{"id":9301,"date":"2010-09-07T10:03:56","date_gmt":"2010-09-07T15:03:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=9301"},"modified":"2010-09-10T09:50:39","modified_gmt":"2010-09-10T14:50:39","slug":"stolen-pixels-224-an-incredible-value","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=9301","title":{"rendered":"Stolen Pixels #224: An Incredible Value"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here is a comic about the Xbox Live price hike<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So my “two gamers on a couch” has become my go-to thing when I don’t have a game to fuel my jokes. This happens now and again with a lot of comic-making folk. (I’ll leave it to the comments for people to cite examples. Would be bad form to do so here.) These jokes are easy to do and work well [enough] to fill the void when I’m low on material. Which is always the case when I’m not consuming games that can feed the comic mill. Breen is also good for this, but I don’t want him taking over too much.<\/p>\n

If you’re curious, here is what I’m playing these days:
\n
\nI lost myself in Mass Effect during my convalescence and I’m still working to find my way out of that place again. I am certain the path to freedom will lead me through the endgame. Simply walking away from this playthrough is not an option. I must see it through. <\/p>\n

Chime<\/a>. Or, as I’ve come to call it over the last 12 hours, OMG CHIME!!!!!<\/strong> If you like Tetris \/ Lumines type stuff, then the gameplay will probably appeal to you. (It’s actually most similar to carpentry from Puzzle Pirates<\/a>.) A few weeks ago I talked about making a station for Pandora<\/a>. It’s like someone turned that station into a game. (Artists include Orbital, Moby, Lemon Jelly. The game also includes, somewhat incongruously, JoCo<\/a>‘s “Still Alive”.) The game sort of remixes the songs as you go. There are only a few songs, which means I might (hopefully) get tired of this game quickly enough that it won’t wreck my life.<\/p>\n

I’m obviously playing WoW, but if that time yields comedic material it must be harvested for the coming Let’s Play. (Which begins in eight weeks. Which is a long time if you’re waiting to read something, but so terrifyingly imminent when it’s an approaching deadline.) <\/p>\n

I’ve got Assassin’s Creed 2 here. (Review copy. Ubisoft’s ludicrous DRM makes buying this game a way of getting yourself digitally mugged.) But my heart is not in it. I can’t find fault with the game. It’s not that anything is bad. The story is not boring. (If you’ve played the game: Ezio just attended a hanging.) I just find myself not particularly curious what happens next. I put the game on hold a month ago and I still have no desire to return. I don’t know why. I should make a comic about it, but this fire will not light.<\/em> I have nothing to say about it. <\/p>\n

I’ve also got a copy of Din’s Curse<\/a>, a game of looting and leveling. I sunk a couple of hours into that recently. Its status as an indie game with procedurally generated content means that there is very little specific enough to make fun of and few people who will get the joke. I’ll probably give it a long-form review here, but it can’t feed my comic.<\/p>\n

I guess we’re at the tail end of the summer slump. Soon we’ll enter October and we’ll once again have more games than anyone knows what to do with.<\/p>\n

EDIT: I just fixed about nine hundred typos in this entry. But during that edit I re-read the previous paragraph and it struck me as absurd. “Yeah, I’m only playing five games right now. Dang summer slump!” I don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote that.<\/p>\n

EDIT II: Also: I’m still playing DDR<\/a>. Not much to say about that aside from pointing out that the leap from tier 2 to 3 is difficult to the point of discouragement. I didn’t play for a few weeks while I was ill, and now I’m fighting to get in shape again. Amazing how fast you can lose it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here is a comic about the Xbox Live price hike. So my “two gamers on a couch” has become my go-to thing when I don’t have a game to fuel my jokes. This happens now and again with a lot of comic-making folk. (I’ll leave it to the comments for people to cite examples. Would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9301\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}