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."

Re:which to get

[p0tat03]

I got it on 360, loved every moment of it, will probably replay it for achievements soon :) IMHO the 360 version is better, since all the commands are tied well into the various controller buttons, whereas the PC is entirely mouse-driven. Combat is a bit easier on 360 because of this.

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.

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:The Review

[Danse]

Decent review. A little harsh on the environments, given the engine. Still nothing about the crappy writing given there was so little of it.

I thought the writing was pretty well on par with the comic. If you like the writing in the comic, you'd most likely enjoy the writing in the game too. I did. Plenty of people don't like the comic writing either though, so to each his own. I don't think those people should buy the game. For $20 it was a pretty fun game.

its like we didn't play the same game...

[drkoemans]

I thought the game was great as far as RPGs go. I am a fan of the comic but I would have liked the game even without that element. To me it brought the best parts together of a forgotten genre. It felt like it vamped a lot on the mechanics of the paper mario series (which IMHO is one of the best RPG series ever) while adding in just enough of the real time elements along the lines of what silicon knights did with KOTOR. Im a dinosour by gaming standards which might be why I am not jiving with the rest of these comments but I couldn't be more pleased to see someone bring back the turn based adventure style of days gone by. I hope their success will encourage others to design more games in this vein.

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).