Tycho: As seen here. You should be careful about any kind of celebration, though: the third paragraph tells you why. They're still tying incredibly useful Battle.net functionality to it, so this is the Public Relations equivalent of Aikido. (Aikido is a martial art that leverages your opponent's natural momentum. Trust me, it's an incredible analogy.) (CW)TB

New Comic: The Grim Curriculum

Tycho: Blizzard's RealID thing didn't make any sense to me, but that's because I was relying on the official message to get a sense of it's purpose. It's a much more straightforward when you read the article at USAToday's Game Hunters entitled "Blizzard and Facebook's friendly social networking deal launches with 'StarCraft II'." If I thought I could top this comment over at MetaFilter, I would do so. I can't. The RealID thing is a bad idea that won't work. If it were merely a bad idea, or merely wouldn't work, maybe there'd be something in it. Accountability is crucial - ...

Tycho: Oh, I remember what we were talking about, prior to our dark fugue: Laurell K. Hamilton. Okay, yeah. That explains all this, then. You're safe, now; these are the only comics in this theme. You're safe. When Cliff Bleszinski says that shooters are the future of RPGs, he's not wrong; late, but not wrong. The original Modern Warfare is as much an RPG as any other game that toils under that yoke. Play it, and tell me it's not: you earn levels and equip items, customizing your character along three distinct trees. In the sequel, even your Goddamned perks level ...

New Comic: The Butcher's Bill, Part Two

New Comic: The Butcher's Bill, Part One

Tycho: Gabriel and I were talking, about something - I forget what - when we fell into a black slumber. Through the sludge of our waking stupor, we discovered that not one but two comics had been written and produced. Here is the first; prepare to be progressively harrowed. Still thinking about Horde. No, not that Horde, but if we're watching Kirk Cameron videos we might as well watch the best one. Anyway, wrong Horde. I found my time with ODST's Firefight more enjoyable than most iterations of the concept, and I've tried to figure out why that might be, because ...

Tycho: Would you like some of that? Because we have a new episode. No, really! (CW)TB

New Comic: Twisp & Catsby in: Der Dorbelgorbel

Tycho: We put the word out - technically, a chirp - regarding what people might like to see in a comic. That is a rare request, truly, but while we're out of town for the Fourph of July you might as well get an approximation of what you actually want. Twisp & Catsby were the winners by far, followed by Annarchy and Div, though there was also a pronounced Wil Wheaton contingent(!). Sometimes, though, we don't get what we want. Case in point: I suggested to Gabriel that we execute on a "Broodax on Fraternity Row" type scenario, called either "Dudax" ...

Gabe: In my last news post I talked about how I actually built the planets for my Elemental Chaos encounter. In this post I’ll talk a little bit about the actual mechanics of the fight. Tycho and I went and got some lunch and I explained what I wanted to do. The two of us ended up building an encounter that my players really had a good time with. You can see the basic structure in the photos. I had the ice planet and the fire planet on opposite ends of the table. In the middle of them was a small ...

New Comic: Incredible Savings

Tycho: It never ceases to amaze me how much better at this Sony is. This is something Microsoft doesn't understand well, to the extent they understand it at all, and before I continue here I want to establish something up front. What you and I are doing right now is looking directly at each company's character sheet: we're running assessments based on expressed and abstract capabilities. Sony is better at the game of games than Microsoft is. They're better at projecting the information they want you to know, and pruning the rest. For example: Kinect leverages ten to fifteen percent of ...

Gabe: If you saw my Twitter last night you know that I ran a pretty crazy game of D&D. My players ended up int he Elemental Chaos, a place called the Moteswarm to be exact. I wanted to create something that would really give them the feeling of fighting on these giant elemental motes in bizarre gravity. So what I did is create a series of 3D “planets” for the encounters to take place on. The first thing I had to do was build all this stuff. I ended up settling on Styrofoam balls for my planets. I chose Styrofoam because ...

Gabe: Hey did you watch last weeks PATV episode? What’s that? You say you didn’t? Well you better go watch it right now then!-Gabe out