Penny Arcade - Comic - Artful Dodger

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Penny Arcade - Comic - Artful Dodger

Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.

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dennis

I feel like you could just replace Rage 2 in this strip with any number of games.

What I really want to comment on is the newspost:

And, you know, Rage 2… it’s fine. That’s Gabe’s review, and he played way more than me. I’m on some Jean-Luc shit - there’s fewer days ahead than behind, people3. I gotta think about how I’m spending my motherfucking time.

It's interesting to me that Jerry says this, given what we witnessed in the First 15 days (and what you'll sometimes see on the stream). It's like in some ways he's converging towards Mike's approach to games (just with different priorities of what makes a game worthwhile). Mike was pretty clear about not "wasting" his time with a bad game when there were so many good ones out there, but Jerry was much more willing to spend time on a game - even a bad game - to fully explore it.

Maybe it's just advancing dadhood. I know it has that effect on me. I'm a guy who has never seen an Avengers movie because children ate all my free time. I can't imagine also doing that while attending three Paxes a week, streaming 25/7, and also trying to fit in books and stuff.

jandrese

The question I have is: Does Rage 2 have an ending? I was one of the apparently few who was mostly enjoying Rage 1, but then the game just kind of abruptly stopped. No big boss fight, plot threads left dangling in the wind, the conclusion being a 15 second cutscene and a paragraph of text. It was like someone walked into the development studio one day and said "We're shipping tomorrow, put an ending on there and get it ready to go." The game had just barely introduced you to the BFG when it suddenly ends. Maybe they were planning to make the ending DLC but never got around to it?

Anyway, the experience left me pretty reluctant to spend money on Rage 2, and the middling to poor reviews aren't helping matters.

Preacher

I've seen the ending of rage 2. Ending spoilers

It just kind of ends? Like you kill the bad guy, get infected by the thing you kill him with but get protagonist saved so you can do more open world stuff and yep that's the game.

There doesn't seem to be much actual resolution.

dennis

Preacher wrote: »

I've seen the ending of rage 2. Ending spoilers

It just kind of ends? Like you kill the bad guy, get infected by the thing you kill him with but get protagonist saved so you can do more open world stuff and yep that's the game.

There doesn't seem to be much actual resolution.

Since I wasn't interested in the game at all, I read the spoiler so I could translate for jandrese and anyone else. I'll tag this with a spoiler because Preacher did, but I don't consider this any kind of spoiler:

The ending isn't as abrupt as Rage 1 but it is kind of anti-climactic (more than usual). Boss fight, thing happens, then you can go play around in the open world until you get bored.

RatherDashing89

Unless I'm thinking of the wrong game, wasn't the selling point for the first Rage mostly, "it's a modern take on what made Doom great?" But, like, now we have Doom that seems to have "being Doom" covered. So another Rage seems pretty redundant.

Preacher

The first rage looked like it was going to be like a first person mad max game with like car combat. And then it was just this very short kind of dead FPS without an ending.

Lucascraft

I own Rage 1. Got it for just a few bucks during a Steam sale. It was fun but I never finished it. I also was not aware of the abrupt ending so maybe I played more of it than I thought I did? I dunno. It had fun combat but the story didn't really grip me and I lost interest pretty fast.