Penny Arcade - Comic - Midnight Sins

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Penny Arcade - Comic - Midnight Sins

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

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el_vicio

From what I've seen of the game, I think I'm with Gabe on this one. What really irks me on top of that is that it is a full price game, and still has mobile-style weird currencies that you can get via microtransactions, to unlock skins. While the graphical fidelity makes it look like a Sims game.

The actual meat of the gameplay seems cool though, so there's that

A Dabble Of Thelonius

Meh.

It's got one funbux and that's just for the skins that you would have gotten preordering a special edition. Silly, but not predatory.

The graphics aren't amazing, but they get the job done and action looks pretty good.

And the big ol map to run around and talk to people instead of a menu is, well I don't know what to tell you there. I prefer my in-game social and story stuff to not happen on an excel sheet.

Anywho. Opinions. Art is subjective. Blah blah. Magik for life

Delzhand

Nails in the snowball. What a scamp.

Tofystedeth

I've been having a blast with it so far.

Anon von Zilch

Getting to make an OC and hang out with Marvel character actually sounds pretty good.

Tofystedeth

I can understand people being disappointed about the lack of the "and chill" half. But I imagine there would be a large and very loud contingent of folks complaining if you could too.

Anyway none of that matters because no matter how big a crush I have on Captain Marvel it pales next to the fun I have playing wingman to Blade's crush.

dennis

From the news post, it does seem like Jerry really digs the actual card playing game part, but just feels that the execution of almost every other part of it is inexplicably bad.

ArmsForPeace84

Which one is supposed to be the wordsmith, again? Because that was gold.

Drez

I've been here since 2003, and I think I've never disagreed with a PA comic or newspost more than this one.

HighPriestofZuul

So far the best part of this game has been figuring out I couldn't get it running properly in time to get a no-hassles refund from Steam.

Also, I suspect that in trying to get it to run, I probably blew through 3/5 of my allocated installs, though at this point I don't exactly care. Thanks Denuvo.

tgbennett30

I find it terribly amusing that Tycho has sung the praises of card games for over a decade now while I have avoided them like the plague. Fast forward and he isn't enjoying this one and it has *deep* hooks into me.

The writing fascinates me. The common criticism is "the writing is awful!" but I'd argue that's a bit too broad of a brush. Yeah, a lot of it is... stuff that sounds like a 2000-ish AI wrote it, or else someone with no actual history of interaction with real humans, LOL. But some is not bad, and some small few nuggets here and there struck me, I was like "Man, I *felt* that. Whoa." I wonder if a team wrote all the dialogue and some one random talented person in there got some diamonds in amidst all the coal. But I can see someone being badly put off by all the clunker lines.

And yeah, the lack of romancing annoyed me at first, at least until I realized Marvel would NEVER allow their IP to be used in such a way in a game, haha. Still, my wife was watching me play, and she laughed "It sounds like Spider-Man wants to **** you - and you're a dude! Can you pull this off?" They really should have done a lot of that dialogue differently, and it wouldn't have hurt to have the "friendship" notification be a thumbs up (or down) or a bro-fist or whatever, not a heart. That has... implications :-) Had I figured that out, I wouldn't have wasted so much time trying to hook up with Magik when all I was really doing was screwing up my light/dark balance.

dennis

tgbennett30 wrote: »

I find it terribly amusing that Tycho has sung the praises of card games for over a decade now while I have avoided them like the plague. Fast forward and he isn't enjoying this one and it has *deep* hooks into me.

But if you read the news post, he really does enjoy the card play in this one quite a lot.

Nestled somewhere inside these bizarre decisions and console refugee portsmanship is one of the most interesting battle systems I've seen. Understand that skirmish wargaming is my chief interest currently, my knowledge isn't encyclopedic by any means but it does border on some combination of Ridiculous and Gourmet, and the way they've braided the action economy with the card systems is the .gif of a bearded, leather-clad man nodding in approval. The way the characters I have characters are modeled in those systems might actually be genius, and I had to spoil the others. Why are you hiding this game beneath the other one?

I'd have more to say, but it didn't want me to play it. And I have a very specific allergy to games that crash at the Victory screen.

It's just the execution of the rest of the game that he's faulting.

tgbennett30

I didn't say he hated it - I simply observed it sounds like he's going to drop it since the non-card sections spoil his enjoyment of it. Conversely I can't put it down. I would not have predicted either of those. Thus the chuckle.

dennis

tgbennett30 wrote: »

I didn't say he hated it - I simply observed it sounds like he's going to drop it since the non-card sections spoil his enjoyment of it. Conversely I can't put it down. I would not have predicted either of those. Thus the chuckle.

Jerry will put up with a lot if he thinks there's a kernel of goodness. Just watch the old First 15s for proof of that. But it seems like he's mainly dropping this because it just keeps crashing. It's making it impossible to actually play in a reasonable way.

Tofystedeth

I had my first crash last night. Which was unfortunately when I tried to save my game to exit, and due to the activities I'd been doing, it was 45 minutes since my last autosave

tgbennett30

Yeah, that threw me - mine has never crashed *knock on wood* But I got on the Steam forums while my download was coming and saw a lot of crash complaints, and folks recommended going around the launcher, and so I did it from the get-go. Seems to have worked for me. Jerry looks to have done something similar.

Glad he got it going, and he's enjoying it now. All is (mostly) right with the world - I still can't believe I'm playing a card game :-P

Tofystedeth

Wait you can skip the launcher?

dennis

Tofystedeth wrote: »

Wait you can skip the launcher?

I had to do a couple things first: in a fun, retro throwback, I had to run the executable directly from the folder and not via the 2K Launcher it has set up by default. The effects of this thing are… I mean, they're inexplicable. It's not required to run the game, so what in the fuck is it doing? 2K made this team look like assholes.

Tofystedeth

dennis wrote: »

Tofystedeth wrote: »

Wait you can skip the launcher?

I had to do a couple things first: in a fun, retro throwback, I had to run the executable directly from the folder and not via the 2K Launcher it has set up by default. The effects of this thing are… I mean, they're inexplicable. It's not required to run the game, so what in the fuck is it doing? 2K made this team look like assholes.

Ah. I meant like, via steam, which apparently you can do.