zend_Db component). You can check out this and the rest of the contents of his presentation here [pdf] and here [mp3 podcast].
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Tycho: Keek directed me to a radical (and potentially even "badical") article on BioShock over at Gamers Wif Jobs. I've been wondering about the recent PR shift the game has gone through, because I don't just keep hearing that it is a "shooter first," but I keep hearing specifically that it is a "kick-ass shooter," even though it's a game where you learn about Objectivism underwater while helping jealous composers get revenge. I've never doubted that the game will be great, by whatever road it reaches that greatness. The recent WWE slant just had me curious about whether I'll be able to perform a suplex in-game. You may not think that is important, but it is totally important.(CW)TB
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Tycho:  I should have all the science lined up by the end of the week, ready to stuff into the piano black lozenge I've obtained to celebrate my return to personal computing.  Wish me luck; I've never before had the opportunity to fry four processors at once.       I know things.  Specifically, things that may be of interest to you.  For example, I know if playing Eye of Judgment online is an onerous as it might seem.  It is not!  I cannot express my relief.    Well, let's try.  In my last, vast expose, I broke down a card's unique language and expressed some misgivings about online play - ultimately just accepting it, because what they're trying to do is so weird that there's no prior art.  Essentially, you "register" your thirty card deck with the system itself, where it is stored and named for future use.  This process is extremely straightforward:  it is simply a matter of you laying your cards anywhere on the mat, a few at a time.  It will probably take two minutes if you really keep on it.  Then, you jump online, choose what nation you want to play for, and track down a partner.  At this point, the game will "draw" you your five card hand by showing you the card art onscreen.  You get one Mulligan (or redraw), but if you like your hand you move into the game proper.  We laid out our deck by element, face up, and this smoothed the turn to turn process considerably.      In the build we have, and I hope this is changed for release, it shows you these cards in a single file line without their name or text - just the art.  Once you got familiar with these images, slightly modified from their card format, it's pretty quick - but the names should be displayed on this screen.  You can use the controller to pull up the names, but let's be serious - at no point should the player be forced to interact with a mundane controller once the game is underway.     You should know that the game really wants a well-lit environment.  You don't need a flare gun or anything, but we didn't have what we needed before and certain squares would slow down the game flow with partial reads that would only resolve after several attempts and minute card adjustments.  I should state that here in the office, we removed all the overhead lights, installing a single track of illumination that we point at the ceiling, where lights used to be.  We tend to transform any place we live into a cave.  So, our scenario might be somewhat atypical.    Also, I know if playing Rock Band with all the instruments off of a USB hub is onerous.  You will be happy to know that it is not - we played said instruments spread out on an actual stage, and found it more than satifactory.  The reality is that the drum kit already needs its own wire, so it isn't as though the future had actually arrived anyway.  Plus, the mic isn't wireless either. This makes the contrived brouhaha over wired guitars a fairly transparent traffic ploy.    This is a matter quite apart from Microsoft's reticence to play ball with unique, third party hardware.  And when I say "play ball," I'm taking about the shakedown operation they've got going licensing their wireless technology, which either makes products for their system more expensive or (in the salient case of Rock Band) results in them bundling a wired controller for the same price as a wireless one on a competitor's system.  This is the last holiday they can get away with this sort of thing...  right?
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Tycho:  I really must stress to online PlayStation 3 partisans the extent to which they were not at E3.  Those of you playing "the home game" might have seen a trailer or two and come away with the idea that with grace and pride your grey altar stood high over conquered foes.  Ain't the case.
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Can a computer program generate new works from long dead legends? By Douglas McGray from Wired magazine.