Fabricated
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Posts: 8978
~Living the Dream~
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So yeah, the Penny Arcade game. I bought the first episode when it came out and it was basically everything I thought it would be; an incredibly shallow but playable game driven by the writing of Jerry Holkins (Tycho) and the art of Mike Krahulik (Gabe).
Episode 2 is um, more of that + the ever pointless addition of higher difficulty modes and achievements. Whoopie.
Basically take Super Mario RPG and swap the turned based system for a Final Fantasy style real time system. Tada, that's it. Mini-game button pressing events for special attacks, timed blocks, simple combat. The combat is still boring to say the very least. You find out what your enemies are weak against, be it team-attacks, basic attacks, special attacks, or a weapon type, then you use that until they're all dead. If you're really itching to get it over with you can use some of your never ending supply of buff/debuff/attack items to speed things up. Turning up the difficulty or playing on insane (which requires a full completion beforehand) basically just forces you to actually use items to heal/buff/debuff, and to not fuck up blocks.
But the writing and humor is the reason to play right? It's still there, still written in that vaguely schizophrenic but endearing writing style Tycho uses. We get it, you own a thesaurus but you're still not too hip for the word 'fuck'. Not to say it isn't funny though; it is...there's just not enough of it really. Even when you churn out a new episode every 4-6 months instead of every year and a half (hey Valve), this episodic gaming stuff has already proven to be an awful idea. I play it for 4ish hours, I get some amusement, it suddenly ends, and despite me enjoying the a fair amount of it I'm left with a general feeling of "Eh." Adding achievements (worst new game element since bloom) and unlockables doesn't make me want to suffer through mediocre gameplay after I've already read all the good lines.
Leave it. Wait for all the episodes to come out and then buy them all as a bundle and play it like a full-fledged game. I'm pretty sure you'll get more satisfaction from that than you would from playing each new episode as it comes out every 4+ months.
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