[TRENCHES] Thursday, April 16, 2015 - Tipping Point

Geth

Tipping Point
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/tipping-point

Post-Traumatic Stress

Anonymous

I once had the great misfortune to be assigned to a licensed superhero game for the Game Boy Advance. This was, sadly, before the SP came out, so the stupid thing had no backlight. I had the PA strip “Lame Boy Advance” posted in my cubicle, where I sat with the GBA tilted at the one exact angle that allowed my fluorescent tube lamp to illuminate the screen without reflecting glare directly into my eyes.

But I digress.

The true horror wasn’t the hardware, it was the software. The main game wasn’t particularly difficult with all the superpowers the main character could use, and it was short, only ten or so levels. I could perform multiple full playthroughs in a day. But in order to unlock the Final Boss Stage, I had to score a 3/3 rating on every level on the Fist Meter. What is the Fist Meter, you ask? Excellent question! It’s the meter that scores how often the player defeats enemies by punching them to death instead of using, you know, the main character’s world-famous iconic powers.

So I had to pretend that an awesomely powerful hero was actually just some dude in tights who really liked hitting people in the face.

After a movie about this superhero came out, my friends and I were walking down the street discussing that character’s rogues gallery and speculating who would make a good villain for the sequel. My friend mentioned the villain that just happened to be the Final Boss who I had come to despise so much. I despised him not because he was a pain in the ass to kill (he was) but because the asinine conditions to unlock him took away the one pleasure that the game afforded, which was being an unstoppable force of destructive might.

I stopped dead and bent over, hyperventilating. The memories all returned at once, suddenly filling me with the anger, the loathing, the relentless tedium I experienced more than a decade ago. I clutched my hands to my head and shouted “NEVER MENTION THAT NAME IN MY PRESENCE!”

I think I was mostly hamming it up for effect. I’m pretty sure I was. I mean, it was just a game, right? Not some genuine trauma that left permanent scars on my psyche that will haunt me until the end of my days.

Right?

darkmayo

took me a minute to figure out what the hell was going on in the last panel.

They are testing some detective game, and Cora is clipping through ... the other one who's name I forget.

milski

Why are the quotation marks in the place they are?

Also... this latest string of comics reminds me of the worst parts of CADs "funny" one shots. They're overly wordy, the references are dated, and the punchlines are nonexistent. We just need a fourth panel explaining the "joke" and we'll be golden.

Morninglord

I liked this one. Because I've done that before, looked up something and learnt about a problem I didn't even know existed, and then talked about it with someone I know who is all ???? We all have, it's the internet.

Morgan Blackpowder

The reference is "she who lies with dogs, gets fleas" old adage. But yes this particular one-shot was especially rough. I really hope whomever is writing this these days gets a story in place. If I wanted one-shots there's a thousand other comics I could read and click ads on.

plki76

No idea where this comic is going. Was there a punch line in this one? Was this supposed to be some kind of Reservoir Dogs homage?

forty

The Tale sounds like a Spider-Man game.

Neuroskeptic

From the very start of the Trenches, people have been saying it's going downhill, or that they don't follow the plot, or that the style has changed for the worse.

One day the Trenches might actually become bad and then no-one will notice, boy who cried wolf etc. But that day has not yet come.

Darkewolfe

This comic has turned into a bunch of random drawings coupled with Seinfeld's lost essays.

Morgan Blackpowder

Neuroskeptic wrote: »

From the very start of the Trenches, people have been saying it's going downhill, or that they don't follow the plot, or that the style has changed for the worse.

One day the Trenches might actually become bad and then no-one will notice, boy who cried wolf etc. But that day has not yet come.

What you say is true, however we can point to specific events that have happened this season which back up our claim that this isn't the same level of quality as previous seasons. I don't feel this is worthy of being characterized as more of the same "typical elitists will dismiss everything on the internet". We have specific points here. Maybe you can counter our points? I'd love to see evidence to the contrary.

milski

Neuroskeptic wrote: »

From the very start of the Trenches, people have been saying it's going downhill, or that they don't follow the plot, or that the style has changed for the worse.

One day the Trenches might actually become bad and then no-one will notice, boy who cried wolf etc. But that day has not yet come.

If nobody notices when the comic is Objectively Bad by The All-Powerful Council of Webcomic Critics because they stopped reading it when it was only Kind Of Mediocre, Guys... why does it matter?

Besides quality being subjective, of all the ways to defend the comic, "it isn't actually shitty yet, why not stay until it's shitty" is the strangest.