08月 31st, 2008
The creators of the webcomic Penny Arcade could not have taken lightly the decision to create their own videogame. Having spent the last few years voicing some of game criticism’s most no-holds-barred opinions and gaining legions of fans in the process, they had no choice but to deliver a high-quality product.
Luckily, Penny Arcade Adventures lives up as well as any game could to an overabundance of hype. That is to say, while it does try to bite off a great deal more than it can chew — and suffers for it — the game is a solid, clever, hilarious piece of entertainment that will more than please its audience.
Developed by Hothead Games, Penny Arcade Adventures has been given the purposely unwieldy subtitle Episode 1: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness. Yes, that does mean that this $20 PC, Mac, Linux and Xbox 360 game is the first in an episodic series, although Hothead has intimated that the episodes will come in less frequently than Telltale Games’ monthly installments of Sam & Max — although probably faster than episodes of Half-Life.
While $20 might seem like a bit much for a little over five hours of gameplay, there’s a lot of content packed into this first installment: four largish 3-D environments, a dozen or so main characters and reams of funny dialogue.
On that last point, I should say right up front what everyone likely already knows: Penny Arcade is likely to end up as one of the funniest and best-written games of the year. If the webcomic has you in stitches, so will this. The plot’s bizarre mix of Lovecraftian horror and 21st-century toilet jokes somehow makes perfect sense, and even randomly clicking on the scenery in every level is bound to turn up dozens of throwaway bits of humor.
The gameplay is a mix of point-and-click adventure games and Final Fantasy, with heavier emphasis on the latter. While you do in fact walk around by pointing and clicking on places, objects and people, and there are a few easily solved item-based puzzles, you’ll spend the vast majority of your time in the battle system.
I name-drop Final Fantasy because fans of the series will recognize the concept of “active-time battles.” While the combat consists of turn-based affairs where most of your actions are undertaking by picking items from a menu, you have to make your choices quickly, as the enemies don’t stop attacking just because you’re taking too long to decide.
There’s also a good deal of Paper Mario sprinkled in there. You can block enemy attacks by pressing the spacebar at the right moment during their attack animation. Do it right on time and you’ll take no damage, which quickly becomes crucial to success.
Also playing off Mario’s role-playing game are the special attacks, in which you have to execute a series of accurately timed button presses in order to do full damage. The mini-games that result are different for each of your three main characters. For Gabe’s fisticuffs, you have to slam on your spacebar to raise a gauge, then press it one more time with perfect timing to stop the needle in the center. To spray more bullets from Tycho’s machine gun, you must press the arrow or WASD keys in a certain sequence before a timer runs out. And for the character that you create, a spinning needle whirls around in a circle and you press the spacebar to stop it in four hot spots around the perimeter.
Penny Arcade’s character creator is an interesting bit of tech, as you create one character that is then used in both the 3-D battles and the 2-D, comic-style dialogue sequences and cinematic scenes. It’s not the most fully featured character editor around — I found the lack of bizarre facial-hair types not particularly conducive to creating a Penny Arcade-style Kohler — but the swapping between dimensions is a neat trick.
Penny Arcade Adventures began to go off the rails for me once I realized that despite all the potential in the intricate timing-based combat system, you never really need to worry about failure. Your health is automatically refilled after every battle, you can flee instantly from all but the three boss fights, and you can restart from the beginning of any battle when you die.
This isn’t necessarily a bad idea when you consider that the game lets you save anywhere you like, so it’s simply saving players from having to load an old saved game. But at the same time, the difficulty curve is basically reversed: It’s harder in the beginning as you’re learning the combat system, and a breeze toward the end once you get the basics down.
While the game will quickly fill your inventory up with 14 different combat items, I found I didn’t need to use any of them except for just a few occasions — and even then, I probably could have gotten by without.
And although I realize that this is episode one of many, it’s tough to ignore the feeling that the game ends just as you’re getting into the groove.
I should point out that the Xbox 360 version of the game, available Wednesday via Xbox Live Arcade, differs from the computer version in a few significant ways. Instead of pointing and clicking, you move your character around directly with the control pad. I found this to be a bit less fussy than the mouse control, although selecting from the menus in battle was more complicated.
The graphics haven’t quite been optimized for television sets — while the text size has been scaled up, the general layout of the screen is identical, and what looks good from a foot away on a computer monitor just doesn’t feel right on a big-screen TV.
But either version will surely be devoured whole by fans of the webcomic. I’d love to see a longer Episode 2 that makes deeper use of the clever battle system.
– Chris Kohler
WIRED Great presentation, pitch-perfect dialogue, engaging battle system
TIRED Short, could use more and deeper battles
$20, Hothead Games
Rating: 
Read Game|Life’s game ratings guide.
Images courtesy Hothead Games
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